Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/159

 studies was a discovery that if the span of his life permitted fifty years' uninterrupted groping among the pages of the Book of Changes (Yih King), he might hope to reach the truth. In one important respect his philosophy corresponded with Shintō: it was inductive. The rule of life for men in all their relations was to be found within themselves: heaven had conferred on every human being a moral sense, compliance with which would keep him always in the right path. He did not recognise, however, that consideration for woman and her chivalrous treatment should be catalogued among the promptings of conscience. With the high place assigned to woman in the Shintō cosmogony and the Shintō ceremonials, he would have been absolutely unsympathetic. Confucianism, in short, was pure secularism. Faithful followers of the Chinese sage lived as units of their families, thoughtless of a hereafter, and persuaded that the recompense of their acts would be found, if not in their own fortunes, then in those of their descendants.

It is thus easy to see how greatly Confucianism differed from Shintō, while, at the same time, both had much in common. The similarities and dissimilarities of the two systems are here alluded to, not simply for the sake of establishing the independence of Shintō, but also, and mainly, because from the time of Japan's first acquaintance with Chinese literature, Confucianism won for itself a firm place in the minds of her educated