of this perpetual concern for the body and the needs of the body, and expressed it in imaginative form in his sayings about food and clothing: the fowls of the air sow not, yet God feedeth them; the lilies of the field spin not, yet even Solomon was not so gloriously arrayed. But these words of Jesus have been either misunderstood or distorted into some sense other than the true sense, which is the Tâoist sense. They express a profound confidence that nature will provide for all that is really needful if only man will refrain from stirring up vain desires for superfluous goods. In Europe the praise of inaction is hardly to be found before the eighteenth century, and even then it is rather a witty tour de force than the utterance of a serious conviction.[1]
Christian Europe, instead of converting the Jews, has been converted to the Jewish attitude: Christ has been crucified again and again by the demons of industrial and mercantile civilization. For the essential purpose of that civilization is this: to create as many needs as possible in order that we may work to satisfy them as best we can.
The Tâoists in general, and Kwang-tze in particular, have an excellent antidote for that European malady of doing, undoing, doing over, and overdoing, which wastes and annihilates us all.
- ↑ The idea of inaction is treated, with historical notes as to its development, in my book L’altra metà, Milan, 1912.
