Page:Leaves from my Chinese Scrapbook - Balfour, 1887.djvu/166

 justice of this assertion, for it is to Sophists that we owe some of the finest exhibitions of dialectical skill that the Greek philosophers have bequeathed to us.

Now, just as there were Sophists during the golden age of philosophy in Greece, so were there Sophists, or "garrulous quibblers," as the Chinese call them, during the golden age of philosophy in China. And, as we shall prove, the two classes of men bore a very striking family resemblance to each other, even to the point of advancing almost the same theories and attempting to prove the same paradoxes. Most of our readers are no doubt familiar with the famous fallacies which the Greek Sophists loved to fabricate. "That is my dog. That dog is a father. Therefore, that dog is my father." "If, when you speak the truth, you say you lie, you lie; but you say you lie when you speak the truth; therefore in speaking the truth you lie." "Bread is better than nothing. Nothing is better than Elysium. Therefore bread is better than Elysium." Such were the word-quibbles in the production of which the sophistical quacks of Greece delighted about the time of Socrates; and when we turn to the corresponding period in China we find very much the same phenomenon existing here. There was one very famous Sophists named Hui Shih, who is attacked in a spirited and lively style by Chuang-tzŭ, himself regarded as a Sophist by the orthodox followers of Confucius. "The works of Hui Shih," says his critic, "are numerous and extensive; he has published a great collection of books. But his doctrines are unpractical and contradictory, and his words do not hit the mark; he says just what comes uppermost, without regard to accuracy, affirming that that which is unsurpassably