progeny as they did in their lifetime. They can perhaps, if they are great souls,
protect their descendants, but they themselves need their progeny's protection and
succour through offerings of food for their hunger and burnt paper money for their
sundry expenses in hell, from which place it is the duty of their children to save them
by a Buddhist mass. In a word, they are to be cared for and served as they have
been cared for and served by their children in their old age. That is about as close
as Confucianism comes to religion in the matter of worship. / I have often
observed with interest the differences between a religious culture like tha t of
Christendom and a frankly agnostic culture like that of the Chinese^ and how these
differences are adapted to man's inner needs, which I assume are essentially the same
for all human races. These differences correspond to the threefold actual functions
of religion, as commonly understood. First, religion as an embodiment of priestcraft, with its dogmas, its apostolic succession, its appeal to miracles, its patent cures for
sins and selling of pardons, its salvation "made easy" and its good solid heaven and
hell. This religion, so eminently saleable, is common to all peoples, the Chinese
included, and may be regarded as satisfying man's needs in certain stages of human
culture. Because there is need for these things among the people, Taoism and
Buddhism have furnished them to the Chinese, since Confucianism refused to furnish
them.
Secondly, there is religion as a sanction for moral conduct: here the Chinese and the
Christian points of view differ widely. Humanist ethics is a man-centred, not a
God-centred ethics. To the West, it seems hardly imaginable that the relationship
between man and man (which is morality) could be maintained without reference to a
Supreme Being, while to the Chinese it is equally amazing that men should not, or
could not, behave toward one another as decent beings without thinking of their
indirect relationship through a third party. It should seem possible to conceive that
man should try to do good, simply because it is the human, decent thing to do. I have
wondered what the development of European ethics would have been if it had not
been overshadowed by Pauline theology. It would have developed, I think, by sheer
necessity along the lines of Marcus Aurelius's meditations. Pauline theology has
brought in the Hebrew notion of sin, which has clouded the entire field of Christian
ethics, and from which there seems no escape except by religion, such as is provided
in the Doctrine of Redemption. As it is, a European ethics divorced from religion
seems such a strange notion that it has seldom occurred to people's minds.
And thirdly, there is religion as an inspiration and living emotion, a feeling for the
grim grandeur and mystery of the universe and a quest for security in life, satisfying
man's deepest spiritual instincts. There are moments in our lives, perhaps during the
loss of our dear ones or during the period of convalescence from a great illness, or
perhaps on a chilly autumn morning as we look at the falling leaves and a sense of
death and futility overcomes us, when we live more than the life of the senses and we
look over the visible world to the Great Beyond.
These moments come to the Chinese as to the Europeans, but the reactions are
decidedly different. It has seemed to me, formerly a Christian and now a pagan, that
though religion gives peace by having a ready-made answer to all these problems, it
decidedly detracts from the sense of the unfathomable mystery and the poignant
sadness of this life, which we call poetry. Christian optimism kills all poetry. A pagan,
who has not these ready-made answers to his problems and whose sense of mystery is
for ever unquenched and whose craving for security is for ever unanswered and
unanswerable, is driven inevitably to a kind of pantheistic poetry. Actually, poetry has
taken over the function of religion as an inspiration and a living emotion in the
Chinese scheme of life, as we shall see in the discussion on Chinese poetry. To the
West, unused to this type of sheer pantheistic abandon to nature, religion seems the
natural escape. But to the pagan, this religion seems to be based on the fear that there is not enough poetry and imagination in this present life to satisfy the human being
emotionally, the fear that there is not enough power and beauty in the beech forests of
Denmark or the cool sands of the Mediterranean shore to comfort the wounded human
soul, and the supernatural is then found necessary.
But Confucian common sense, which dismisses supernaturalism as the realm of the
unknowable and expends extremely little time over it, is equally emphatic in the
assertion of the superiority of the human mind over nature and in the denial of nature's
way of life, or naturalism, as the human way, an attitude clearest in Mencius. The
Confucian conception of man's place in nature is that "Heaven, earth and man" are
regarded as "the three geniuses of the universe." This is a distinction somewhat
corresponding to the Babbittian threefold distinction of supernaturalism, humanism
and naturalism. Heaven is seen as consisting of the clouds, the stars, and all those
unknowable forces which Western legal phraseology sums up as "acts of God," while
the earth is seen as consisting of mountains and rivers and all those forces ascribed in
Greek mythology to Demeter, and man occupies an all- important place between the
two. Man knows where he belongs in the scheme of things and is proud of his
position. Like the Chinese roof, and unlike the Gothic spires, his spirit does not aspire
to heaven but broods over the earth. Its greatest achievement is to atta in a measure of
harmony and happiness in this earthly life.
The Chinese roof suggests, therefore, that happiness is first to be found in the home.
Indeed, the home stands for me as a symbol of Chinese humanism. A masterpiece
remains to be painted of an improved version of "Sacred and Profane Love." There
should be three women instead of two, a wan- faced nun (or a missionary lady with an
umbrella), a voluptuous prostitute, and a radiant mother in her third month of
pregnancy. Of the three, the housewife should be the commonest, simplest, and yet
most truly satisfying figure. They would thus stand for religion, humanism and
naturalism, typifying the three ways of life.
