Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II China: Duty And Detachment /CHINESE meditation, quietism, individualistic inaction, as well as the more constructive social energies of the race, reached personal exemplification and classic expression at about the same time in two remarkable personalities. Lao Tzu and Confucius were Chinese incarnations of the vita contemplativa and the vita activa, the /Jtbs SoopijTiKos and TrpaKTiKos. One might whimsically call them the Mary and Martha of China. These two modes of human life may rest on different motives and assume different forms with different peoples. The contemplative life may issue from the detached intellectual temperament, which is supremely interested in knowing, or it may issue from brooding aversion to life’s more blatant activities, or from horror over a sinful world and fearful or loving consecration to one’s own salvation and the God with whom that lies. The active life may embrace many and diverse intellectual interests, may have religious or secular aims, may represent devotion to the social fabric or fierce ambition. For the sake of clarity one distinguishes thesetendencies rather sharply, and speaks of them as opposites. But, of course, they mingle in the same individuals. Moreover, in every land, those who exhibit markedly one tendency will have much in common with those who represent the other, because of like environment and racial characteristics underlying the idiosyncrasies of individuals. So the views of Confucius and Lao Tzu show affinity as well as opposition. It is better to speak first of Confucius, because Lao Tzu, although the elder by some fifty years, embodies a reaction against the more dominant Chinese qualities represented in the younger man.1 How did Confucius consider life and his relationship to the world, and set h…
