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. 5 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.