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He held the field for Confucius not the Taoist, but the Mencian Confucius against all comers; smote Yang Chu the Egotist hip and thigh; smote gentle Mo Ti, the Altruist; preached fine and practical ethics; and had no patience with those dreamers of the House of Laotse. A man sent from the Gods, I should say, to do a great work; even though
This was a work designed to establish the divine claim of the sovereign of the Southern Court. The reader knows that when, in the eighth century, Japan went to Chinese sources for jurisprudential inspiration, she had to eliminate the Confucian and Mencian doctrine that the sceptre may not be wielded by anyone whose virtues do not qualify him for the task in the eyes of the nation.
Nor stopped he with Mahommed and Constantine; he doubted not bringing the Rabbis to such a treaty. How almost identical it was with the Judaism of Moses. The Bishop of Rome might protest. What matter? Romanism segregated must die. And so the isms of the Brahman and the Hindoo, so the Buddhist, the Confucian, the Mencian they would all perish under the hammering of the union.
It is the former's working out of the latter's superb idea of the li. The Mencian system has broken down, and been abolished. It had grown old, outworn and corrupt. But it was established a couple of centuries before that of Augustus, and has been subject to the same stress of time and the cycles; and only broke down the other day. Time will wear out anything made by man.
Each village-community was self-governing; the headman in it taking the place of the father in the family; he was responsible for order, so it was his business to keep the people happy; and the same principle was extended to fit the province, the viceroyalty, the empire. The system is Mencian; the inspiration behind it from Confucius.
Confucius, as I have tried to show you, had all Mysticism divinely behind and backing him, though he said little about it; Mencius, I think, had none. Mencius remade a Confucius of his own, with the mystical elements lacking. He saw in him only a social reformer and teacher of ethics; and it is the easiest thing in the world to see Confucius only through Mencian spectacles.
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