CHAPTER 17

The Master said, "Man is born for uprightness. If a man lose his uprightness, and yet live, his escape from death is the effect of mere good fortune."

14. THE DEGENERACY OF THE AGE ESTEEMING GLIBNESS OF TONGUE AND BEAUTY OF PERSON. 祝, 'to pray', 'prayers'; here, in the concrete, the officer charged with the prayers in the ancestral temple. I have coined the word litanist to come as near to the meaning as possible. This T'o was an officer of the state of Wei, styled 子鱼. Prince Chaou had been guilty of incest with his sister Nan-tsze (see ch.26), and afterwards, when she was married to the duke Ling of Wei, he served as an officer there, carrying on his wickedness. He was celebrated for his beauty of person. 而 is a simple connective, =与, and the 不 is made to belong to both clauses. This seems the correct construction, tho' unusual. The old comm. construe differently:—'If a man have not the speech of T'o, though he may have the beauty of Chaou, &c.,' making the degeneracy of the age all turn on its fondness for specious talk. This can't be right.

15. A LAMENT OVER THE WAYWARDNESS OF MEN'S CONDUCT. 斯道, 'These ways', in a moral sense;—not deep doctrines, but rules of life.

16. THE EQUAL BLENDING OF SOLID EXCELLENCE AND ORNAMENTAL ACCOMPLISHMENTS IN A COMPLETE CHARACTER. 史, 'an historian', an officer of importance in China. The term, however, is to be understood here of 'a clerk', 'a scrivener in a public office', one that is of a class sharp and well informed, but insincere.

17. LIFE WITHOUT UPRIGHTNESS IS NOT TRUE LIFE, AND CONNOT BE CALCULATED ON. 'No more serious warning than this', says one comm., 'was ever addressed to men by Confucius'. A distinction is made by Choo He and others between the two 生, that the 1st is 始生, 'birth', or 'the beginning of life', and the 2d is 生存, 'preservation in life'. 人之生也直, 'The being born of man is upright', which may mean either that man at his birth is upright, or that he is born for uprightness. I prefer the latter view. 罔之生也, 'The living without it', if we take 罔=无, or 'to defame it', if 罔=诬. We long here as elsewhere for more perspicuity and fuller development of view. An important truth struggles here for expression, but only finds it imperfectly. Without uprightness the end of man's existence is not fulfilled, but his preservation in such case is not merely a fortunate accident.