We can laugh at this. Taoism was wrong in its opposition to the increase of knowledge. Man exists under a law of progress. In pursuing it there are demanded discretion and justice. Moral ends must rule over material ends, and advance in virtue be ranked higher than advance in science. So have good and evil, truth and error, to fight out the battle on the field of the world, and in all the range of time; but there is no standing still for the individual or for society. Even Confucius taught his countrymen to set too high a value on the examples of antiquity. The school of Laozi fixing themselves in an unknown region beyond antiquity⁠—a prehistoric time between “the grand beginning of all things” out of nothing, and the unknown commencement of societies of men⁠—has made no advance but rather retrograded, and is represented by the still more degenerated Taoism of the present day.