Social rigidity made China only very slowly progressive in mechanical terms. Political laxity made the country weak in the face of invasion, exploitation, and possible partition. Intellectual traditionalism shut off stimuli available from the outside. Confucius had said, "If terms be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success."[8] Sun Yat-sen, Confucian in spirit though not in form, turned to the dynamics of ideological rather than legal control. To stir the immense lethargy of China, he substituted science for archaism; a Party elite for the scholastic system, propaganda to replace doctrinal education, and agitation to supersede incantation and reverence. [Footnote 8: _The Analects_, Book XIII, Ch. v; Legge, James, _The Chinese Classics_, Oxford, 1893 [Peiping, 1939], I, p. 93; the word _terms_ has been substituted for _names_ in rendering _ming_.] He struck at ideas first: "We cannot say in general that ideas, as ideas, are either good or bad. We must judge whether, when put into practice, they prove useful or not. If they are of practical use to us, they are good; if they are impractical, they are bad. If they are useful to the world, they are good; if they are not useful to the world, they are not good."[9] This pragmatic utilitarianism was to be the philosophical foundation of his revolution. The _San Min Chu I_ therewith remained alien to Marxism, which is dependent upon the occult mysteries of a topsy-turvy Hegelianism; Sun's thought is kin to the working philosophy of America, a pragmatism tinctured by idealist vestiges. [Footnote 9: d'Elia translation, cited, p. 130-1.] The first political principle he developed was _Nationalism_ (_min ts'u_). The theoretical basis for this was a racialism which, scientifically no more tenable than National Socialist Aryanism, is clear in common practice. Very few Chinese have trouble in identifying another Chinese. Sun Yat-sen pointed out that although the European peoples were divided, China was to him both a race and a nation. He thereby established for his followers a foundation for nationality more credible than any mere appeal to state allegiance. Treason against one's government is taken lightly in China: witness the Japanophiles. Treason to the Chinese race is a far more serious matter. In order to preserve the Chinese race-nation, Sun Yat-sen called for ideological reconstruction from three elements: ancient Chinese morality, traditional Chinese social knowledge (e.g., bureaucratic techniques; arbitration instead of adjudication), and Western physical science. He urged a return to cosmopolitanism through nationalism. By becoming strong--instead of extinct under alien colonial rule--the Chinese state could lead the world back to the old pacific cosmopolitanism of Eastern Asia.