Perhaps the closest approach in the past to the movement of which Rousseau is the most important single figure is the early Taoist movement in China. Taoism, especially in its popular aspects, became later something very different, and what I say is meant to apply above all to the period from about 550 to 200 B.C. The material for the Taoism of this period will be found in convenient form in the volume of LÉon Wieger (1913)—Les PÈres du SystÈme taoÏste (Chinese texts with French translations of Lao-tzu, Lieh-tzu and Chuang-tzu). The Tao TÊ King of Lao-tzu is a somewhat enigmatical document of only a few thousand words, but plainly primitivistic in its general trend. The phrase that best sums up its general spirit is that of Wordsworth—a “wise passiveness.” The unity at which it aims is clearly of the pantheistic variety, the unity that is obtained by breaking down discrimination and affirming the “identity of contradictories,” and that encourages a reversion to origins, to the state of nature and the simple life. According to the Taoist the Chinese fell from the simple life into artificiality about the time of the legendary Yellow Emperor, Hoang-ti (27th century B.C.). The individual also should look back to beginnings and seek to be once more like the new-born child[322] or, according to Chuang-tzu, like the new-born calf.[323] It is in Chuang-tzu indeed that the doctrine develops its full naturalistic and primitivistic implications. Few writers in either East or West have set forth more entertainingly what one may term the Bohemian attitude towards life. He heaps ridicule upon Confucius and in the name of spontaneity attacks his doctrine of humanistic imitation.[324] He sings the praises of the unconscious,[325] even when obtained through intoxication,[326] and extols the morality of the beautiful soul.[327] He traces the fall of mankind from nature into artifice in a fashion that anticipates very completely both Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and Sciences[328] and that on the Origin of Inequality.[329] See also the amusing passage in which the brigand Chi, child of nature and champion of the weak against the oppressions of government, paints a highly Rousseauistic picture of man’s fall from his primitive felicity.[330] Among the things that are contrary to nature and purely conventional, according to Chuang-tzu and the Taoists, are, not only the sciences and arts and attempts to discriminate between good and bad taste,[331] but likewise government and statecraft,[332] virtue and moral standards.[333] To the artificial music of the Confucians, the Taoists oppose a natural music that offers startling analogies to the most recent programmatic and descriptive tendencies of Occidental music.[334] See especially Chuang-tzu’s programme for a cosmic symphony in three movements[335]—the Pipes of Pan as one is tempted to call it. This music that is supposed to reflect in all its mystery and magic the infinite creative processes of nature is very close to the primitivistic music (“L’arbre vu du cÔtÉ des racines”) with which Hugo’s satyr strikes panic into the breasts of the Olympians.

The Taoist notion of following nature is closely related, as in other naturalistic movements, to the idea of fate whether in its stoical or epicurean form.[336] From the references in Chuang-tzu[337] and elsewhere to various sects and schools we see that Taoism was only a part of a great stream of naturalistic and primitivistic tendency. China abounded at that time in pacifists,[338] in apostles of brotherly love, and as we should say nowadays Tolstoyans. A true opposite to the egoistic Yang-chu was the preacher of pure altruism and indiscriminate sympathy, Mei-ti. Mencius said that if the ideas of either of these extremists prevailed the time would come, not only when wolves would devour men, but men would devour one another.[339] In opposing discrimination and ethical standards to the naturalists, Mencius and the Confucian humanists were fighting for civilization. Unfortunately there is some truth in the Taoist charge that the standards of the Confucians are too literal, that in their defence of the principle of imitation they did not allow sufficiently for the element of flux and relativity and illusion in things—an element for which the Taoists had so keen a sense that they even went to the point of suppressing the difference between sleeping and waking[340] and life and death.[341] To reply properly to the Taoist relativist the Confucians would have needed to work out a sound conception of the rÔle of the imagination—the universal key to human nature—and this they do not seem to have done. One is inclined to ask whether this is the reason for China’s failure to achieve a great ethical art like that of the drama and the epic of the Occident at their best. The Taoists were richly imaginative but along romantic lines. We should not fail to note the Taoist influence upon Li Po and other Bohemian and bibulous poets of the Tang dynasty, or the relation of Taoism to the rise of a great school of landscape painting at about the same time. We should note also the Taoist element in “Ch’an” Buddhism (the “Zen” Buddhism[342] of Japan), some knowledge of which is needed for an understanding of whole periods of Japanese and Chinese art.

In these later stages, however, the issues are less clear-cut than in the original struggle between Taoists and Confucians. The total impression one has of early Taoism is that it is a main manifestation of an age of somewhat sophistical individualism. Ancient Chinese individualism ended like that of Greece at about the same time in disaster. After a period of terrible convulsions (the era of the “Fighting States”), the inevitable man on horseback appeared from the most barbaric of these states and “put the lid” on everybody. Shi Hwang-ti, the new emperor, had many of the scholars put to death and issued an edict that the writings of the past, especially the Confucian writings, should be destroyed (213 B.C.). Though the emperor behaved like a man who took literally the Taoist views as to the blessings of ignorance, it is not clear from our chief authority, the historian Ssu-ma Ch’ien, that he acted entirely or indeed mainly under Taoist influence.

It is proper to add that though Lao-tzu proclaims that the soft is superior to the hard, a doctrine that should appeal to the Occidental sentimentalist, one does not find in him or in the other Taoists the equivalent of the extreme emotional expansiveness of the Rousseauist. There are passages, especially in Lao-tzu, that in their emphasis on concentration and calm are in line with the ordinary wisdom of the East; and even where the doctrine is unmistakably primitivistic the emotional quality is often different from that of the corresponding movement in the West.