Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 16.djvu/37

 lame conclusion that its full significance is past finding out .' A multitude of the native commentaries are of the highest value, and have left little to be done for the elucidation of the Text; and if they say that a passage in an Appendix is 'unfathomable' or 'incalculable,' it is because their authors shrink from allowing, even to themselves, that the ancient sages intermeddled, and intermeddled unwisely, with things too high for them.

that 'in the same way a host of European Chinese scholars have made translations of the Yî, and have, if possible, made confusion worse confounded,' he only shows how imperfectly he had made himself acquainted with the subject. 'The host of European Chinese scholars who have made translations of the Yî' amount to two,—the same two mentioned by me above on pp. 6, 7. The translation of Regis and his coadjutors is indeed capable of improvement; but their work as a whole, and especially the prolegomena, dissertations, and notes, supply a mass of correct and valuable information. They had nearly succeeded in unravelling the confusion, and solving the enigma of the Yî.

Having described the Yî King as consisting of a text in explanation of certain lineal figures, and of appendixes to it, and having traced the composition of the former to