The first translation of the Tao Te Ching into a western language was executed in Latin by some of the Roman Catholic missionaries, and a copy of it was brought to England by a Mr. Matthew Raper, F.R.S. , and presented by him to the Society at a meeting on the 10th January, 1788—being the gift to him of P. Jos. de Grammont, Missionarius Apostolicus, ex-Jesuita . In this version Tao is taken in the sense of “ratio,” or the “supreme reason of the divine being, the creator and governor.”
M. Abel-Rémusat, the first professor of Chinese in Paris, does not seem to have been aware of the existence of the above version in London, but his attention was attracted to Lao’s treatise about 1820, and, in 1823, he wrote of the character Tao , “ Ce mot me semble ne pas pouvoir être bien traduit, si ce n’est par le mot λόγος dans le triple sense de souverain Être, de raison, et de parole. ”
Rémusat’s successor in the chair of Chinese, the late Stanislas Julien, published in 1842 a translation of the whole treatise. Having concluded from an examination of it, and the earliest Taoist writers, such as Chuang-tzŭ, Ho-kuan Tzŭ, and Ho-shang Kung, that the Tao was devoid of action, of thought, of judgement, and of intelligence, he concluded that it was impossible to understand by it “the primordial reason, or the sublime intelligence which created, and which governs the world,” and to this he subjoined the following note:—“ Quelque étrange que puisse paraître cette idée de Laozi, elle n’est pas sans exemple dans