The Mind of Mencius

The Mind of Mencius is not a translation of the Mencius text but a systematic digest of its doctrines. Ernst Faber classified and rearranged Mencius's sayings by topic—moral science, properties, virtues and corresponding duties, individual character, social relations, and the organization of the state—rather than following the original book and chapter sequence . This makes it a constructive philosophical presentation, not a faithful rendering. Arthur Hutchinson's English version, translated from Faber's German, was published by Trübner in 1882 . Readers seeking Mencius's own words in their original order should consult Legge's translation; readers seeking a Victorian systematization of Mencius's thought as moral and political philosophy will find Faber's digest distinctive.

Ernst Faber was a German missionary of the Rhenish Mission Society who worked in China and wrote extensively on Chinese philosophy. His digest of Mencius was part of a broader project of presenting Confucian thought to Western readers in systematic form, following his earlier digest of Confucius's doctrines . The book's full title—Political Economy Founded Upon Moral Philosophy—signals Faber's interpretive frame: he reads Mencius as a thinker whose economic and political prescriptions are grounded in ethical principles, a framing that resonated with Victorian concerns about the relationship between morality and social order . This is an interpretive construction, not a neutral exposition of the Mencius.

The two works are complementary but fundamentally different in method. James Legge's translation, first published in 1861 and revised in 1895, renders the Mencius faithfully in its original structure, with extensive scholarly notes and prolegomena. Faber's digest, published in 1882, rearranges Mencius's sayings by theme and presents them as a unified system of moral and political philosophy. Legge aimed to give English readers access to the text as it existed in Chinese; Faber aimed to give them a systematic understanding of Mencius's doctrines as a philosophy. The two approaches diverge sharply: Legge's Mencius is a canonical Chinese text in translation, while Faber's is a Victorian philosophical reconstruction.

The digest organizes Mencius's teachings into a progressive structure. It begins with a 'detailed analysis of the system of Mencius' and then proceeds through 'elements of moral science,' 'concerning properties,' 'virtues and corresponding duties,' and a 'practical exhibition of moral science' in the individual character. It then addresses 'ethico-social relations' and the 'result aimed at in moral development,' culminating in 'the organization of the state' . This architecture reflects Faber's conviction that Mencius's thought forms a coherent whole, moving from individual ethics to social relations to political organization. The arrangement imposes a systematic order on sayings that in the original Mencius are occasion-specific and scattered.

The book has had a long but marginal afterlife. The original 1882 Trübner edition was followed by a Boston Houghton Mifflin edition . In the twenty-first century, it has been reprinted by Routledge (2000, 2018) in their Chinese Studies series and by Kessinger Publishing (2010) and Literary Licensing (2014) as print-on-demand facsimiles . These reprints indicate continuing if modest scholarly interest, but no major critical assessment of Faber's digest appears to exist. It remains a historical artifact of nineteenth-century missionary scholarship rather than a standard reference, and its interpretive frame—Mencius as a moral philosopher of political economy—reflects its era more than contemporary Confucian studies.

The most persistent misreading treats the book as a translation of the Mencius and judges it by the standards of translation accuracy. This misunderstands its genre. Faber explicitly described his work as a 'systematic digest' in which the original text was 'classified and translated'—meaning that he selected, rearranged, and commented upon passages according to his own systematic plan . It is a constructive philosophical work, not a faithful rendering. Reading it as a translation and finding it wanting misses its purpose: to present Mencius as a coherent moral and political thinker for a Western audience, an aim that required rearrangement and interpretation rather than fidelity to the original sequence.