The social polity which brings together the people who thus view life is at once singular and appropriate. I well remember how in youth a new volume of the Sacred Books of the East Series, a part of the Confucian Lî-kî, came into my hands and how delighted I was to learn that in China life was regulated by music and ceremony. That was the beginning of an interest in China that has not ceased to grow, though now, when it has become a sort of fashion to exalt the spiritual qualities of the Chinese above those of other peoples, one may well feel disinclined to admit any interest in China. But the conception itself, since it seems to have had its beginning at least a thousand years before Christ, may properly be considered independently of our Western fashions. It is Propriety—the whole ceremony of life—in which all harmonious intercourse subsists; it is “the channel by which we apprehend the ways of Heaven,” in no supernatural sense, for it is on the earth and not in the skies that the Confucian Heaven lies concealed. But if human feelings, the instincts—for in this matter the ancient Chinese were at one with our modern psychologists,—are the field that has to be cultivated, and it is ceremony that ploughs it, and the seeds of right action that are to be planted on it, and discipline that is to weed it, and love that is to gather in the fruits, it is in music, and the joy and peace that accompany music, that it all ends. Indeed, it is also in music that it all begins. For the sphere in which ceremonies act is Man’s external life; his internal life is the sphere of music. It is music that moulds the manners and customs that are comprised under ceremony, for Confucius held that there can be music without sound where “virtue is deep and silent”; and we are reminded of the “Crescendo of Silences” on the Chinese pavilion in Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s story, “Le Secret de l’ancienne Musique.” It is music that regulates the heart and mind and with that development brings joy, and joy brings repose. And so “Man became Heaven.” “Let ceremonies and music have their course until the earth is filled with them!”