too much, and that by this excess he well-nigh prevents the true inner humanization of his bestial self—for nearly all of our daily acts tend rather to satisfy our native bestial instincts in a more complex, refined, safe, and expensive manner, than to correct the original sin of our swinish and tigerish nature. The primitive man had but his nails and his teeth to fight his rival for the body of a stag: the civilized man has submarines, airplanes, torpedoes, bombs, flame-throwers, gas, hand-grenades, shrapnel, and high explosives to fight his rival for a province. Greed and ferocity have been magnified and armed by science: the human beast is unchanged.
Now the Chinese idea of inaction may help us Europeans to discredit the type of action that is merely an agonizing struggle to obtain satisfactions that do not satisfy. Such, indeed, is all action that does not subserve the only purpose worthy of man: the overcoming of his bestial nature by the substitution of sentiments, habits, checks, and reason. Christianity tells us what to do; Tâoism tells us what not to do. In order that we may do what is essential and divine, we must refrain from doing that which is transitory and useless. Tâoism does not regard the immortal soul as something perfect and ready-made, placed in the body to give it life: the soul is a conquest, a terminus, a reward, a sublimation and a trans-substantiation of the body. We have at birth but
