THE FIRST chapter of the “Great Learning” is attributed to Confucius, and if it was really written by him it is probably the only writing of his extant, as the “Analects,” which represents him best, is a report of his conversations and lectures made by his disciples. The Philosopher Ch’ing, whose pupil T’sang edited the “Great Learning,” speaks of it “as a book left by Confucius”; but in the English sense it is a very brief essay which becomes “a book” only when taken in connection with the copious commentaries of T’sang and others. It scarcely suggests the remarkable genius of the great Chinese philosopher, but in the “Analects,” where he is adequately reported by his disciples, we have full proof that he is entitled to rank with Plato, Aristotle, and Bacon. Unless it be in Bacon, modern Europe has produced no one who equals him in comprehensiveness. Like Bacon he is utilitarian in all his habits of thought. The fundamental defect of his system is that it tends to lead those who adopt it to value superiority above quality and to strive for excellence rather than for goodness. It is a philosophy of expediency, and expediency has to do only with the comparative—with what excels or falls below something else. But its limitations are those of human life in society, and Confucius seems to have concentrated the powers of his mind on one after another of the deepest problems of social and political organization. Modern thinkers will be rash in concluding that they have gone beyond him in analysis, or have surpassed him in comprehensiveness. There is a certain negative quality in his philosophy, but he was capable of the highest nobility, not merely of conduct but of motive. When an exile and a wanderer, living in poverty, it was suggested that he become a recluse. He replied with a saying which suggests the secret of his strength: “With whom should I live except with the suffering people?”

  The main facts of his life are well authenticated. He was born under the Chow dynasty in the year 550 or 551 B.C. His ancestry was noble, but his youth was passed in poverty and at the age of twenty-one he began teaching to support himself. China had even then a well-developed literature and a carefully recorded history, in which he became thoroughly versed. He said of himself that he was a transmitter of thought rather than an original thinker; but no matter how much he owed to the ancient wisdom of his country, he owed more to his own faculty of co-ordination. For two years he was a cabinet minister in his native province of Lu, but he resigned because, after making great reforms, he found the hereditary aristocracy too corrupt and feeble to maintain them. The rest of his life was spent as a teacher—much of it in traveling from province to province in the hope of finding some ruler disinterested enough to inaugurate a model government in harmony with the theory that “the moral sense given by God to the people ought to be the guide of government.” It was a vain hope, and when he died, in his seventy-second year (479 B.C.), it is said that his last words were an expression of regret that he had not found a ruler intelligent enough to adopt him for a master. From the date of his death until the present, all Chinese rulers have professed his principles, but their standard is still above the average morals of government in or out of China.