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|8 THE ANALECTS : INTRODUCTION.
and whatever advance she may make will alfl does
depend on a wider touch with the wider philosophy
of_vkler minds. These three philosophers, then, mark the
maximum per se development of the mind of this race,
and with them that development, perhaps not without
intent so far as the Confucian School is concerned, has
been arrested. The heterodox schools of this period,
that of Yang Chu _ _ the self-centred Epicurean, of
Mo Ti -_ _,, (Legge's Mih Teih), tt_e generous apostle
of Universal Love, and of Hsfin Ch'ing _ _l,b (Legge's
Seuen K'ing), who fitly closed this troubled dynasty
with his treatise that man is by nature evil,--these
heterodox schools were completely obscured, as was
natural, by the less extreme and more powerful representatives
of their conservative rivals.
Little remains to be said of the sovereigns who
intervened between the days of the Chou dynasty's great
Founder and its great destroyer Ch'in Shih Huang
_ _ In brief, three centuries after the foundation
by King Wu, saw the Imperial sceptre a veritable
"bauble," so that for five centuries, the eighth to the
third, the history of the Chou dynasty is the history of
its rival States. During this latter period the power of
the Ch'in State _ by slow degress became dominant,
and with.the dethronement and death of Nan _ the last
Emperorj the Hot_se of Chou passed finally away.
Thus was the way opened for the strong man of China,
whose success in welding this continental nation into one
great Empire rivalled the feats of Caesar atad-N'apoleon.
Though the new dynasty was not founded by Ch'in Shih