Confucius

Confucius arrives in the final plays as a figure of immense reputation and uncertain doctrine, one of the great dead whose wisdom the living have inherited without ever testing it. His authority rests on maxims and tradition rather than on any demonstrated grasp of what philosophy actually is, a gap Shaw's preface dwells on when he accuses even Shakespeare of mistaking pessimism for thought. He matters because he embodies the play's central wager: that a civilization can inherit a name without inheriting a method, and that the difference only shows when someone asks the sage a question he has never had to answer.