It does not follow that the humanist is ready to abandon history to the relativist. The main conventions that have prevailed in the past reveal important identities as well as differences. These identities cannot be explained as due to their common derivation from some previous convention. The Chinese made an independent discovery of the law of measure.[2] An important task, indeed, that awaits some properly qualified scholar, preferably a Chinese, is a comparison of Confucian humanism with occidental humanism as it appears, for example, in the _Ethics_ of Aristotle. The announcement was made recently in the press that a Harvard astronomer had discovered the “centre of the universe” (more strictly the centre of our galactic system). In the meanwhile the far more important question is being neglected whether human nature itself has any centre. One’s faith in the existence of such a centre increases when one finds the best commentary on Pascal’s dictum that the great man is he who combines in himself opposite virtues and occupies all the space between them, in a Confucian book the very title of which, literally rendered, means the “universal norm” or “centre.”[3] Here and elsewhere the Confucian books reveal a deep and direct insight into the law of measure. Legge’s translation of the Chinese word for decorum (_li_) as “the rules of propriety” has been rightly censured as unduly prim and formalistic; though it must be admitted that a formalistic element is very marked at times even in the older Confucian writings.