a; and he
was prepared to find them anywhere, and take what came to hand.
His keynote was _duty._ The world went on snubbing, ignoring,
insulting, traducing, and persecuting him; and he went on with
the performance of his duty;--rather, with the more difficult
task of searching for the duty he was to perform. This resorting
to rebels, like that conversing with Nantse, shows him clearly
not the formalist and slave of conventions he has been called,
but a man of highest moral courage. What he stood for was not
forms, conventions, reules, proprieties, or anything of the sort;
but the liens of least resistance in his high endeavor to lift
the world: lines of least resistance; middle lines; common
sense.--As ususal, there was nothing to be done with the Duke
of Ts'ae.

Wandering from state to state, he came on recluses in a field by
the river, and sent Tse Lu forward to ask one of them the way to
the ford. Said the hermit:--"You follow one who withdraws from
court to court; it would be better to withdraw from the world
altogether."--"What!" said Confucius when it was told him;
"shall I not associate with mankind? If I do not associate with
mankind, with whom shall I associate?"

In which answer lies a great key to Confucianism; turn it once
or twice, and you get to the import of his real teaching. He
never would follow the individual soul into its secrecies; he
was concerned with man only as a fragment of humanity. He was
concerned with man _as_ humanity. All that the West calls
(personal) religion he disliked intensely. Any desire or scheme
to save your own soul; any right-doing for the sake of a reward,
either here or hereafter, he would have bluntly called wrong-
doing, anti-social and selfish. (I am quoting in substance from
Dr. Lionel Giles.) He tempted no one with hopes of heaven;
frightened none with threats of hell. It seemed to him that he
could make a higher and nobler appeal,--could strike much more
forcibly at the root of evil (which is selfishness), by saying
nothing about rewards and punishments at all. The one inducement
to virtue that he offered was this: By doing right, you lead the
world into right-doing. He was justified in saying that Man is
divine; because this divine appeal of his was effective; not
like the West's favorite appeal to fear, selfish desire, and the
brutal side of our nature. "Do right to escape a whipping, or a
hanging, or hell-fire," says Christendom; and the nati