[
    {
        "id": 212286,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1990",
        "page_number": 228,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "205\n\n“Scottish Commonsense” philosophy was a conscious effort in the eighteenth century to counteract the sceptical implications of the radical philosopher, David Hume. The young Legge had read the writings of Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown while a student at King's College in the early 1830s. He claimed later that he did not agree with all their philosophical implications, preferring a less rationalistic philosophy (perhaps that of William Paley), but even his granddaughter, the late Prof. Mary Dominica Legge, underscored his preference for Aristotelean ethics over the Confucian equivalent. If the content of James Legge's thought is rooted in the Biblical interpretations of the Non-Conformist tradition and Paley's evangelical system of natural theology, the categories came largely from the Commonsense tradition.\n\n72\n\nIt was these categories which, as translator and interpreter, James Legge employed in evaluating Confucian ethics, education, and epistemology. The lack of rational precision in a number of places in Confucius' life evoke from Legge a sense that there was a “want of freedom” in Confucius' behaviour. He likewise criticized the important Song dynasty Confucian commentator, Zhu Xi, for implying that, when knowledge is complete, the thoughts are by this means necessarily made sincere or without self-deception. For Legge, the moral life stemmed from a spiritual source related to the moral will, which was more penetrating and more complex than a mere mental grasp of things.\n\n7.1\n\nIn his study of Confucius' philosophy, Legge identifies specific details of the sage's biography in which his evasion of the truth (in one case involving an oath) is claimed to have produced an \"injurious influence” as an example to later Chinese people. There is also a conflict between Confucius' more humble claims about himself and the claims made about him by later Confucianists. At times these claims approach blasphemy, and Legge minces no words in decrying these assertions. The fact that other canonical texts included passages in which Confucius appears as the advocate of an ethic of revenge, especially when it involved family or clan ties, was an additional issue Legge regarded as deserving unqualified criticism. Whether or not these texts were historically reliable, their negative ethical influence was undeniable.\n\nWhat is important here is that the ethical questions Legge asked",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299",
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    {
        "id": 212299,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1990",
        "page_number": 241,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "218 \n\nin the Bodleian Archives at Oxford.\n\n71 I have found no direct support for this claim, though according to Ralph Covell the influence of William Paley's natural theology on nineteenth century Protestant missionary apologetics was immense. See Ralph Covell, Confucius, The Buddha, and Christ: A History of the Gospel In Chinese (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1986), pp. 98-102. A helpful text on the background of William Paley and his rationalistic theology is D. L. LeMahieu's The Mind of William Paley: A Philosopher, and His Age (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976).\n\n72 This is a claim made in her essay entitled \"James Legge\" (pp. 10-11), presented to the Sino-Scottish Society at the University of Edinburgh on February 4, 1951.\n\n73 See James Legge, The Chinese Classics, Vol 1, p. 89. This is significantly changed from the original 1861 edition.\n\n74 Ibid.\n\nPage 367\n\n75 Ibid., pp. 100-101.\n\n76 Ibid., pp. 49-51, 94-97.\n\n77 The Book of Rites and The Rites of Zhou, cited in The Chinese Classics. Vol 1, op. cit., pp. 110-111.\n\n78 I am thinking here of Liang Qichao, who in 1902 and 1903 wrote some famous articles urging Chinese intellectuals to discard the inadequate value system of traditional Confucian life. See my article which includes this attack, “Liang Qi-Chao and the Problematic of Social Change: Analyzing a Philosophical Tension in Twentieth Century Chinese Philosophy\". Synthesis Philosophica (Yugoslavia) 4:1 (1989), pp. 189-212.\n\n79 Legge wrote a series of three articles on Qu Yuan entitled \"The Li Sao Poem and its Author,\" all of which appeared in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain And Ireland. See n. 5. Another interpretation of these texts is offered in \"The 'Failures' Of James Legge's Fruitful Life For China\", op. cit., pp. 258-260.\n\nFor a recent translation of Qu Yuan's \"Heavenly Questions\" see David Hawkes, The Songs of the South (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd, 1985). Legge did begin translating other poems of Qu Yuan, but never had them published.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299",
        "rank": 0
    }
]