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CAP. II.]
The Identity of Contraries
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so obscured that it admits the idea of contraries? How can Tao go away and yet not remain?
- Being omnipresent.
How can speech exist and yet be impossible?
- See p. 13.
"Tao is obscured by our want of grasp. Speech is obscured by the gloss of this world.
- I.e. by the one-sided meanings attached to words and phrases.
Hence the affirmatives and negatives of the Confucian and Mihist schools,
- Mih Tzŭ was a philosopher of the fourth century B.C., who propounded various theories which were vigorously attacked by the Confucianists under Mencius. We shall hear more of him by-and-by.
each denying what the other affirmed and affirming what the other denied. But he who would reconcile affirmative with negative and negative with affirmative,
- The "union of impossibilities," which Emerson credits to Plato alone.
must do so by the light of nature.
- I.e. Have no established mental criteria, and thus see all things as ONE.
"There is nothing which is not objective: there is nothing which is not subjective. But it is impossible to start from the objective. Only from
