And we call that by turns electricity, friction, caloric, and light,
Which is none of these things, and yet all of them. Ask of the waves and the winds,
Ask of the stars of the firmament, ask of the flowers of the field;
They will answer you all of them, naming it each by a different name.
For the meaning of Nature is neither wholly conceal’d nor reveal’d;
But her mind is seen to be single in her acts that are nowhere the same.”[35]
Further, Lao-tzŭ represents pure or abstract existence as identical with non-existence, and in our own century Hegel has said that Being and Non-being are the same.[36] Again, Lao-tzŭ speaks of the ultimate existence as that out of which all other existences have proceeded, and he regards it as becoming active and producing from having been inactive and quiescent. So many modern philosophers have maintained that God made all things out of himself; and in the opinion of some the Deity became personal from being impersonal, and the Infinite manifested itself as finite in the created universe.[37] But the great point on which Lao-tzŭ differs from the large majority of modern thinkers with regard to the First Cause is that he never introduces or supposes the element of personality; consequently will and design are excluded from his conception of the primordial existence.[38] Here, I think, he is logically more correct than the modern philosopher referred to above, although his notions may be much farther from the actual truth than theirs. Again, when Lao-tzŭ speaks of Nature (Tao) as the source whence all things spring—as that which informs and cherishes all the world—and as that into which all living creatures, high and low, finally return—he says what many others have expressed in terms often very similar. I select only two or three instances by way of illustration. The Pythagorean doctrine is thus put by Virgil—
—“deum (i.e. animum) ire per omnes
Terrasque tractusque maris cælumque profundum.
Hinc pecudes, armenta, viros, genus omne ferarum,