defend the proposition against all comers, and especially against one of no mean standing, the philosopher Kao (Cow).  Kao declared that righteousness is only to be got out of man’s nature in the same way that good cups and bowls are to be got out of a block of willow wood, namely, by care in fashioning them.  Improper workmanship would produce bad results; good workmanship, on the other hand, would produce good results.  In plain words, the nature of man at birth is neither good nor bad; and what it becomes afterwards depends entirely upon what influences have been brought to bear and in what surroundings it has come to maturity.  Mencius met this argument by showing that in the process of extracting cups and bowls from a block of wood, the wood as a block is destroyed, and he pointed out that, according to such reasoning, man’s nature would also be destroyed in the process of getting righteousness out of it.

Again, Kao maintained that man’s nature has as little concern with good or evil as water has with east or west; for water will flow indifferently either one way or the other, according to the conditions in each case.  If there is freedom on the east, it will flow east; if there is freedom on the west, it will flow west; and so with human nature, which will move similarly in the direction of either good or evil.  In reply, Mencius freely admitted that water would flow either east or west; but he asked if it would flow indifferently up or down.  He then declared that the bent of human nature towards good is precisely like the tendency of water to flow down and not up.  You can force water to jump up, he said, by striking it, and by mechanical appliances you can make it flow to the top of a hill; but what you do in such cases is entirely contrary to the nature of water, and is merely the result of violence, such violence, in fact, as is brought into play when man’s nature is bent towards evil.

“That which men get at birth,” said Kao, “is their nature,” implying that all natures were the same, just as the whiteness of a white feather is the same as the whiteness of white snow; whereupon Mencius showed that on this principle the nature of a dog would be the same as that of a an ox, or the nature of an ox the same as that of a man.  Finally, Mencius declared that for whatever evil men may commit, their natures can in nowise be blamed.  In prosperous times, he argued, men are mostly good, whereas in times of scarcity the opposite is the case; these two conditions, however, are not to be charged against the natures with which God sent them into the world, but against the circumstances in which the individuals in question have been situated.