212
Kong CT. London Missionary Society Archives, South China, April 24, 1845: Legge writes to the headquarters, sending copies of Collie's work to them.
C Andrew J Nathan, "The Place of Values in Cross-Cultural Studies: The Example of Democracy and China", in Paul A. Cohen and Merle Goldman, eds., Ideas Across Cultures: Essays on Chinese Thought in Honor of Benjamin I. Schwartz (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 293-314. I quote here the three relevant sections.
**After World War II] relativism especially recommended itself as a corrective to our society's nineteenth and early twentieth-century missionary impulses... that their way of life was not going to sweep the world.... (Ibid. p 296).
**The relativist position |-| adopted in order to prevent missionary zeal from clouding our understanding of the non-Western world |. led in some cases to an equal but opposite kind of self-deception”. (Ibid. p 304).
"Evaluative universalism by no means requires a return to the missionary mode of promoting Western values. It is not a call for proselytism but an expression of the belief, first, that value differences when they exist can, and can only, be honestly expressed, and second, that beliefs originating in different societies can fruitfully be confronted with one another, compared, and judged, even though disagreement is expected to persist”. (Ibid. pp 312-313).
Recorded in Legge's autobiographical account entitled "Notes of My Life" (pp. 25-27), kept now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
12 These books are Paraphrasis Psalmorum Davidis Poetica (n.p., 1566) and Rerum Scoticorum Historia (ed. apud A. Arbuthnetum, 1582). English translations of both were available in Legge's time.
Li
This version was apparently intended as a replacement of the earlier rendition of The Book Of Poetry published by Legge in 1871. It was a completely revised text of both the verse and the commentarial notes. Because it only included the English text and not the Chinese text which appeared in the first edition, however, the later Oxford edition of 1893-1895 republished the earlier text. A comparison of this earlier rendition with the second edition (which others called Legge's "metrical“ Shijing "jén) would display the kind of discipline Legge had as a translator of classical texts. See James Legge, The Chinese Classics: translated into English, with Preliminary Essays And Explanatory Notes – Vol III: The She King; or, The Book Of Odes (London: Trübner & Co., 1876). See also Alfred Lister, "Dr. Legge's Metrical Shi-King", The China Review 5:1 (July 1876), pp. 1-8.
11
This Hebrew Psalter was prepared with a twenty-seven page introductory essay which included some critical commentary, and over three hundred pages of metrical paraphrases of the Psalms. Legge's position in presenting the Psalter was primarily meditative and not textual-critical; neither did this tome contain the kind of extensive commentarial apparatus which The Chinese Classics always included. Perhaps it is for some of these reasons that the manuscript was never published. It is now kept in the library of New College at the University of Edinburgh.
14 The printed text of this poetic summary of Chinese history I found in the Oriental Studies Library in Oxford. It was clearly planned and printed as part of some larger work.
For the value of "cherishing the old", see the Analects 2:11, The Chinese Classics: Vol 1, op. cit., p. 49. Han Yu's opposition to Buddhist and Taoist superstitions, his courageous attack on their spiritual deceptions, and his consequent punishment must have stood as a courageous example to Legge. Han's specific interest in the old style, and his influence in stimulating interest in the renewed study of ancient texts and writing styles, parallels some of Legge's own interests.
17 After graduating from King's College, the young James spent time with his father