en confused, perhaps with malice aforethought.

We can only say for certain that after Lao Tzu came Confucius--at what
interval we do not know. Now, in all the works of Confucius, whether as
writer or as editor, and throughout all his posthumously published
Discourses, there is not a single word of allusion either to Lao Tzu or
to this treatise. The alleged interviews have been left altogether
unnoticed.

One hundred years after Confucius came Mencius, China's second sage. In
all his pages of political advice to feudal nobles, and all his
conversations with his disciples, much more voluminous than the
Discourses of Confucius, there is equally no allusion to Lao Tzu, nor to
the treatise.

It has been pointed out by an eminent Chinese critic of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, that Mencius spent his life chiefly in
attacking the various heterodox systems which then prevailed, such as
the extreme altruistic system of Mo Ti and the extreme egoistic system
of Yang Chu; and it is urged--in my opinion with overwhelming force--that
if the _Tao-Te-Ching_ had existed in the days of Mencius, it must
necessarily have been recognised and treated as a mischievous work,
likely to alienate men's minds from the one perfect and orthodox
teaching--Confucianism.

Chuang Tzu, a philosopher of the fourth century B.C., devoted himself to
elucidating and illuminating the teaching of Lao Tzu. His work, which
has survived to the present day, will shortly occupy our attention. For
the moment it is only necessary to say that it contains many of the
Master's traditional sayings, but never once mentions a treatise.

In the third century B.C. there lived another famous Taoist writer, Han
Fei Tzu, who devotes the best part of two whole sections of his work to
explaining and illustrating the sayings of Lao Tzu. Yet he never
mentions the treatise. He deals with many sayings of Lao Tzu now to be
found in the treatise, but he does not take them in the order in which
they now stand, and he introduces several others which do not occur at
all in the treatise, having apparently been overlooked by the compiler.

In the second century B.C. there lived another famous Taoist writer,
Huai-nan Tzu, who devotes a long chapter to illustrating the doctrines
of Lao Tzu. He never mentions a book.

One hundred years B.C. comes the historian Ssu-ma Ch'ien, whose
brilliant work, the first of the Dynastic Histories, I have already had
occasion to bring to your