relatively, in perfection, or attains to such possession of it, he
becomes invested with the highest dignity and power, and may
say to himself-- 'I am a god; yea, I sit in the seat of God.' I will
not say here that there is impiety in the last of these ideas; but
do we not have in them the same combination which we found in
the Great Learning,-- a combination of the ordinary and the
extraordinary, the plain and the vague, which is very perplexing to
the mind, and renders the Book unfit for the purposes of mental
and moral discipline?
And here I may inquire whether we do right in calling the
Treatise by any of the names which foreigners have hitherto used
for it? In the note on the title, I have entered a little into this
question. The Work is not at all what a reader must expect to find
in what he supposes to be a treatise on 'The Golden Medium,' 'The
Invariable Mean,' or 'The Doctrine of the Mean.' Those

l Compare Chu Hsi's language in his concluding note to the first
chapter:-- ·¨¤ó©Ò¿×¤@½g¤§Â§­n, and Mao Hsi-ho's, in his ¤¤±e»¡, ¨÷¤@,
p. 11:-- ¦¹¤¤±e¤@®Ñ¤§»â­n¤].


names are descriptive only of a portion of it. Where the phrase
Chung Yung occurs in the quotations from Confucius, in nearly
every chapter from the second to the eleventh, we do well to
translate it by 'the course of the Mean,' or some similar terms;
but the conception of it in Tsze-sze's mind was of a different
kind, as the preceding analysis of the first chapter sufficiently
shows [1].
4. I may return to this point of the proper title for the Work
again, but in the meantime we must proceed with the analysis of