The Higher Usefulness of Science 83 



of men's lives are by-products of natural selection (the 

 view of orthodox Weismannism) or are incidents of the 

 interaction between Heredity and Environment re- 

 garded as two modern Fates, and so outside the realm 

 of science. 



The list of great men given above contained no ex- 

 amples of geniuses in the realm of morals and religion. 

 What about these? It is just here that almost all for- 

 mal philosophy has held the generative powers of 

 nature to fail. The incompetency of such powers to 

 account for the origin of man is specially seen, so 

 philosophy asserts, when we come to consider what 

 history presents in these realms. "Almost all," I said, 

 of the great philosophies have believed nature inade- 

 quate at this point. A partial exception to this is the 

 system of moral philosophy inseparably linked with the 

 name Confucius. Of the several ways in which the 

 teachings of this great man, so much neglected by the 

 western world, ought to become a vital force in that 

 world, I can touch only a few, one of which is his in- 

 culcations on mental morality. "When you know a 

 thing," Confucius says in one of the Analects, "to hold 

 that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, 

 to acknowledge that you do not, that is knowledge." 

 "In these words," writes M. M. Dawson in his recent 

 volume, The Ethics of Confucius, "Confucius set forth 

 more lucidly than any other thinker, ancient or mod- 

 ern, the essential of all morality, mental honesty, in- 

 tegrity of mind the only attitude which does not 



