Dr. Giles ese biographical diary, it must be admitted, is a work of immense labour. But here again Dr. Giles shows an utter lack of the most ordinary judgment. In such a work, one would expect to find notices only of really notable men.
Hie manus ob patriam pugnando vulnera passi, Quique sacerdotes casti, dum vita ma, Quique pii votes et Phoebo digna locuti, Ias aut qui vitam excoluere per artes, Quique sui memores aliquos fecere merendo.
But side by side with sages and heroes of antiquity, with mythical and mythological personages, we find General Tg Ki-tong,
Mr. Ku Hung-ming, Viceroy g Chi-tung and Captain Lew Buah, _the last whose sole title to distin is that he used often to treat his fn friends with unlimited quantities of champagne!
Lastly these "Adversaria,"_Dr. Giles latest publication_will not, I am afraid, enhance Dr. Giles reputation as a scholar of sense and judgment. The subjects chosen, for the most part, have hly practical or human i. It would really seem that Dr. Giles has takerouble to write these books not with any iion to tell the world anything about the ese and their literature but to show what a learned ese scholar Dr. Giles is and how much better he uands ese than anybody else. Moreover, Dr. Giles, here as elsewhere, shows a harsh and pugnacious dogmatism which is as un-philosophical, as unbeing a scholar as it is unpleasing. It is these characteristics of sinologues like Dr. Giles which have made, as Mr. Hopkins says, the very name of sinologue and ese scholarship a byword and s among practical fn residents in the Far East.
I shall here select two articles friles latest publication and will try to show that if hitherto writings of fn scholars on the subjects of ese learning and ese literature have been without human or practical i, the fault is not in ese learning and ese literature.
The first article is entitled "What is filial piety." The point iicle turns upon the meaning of two ese characters. A disciple asked what is filial piety. fucius said: se nan fa^ (lit, colour difficult).
Dr. Giles says, "The question is, and has been for twenty turies past, what do.these two characters mean?" After g and dismissing all the interpretations and translations of native and fn scholars alike. Dr. Giles of course finds out the true meaning. In order to shiles harsh and unscholarly dogmatiner, I shall here quote Dr. Giles words with which he announces his discovery. Dr.
Giles says:_
"It may seem presumptuous after the above exordium to declare that the meaning lies a la Bill Stumps (! ) upon the surface, and all you have to do, as the poet says, is to
Stoop, and there it is;
Seek it nht nor left!
"When Tzu-hsia asked fucius, What is filial piety? the latter replied simply,
" se to defi, nan is difficult, a most intelligible and appropriate answer."
I shall not here enter into the ies of ese grammar to show that Dr. Giles is wrong. I will only say here that if Dr. Giles is right in supposing that the character se is a verb, then in good grammatical ese, the sentence would not read se nan, but se chih wei nanto defi, is difficult. The impersonal pronoun chi it, is here absolutely indispensable, if the character se here is used as a verb.
But apart from grammatiiceties, the translation as given by Dr. Giles of fucius answer, when taken with the whole text, has no point or sense in it at all.
Tzu hsia asked, what is filial piety?