An idea · Twentieth Century (to mid-century) · first attested 1943
The Tao
The common moral inheritance of mankind – and what happens when it is lost.
Lewis borrowed the Chinese word Tao for what he took to be an objective moral order: the body of first principles about good and evil that every great civilisation, pagan and Christian, has recognised in some form. The Tao is not proved from outside – one reasons from within it, as one sees from within one's own eyes; to deny it wholesale is to saw off the branch on which any morality sits, rebellion included. Cut a person off from the Tao, teach him that all values are merely feelings, and you get a man without a chest: intellect and appetite with no trained heart between them to love the good. And those who would step outside the Tao to remake human nature, in mastering man, would abolish him, since no standard would remain to call their design wrong.