effort of the imagination which they there encountered. Thus they tried to complete the thought of the old sages of China, to fill up their outline, and to form into distinctness the shadowy shapes of more ancient ideas. The round line to represent the T'ai-ki, the circle half white and half black with the curved diameter which marks light and darkness, or yin and yang, are new; and the old notion of the four seasons, which was popular in the Han dynasty as explaining the four siang or "images," was given up for the great yin and the little yin and the great yang and the little yang, phrases new to the Confucian doctrine. We cannot wonder that they gave up the four seasons, for how could the eight kwa come out of the seasons? Others said that the four siang, or "images," were the animals that pass through metamorphoses, such as the tortoise, the dragon, and the dragon-horse that bore on his back the arithmetical scheme or magic square offered to Yu the Great. But why follow out these ideas? They were unknown to Confucius. They extended the cosmogony without introducing the idea of a personal Creator. This was due to the influence of Buddhism, and the fact that the ancient books had not the doctrine. The peculiar form of their cosmogony was due to Buddhist influence, which inculcates faith in a creating and destroying Fate, blindly impartial, entirely impersonal, and incessantly efficient. If Buddhism had been truly a religion adapted to draw man back to God, his Sovereign and Judge, the true doctrine of creation would have been taught in the Indian Shastras, and the Chinese writers of the Sung dynasty would probably have adopted the idea. But the perversity of Hindoo philosophy was better pleased with irresistible Fate as a substitute for the Divine Ruler.

In taking example from the Buddhists in this particular, the Sung philosophers were the more willing, inasmuch as the teachers of Tauism had preferred the doctrine of spontaneous growth, to represent the origin of the world. The tendency of their speculations was to shut

out God from the world, so far as His being in any sense an active Creator.

This remark brings me, by a natural transition, to speak of the difference between Confucius and the Sung philosophers in regard to their philosophy of nature. In ancient China, the notion of five elements was already in existence, but it was not till the Tauists of the Han developed the doctrine that it assumed its modern form. It is remarkable that, after so great an interval, no gleam of a true science of nature should have entered into the intellects of the Sung philosophers. They were too much devoted to antiquity, and too lacking in independence, to shake off the yoke of a materialistic nomenclature.