For Confucius in his
teaching treated only of man's life on earth, and seems to have had no
ideas with regard to the human lot after death; if he had any ideas he
preserved an inscrutable silence about them. As a moralist he prescribed
the duties of the king and of the father, and advocated the cultivation
by the individual man of that rest or apathy of mind which resembles so
much the disposition aimed at by the Greek and Roman Stoic. Even as a
moralist, he seems to have sacrificed the ideal to the practical, and
his loose notions about marriage, his tolerance of concubinage, the
slight emphasis which he lays on the virtue of veracity--of which indeed
he does not seem himself to have been particularly studious in his
historic writings--place him low down in the rank of moralists. Yet he
taught what he felt the people could receive, and the flat mediocrity of
his character and his teachings has been stamped forever upon a people
who, while they are kindly, gentle, forbearing, and full of family
piety, are palpably lacking not only in the exaltation of Mysticism, but
in any religious feeling, generally so-called.
The second reason that made the teaching of Confucius so influential is
based on the circumstances of the time. When this thoughtful, earnest
youth awoke to the consciousness of life about him, he saw that the
abuses under which the people groaned sprang from the feudal system,
which cut up the country into separate territories, over which the power
of the king had no control.
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