Page:Eminent Chinese Of The Ch’ing Period - Hummel - 1943 - Vol. 2.pdf/380

 important alterations were made in the text which remains today substantially as it was when it also was transcribed into the Imperial Manuscript Library. (3) That the many real similarities which are observable in the works of Chao and Tai—both in their masterly separation of the long-confused texts of the earlier ching and the later chu, and in thousands of minor textual corrections—illustrate a natural phenomenon in the history of science, namely that investigators working on similar materials may often arrive independently at convergent or even identical conclusions. (4) That the manuscript notes of Ch'üan Tsu-wang—who reached independently many important solutions similar to those of Chao and Tai, but did not live to complete his work—are no longer extant; and that the so-called Ch'üan-shih ch'i-chiao shui-ching chu (see I, ), printed in 1889, which purports to transmit his work, can easily be shown to be a stupid forgery. (5) That those scholars who charged Tai Chên with plagiarism—principally Chang Mu, Wei Yüan, Wang Kuo-wei and Mêng Sên—were unduly swayed by feelings of moral indignation against him, which rendered them more eager to press their charges than to search out the facts in the case, or even to establish the truth or validity of what they offered as evidence.

In a sense, the long history of the posthumous persecution of Tai Chên was foreshadowed more than a century and a half ago in his own writings. He explicitly warned us that when li (reason) is not viewed objectively as the internal structure and texture in things, but is subjectively regarded as inborn in man and available to a mind unclouded by selfish desires, there is always the danger of a self-right ous man condemning innocent persons to death in the name of li which unhappily is too often nothing more than his own unexamined opinion. "Sympathy," said Tai Chên, "is sometimes expressed for men who are murdered in the name of Law. But who will sympathize with those men who are murdered in the name of Li!" It was the destiny of the philosopher who uttered these prophetic words to be him self condemned to a moral death—almost without redress and without sympathy, for a hundred years—by a long line of righteous men who honestly believed that by stressing their private conceptions of li they were championing the cause of Justice (kung li).

New York City May 31, 1944