For many years, an aphorism has been circulating among the people, allegedly invented by a Chinese philosopher. We checked whether its author is indeed Confucius.

The expression “It's hard to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there isn't one there” is usually used to refer to futile attempts to prove something obviously false. With a reference to Confucius, it can be heard in the series "The meeting place cannot be changed"(1979) and in the film by Tengiz Abuladze"Repentance"(1987), read in fiction literature, collections aphorisms and media publications such as “RIA Novosti", "Parliamentary newspaper" And "Komsomolskaya Pravda"

Chinese thinker Kung Fu Tzu (Confucius is the Latinized form of his name) lived in the 6th–5th centuries BC. e., and all works of which he is considered to be the author with varying degrees of probability, got there before us in editions of much later times. Notes recording the statements and actions of Confucius, as well as dialogues with his participation, were collected by the philosopher’s students in a book entitled “Lun Yu"("Conversations and Judgments"). However, neither in this work nor in other texts available today that scholars suggest Confucius could have written, “Verified” did not find statements about a black cat in a dark room.

Saying attributed to Confucius meets not only in the series “The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed,” but also in its original source, the Weiner brothers’ novel “The Era of Mercy” (1975), however, without indicating the color of the cat and with the word “catch” instead of “find.” This version of the phrase probably became known after the publication in March 1973 in the journal Foreign Literature of a translation of Driss Schraibi's novel "Donkey" Soon, Ogonyok published individual chapters of Sergei Sartakov’s novel “And you shine, star...", where the author used the same wording, and put the phrase into the mouth of Lenin, who allegedly remembered the aphorism of Confucius.

However, the canonical form of the phrase (with the search for a black cat) appeared in the Russian-language press long before this. The earliest case found by Verified dates back to 1947, when in a number of Soviet magazines published an article criticizing the English philosopher of the first half of the 20th century, Cyril Joad. He allegedly stated that his colleagues were often like “a blind man looking in a dark room for a black cat that is not there.” In this case, there was no attribution to the ancient Chinese thinker yet.

By the middle of the 20th century this metaphor was already well known in Great Britain, where it was attributed to many - in particular, the naturalist Charles Darwin and the poet Ralph Emerson (both lived in the century before last). In the first case, however, it was no longer about a cat. The creator of the theory of evolution allegedly stated: “A mathematician is a blind man who in a dark room is looking for a black hat that is not there.” It is in this form that the saying appears to have been first attributed to Confucius. Thus, in 1894, British newspapers reported that the recently deceased judge Lord Charles Bowen liked to tell an anecdote from the life of a Chinese sage as a metaphor for “the greatest impossibility.” Note that the word “hat” in English differs from the word “cat” by only one letter (hat and cat, respectively), and this could be the reason for the spread of two variants of the idiom.

The oldest examples of metaphor found by “Verified” still mention a cat. In 1846, in the New York literary magazine The Knickerbocker, the critic wrote, that a certain author has less chance of success than “a blind black man looking for a black cat in a dark basement with a blown out candle.” Three years later, newspapers were already citing The Penny Punch printed a joke about how a boy, in response to his father’s request to define the concept of “darkness,” says: “A blind Ethiopian is in a dark basement at midnight looking for a black cat.”

Thus, a more or less canonical version of the phrase about a black cat in a dark room appeared in the second half of the 19th century in Great Britain, where they began to pass it off as an aphorism of Confucius. The prototype of the phrase was a statement about the search for a black cat in a dark basement, which circulated in print several decades earlier.

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