Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: YANG TZU. 4TH CENTURY B.C. [A heterodox thinker who taught the doctrine of egoism, as opposed to the altruism of Meh Tzfi, another philosopher of the same age, also a dissenter from Confucianism pure and undefiled. Mencius says of them, "Yang Tzu was all for self. He would not have sacrificed a hair to benefit the whole world. Meh Tzu was all for others. If it would have benefited the world to have sacrificed his body from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, he would have done it."] IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? A Hundred years are the extreme limit of human life,— an age which not one in a thousand attains. Let us take the case of a man who does. His helpless infancy and his helpless old age will together occupy nearly half the time. Pain and sickness, sorrow and misfortune, actual losses and opportunities missed, anxieties and fears,—these will almost fill up the rest. He may possibly have some ten years or so to the good; but even then he will hardly enjoy a single hour of absolute serenity, undarkened by the gloom of care. What, then, can be the object of human existence? Wherein is happiness to be found? Ir the appointments of wealth and luxury? Or in the enjoyment of the pleasures of sense ? Alas! those will hot always charm, and these may not always be enjoyed. Then again there is the stimulus of good report, there is the restraint of law, in things we may do and in things we may not do. And thus we struggle on for a breath of fame, and scheme to be remembered after death; ever on our guard against the allurements of sense, ever on the watch over our hearts and actions. We miss whatever of real happiness is to be got out of life, never being able even for a single moment to relax the vigilance of our heed. In what do we differ, indeed, from the fe...