Such simplicity is difficult, for simplicity is the quality of great minds. The Chinese
have achieved this simple ideal, not by mere laziness of effort but by a positive
worship of simplicity, or the Religion of Common Sense. How this was achieved we
shall now see.
III. THE DOCTRINE OF THE GOLDEN MEAN
The religion of common sense or the spirit of reasonableness is part and parcel of
Confucian humanism. It is this spirit of reasonableness which has given birth to the
Doctrine of the Golden Mean, the central doctrine of Confucianism. Reference has
already been made in the preceding chapter to the spirit of reasonableness, as
contrasted with logic or reason itself. It has been shown there that the spirit of
reasonableness is largely intuitive and practically identical with English common sense. It has been further shown that for a Chinese it is not enough that a proposition
be "logically correct'5; it is much more important that it be "in accord with human
nature."
The aim of the Chinese classical education has always been the cultivation of the
reasonable man as the model of culture.
An educated man should, above all, be a reasonable being, who is always
characterized by his common sense, his love of moderation and restraint, and his
hatred of abstract theories and logical extremes. Common sense is possessed by all
common people. The academic scholar is in constant danger of losing this common
sense. He is apt to indulge in excesses of theory; the reasonable man, or the Chinese
man of culture, should avoid all excesses of theory and conduct. You have, for
instance, the historian Froude saying that the divorce of Henry VIII from Catherine of
Aragon was for purely political reasons, and you have Bishop Creighton claiming, on
the other hand, that it was entirely dictated by animal lust,1 whereas the
common-sense attitude should be that both considerations were effective., which is
probably nearer the truth. In the West one scientist is infatuated by the idea of heredity
and another is obsessed by the notion of environment, and each one goes about
doggedly to prove his theory with great learning and stupidity, whereas the Oriental,
without much cerebration, would allow something for both. A typically Chinese
judgment is: "-4 is right, and B is not wrong either."
Such self-sufficiency is sometimes infuriating to a logical mind, but what of it? The
reasonable mind keeps a balance when the logical mind has lost it. The idea that a
Chinese painter could, like Picasso, take the perfectly logical remark that the world of
objects could be reduced to cones, planes and angular lines and then proceed logica lly
to carry that theory into painting is obviously impossible in China. We have a natural
distrust of arguments that are too perfect and theories that are too logical. Against
such logical freaks of theories, common sense is the best and most effective antidote.
Bertrand Russell has acutely pointed out that "In art, they [the Chinese] aim at being
exquisite, and in life at being reasonable." . The result of this worship of common
sense is therefore a dislike of all extravagances of theory in thought and all excesses
of conduct in morals. The natural consequence of this is the Doctrine of the Golden
Mean, which is really the same as the "nothing too much" ideal of the Greeks. The
Chinese word for moderation is chungho, meaning "not extreme and harmonious/' and
the Chinese word for restraint is chieh, which means "control to proper degree." In the
Shuking (Book of History), supposed to contain the earliest Chinese political
documents, the advice of Emperor Yao, on his abdication, to Emperor Shun was
"Hold the mean!" Mencius said of another ideal emperor, T'ang, that he "held the
mean." It is said that this emperor used to "listen to both extremes of counsel and then
apply the mean to the people," which means that he would listen to two contradictory
propositions, and give a fifty-percent discount of each. So important is the Doctrine of
the Golden Mean to the Chinese that they have called their own country the "Middle Kingdom." It is more than a geographical notion: it signifies a way of life which, by
holding on to the mean, the normal and the essentially human, claims, as the old
scholars did, that they have discovered all the essential truths of all schools of
philosophy.
* See the extremely illuminating little book, The Magic of Common Sense, by George
Frederick Wates (John Murray, London).
The Doctrine of the Golden Mean covers all and envelops all. It dilutes all theories
and destroys all religions. In an argument with a Buddhist priest who is probably able
to spin out an absolute proof of the non-existence of matter and the futility of life, a
Confucianist would simply say, in his matter-of-fact and illogical way, "What would
become of the world, the state and the human race if everybody left his home and
entered a monastery like you?" That illogical but supremely sensible appeal to life has
a clinching force of its own. Not only against Buddhism, but against all religions and
all theories, the test of life holds. We cannot afford to be logical. In fact, all theories
have become theories only by certain ideas developing into a psychosis in the minds
of their founders. The Freudian complex is Freud himself, and the Buddhist complex
is Buddha. All such theories, whether of Freud or of Buddha, seem to be based on an
exaggerated illusion. The sufferings of mankind, the troubles of married life, the sight
of a sore-ridden beggar or the pains and groanings of a sick man, which to us common
men are no sooner felt than healthily forgotten, must have struck Buddha's
hyper-sensitive nerves with a force which gave him the vision of a Nirvana.
Confucianism, on the other hand, is the religion of the common man, who cannot
afford to be hyper-sensitive or the world will go to pieces.
The working out of the Doctrine of the Golden Mean may be illustrated in all spheres
of life and knowledge. Logically no man should get married, but practically all men
should, so Confucianism advises marriage. Logically all men should be equal, but
practically all men aren' t, so Confucianism teaches authority and obedience. Logically
men and women should not be different, but practically they are, so Confucianism
teaches the differentiation of the sexes. One philosopher, Motse, taught the love of all
men, and another, Yang Chu, taught the love of oneself, and Mencius condemned
them both, merely saying: "Love your own parents." It was such a sensible thing to
