The dance of life / Havelock Ellis.

  • Havelock Ellis
Date:
1926
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The dance of life / Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    puzzled if not dissatisfied. He was willing to work not only from within outwards, but from without inwards, because he allowed so large a place for social solidity, for traditionalism, for paternalism, though he recognised that ceremony is subordinate in the scheme of life, as colour is in a painting, the picture being the real thing. Lao-tze was an individualist and a mystic. He was little con¬ cerned with moralities in the ordinary sense. He recog¬ nised no action but from within outwards. But though Confucius could scarcely have altogether grasped his conception, he was quite able to grasp that of Confucius, and his indifference to tradition, to rule and propriety, was simply an insistence on essential reality, on music/’ Ceremonies,” he said, ” are the outward expression of inward feeling.” He was no more opposed to the funda¬ mental Chinese conception than George Fox was opposed to Christianity in refusing to observe the mere forms and ceremonies of the Church. A sound Confucianism is the outward manifestation of Taouism (as Lao-tze himself taught it), just as a sound socialism is the outward mani¬ festation of a genuine individualism. It has been well said that Chinese socialistic solidarity rests on an individu¬ alistic basis, it is not a bureaucratic State socialism ; it works from within outward. (One of the first European visitors to China remarked that there a street was Like a home.) This is well shown by so great and typical a Chinese philosopher as Meh-ti, who lived, shortly after Confucius, in the fifth century b.c.1 He taught universal 1 His ideas have been studied by Madame Alexandra David, Le Philosophe Meh-ti et l’ I die de Solidarity, London, 1907.
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