Note 65 — Chapter V · EUROPE AND ASIA

Of Confucius, for example, the late Professor Chavannes of the Collège de France says: “He was, as it were, five hundred years before our era, the national conscience which gave precision and corroboration to the profound ideas of which the classic books of remote antiquity reveal to us the first outlines.... He went about proclaiming the necessity of conforming to the moral idea that China had slowly conceived in the course of the centuries; the men of his time refused to obey him because they found it too difficult to give up their comforts or their interests; they felt, nevertheless, that his voice had a more than human authority; they were moved and stirred to the depths of their being when they were touched by the potent spirit coming from the distant past which summoned up in them the truths glimpsed by their fathers.” Quelques Idées morales des Chinois (lecture originally given at the Sorbonne and published in Bulletin de la Société autour du Monde, Janvier-Mai, 1918, pp. 47 ff.).