to us and we give
birth to others. " Life becomes a biological procession and the very question of
immortality is sidetracked. For that is the exact feeling of a Chinese grandfather
holding his grandchild by the hand and going to the shops to buy some candy, with
the thought that in five or ten years he will be returning to his grave or to his
ancestors. The best that we can hope for in this life is that we shall not have sons
and grandsons of whom we need be ashamed. The whole pattern of Chinese life is
organized according to this one idea.

II. EARTHBOUND
The situation then is this: man wants to live, but he still must live upon this earth.
All questions of living in heaven must be brushed a-side. Let not the spirit take
wings and soar to the abode of the gods and forget the earth. Are we not mortals,
condemned to die? The span of life vouchsafed us, threescore and ten, is short enough,
if the spirit gets too haughty and wants to live forever, but on the other hand, it
is also long enough, if the spirit is a little humble. One can learn such a lot and
enjoy such a lot in seventy years, and three generations is a long, long time to see
human follies and acquire human wisdom. Anyone who is wise and has lived long enough
to witness the changes of fashion and morals and politics through the rise and fall
of three generations should be perfectly satisfied to rise from his seat and go away
saying, "It was a good show" when the curtain falls.
For we are of the earth, earth-born and earthbound. There is nothing to be unhappy
about the fact that we are, as it were, delivered upon this beautiful earth as its
transient guests. Even if it were a dark dungeon, we still would have to make the
best of it; it would be ungrateful of us not to do so when we have, instead of a dungeon,
such a beautiful earth to live on for a good part of a century. Sometimes we get too
ambitious and disdain the humble and yet generous earth. Yet a sentiment for this
Mother Earth, a feeling of true affection and attachment, one must have for this
temporary abode of our body and spirit, if we are to have a sense of spiritual harmony.
We have to have, therefore, a kind of animal skepticism as well as animal faith, taking
this earthly life largely as it is. And we have to retain the wholeness of nature
that we see in Thoreau who felt himself kin to the sod and partook largely of its
dull patience, in winter expecting the sun of spring, who in his cheapest moments
was apt to think that it was not his business to be "seeking the spirit", but as much
the spirit's business to seek him, and whose happiness, as he described it, was a
good deal like that of the woodchucks. The earth, after all is real, as the heaven
is unreal: how fortunate is man that he is born between the real earth and the unreal⑨⑨網⑨文⑨檔⑨下⑨載⑨與⑨在⑨線⑨閱⑨讀⑨
heaven!
Any good practical philosophy must start out with the recognition of our having a
body. It is high time that some among us made the straight admission that we are animals,
an admission which is inevitable since the establishment of the basic truth of the
Darwinian theory and the great progress of biology, especially bio-chemistry. It was
very unfortunate that our teachers and philosophers belonged to the so-called
intellectual class, with a characteristic professional pride of intellect. The men
of the spirit were as proud of the spirit as the shoemaker is proud of leather.
Sometimes even the spirit was not sufficiently remote and abstract and they had to
use the words, "essence" or "soul" or "idea," writing them with capital letters to
frighten us. The human body was distilled in this scholastic machine into a spirit,
and the spirit was further concentrated into a kind of essence, forgetting that even
alcoholic drinks must have a "body" mixed with plain water if they are to be palatable
at all. And we poor laymen were supposed to drink that concentrated quintessence of
spirit. This over-emphasis on the spirit was