Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/41

 Rh becomes the main object, reading being wholly subordinate. According to Dr. Martin, the primary step in Chinese composition is yoking double characters followed by practise in reduplicating such binary compounds to form parallels, an idea which runs through the whole of Chinese literature. Detailed symmetry is a chief characteristic of Chinese composition as practised by old methods. Chiefly artificial forms of verse and an even more artificial form of prose are acquired and mark the climax of the whole course. The reading includes rhetorical models and sundry anthologies. History is studied, but only in compends, not to gain wisdom, but merely to embellish classic essays with a profusion of historical allusions. Knowledge and mental discipline are discounted and style is at a premium. In such a system progressive knowledge is alien and education with such a goal is necessarily superficial.

The 'Five Classics' follow the 'Four Books,' and we shall briefly note their content.

If not the oldest, certainly the most venerated member of this Pentateuch is the I Ching, or 'Book of Changes,' whose diagrams date back 2800 B.C., the text to 1150 B.C., and the Confucian commentary thereon to 500 B.C. It ranks chief in the canon of Taoism and was spared from the flames of the Tyrant of Ch'in to which all the other writings of Confucius and his disciples were consigned in 213 B.C., only to be rehabilitated from the living memories of devout literati. The accredited author of the text, Weng Wang, was the virtual founder of the great Chou dynasty (B.C. 1122-249) and the contemporary of Pythagoras. It is a fanciful system of philosophy based on a set of trigrams, each of which represents some power in nature whose combinations are developed in sixty-four short essays, enigmatically and symbolically expressed, on moral, social and political themes, as well as on the more lofty and subtile subject of the origin and destiny of cosmos. The whole universe, in broad and in detail, is ascribed to the interactions of two great male and female elements, the Yin and the Yang, which in turn proceed from T'ai Chi, or the first great cause. The text is followed by commentaries called the 'Ten Wings,' generally ascribed to Confucius, whose extravagant admiration of the I led him to declare that were a hundred years added to his life, he would give fifty of them to the study of the I so that he might come to be without faults. But the work appears to be little more than a lot of enigmatical gibberish intended for the prognostication of good and bad fortune. From it charlatans of all sorts have drawn their supplies. The following is a specimen of the text and the accompanying wing (Legge's translation):