magic the infinite creative processes of nature is very close to the primitivistic music (“L’arbre vu du côté des racines”) with which Hugo’s satyr strikes panic into the breasts of the Olympians. The Taoist notion of following nature is closely related, as in other naturalistic movements, to the idea of fate whether in its stoical or epicurean form.[336] From the references in Chuang-tzŭ[337] and elsewhere to various sects and schools we see that Taoism was only a part of a great stream of naturalistic and primitivistic tendency. China abounded at that time in pacifists,[338] in apostles of brotherly love, and as we should say nowadays Tolstoyans. A true opposite to the egoistic Yang-chu was the preacher of pure altruism and indiscriminate sympathy, Mei-ti. Mencius said that if the ideas of either of these extremists prevailed the time would come, not only when wolves would devour men, but men would devour one another.[339] In opposing discrimination and ethical standards to the naturalists, Mencius and the Confucian humanists were fighting for civilization. Unfortunately there is some truth in the Taoist charge that the standards of the Confucians are too literal, that in their defence of the principle of imitation they did not allow sufficiently for the element of flux and relativity and illusion in things--an element for which the Taoists had so keen a sense that they even went to the point of suppressing the difference between sleeping and waking[340] and life and death.[341] To reply properly to the Taoist relativist the Confucians would have needed to work out a sound conception of the rôle of the imagination--the universal key to human nature--and this they do not seem to have done. One is inclined to ask whether this is the reason for China’s failure to achieve a great ethical art like that of the drama and the epic of the Occident at their best. The Taoists were richly imaginative but along romantic lines. We should not fail to note the Taoist influence upon Li Po and other Bohemian and bibulous poets of the Tang dynasty, or the relation of Taoism to the rise of a great school of landscape painting at about the same time. We should note also the Taoist element in “Ch’an” Buddhism (the “Zen” Buddhism[342] of Japan), some knowledge of which is needed for an understanding of whole periods of Japanese and Chinese art.