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71. 1. To know and yet (think) we do not know is the highest (attainment); not to know (and yet think) we do know is a disease.
2. It is simply by being pained at (the thought of) having this disease that we are preserved from it. The sage has not the disease. He knows the pain that would be inseparable from it, and therefore he does not have it.
, 'The Disease of Knowing.' Here, again, we have the Tâo working 'by contraries,'--in the matter of knowledge. Compare par. 1 with Confucius's account of what knowledge is in the Analects, 11, ch. 17. The par. 1 is found in one place in Hwâi-nan, lengthened out by the addition of particles; but the variation is unimportant. In another place, however, he seems to have had the correct text before him.
Par. 2 is in Han Fei also lengthened out, but with an
important variation (
for
), and I cannot construe his text. His
is probably a transcriber's error.