Illustrations of the Tao

Scripture for reflection

“For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness.”

Romans 2:14–15 KJV

UECF.NET summary

The book closes with an appendix in which Lewis compiles his own translations and selections of maxims and precepts from a wide range of the world’s ethical traditions — among them the Old and New Testaments, Ancient Egyptian and Babylonian sources, Old Norse literature, the Hindu tradition, the Confucian Analects, Native American teaching, Anglo-Saxon, Roman, and Greek writers — arranged under eight headings: General Beneficence, Special Beneficence, Duties to Parents, Elders and Ancestors, Duties to Children and Posterity, Justice, Good Faith and Veracity, Mercy, and Magnanimity.

Lewis offers the appendix as illustration rather than formal proof: a demonstration that the basic moral demands he calls the Tao — care for others, honesty, justice, mercy, respect for family across generations — recur, in broadly similar form, across civilizations with no direct contact with one another. UECF.NET does not reproduce Lewis’s compiled maxims themselves, since his particular selection, translation, and arrangement of them remain part of the copyrighted book; the eight category headings above are cited here only as bibliographic and structural information, the way a library catalog might describe a book’s table of contents.

Read alongside the three lectures, the appendix functions as Lewis’s evidence for the claim underlying the whole book: that the Tao is not the parochial invention of any one culture (including his own), but a substantially shared moral inheritance that education can either cultivate or, at real cost, dismantle.

Related Bible references

• Romans 2:14–15
• Micah 6:8
• Amos 5:24
• Deuteronomy 10:18–19