notice. In his brief memoir of Lao Tzu, he
does mention a book in five thousand and more characters; but he
mentions it in such a way as to make it clear beyond all doubt that he
himself could never have seen it; and moreover, in addition to the fact
that no date is given, either of the birth or death of Lao Tzu, the
account is so tinged with the supernatural as to raise a strong
suspicion that some part of it did not really come from the pen of the
great historian.

About two hundred years later appeared the first Chinese dictionary,
already alluded to in a previous lecture. This work was intended as a
collection of all the written characters known at date of publication;
and we can well imagine that, with Lao Tzu's short treatise before him,
there would be no difficulty in including all the words found therein.
Such, however, is not the case. There are many characters in the
treatise which are not to be found in the dictionary, and in one
particular instance the omission is very remarkable.

Much other internal evidence against the genuineness of this work might
here be adduced. I will content myself with a single, and a ludicrous,
item, which shows how carelessly it was pieced together.

Sentences occur in the _Tao-Te-Ching_ which positively contain, in
addition to some actual words by Lao Tzu, words from a commentator's
explanation, which have been mistaken by the forger for a part of Lao
Tzu's own utterance.

Add to this the striking fact that the great mass of Chinese critical
scholarship is entirely adverse to the claims put forward on behalf of
the treatise,--a man who believes in it as the genuine work of Lao Tzu
being generally regarded among educated Chinese as an amiable crank,
much as many people now regard any one who credits the plays of
Shakespeare to Lord Bacon,--and I think we may safely dismiss the
question without further ado.

It will be more interesting to turn to any sayings of Lao Tzu which we
can confidently regard as genuine; and those are such as occur in the
writings of some of the philosophers above-mentioned, from which they
were evidently collected by a pious impostor, and, with the aid of
unmistakable padding, were woven into the treatise, of which we may now
take a long leave.

Lao Tzu imagined the universe to be informed by an omnipresent,
omnipotent Principle, which he called _Tao_. Now this word _Tao_ means
primarily "a road," "a way"; and Lao Tzu's Principle may therefore be