1 See the 續文獻通考, Bk. cxcix, art. 子思,--曾子得之于隨事省察,而子思之學,則 直達天德,庶幾顏氏之妙悟.
2 中節.
correctness, produces the state of harmony, and such harmonious response is the path along which all human activities should proceed.
Finally. 'Let the states of equilibrium and harmony exist in perfection, and a happy order will prevail throughout heaven and earth, and all things will be nourished and flourish.' Here we pass into the sphere of mystery and mysticism. The language, according to Chu Hsi, 'describes the meritorious achievements and transforming influence of sage and spiritual men in their highest extent.' From the path of duty, where we tread on solid ground, the writer suddenly raises us aloft on wings of air, and will carry us we know not where, and to we know not what.
3. The paragraphs thus presented, and which constitute Chu Hsi's first chapter, contain the sum of the whole Work. This is acknowledged by all;-- by the critics who disown Chu Hsi's interpretations of it, as freely as by him [1]. Revolving them in my own mind often and long, I collect from them the following as the ideas of the author:-- Firstly, Man has received from Heaven a moral nature by which he is constituted a law to himself; secondly, Over this nature man requires to exercise a jealous watchfulness; and thirdly, As he possesses it, absolutely and relatively, in perfection, or attains to such possession of it, he becomes invested with the highest dignity and power, and may say to himself-- 'I am a god; yea, I sit in the seat of God.' I will not say here that there is impiety in the last of these ideas; but do we not have in them the same combination which we found in the Great Learning,-- a combination of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the plain and the vague, which is very perplexing to the mind, and renders the Book unfit for the purposes of mental and moral discipline?
And here I may inquire whether we do right in calling the Treatise by any of the names which foreigners have hitherto used for it? In the note on the title, I have entered a little into this question. The Work is not at all what a reader must expect to find in what he supposes to be a treatise on 'The Golden Medium,' 'The Invariable Mean,' or 'The Doctrine of the Mean.' Those
l Compare Chu Hsi's language in his concluding note to the first chapter:-- 楊氏所謂一篇之禮要, and Mao Hsi-ho's, in his 中庸說, 卷一, p. 11:-- 此中庸一書之 領要也.
names are descriptive only of a portion of it. Where the phrase Chung Yung occurs in the quotations from Confucius, in nearly every chapter from the second to the eleventh, we do well to translate it by 'the course of the Mean,' or some similar terms; but the conception of it in Tsze-sze's mind was of a different kind, as the preceding analysis of the first chapter sufficiently shows [1].
4. I may return to this point of the proper title for the Work again, but in the meantime we must proceed with the analysis of it.-- The ten chapters from the second to the eleventh constitute the second part, and in them Tsze-sze quotes the words of Confucius, 'for the purpose,' according to Chu Hsi, 'of illustrating the meaning of the first chapter.' Yet, as I have just intimated, they do not to my mind do this. Confucius bewails the rarity of the practice of the Mean, and graphically sets forth the difficulty of it. 'The empire, with its component States and families, may be ruled; dignities and emoluments may be declined; naked weapons may be trampled under foot; but the course of the Mean can not be attained to [2].' 'The knowing go beyond it, and the stupid do not come up to it [3].' Yet some have attained to it. Shun did so, humble and ever learning from people far inferior to himself [4]; and Yen Hui did so, holding fast whatever good he got hold of, and never letting it go [5]. Tsze-lu thought the Mean could be taken by storm, but Confucius taught him better [6]. And in fine, it is only the sage who can fully exemplify the Mean [7].
All these citations do not throw any light on the ideas presented in the first chapter. On the contrary, they interrupt the train of thought. Instead of showing us how virtue, or the path of duty is in accordance with our Heaven-given nature, they lead us to think of it as a mean between two extremes. Each extreme may be a violation of the law of our nature, but that is not made to appear. Confucius's sayings would be in place in illustrating the doctrine of the Peripatetics, 'which placed all virtue in a medium between opposite vices [8].' Here in the Chung Yung of Tsze-sze I have always felt them to be out of place.
5. In the twelfth chapter Tsze-sze speaks again himself, and we seem at once to know the voice. He begins by saying that 'the way of the superior man reaches far and wide, and yet is