made known how in his view a ruler should act or should not act.  He did not shrink from falsifying history, as can today be demonstrated.  Thus on one occasion a ruler had to flee from a feudal prince, which in Confucius’s view was impossible behaviour for the ruler; accordingly he wrote instead that the ruler went on a hunting expedition.  Elsewhere he tells of an eclipse of the sun on a certain day, on which in fact there was no eclipse.  By writing of an eclipse he meant to criticize the way a ruler had acted, for the sun symbolized the ruler, and the eclipse meant that the ruler had not been guided by divine illumination.  The demonstration that the Annals of Spring and Autumn can only be explained in this way was the achievement some thirty-five years ago of Otto Franke, and through this discovery Confucius’s work, which the old sinologists used to describe as a dry and inadequate book, has become of special value to us.  The book ends with the year 481 B.C., and in spite of its distortions it is the principal source for the two-and-a-half centuries with which it deals.

Rendered alert by this experience, we are able to see and to show that most of the other later official works of history follow the example of the Annals of Spring and Autumn in containing things that have been deliberately falsified.  This is especially so in the work called T’ung-chien kang-mu, which was the source of the history of the Chinese empire translated into French by de Mailla.

Apart from Confucius’s criticism of the inadequate capacity of the emperor of his day, there is discernible, though only in the form of cryptic hints, a fundamentally important progressive idea.  It is that a nobleman (chuen-tz[)u] should not be a member of the ruling elite by right of birth alone, but should be a man of superior moral qualities.  From Confucius on, “chuen-tz[)u]” became to mean “a gentleman”.  Consequently, a country should not be ruled by a dynasty based on inheritance through birth, but by members of the nobility who show outstanding moral qualification for rulership.  That is to say, the rule should pass from the worthiest to the worthiest, the successor first passing through a period of probation as a minister of state.  In an unscrupulous falsification of the tradition, Confucius declared that this principle was followed in early times.  It is probably safe to assume that Confucius had in view here an eventual justification of claims to rulership of his own.

Thus Confucius undoubtedly had ideas of reform, but he did not interfere with the foundations of feudalism.  For the rest, his system consists only of a social order and a moral teaching.  Metaphysics, logic, epistemology, i.e. branches of philosophy which played so great a part in the West, are of no interest to him.  Nor can he be described as the founder of a religion; for the cult of Heaven of which he speaks and which he takes over existed in exactly the same