But he was chiefly a thinker; he made no attempt to elevate the people; his purpose was to repress the passions, and to preserve the soul in a perfect equanimity.

He was the Zeno of the East, founder of a Chinese stoicism.

With him virtue is sure of its reward; everything is arranged by a fixed law.

His disciples afterwards added to his system a thaumaturgic element and an invocation of departed spirits, so that now it resembles our modern Spiritism; but the original doctrine of Lao-tse was rationalism in philosophy and stoicism in morals.

Confucius is said, in a Chinese work, to have visited him, and to have frankly confessed his inability to understand him.