different schools or schemes of thought; but did not touch, so far as we know, on the comparative antiquity of their views. It is a peculiarity of the Tao Te Ching that any historical element in it is of the vaguest nature possible, and in all its chapters there is not a single proper name. Yet there are some references to earlier sages whose words the author was copying out, and to “sentence-makers” whose maxims he was introducing to illustrate his own sentiments. In the most distant antiquity he saw a happy society in which his highest ideas of the Tao were realised, and in the seventeenth chapter he tells us that in the earliest times the people did not know that there were their rulers, and when those rulers were most successful in dealing with them, simply said, “We are what we are of ourselves.” Evidently mean existed to Laozi at first in a condition of happy innocence—in what we must call a paradisiacal state, according to his idea of what such a state was likely to be.
When we turn from the treatise of Laozi to the writings of Chuang-tzŭ, the greatest of his followers, we are not left in doubt as to his belief in an early state of paradisiacal Taoism. Huang Ti, the first year of whose reign is placed in BC 2697, is often introduced as a seeker of the Tao , and is occasionally condemned as having been one of the first to disturb its rule in men’s minds and break up “the State of Perfect Unity.” He mentions several sovereigns of whom we can hardly find a trace in the records of history as having ruled in the primeval period, and gives us more than one description of the condition of the world during that happy time.
I do not think that Chuang-tzŭ had any historical evidence for the statements which he makes about those early days, the men who flourished in them, and their ways. His narratives are for the most part fictions, in which the names and incidents are of his own devising. They are no more true as matters of fact than the accounts of the characters in Bunyun’s Pilgrim’s Progress are true, with reference to any particular individuals; but as these last are grandly true of myriads of minds in different ages, so may we read in Chuang-tzŭ’s stories the thoughts of