THOUGHTS ON THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN SCOTT HALDANE 



maintained, with only a certain proneness to evil; but we are con- 

 cerned here rather with the effect on the climate of thought than with 

 the letter of the law on which a defence of christian theology might 

 rely. The Encyclopaedists, therefore, were striking out a new line 

 in their insistence on the intrinsic goodness of man's nature. 



It now appears that in this progressive effort they were mightily 

 assisted by a knowledge of the fact, then just entering Europe, that 

 in traditional Chinese thought, the essential goodness of man's nature 

 had always been a basic belief. In China Meng-tze (Mencius) had been 

 orthodox, and the pessimistic philosopher, Hsiin-tze, had been hereti- 

 cal. The great story of the influence of China on European thought 

 in the eighteenth century is only now coming to be written. An 

 outward and visible manifestation of it was, of course, the Chinoiserie 

 period which set its mark so thoroughly on all the arts of domestic 

 decoration. But the philosophers of the Enlightenment were 

 amazed, and deeply encouraged, to find that their belief in the 

 separability of morality from superstitious religion, was and had 

 been for more than a thousand years an essential tenet of classical 

 Chinese philosophy. 



About the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Jesuit mission- 

 aries reached Peking. They were highly cultivated men, who found 

 the Chinese irflfcllectual atmosphere so congruent with christian ideas 

 that they felt they had but to add certain keystones to an arch already 

 complete. Hence their very adequate translations of the Chinese 

 Classics of Confucian philosophy; for example the Confucius Sinarum 

 Philosophus of 1687, which includes Latin versions of the Lun-Yii 

 and the Ta-ShioL Such books contained notions of natural law, the 

 possession of certain inalienable rights by common humanity, and 

 above all, the view, enshrined to this day in the first schoolbook 

 learned by every Chinese child (the three-character classic, the San- 

 Tie-Ching)^ that man's spirit is fundamentally good. From this it was 

 not a far cry to the slogan of Rousseau, "Man is everywhere born 

 free, but he is everywhere in chains." 



Evidence of the interest taken in classical Chinese philosophy by 

 the Encyclopaedists, Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire, etc. is easy to find. 

 In Voltaire's Dictionnaire Philosophique one finds: — 



"I knew a philosopher who had no portrait but that of Con- 

 fucius in his working room, and underneath it he had written 

 these lines: 



139 



