Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/291

Rh Confucius could not be extinguished. The of undefined was of short duration; and the next, that of undefined, while entering into the new , found its surest strength in doing honour to his name, and trying to gather up the wreck of the ancient s. It is a great and a difficult undertaking to determine what there was about Confucius to secure for him the influence which he has wielded. Reference has been made to his ; but the study of them only renders the undertaking more difficult. He left no writings in which he detailed the. The Doctrine of the Mean, by his grandson Tze-sze, and The Great Learning, by Tsăng Sin, the most profound, perhaps, of his s, give us the fullest information on that subject, and contain many of his sayings. The Lun Yu, or, “Discourses and s,” is a compilation in which many of his s must have taken part, and has great value as a record of his ways and utterances; but its chapters are mostly disjecta membra, affording faint traces of any guiding method or mind. undefined, Hsiin K&lsquo;ing, and of the undefined, whose works, however, are more or less l, tell us much about him and his opinions, but all in a loose and unconnected way. No has ever seriously undertaken to compare him with the  and s of other s.

The, probably, did not think it necessary to put down many of his own thoughts in, for he said of himself that he was &ldquo;a transmitter, and not a maker.&rdquo; Nor did he lay claim to have any s. He was not born, he declared, with knowledge, but was fond of , and earnest in seeking knowledge there. The for  in all their relations, he held, was to be found within themselves. The right development of that rule, in the ordering not of the individual only, but of, was to be found in the and s of the ancient s. , it has already been observed, had a before Confucius. All the monuments of it, however, were in danger of perishing through the disorder into which the had fallen. The that had subsisted for more than 1500 s had become old. Confucius did not see this—did not see how

It was impossible that in his circumstances he should see it. was in his eyes drifting from its ancient moorings, drifting on a of storms &ldquo;to hideous ruin and ;&rdquo; and the expedient that occurred to him to arrest the evil was to gather up and preserve the  of, illustrating and commending them by his own teachings. For this purpose he d to his s on the, , and al works of the. What he thus did was of inestimable value to, and all other are indebted to him for what they know of  before his time, though all the contents of the ancient works have not come down to us. He wrote, we are told, a preface to the Shu King, or Book of Historical Documents. The preface is, in fact, only a schedule, without any remark by Confucius himself, giving the names of 100 s, of which it consisted. Of these we now possess 59, the oldest going back to the 23d century, and the latest dating in the 8th centuryundefined The credibility of the earlier portions, and the genuineness of several of the documents have been questioned, but the collection as a whole is exceedingly valuable. The Shi King, or Ancient, as existing in his time, or compiled by him (as generally stated, contrary to the evidence in the case), consisted of 311 pieces, of which we possess 305. The latest of them dates 585 sundefined, and the oldest of them ascends perhaps twelve centuries higher. It is the most interesting of ancient in the, and many of the pieces are really fine s. Confucius was wont to say that he who was not acquainted with the Shi was not fit to be conversed with, and that the study of it would produce a mind without a single depraved thought. This is nearly all we have from him about the poems. The Li, or s of s and Ancient and of s, chiefly of the undefined, have come down to us in a sadly mutilated condition. They are still more than sufficiently voluminous, but they were edited, when recovered under the undefined, with so many additions, that it is hardly worth while to speak of them in connection with Confucius, though much of what was added to them is occupied with his history and sayings. Of all the ancient s not one was more prized by him than the Yih King, or &ldquo;The Book of Changes,&ldquo; the rudiments of which are assigned to undefined in the 30th centuryundefined Those rudiments, however, are merely the 8 trigrams and 64 diagrams, composed of a whole and a broken line (—, –&thinsp;–), without any text or explanation of them earlier than the rise of the undefined. The thongs, by which the tablets of Confucius's copy were tied together, were thrice worn out by his constant handling. He said that if his life were lengthened he would give fifty s to the study of the Yih, and might then be without great faults. This has come down to us entire. If not intended from the first for purposes of, it was so used both before and after Confucius, and on that account it was exempted, through the superstition of of the undefined, from the flames. It is supposed to give a theory of the phenomena of the, and of and  principles by the trigrams and the different lines and numbers of the diagrams of undefined. Almost every sentence in it is enigmatic. As now published, there are always subjoined to it certain appendixes, which are ascribed to Confucius himself. and he were contemporaries, and in the fragments of the  about the &ldquo;elements of s as the elements of &rdquo; there is a remarkable analogy with much of the Yih. No  or foreign student of  has yet been able to give a satisfactory account of the. But a greater and more serious difficulty is presented by his last labour, the work claimed by him as his own, and which has already been referred to more than once as the Annals of Lu. Its title is the Ch&lsquo;un Ts&lsquo;iu, or “ and ,” the events of every being digested under the heads of the four s, two of which are used by  for the whole. undefined held that the composition of the Ch&lsquo;un Ts&lsquo;iu was as great a work as undefined's of the s of the  with which the Shu King commences, and did for the face of  what the earlier labour did for the face of. This work also has been preserved nearly entire, but it is excessively meagre. The events of 242 s barely furnish an hour or two's reading. Confucius's do not bear a greater proportion to the events which they in dicate than the headings in our s bear to the contents of the chapters to which they are prefixed. Happily undefined took it in hand to supply those events, incorporating also others with them, and continuing his narratives over some additional s, so that through him the in all its, from  to , for more than two centuries and a half, lies bare before us. undefined never challenges the text of the master as being incorrect, yet he does not warp or modify his own narratives to make them square with it; and the astounding fact is, that when we compare the events with the summary of