Page:The Spirit of the Chinese People.djvu/71

 accepted faith of the masses of a people or nation, whereas Confucianism has become a religion or the equivalent of a religion to even the mass of the population in China. When I say religion here, I mean religion, not in the narrow European sense of the word, but in the broad universal sense. Goethe says:—"Nur saemtliche Menschen erkennen die Natur; nur saemtliche Menschen leben das Menschliche. Only the mass of mankind know what is real life; only the mass of mankind live a true human life." Now when we speak of religion in its broad universal sense, we mean generally a system of teachings with rules of conduct which, as Goethe says, is accepted as true and binding by the mass of mankind, or at least, by the mass of the population in a people or nation. In this broad and universal sense of the word Christianity and Buddhism are religions. In this broad and universal sense, Confucianism, as you know, has become a religion, as its teachings have been acknowledged to be true and its rules of conduct to be binding by the whole Chinese race and nation, whereas the philosophy of Plato, of Aristotle and of Herbert Spencer has not become a religion even in this broad universal sense. That, I say, is the difference between Confucianism and the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle and of Herbert Spencer—the one has remained a philosophy for the learned, whereas the other has become a religion or the equivalent of a religion for the mass of the whole Chinese nation as well as for the learned of China.