but in a subsequent incarnation. Te is anything that happens to one or that one does of a kind indicating that, as a consequence, one is going to meet with good or bad luck. It means, so to speak, the stock of credit (or the deficit) that at any given moment a man has at the bank of fortune. Such a stock is of course built up partly by the correct carrying out of ritual; but primarily by securing favourable omens; for unless the omens are favourable, no rite can be carried out at all. Based on the cognate relation between de and zhi "to plant", Waley further noted the early Chinese regarded planting seeds as a de, hence it "means a latent power, a 'virtue' inherent in something." The linguist Peter A. Boodberg investigated the semantics and etymology of de , which he called "perhaps the most significant word, next to tao , in ancient Chinese macro- and microcosmology." The standard translation for it is "virtue," both in the sense of inherent quality and in that of moral excellence, but with the validity of the traditional rendering somewhat shaken by Arthur Waley's insistence on interpreting it as "power." Indeed, it is believed by many scholars that the term originated in the mytho-magical period of Chinese speculation when tê was conceived as a kind of mana-like potency inherent in substances, things, and human beings, a potency which, on the one hand, made them true to their essence, and on the other, made possible their influencing of other entities. It appears often as if it had been imagined as a kind of electric charge permeating the thing in question, waxing or waning in accordance with some mysterious law, and capable of being transmitted, in the case of living beings, from one generation to another. Contrary-minded students of ancient Chinese philosophy dispute this interpretation as rather narrow and possibly anachronistic, and point to the fact that tê had early acquired, at least in Confucian literature, ethical connotations close to our "virtue," that is, as moral, and only rarely amoral or immoral, efficacy. They find, therefore, no quarrel with rendering tê, almost invariably, as "virtue." Philologists are, however, troubled by the absence in the Chinese term of any connotations reminiscent of the Latin etymon vir, such as manliness and virility. They remind us that tê is free from any contamination with sexual associations