to reconstruct. It buries itself in its materials, instead of going behind them. Hindu cosmogony makes the v/orld issue from mystic thought ; Manu forms the creatures by devotion. Bat the Chinese skips the question of origin, and says that the world has a self-shaping force ; or that the first man must have fashioned the world- stuff with hammer and chisel, himself and his tools being already a part of it. Speculation here holds fast by the actual and concrete ; takes the human for the divine, and positive visible work for the best part of the human.
China does not grow metaphysicians in tropical luxuriance, as the plains of the Ganges do. It has been hospitable to Buddhist literature, but the higher speculative forms of Buddhism were not of native origin, and have not maintained themselves among the people. The sublime idealism of Lao-tse, instead of flowering out, as it would have done in any Indo-European race, into a rich cycle of mystical philosophy, — like the Vedanta in India, or Sufism in Persia, — rapidly faded into low forms of conjuring with spirits, elements, and spells. The rationalism of Confucius and Mencius holds fast to the solid ground of practical ethics and social organization ; while its philosophical interpreters, like Chuhi, guard carefully against separating essence, even in the idea, from material form. And the bewildering jargon of the " Two Principles," which circulates among the people in a great variety of shapes as a substitute for philosophy, usually winds itself up with the saying, that all this has inexpressible meanings which no one since Confucius has been able to conceive. The national religion of China is essentially a political institution; and we shall realize the distance between the popular Buddhism and that absolute mental abstraction from things visible and conceivable, which distinguishes the original faith, when we consider how intensely and exclusively the Chinese mind holds to the reality of the phe-
