time: the refreshing river 



'De la seule raison salutaire interprete, 

 Sans eblouirle monde clairant les esprits, 

 II ne parla qu'en Sage, et jamais en Prophete; 

 Cependant on le crut, et meme en son pays.' 



"I have read his books widi attention, and I have made 

 extracts from them; I found nothing in them except the purest 

 morahty, without the least admixture of charlatanism."^ 



And in Germany, where the same movement was in progress, 

 Christian Wolff delivered an inaugural address "Rede iiber die 

 Sittenlehre der Sineser" in 1721 when appointed Pro-rector of the 

 University of Halle. For this address, in which it was asserted that 

 morality is independent of revelation, Wolff was so persecuted that 

 he had to leave Prussia for twenty years. 



We have, therefore, the remarkable paradox that China gave to 

 the West a single precious treasure of doctrine, an idea that may yet 

 save the West from itself, and the world from the domination of that 

 Western commercialism against which Haldane wrote so strongly. 

 Haldane did not wish the East to accept from the West mechanical 

 materialism. In this he was right, though he did not couple with it 

 what goes with it, other-worldly religiosity, servile science, and 

 capitalist economics. He did not know that the We^accepted from 

 the East two centuries ago the germ of all those progressive social 

 conceptions which alone can turn the spread of western civilisation 

 throughout the world into beneficent channels. If christian theology 

 is one grandmother of communism, Confucian philosophy is the other. 



■^ Dicdonnaire Philosop/iique, 1834 edn. Vol. II, p. 406. 



140 



