... the lesson to be learned from China's Confucianism could never be more significant for us than it is now. Its ethical aspects ...are a reminder which our Christian civilization needs if we are not to stand before the world as hypocrites who preach love while practicing the bitterest hatreds toward more rival orthodoxies and toward peoples whose skins are of a different hue. We shall, in fact, dig the gave of Western civilization unless we implement the faith that Confucianism and democracy have in common, namely, that ethics has its roots in man's relation to the universe, that morality comes into being through honest, clear-cut human relationships and cannot endure unless it is reflected in the patterns of daily life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thus I believe that without doing violence to the ancient doctrine of the Chinese, one can say that the Li has been brought by the... perfection of its nature to choose, from several possibilities, the most appropriate; and that by this means it has produced the Ki (Ch'i) or matter with dispositions such that all the rest has come about by natural propensities, in the same way that Monsieur Descartes claims to bring forth the present order of the world as a consequence of a small number of initially generated assumptions. Thus the Chinese, far from being blameworthy, merit praise for their ideas of things being created by their natural propensity and by a pre-established harmony.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »