whereof he affirmed. Mao Hsi-ho and some other modern writers
explain away many of his predicates of sincerity, so that in their
hands they become nothing but extravagant hyperboles, but the
author himself would, I believe, have protested against such a
mode of dealing with his words. True, his structures are castles
in the air, but he had no idea himself that they were so.
In the twenty-fourth chapter there is a ridiculous descent
from the sublimity of the two preceding. We are told that the
possessor of entire sincerity is like a spirit and can foreknow,
but the foreknowledge is only a judging by the milfoil and
tortoise and other auguries! But the author recovers himself, and
resumes his theme about sincerity as conducting to self-
completion and the completion of other men and things,
describing it also as possessing all the qualities which can be
predicated of Heaven and Earth. Gradually the subject is made to
converge to the person of Confucius, who is the ideal of the sage,
as the sage is the ideal of humanity at large. An old account of
the object of Tsze-sze in the Chung Yung is that he wrote it to
celebrate the virtue of his grandfather [1]. He certainly contrives
to do this in the course of it. The thirtieth, thirty-first, and
thirty-second chapters contain his eulogium, and never has any
other mortal been exalted in such terms. 'He may be compared to
heaven and earth in their supporting and containing, their over-
shadowing and curtaining all things; he may be compared to the
four seasons in their alternating progress, and to the sun and
moon in their successive shining.' 'Quick in apprehension, clear in
discernment, of far-reaching intelligence, and all-embracing
knowledge, he was fitted to exercise rule; magnanimous,
generous, benign, and mild, he was fitted to exercise forbearance;