upon Confucius and in the name of spontaneity attacks his
doctrine of humanistic imitation. ¹ He sings the praises of
the unconscious, ²
even when obtained through intoxication, ³
and extols the morality of the beautiful soul. ⁴ He traces
the fall of mankind from nature into artifice in a fashion that
anticipates very completely both Rousseau's Discourse on the
Arts and Sciences ⁵ and that on the Origin of Inequality. ⁶ See
also the amusing passage in which the brigand Chī, child of
nature and champion of the weak against the oppressions of
government, paints a highly Rousseauistic picture of man's
fall from his primitive felicity. ⁷ Among the things that are
contrary to nature and purely conventional, according to
Chuang-tzû and the Taoists, are, not only the sciences and arts
and attempts to discriminate between good and bad taste, ⁸ but
likewise government and statecraft, ⁹ virtue and moral stand-
ards. ¹⁰ To the artificial music of the Confucians, the Taoists op-
pose a natural music that offers startling analogies to the most
recent programmatic and descriptive tendencies of Occidental
music. ¹¹ See especially Chuang-tzû's programme for a cosmic
symphony in three movements ¹² -- the Pipes of Pan as one is
tempted to call it. This music that is supposed to reflect in all
its mystery and magic the infinite creative processes of nature
is very close to the primitivistic music ("L'arbre vu du côté
des racines") with which Hugo's satyr strikes panic into the
breasts of the Olympians.

The Taoist notion of following nature is closely related, as in
other naturalistic movements, to the idea of fate whether in its
stoical or epicurean form. ¹³ From the references in Chuang-tzû14Ch. ¹⁴

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