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A review from The Chronicle: Doctor Carus has given us the life of Confucius, the doctrine of Confucius, the doctrine of Lao Tse, and an impression of great China all in one little book of seventy pages, mostly blank verse. We do not hesitate to say that the student will learn more about China from this little drama, than from studying volumes of missionary or diplomatic histories. We seem to be inside and to sense it intuitively. That Chinese philosophy has anything new to bring the West, we gravely doubt. That Western philosophy has much new to offer China is equally doubtful. It is all there in both cases. The mind has reasoned out the circle of the mind's own necessary (or acquired) ideas. The ancient book of diagrams gave a mathematical foundation to Chinese thought, even as Pythagoras guided the Greek thinkers into the paths of accurate mathematical reasoning. The origin of all things is the absolute. Within this there set up the opposition between the Yang and the Yin, the odd and the even, the male and the female. Thus the knowable is the world of the relative. Confucius developed his moral philosophy from the five social relations of prince and subject, husband and wife, parent and child, elder brother and younger brother, friend and friend. If these relations were mutually fulfilled society would be perfect and happy. He found the correct principles of this mutuality in the writings of Chinese literature. He edited the five books of history, poetry, and so forth and revived the old Chinese ritual and ceremonial. Lao Tse struck out a more original and Platonic philosophy. He did not look to a mechanical, or physical Absolute (T'ae Chi), but to the divine mind (Tao) as the Creator of all things. He found the path not in mutuality and ceremonial, but in mystical communion with the Word of God. In this book the two philosophers meet and dispute. A degraded Taoism still numbers millions of followers in China, but the thought of China, ever since that pregnant fifth century before Christ, has been guided by the dead hand; the empty, ceremonial ethic, of Confucius.

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