l’histoire de la philosophie. Le mot nature n’a-t-il pas été employee par certains philosophes, que la religion et la raison condamnent, pour désigner une cause première, également dépourvue de pensée et d’intelligence? ” Julien himself did not doubt that Lao’s idea of the character was that it primarily and properly meant “a way,” and hence he translated the title Tao Te Ching by Le Livre de la Voie et de la Vertu , transferring at the same time the name Tao to the text of his version.
The first English writer who endeavoured to give a distinct account of Taoism was the late Archdeacon Hardwick, while he held the office of Christian Advocate in the University of Cambridge. In his Christ and Other Masters ( vol. ii p. 67), when treating of the religions of China, he says, “I feel disposed to argue that the centre of the system founded by Laozi had been awarded to some energy or power resembling the ‘nature’ of modern speculators. The indefinite expression Tao was adopted to denominate an abstract cause, or the initial principle of life and order, to which worshippers were able to assign the attributes of immateriality, eternity, immensity, invisibility.”
It was, probably, Julien’s reference in his note to the use of the term nature, which suggested to Hardwick his analogy between Laozi’s Tao , and “the nature of modern speculation.” Canon Farrar has said, “We have long personified under the name of nature the sum total of God’s laws as observed in the physical world; and now the notion of nature as a distinct, living, independent entity seems to be ineradicable alike from our literature and our systems of philosophy.” But it seems to me that this metaphorical or mythological use of the word nature for the cause and ruler of it, implies the previous notion of Him, that is, of God, in the mind. Does not this clearly appear in the words of Seneca?—“ Vis illum ( h.e. Jovem Deum) naturam vocare, non peccabis:—hic est ex quo nata sunt omnia, cujus spiritu vivimus. ”
In his translation of the Works of Chuang-Tzŭ in 1881, Mr. Balfour adopted Nature as the ordinary rendering of the Chinese Tao . He says,