Such was briefly the life of Confucius.  His enemies claim that he was a political intriguer, inciting the feudal lords against each other in the course of his wanderings from one state to another, with the intention of somewhere coming into power himself.  There may, indeed, be some truth in that.

Confucius’s importance lies in the fact that he systematized a body of ideas, not of his own creation, and communicated it to a circle of disciples.  His teachings were later set down in writing and formed, right down to the twentieth century, the moral code of the upper classes of China.  Confucius was fully conscious of his membership of a social class whose existence was tied to that of the feudal lords.  With their disappearance, his type of scholar would become superfluous.  The common people, the lower class, was in his view in an entirely subordinate position.  Thus his moral teaching is a code for the ruling class.  Accordingly it retains almost unaltered the elements of the old cult of Heaven, following the old tradition inherited from the northern peoples.  For him Heaven is not an arbitrarily governing divine tyrant, but the embodiment of a system of legality.  Heaven does not act independently, but follows a universal law, the so-called “Tao”.  Just as sun, moon, and stars move in the heavens in accordance with law, so man should conduct himself on earth in accord with the universal law, not against it.  The ruler should not actively intervene in day-to-day policy, but should only act by setting an example, like Heaven; he should observe the established ceremonies, and offer all sacrifices in accordance with the rites, and then all else will go well in the world.  The individual, too, should be guided exactly in his life by the prescriptions of the rites, so that harmony with the law of the universe may be established.

A second idea of the Confucian system came also from the old conceptions of the Chou conquerors, and thus originally from the northern peoples.  This is the patriarchal idea, according to which the family is the cell of society, and at the head of the family stands the eldest male adult as a sort of patriarch.  The state is simply an extension of the family, “state”, of course, meaning simply the class of the feudal lords (the “chuen-tzu").  And the organization of the family is also that of the world of the gods.  Within the family there are a number of ties, all of them, however, one-sided:  that of father to son (the son having to obey the father unconditionally and having no rights of his own;) that of husband to wife (the wife had no rights); that of elder to younger brother.  An extension of these is the association of friend with friend, which is conceived as an association between an elder and a younger brother.  The final link, and the only one extending beyond the family and uniting it with the state, is the association of the ruler with the subject, a replica of that between father and son.  The ruler in turn is in the position