The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [76]
15. ‘The inferior person stands in awe only of what has power to harm his advantage, whether it is good or bad.
16. ‘In youth he indulges in excess, in maturity he is quarrelsome, in old age covetous.
17. ‘He speaks out of turn, conceals his meaning, looks no one in the eye.
18. ‘He is idle and indulgent, and his poor choice of friends confirms him in the ways of vice and inferiority.’
Chapter 8
1. The master said, ‘Most people cannot bear to see the sufferings of others; this is the good in our nature.
2. ‘If someone should see a child about to fall into a well, he will feel alarm and distress,
3. ‘Not to gain favour with the child’s parents, nor to seek the praise of their neighbours,
4. ‘Nor from fear of a reputation for being unmoved by such a thing.
5. ‘From this we may perceive that commiseration is essential to man, that feelings of shame and dislike are essential to man,
6. ‘That feelings of modesty and complaisance are essential to man, and that the feeling of approving and disapproving is essential to man.
7. ‘The feeling of commiseration is the principle of benevolence.
8. ‘The feeling of shame and dislike is the principle of righteousness.
9. ‘The feeling of modesty and complaisance is the principle of propriety.
10. ‘The feeling of approving and disapproving is the principle of knowledge.
11. ‘Men have these four principles just as they have four limbs.
12. ‘When men wilfully do not live according to these principles, they play the thief with themselves; they steal away their own better nature.
13. ‘Since all men have these four principles in themselves, let them give full development and completion to them,
14. ‘And the result will be like a fire which has begun to burn, or a spring which has begun to flow.
15. ‘Let the principles have their complete development, and they will suffice to love and protect all.
16. ‘Let them be denied development, and they will not suffice for a man even to honour his parents.’
17. The master said, ‘All things are already complete in us. There is no greater delight than to be conscious of sincerity when one examines oneself.
18. ‘Let a man not do what his own sense of rightness tells him not to do, and let him not desire what his sense of rightness tells him not to desire: to act thus is all he has to do.
19. ‘Benevolence is the natural state of our minds, and rightness is our path.
20. ‘How lamentable is it to neglect the path, and not pursue it; to lose this benevolence, and not know how to seek it again!
21. ‘When men’s dogs or sheep are lost, they know enough to look for them; but if they lose their virtue, they either do not know how to find it again, or do not care.
22. ‘The great end of learning is nothing else but to seek to know oneself and to maintain one’s understanding of rightness.’
Chapter 9
1. The master said, ‘The trees of the mountain were once beautiful.
2. ‘But being situated on the borders of a large state, they were hewn down with axes.
3. ‘Could they still retain their beauty? And yet, through the powers of life,
4. ‘Day and night, and with the nourishing influence of rain and dew,
5. ‘Their stumps produced buds and sprouts springing forth.
6. ‘But then came cattle and goats, and browsed upon the succulent sprouts, stripping them.
7. ‘To these things is owed the bare appearance of the mountain which, when people see it, they think was never finely wooded.
8. ‘But is what they see the nature of the mountain?
9. ‘And so also of what properly belongs to man: shall it be said that the mind of anyone was originally without the possibility of benevolence and rightness?
10. ‘The way in which a man loses his proper goodness is like the way that the trees are felled by axes.
11. ‘When its principles are hewn down day after day, can the mind retain its beauty?
12. ‘But there is a development of its life day and night,
13. ‘And in the calm air of the morning, just between night and day, the mind feels something of those desires and aversions which are proper to humanity;
14. ‘But the feeling is not strong, and it is