They knew that in creation all things had their possibilities and their impossibilities. Therefore they said, "Selection excludes universality. Training will not reach in all directions. But Tao is comprehensive."
Consequently, Shên Tao discarded all knowledge and self-interest and became a fatalist.
It is about as difficult to apprehend Tao apart from fatalism as the omniscience of God apart from predestination.
Passivity was his guiding principle. "For," said he, "we can only know that we know nothing, and a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
"Take any worthless fellow who laughs at mankind for holding virtue in esteem, any unprincipled vagabond who reviles the great Sages of the world, and subject him to torture. In his agony he will sacrifice positive and negative alike. If he can but get free, he will trouble no more about knowledge and forethought. Past and future will cease to exist for him, in his then neutral condition.
"Move when pushed, come when dragged. Be like a whirling gale, like a feather in the wind, like a mill-stone going round. The mill-stone as an existence is perfectly harmless. In motion or at rest it does no more than is required, and cannot therefore incur blame.
"Why? Because it is simply an inanimate thing. It has no anxieties about itself. It is never entangled in the trammels of knowledge. In motion or at rest it is always governed by fixed laws, and therefore it never becomes open to praise. Hence it has been said, 'Be as though an inanimate thing, and there will be no use for Sages.'
"For a clod cannot be without Tao,"—at which some full-blooded young buck covered the argument with ridicule by crying out, "Shên Tao's Tao is not for the living, but for the dead!"
It was the same with T'ien P'ien. He studied under P'êng Mêng; with the result that he learnt nothing.
Tao cannot be learnt.