The chapter opens with five clauses in the same shape, each pairing a superlative with the appearance of its opposite. Great completion seems defective. Great fullness seems empty. Great straightness seems bent. Great skill seems clumsy. Great eloquence seems tongue-tied.
The first two are given a consequence that the last three are not: the use of the apparently defective thing is unimpaired, and the use of the apparently empty thing is inexhaustible. That is the argument. What looks finished has nothing left to do, and what looks full has nowhere for anything to go, so the marks of incompleteness are the marks of a thing that still works.
The list belongs with the sayings quoted in chapter forty-one, where the great square has no corners and the great vessel is finished late, and the two chapters may be drawing on the same stock of formulae. What distinguishes this one is that it moves from the paradoxes to a piece of physical observation and then to a political conclusion, in three sentences.
The physical observation is that moving about overcomes cold and keeping still overcomes heat. Both are true and both are ordinary: exertion warms a person, stillness in the heat does not add to it. The pairing sets up the last line, which selects one of the two as the general standard rather than treating them symmetrically.
That line is the chapter's conclusion and its link to the rest of the book: clear stillness is the standard of the world. Chapter twenty-six had already made stillness the ruler of restlessness. Here it is promoted from a personal quality to a public measure.