Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 16.djvu/50

 But his method strikes us as singular. Each line seemed to become living, and suggested some phenomenon in nature or some case of human experience, from which the wisdom or folly, the luckiness or unluckiness, indicated by it could be inferred. It cannot be said that the duke carried out his plan in a way likely to interest any one but a  who is a votary of divination, and admires the style of its oracles. According to our notions, a framer of emblems should be a good deal of a poet, but those of the Yî only make us think of a dryasdust. Out of more than 350, the greater number are only grotesque. We do not recover from the feeling of disappointment till we remember that both father and son had to write 'according to the trick,' after the manner of diviners, as if this lineal augury had been their profession.

At length I come to illustrate what I have said on the subject-matter of the Yî by an example. It shall be the treatment of the seventh hexagram, which king Wăn named  , meaning Hosts. The character is also explained as meaning 'multitudes;' and in fact, in a feudal kingdom, the multitudes of the people were all liable to become its army, when occasion required, and the 'host' and the 'population' might be interchangeable terms. As Froude expresses it in the introductory chapter to his History of England, 'Every man was regimented somewhere.'

The hexagram  is composed of the two trigrams    and  , exhibiting waters collected on the earth; and in other symbolisms besides that of the Yî, waters indicate assembled multitudes of men. The waters on which the mystical Babylon sits in the Apocalypse are explained as 'peoples and multitudes and nations and tongues.' I do not positively affirm that it was by this interpretation of the trigrams that king Wăn saw in the feudal hosts of his country collected, for neither from him nor his son do we learn, by their direct affirmation, that they had any acquaintance with the trigrams of Fû-hsî. The name which he gave