page, near the beginning of book VI , we meet with the following sentence, having every appearance of being translated from the Chinese text:—“God is a principle which exists by virtue of its own intrinsicality, and operates without self-manifestation.” By an inadvertence he has introduced his own definition of “God” as if it were Chuang-tzŭ’s; and though I can find no characters in the text of which I can suppose that he intends it to be the translation, it is valuable as helping us to understand the meaning to be attached to the great name in his volume.
I have referred above ( par. 11 ) to the only passage in Lao’s treatise, where he uses the name Ti or God in its highest sense, saying that “the Tao might seem to have been before him.” He might well say so, for his first chapter he describes the Tao , “(conceived of as) having no name, as the originator of heaven and earth, and (conceived of as) having a name, as the mother of all things.” The reader will also find the same predicates of the Tao at greater length in his fifty-first chapter .
The character Ti is also of rare occurrence in Chuang-tzŭ , excepting as applied to the five ancient Tis . In bk. III par. 4, and in one other place we