Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/470

440 patience rather than of genius, it is at least not the dead handwork of millions, directed by priesthood and caste, but the spontaneous life of a people.

The revival of letters (150 b.c.) after the downfall of the Extent of T'siu was the pivot, not of this whole literary his- Revl^dof ^^^y ^^^y^ ^^^^ ^^ ^^^ national life of China; since. Letters. it assured that supremacy of the literary class which is her motive force. Out of that purgation by fire arose the ethical and historical writings of Confucius in their enduring form. The history of their recovery will not be related here. It is evident, however, that the fires of T'sin were far from effectual in any department. The Catalogue of the Han revival gives systematic report of thirteen thousand works recovered or gathered in all branches, comprising those of nearly two hundred schools in philosophy, discussing many of our own problems in civil and social science, as well as covering the astrological and divinatory systems which the developed fetichism of the nation had produced. Pan-kou, the compiler, a rationalist of the thinking classes, was not only without faith in these latter systems, but mourns over the degeneracy of his time amidst the wealth he records ; over careless habits of study, and neglect of the sages. He describes the nine leading schools as a reunion of sick people waiting a physician in a desert. This longing for the past is in the ordinary tone of Oriental philosophers, and no more conclusive against the value of the age he represents than the dissatisfaction of a modern critic whose eye is on an ideal future.

Nothing can be more characteristic than his comments Pan-kou's ^u poctry, of which his lists could show thirteen Report. hundred books and a hundred schools. His studies taught him that he was living in a poor prosaic age, and he longed for the old days when the missives between States were couched in verse, and statesmen fell into disgrace when