art of going through the motions. Such was only too often the decorum of the French drawing-room, and such we are told, has frequently been the decorum of the Chinese humanist. Yet the decorum of Confucius himself was not only genuine but he has put the case for the humanist with his usual shrewdness. “I venture to ask about death,” one of his disciples said to him. “While you do not know life,” Confucius replied, “how can you know about death?”[306] The solution of this problem as to the relation between humanism and religion, so far as a solution can be found, lies in looking upon them both as only different stages in the same path. Humanism should have in it an element of religious insight: it is possible to be a humble and meditative humanist. The type of the man of the world who is not a mere worldling is not only attractive in itself but has actually been achieved in the West, though not perhaps very often, from the Greeks down. Chinese who should be in a position to know affirm again that, alongside many corrupt mandarins, a certain number of true Confucians[307] have been scattered through the centuries from the time of the sage to the present. If humanism may be religious, religion may have its humanistic side. I have said, following Aristotle, that the law of measure does not apply to the religious life, but this saying is not to be understood in an absolute sense. Buddha is continually insisting on the middle path in the religious life itself. The resulting urbanity in Buddha and his early followers in India is perhaps the closest approach that that very unhumanistic land has ever made to humanism. It is right here in this joining of humanism and religion that Aristotle, at least the Aristotle that has come down to us, does not seem altogether adequate. He fails to bring out sufficiently the bond between the meditative or religious life that he describes at the end of his “Ethics” and the humanistic life or life of mediation to which most of this work is devoted. An eminent French authority on Aristotle,[308] complains that this separation of the two lives encouraged the ascetic excess of the Middle Ages, the undue spurning of the world in favor of mystic contemplation. I am struck rather by the danger of leaving the humanistic life without any support in religion. In a celebrated passage,[309] Aristotle says that the “magnanimous” man or ideal gentleman sees all things including himself proportionately: he puts himself neither too high nor too low. And this is no doubt true so far as other men are concerned. But does the magnanimous man put human nature itself in its proper place? Does he feel sufficiently its nothingness and helplessness, its dependence on a higher power? No one, indeed, who gets beyond words and outer forms would maintain that humility is a Christian monopoly. Pindar is far more humble[310] than Aristotle, as humble, one might almost maintain, as the austere Christian.