various customs inculcated by former sages, a collection in which all the minutiae of daily life, even sitting, standing, eating, sleeping, and walking, are dwelt upon, and the proper mode of action prescribed under almost all possible contingencies. It has been said that one has but to read this book in order to understand the fixity and immobility of Chinese customs. 5. The Spring and Autumn Annals, so called because it was started in the spring and completed in the autumn. It is the one work that was written by Confucius himself and is the product of his old age. It contains particularly a history, covering some two hundred years, of his native state of Loo, which was one of the feudal states in what is now the province of Shantung.

The second class, or the Four Books, consist of: I. The Analects, which is an important collection of the sayings of Confucius recorded by his various disciples. 2. The Great Learning. This is a treatise setting forth how to regulate the thoughts and correct the heart of the individual in order to establish the family, which is the basis of Chinese society, and so govern the country and produce concord throughout the whole world. 3. The Doctrine of the Mean. This is a short treatise showing how the ideal character of the Superior or Princely Man must observe the principle of order found in Nature. This is unquestionably the teaching of the Doctrine of the Mean. 4. The Book of Mencius, which is a philosophical treatise on government and morals, written by Mencius, the greatest of Confucius' followers and ranking second only to the master in the admiration and esteem of the Chinese.

Confucianism, summed up in these works, is thus to be regarded as from the very outset a glorified conservatism, and this goes far toward explaining the monotonous sequel of

Chinese history. Indeed one could not well conceive of a sharper antithesis than that which exists between the forwardlooking method of Socrates the inquirer, which is the very breath and spirit of Western philosophy, and the archaism of Confucius the transmitter, which has for centuries been. at once the spirit of Chinese civilization and a cause of its stagnation. "The Master said, 'I am not one who was born in the possession of knowledge. I am one who is fond of antiquity and earnest in seeking it (knowledge) there.' ” 10

It may seem gratuitous to stress the point that intelligence was never emancipated in China. But it should be constantly borne in mind that the unity of Chinese civilization, a unity that in some respects is truly marvelous, was achieved by having rivetted upon it the incubus of an ancient tradition which meant the sacrifice of all possibility of progress. Only in our day is the Chinese beginning to "think for himself," and to appreciate the possibilities and consequences of free intelligence operating-often, to be sure, in a misguided manner-in the sphere of human relationships. We cannot emphasize too strongly this divergence in method and spirit between the West and the greatest country of the East. The fifth century B. C. really marks a spiritual parting of the ways between the civilization of Europe and the civilization of China. It needs always to be remembered that Confucius considered his task to be to synthetize, in order to conserve and make more effective, the heritage from the past. For him, therefore, the problem seemed entirely different from that of his near contemporary in Greece, who considered his mission to be the erection of a new foundation for life and morality based upon man's reason and reflection. The former arrested the development of social theory and 10 Analects, Book VII.

practice in China, albeit on a very high plane, for twentyfive hundred years; the latter initiated a history of thought. The forces of traditionalism, never entirely absent in Greek society, and increasing in strength slowly but surely prior to Socrates' day, led to his repudiation and his death. But no one could by the greatest stretch of imagination think of Confucius as a radical and an innovator. He never thought of himself as anything but a "transmitter," a transmitter of custom and usage and traditional principles which the ancient rulers from the very dawn of recorded Chinese history had bequeathed to succeeding generations. The "truth once delivered" had been forgotten in the lives of princes and kings. It therefore had to be revived. Good government and a good society, possible only when individuals were themselves good, were alike for Socrates and Confucius the aim and goal to be striven for. But for Confucius the principles for the most perfect regulation of private character and the most perfect social arrangement were reckoned as having been already revealed and handed down from the society of an earlier day. Resuscitation of the past in order the better to duplicate the past rather than prospective fashioning of the future in the light of the past, is thus the key-note of Confucian thought, and, until the present generation at least, the most prominent feature of the Chinese mentality.

It seems scarcely necessary to suggest that the Socratic impulse to use intelligence in the control of life is the impulse of modern science in the West, and that, on the other hand, the absence of this same Socratic impulse is responsible to a very great extent for the torpid condition of China for so many centuries. It is interesting to speculate on all the various forces that combined to bring about the rise of modern

science in the seventeenth century, and, of course, it would be an absurd piece of extravagance to attribute the phenomenon simply to the life and death of Socrates. But it is surely more than a fancy or conjecture to say that if we extend the Socratic method of the careful use of intelligence as an instrument of control in the world of human relations to the world of physical nature, and then think of the control of nature as contributing to the further control and improvement of human relations, we have modern science and modernity. The impulse to be curious about the meaning of "Justice," let us say, and straightway to embark upon an uncertain voyage of discovery to ascertain its meaning because it is felt that this meaning, once discovered, will enhance human welfare, is one with the impulse to inquire patiently and systematically, by observation and experiment, into the secrets of nature so that nature may be made to contribute to the improvement of man's estate. Xenophon tells us in his Memorabilia how Socrates "used always to talk about what related to man, and consider the meaning of piety, impiety, honour, dishonour, justice, injustice, moderation, madness, courage, cowardice; asking what do city and politician, government and governor connote, and reflecting on those topics, knowledge of which makes a man deserve the name of Kaλòs kȧyalós, ignorance of which, the name of slave." 11 And it was Aristotle, we may remember, who declared that "two things may be ascribed to Socrates, his inductive reasoning and his fixing of general concepts."

In a very real sense, therefore, the Socratic impulse is the same impulse that motivates modern science. For intelligence once liberated and urged to operate freely in any 11 Livingstone, op. cit., p. 223.

sphere must sooner or later assert itself in all spheres, influence men's lives at every point, and reveal to them ever new possibilities of achievement. Modern science is teaching us with renewed conviction the truth which Sophocles taught in the Age of Pericles. Would it be too rhetorical to say that we may sing again with a fresh insight into its meaning the pæan of human power which the dramatist puts into the mouth of the famous chorus of the Antigone: "Of all strong things none is more wonderfully strong than Man. He can cross the wintry sea, and year by year compels with his plough the unwearied strength of Earth, the oldest of the immortal gods. He seizes for his prey the aery birds and teeming fishes, and with his wit has tamed the mountain-ranging beasts, the longmaned horses and the tireless bull. Language is his, and windswift thought and city-founding mind; and he has learned to shelter himself from cold and piercing rain; and has devices to meet every ill, but Death alone. Even for desperate sickness he has a cure, and with his boundless skill he moves on, sometimes to evil, but then again to good."

The West did move on while the East remained stationary; but for a time the spirit of free inquiry was all but lost and the West came to a long pause. Dogma and an excessive veneration for the past then became the key-note of Western civilization. The incubus under which the medieval mind was laid was the incubus of an unfortunate ecclesiasticism, of which scholasticism was a product. The most prominent characteristic of scholasticism was its systematization of religious dogma. To this task the schoolmen brought a vast amount of ability and acumen; and it was the want of a worthy subject-matter and the absence of a fruitful direction and goal that gave their speculations that air of unreality