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It was a great pity that nothing clear and general was expressed as to what constitutes Honor, only a few enlightened minds being aware that it "from no condition rises," but that it lies in each acting well his part: for nothing was easier than for youths to forget in the heat of action what they had learned in Mencius in their calmer moments.
We needed no Shakespeare to feel though, perhaps, like the rest of the world, we needed him to express it that mercy became a monarch better than his crown, that it was above his sceptered sway. How often both Confucius and Mencius repeat the highest requirement of a ruler of men to consist in benevolence.
Mencius himself regarded Heaven as the First Cause, or Cause of Causes, but it was not the same personal Heaven as that of Mo Tzu. Nor does he hang any cosmogony upon it. His chief concern was to eulogize the doctrines of the great Confucius, and like him he preferred to let the origin of the universe look after itself. Lieh Tzu's Absolute
This master passion of the typical Samurai of old Japan made him regard life as infinitely less than nothing, whenever duty demanded a display of the virtue of loyalty. "The doctrines of Koshi and Moshi" (Confucius and Mencius) formed, and possibly even yet form, the gospel and the quintessence of all wordly wisdom to the Japanese gentleman; they became the basis of his education and the ideal which inspired his conceptions of duty and honor; but, crowning all his doctrines and aspirations was his desire to be loyal. There might abide loyal, marital, filial, fraternal and various other relations, but the greatest of all these was loyalty. Hence the Japanese calendar of saints is not filled with reformers, alms-givers and founders of hospitals or orphanages, but is over-crowded with canonized suicides and committers of hara-kiri. Even today, no man more quickly wins the popular regard during his life or more surely draws homage to his tomb, securing even apotheosis, than the suicide, though he may have committed a crime. In this era of Meiji or enlightened peace, most appalling is the list of assassinations beginning with the murder in Ki[=o]to of Yokoi Héishiro, who was slain for recommending the toleration of Christianity, down to the last cabinet minister who has been knifed or dynamited. Yet in every case the murderers considered themselves consecrated men and ministers of Heaven's righteous vengeance. For centuries, and until constitutional times, the government of Japan was "despotism tempered by assassination." The old-fashioned way of moving a vote of censure upon the king's ministers was to take off their heads. Now, however, election by ballot has been substituted for this, and two million swords have become bric-
Beyond these, to the west and north, are Confucius and Mencius Temples, the latter being the nearer. These are respectively at an elevation of seven thousand one hundred and twenty-eight feet and seven thousand feet. The eye now rests on Point Sublime, the spot where Captain Dutton indited his vividly descriptive accounts of the Great Canyon. Marsh Butte.
He knows but little of Confucius, and absolutely nothing of Mencius. Owing to the negligence of his father, he associated, perhaps, too much with American children. "I should have answered your letter before, by post; but I thought that Wan Lee himself would be a better messenger for this. "Yours respectfully, And this was the long-delayed answer to my letter to Hop Sing.
To-day his descendants form the only hereditary nobility in China, with the exception of those of his great disciple Mencius, who proved a worthy successor to the sage. It is to Confucius that we owe nearly all we possess of the early literature of China. Of what are known as the "Five Classics," four are by his hand.
His memory has been aspersed by the writers of China, who have generally denounced him as a free-thinker and a nihilist, and although, twenty years after his death, a tablet bearing his name was placed in the Hall of Confucius as the greatest Chinese thinker since Mencius, it was removed after a brief period, and since then both the name and the works of Wanganchi have been consigned to an oblivion from which only the curiosity of European writers has rescued them.
The safest, indeed the only reasonable, course is that of the agnostic to leave alone the unknowable, while acknowledging its existence and its mystery, and to try to understand knowable phenomena and guide our actions accordingly. Mo Tzu and Creation He even went so far as to describe Mo Tzu and those who thought with him as "wild animals." Mencius and the First Cause
It is on benevolence, justice, propriety, and knowledge that the good king's heart is set." Mencius said, "In the good days of old, men of virtue and talent abounded in the land, and their influence for good was great upon their fellows. But now, alas, the masses of the people are ignorant, and depraved, and their dominant influence is bad."
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