The Chinese Classics
a Translation by , D. D., of the London Missionary Society. Part I. CONFUCIUS. Part II. MENCIUS. Hurd and Houghton. New York.
DR. LEGGE, a London missionary in China, has translated and edited the Chinese classics, amounting in all to a tenvolume series, and he gives us in the above-named volume the first instalment of the publication. It is well reprinted; but we wish the American editor could have been content to give us Dr. Legge’s Prefaces without mutilation, whether he should see fit thereupon to criticise them or not. Dr. Legge is evidently a man of original knowledge on the subject of which he speaks, and whatever defects his judgment may exhibit, it is at all events entitled to be respectfully heard.
There seem to be three great schools which claim between them the empire of the Chinese intellect, the earliest and the latest of which, those respectively of Laotse and of Fo or Buddha, contain a speculative doctrine, while the middle school, that of Confucius, is severely practical or moralistic. Indeed, Confucius is so deficient on the speculative side, that his ideas are often supposed to be atheistic. But this charge appears to be unreasonable. He accepts ex animo the traditional faith of his countrymen in a heavenly providence, according to which man, being imperfect, is bound to shape himself. “ Upon the highest as upon the humblest of men,” he said, “one equal obligation impended, that, namely, of self-correction or moral progress.” He indulged in no sceptical flings at the popular religion, but, on the contrary, affirmed very heartily all its ritual principles and practices, lending himself to its ideas about spiritual existences, sacrifices, and other ceremonials, with even uncommon devoutness. In fact, he seems altogether to have been a curious amalgam of formal superstition and rational freedom. The most vigorous utterance we have found cropping out of the somewhat dreary flow of his meditations is where he says that “ to give one’s self earnestly to present duty, and while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom.” This looks like genuine manhood ; but, on the whole, apart from the elevated morality of the book, a Chinese flavor abounds, and you scarcely for a moment lose sight of the pigtail. Confucius himself was a sort of Chinese Dr. Johnson, with a good deal more amenity, doubtless, because he had a less scrofulous temperament; but with the same tendency to conservatism and the same proclivity to dogmatizing. Mencius was a man of higher intellect and wider sympathies, and his portion of the volume before us will better repay modem perusal. The critical spirit entered to some extent into his cogitations, and no better democratic doctrine can be desired than we find in his pages. “ Mencius said, Kee and Chow’s losing the empire arose from their losing the people, and to lose the people means to lose their hearts. There is a way to get the empire. Get the people, and the empire is got. There is a way to get the people; get their hearts, and they are got. There is a way to get their hearts; it is simply to collect for them what they like, and not to lay on them what they dislike.” Mencius held to the goodness of human nature ; and maintained that if any one did evil he did so by the constraint of his passions disturbing his rationality. Mencius had a distinguished opponent, Sun-tse or Sun-king as he is called by Dr. Legge, who maintained that human nature was evil, and endeavored to refute the reasonings of Mencius on that subject.
No one, we think, can seriously ponder the literary remains of the great Eastern religions, which so many erudite scholars are now elucidating for us, without being forcibly struck with the vast intellectual superiority which Christianity avouches to them all, in claiming as it does to construe both nature and history as a mere revelation of God in man. None of the older religions make the least claim to this superb office. In fact, they all identify God and nature, or turn out practically and at best a gigantic scheme of naturalism as stifling to the life of God as it is to that of man. In all these ancient pantheistic religions man is presented to us simply as the victim of his participation of the divine nature. Existence or consciousness is his burning hell, and no rest or heaven is attainable to him save by the cessation of consciousness, that is, by annihilation. All that the very purest of these faiths can do to soften this really immitigable doom of man is to make his annihilation convertible with absorption in God ; and the conception of God as a creator, and of man consequently as a creature, is as repugnant to them as day is to night. Naturalism, in short, is the ineffaceable stigma of all the old religions, and naturalism is the almost ineradicable disease of the human mind itself; so that Christianity, which is religion in its sovereign spiritual form, as implying the essential subserviency of nature to spirit, or of the universe to man, is only now at last laying off her carnal fetters, and displaying an infinite interior significance, ample at once to satisfy the deathless craving of the soul after inward peace, or harmony with God, and the deathless craving of the senses after outward prosperity, or harmony with man and nature. But once entered upon this career, its march is destined never to relent until science recognizes in nature no longer a field of true being, but only of pure seeming ; no longer a divine finality, but a strict divine method for the education of the human mind into harmony with infinite goodness and truth.