0444_Bk

34 THE ANALECTS : INTRODUCTrON.
tion of true happiness, and this Virtue is to be attained
thtough the energy of tile individual will.
But the aim of Confucius was not so much the renovation
of file individual as the renovation of the State, his
mind and object was ethieo-political, his desire the renais-
sance of the golden age of antiquity through a return to
the virtue of those Arcadian days. Hence, as already
remarked, the Prince as Father of his people, must take
the lead, and as the rivers that make fruitful the land take
their rise on the mountain tops, so moral renovation must
begin at the summit of the State. Alas! the mountain
tops were waterless, and what our Sage was able to pour
upon them rapidly distilled in so rare a moral atmosphere,
for if the rich shall hardly enter into the realm of moral
nobility, how much less shall Princes, degenerating generation
by generation through the allurements of luxury and
lust, be able to filter the vitalising waters of moral chastity
to the shrivelled souls of their people? On these arid
heights Confucius failed, for even in his own State, when
the indications were most hopeful of success, the eighty
singing girls of Wei _, proved more potent than the
virtue of the Sage, and in the end it was in the hearts of
his poorer disciples that his doctrines found their early and
more hardy growth, rather than in the Courts of the great.
Though failure dogged his wandering footsteps while
with men, his philosophy wa_ not allowed to die, and
notwithstanding that it has never satisfied the people at
large, as witness the. success of Taoism and Buddhism, it
appeals to the conservative and educated element/'and
has become both the base and summit of Chinese religion