Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 3.djvu/110

Contemporary with Confucius during a part of his career, but fifty-two years older, was Laotsu. His name being open to two interpretations, "venerable philosopher" or "aged boy," the latter suggested a fanciful legend that he had been carried in his mother's womb for seventy-two years and was born with white hair. The system of philosophy conceived by him is embodied in a treatise about twice as large as the Sermon on the Mount, called Tao-teh-king. If sinologues could agree conclusively about the interpretation of this title, there would be less room for the diverse theories that have prevailed about the philosophy embodied in the volume. But while there is tolerable consensus that teh means virtue, there is marked divergence about tao, one party calling it "reason" and designating the system founded on it "rationalism;" another claiming that it means "way," in an abstract sense, and that the