Page:China- Its State and Prospects.djvu/34

 overspread and divided China, from their days to the present time. These individuals have been already referred to, viz., Confucius and Laou-tsze, and their interview with each other recorded. Though they seem to have had a respect for each other, yet they do not appear to have combined or coalesced in the plans they laid down for the instruction of posterity. Of Confucius it is said, that he never spoke of the strange and marvellous, and sought to fix men's attention on the duties of the human relations; while the other inculcated a contempt for worldly greatness and domestic happiness—placing the chief good in mental abstraction, and professing to deal much with the spiritual world. The one erred in being too sceptical, and the other in being too superstitious; yet they have both retained their hold of the mind of China, even to the present day, and it is difficult now to say, which system is most prevalent throughout the empire.

About the same period, Buddhism arose in India; and though it did not immediately spread into the ultra Gangetic nations, it diffused itself rapidly on its subsequent introduction, and now exerts as great an influence over the minds of the vulgar as the other two sects do over the learned and the superstitious.

A little more than two hundred years before the Christian era, China became subject to a fourth dynasty, called Tsin, from which Chin, or China, the name by which that country is known in the western world, is probably derived. The ruler of Tsin conceived the insane idea of establishing a dynasty, which should extend from the beginning to the end of time. With this view, he collected and burnt all the records of previous ages, and buried alive four hundred and