compassionate and charitable,—he is a superior man.
- We sink here to a lower level, though still a high one. The "superior man" is the ideal man of Confucian ethics. In him divinity finds no place.
He who regulates his conduct by law, who regards fame as an external adjunct, who verifies his hypotheses, who bases his judgment upon proof,—such men rank one, two, three, four, etc. It is thus that officials rank. In a strict sense of duty, in making food and raiment of paramount importance, in caring for and nourishing the old, the weak, the orphan, and the widow, they all exemplify the principle of true government.
- Partly, if not wholly. This the dead level of ordinary mortality, still within the operation of Tao.
Thus far-reaching was the extension of Tao among the ancients.
The companion of the gods, the purifier of the universe, it nourishes all creation, it unites the empire, it benefits the masses. Illuminating the fundamental, it is bound up with the accessory, reaching to all points of the compass and to the opposite extremes of magnitude. There is indeed nowhere where it is not!
How it enlightened the polity of past ages is evidenced in the records which historians have preserved to us. Its presence in the Canons of Poetry, History, Rites, and Music, has been made clear by many scholars of Chou and Lu. It in-
