Page:Leaves from my Chinese Scrapbook - Balfour, 1887.djvu/101



never been seen. The sensation produced by flavour is experienced by gustation; but the taste-producing flavour has not been discovered. All these phenomena are functions of the principle of Inaction. The ability to be inherent in the Yin and Yang, softness and hardness, shortness and length, circularity and squareness, life and death, heat and cold, floating and sinking, do and re, production and annihilation, blue and yellow, sweet and bitter, stench and fragrance, appears divorced from both consciousness and power; but really there is nothing beyond either the consciousness or the power [of this principle of Inaction].

Our philosopher has now fairly plunged into a swamp of metaphysical speculation, and soon gets beyond his depth. We will follow him a little farther in his researches, and then proceed to the stories and parables—some comic, some very beautiful, but all quaint and interesting—with which this book abounds.

The moral of all which is contentment with one's lot in life, and this forms the subject of the first story that we shall present to our readers. But first let us hear what Lieh-tzŭ and the Yellow Emperor have to say about death, as the illustrations which are given of