Page:Decline of the West (Volume 2).djvu/303

Rh, and all that was necessary was to expunge the traces of the original nature-myth.

To the Chinese waking-consciousness heaven and earth were halves of the macrocosm, without opposition, each a mirror-image of the other. In this picture there was neither Magian dualism nor Faustian unity of active force. Becoming appears in the unconstrained reciprocal working of two principles, the yang and the yin, which were conceived rather as periodic than as polar. Accordingly, there are two souls in man, the kwei which corresponded with the yin, the earthly, the dark, the cold, and disintegrated with the body; and the sen, which is higher, light, and permanent. But, further, there are innumerable multitudes of souls of both kinds outside man. Troops of spirits fill the air and the water and the earth — all is peopled and moved by kweis and sens. The life of nature and that of man are in reality made out of the play of such units. Wisdom, will, force, and virtue depend on their relationship. Asceticism and orgiasm; the knightly custom of hiao, which requires the noble to revenge an impiety towards an ancestor even after centuries, and commands him never to survive defeat; and the reasoning moral of the yen, which, according to the judgment of rationalism, followed from knowledge — all proceed from conceptions of the forces and possibilities of the kwei and the sen.

All this is concentrated in the basic word "tao." The conflict between the yang and the yin in man is the tao of his life; the warp and woof of the spirit-swarms outside him are the tao of Nature. The world possesses tao inasmuch as it possesses beat, rhythm, and periodicity. It possesses li, tension, inasmuch as man knows it and abstracts from it fixed relationships for future use. Time, Destiny, Direction, Race, History — all this, contemplated with the great world-embracing vision of the early Chóu times, lies in this one word. The path of the Pharaoh through the dark alley to his shrine is related to it, and so is the Faustian passion of the third dimension, but tao is nevertheless far removed from any idea of the technical conquest of Nature. The Chinese park avoids energetic perspective. It lays horizon behind horizon and, instead of pointing to a goal, tempts to wander. The Chinese "cathedral" of the early time, the Pi-Yung, with its paths that lead through gates and thickets, stairs and bridges and courts, has never the inexorable march of Egypt or the drive into depth of the Gothic.

When Alexander appeared on the Indus, the piety of these three Cultures — Chinese, Indian, Classical — had long been moulded into the historyless forms of a broad Taoism, Buddhism, and Stoicism. But it was not long before the group of Magian religions arose in the region intermediate between the Classical and the Indian field, and it must have been at about the same time that the