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From Physical Geography (lectures, Rink edition 1802; Glasenapp compilation)
“Philosophy is not to be found in the whole Orient…. Their teacher Confucius teaches in his writings nothing outside a moral doctrine designed for the princes … and offers examples of former Chinese princes…. But a concept of virtue and morality never entered the heads of the Chinese…. In order to arrive at an idea … of the good [certain] studies would be required, of which [the Chinese] know nothing.”e98bdd
“Their morals and philosophy are nothing more than a daily mixture of miserable rules that everybody knows already by himself…. the entirety of Confucian morals consists of ethical sayings that are intolerable because anyone can rattle them off.”
From this [improper dabbling in the transcendent] comes the monstrous system of Lao-kiun [Laozi] concerning the highest good, that it consists in nothing, i.e., in the consciousness of feeling oneself swallowed up in the abyss of the Godhead by flowing together with it, and hence by the annihilation of one’s personality; in order to have a presentiment of this state Chinese philosophers, sitting in dark rooms with their eyes closed, exert themselves to think and sense their own nothingness. Hence the pantheism