Page:Leaves from my Chinese Scrapbook - Balfour, 1887.djvu/97

 and find no place of refuge' if they were not popular—it alone survived. It is the old story of the struggle for life, and of the survival of the fittest—that is, of the fittest under certain circumstances, the fittest for the needs of the school in which it existed, the fittest for its peculiar environment; not, of course, the fittest absolutely, nor the fittest for the purposes of modern historical research. The books lived, or rather were kept alive, not for the sake of the author, but for the sake of their contents. Hence it is that, though certain of the wise sayings or verses it contains may have authors assigned to them, no really ancient book claims to have an author—a human author. It is only later that the tendency is felt to satisfy the natural craving for a cause by assigning books to individual hands." Candour compels us to admit that these remarks apply with singular aptitude to the book which bears the name of Lieh-tzŭ. It presents all the features of a compilation, and a compilation made by different hands; it contains passage after passage, copied in some instances verbatim, in other instances with less exactitude, from at least two classical works of the Taoist school universally recognised as authentic; while nothing, or next to nothing, is known of the man to whom it is attributed, beyond references to him in the third person in the very book of which he is the alleged author. We consider, therefore, that we are justified in speaking of him as a philosopher who never lived, and in regarding the Lieh-tzŭ of the Ch'ung Hsü Ching as no more than a supposititious personage, projected from the minds of a Taoist literary clique.

But the book remains. That is a visible fact, and with it we now propose to deal. The criticism which