ABSTRACT
The Empire dissolved in ko-ming. Ko-ming, itself drained of its traditional literal meaning and metaphorized into modern 'revolution', freed men's minds and made them aware of the changing content of Chinese civilization. Chinese imperial forms became anachronisms. For a modern, to say that Hsiian-t'ung 'lost the mandate' in 1911 was to strive with conscious anachronism for allusive effect. Once-serious Confucian content was turned into rhetoric. Bureaucracy without Confucianism—Confucianism without bureaucracy—Confucianism's intellectual content had profoundly altered. For the primordial heroes in Confucian myth is men, not gods or descendants of gods; but the Japanese myth begins with the sun-goddess and her Japanese warrior-offspring. Joseph de Maistre, the French Restoration royalist and ultramontane, had a quite non-Confucian transcendental religious standpoint: kings were related to God through Popes, who were entrusted by God with the education of sovereigns. The institution of monarchy was of just as much consequence as the philosophy of Confucianism.
