Darkened Enthusiasm at the Top, and the Change Still Available

Enthusiasm closes on a fault and then reopens it. Legge's translation shows the topmost line with a darkened mind, given over to the pleasure and satisfaction of the moment, and then adds the reprieve: if a change is made even when the thing may be considered complete, there will be no error. Two judgements sit in one sentence, and the second does not cancel the first so much as refuse to let it be final.

The stroke is yielding in an even place, correctly positioned at the top of the upper trigram Zhen, past the seat of rule and at the end of the hexagram's movement. Sixth lines are ordinarily read as positions where a situation has run its course, and here the course has run into blindness: enthusiasm sustained past every reason for it, pleasure continued out of momentum rather than out of judgement. The darkening is not wickedness. It is the failure to notice that the moment has ended.

What makes this an unusually generous close is the phrase about completion. The text explicitly contemplates a person who has gone all the way to the end of a mistake, and it still leaves the door open, on the single condition that the change is actually made. Enthusiasm ends, in other words, by insisting that momentum is never binding. Nothing in the hexagram has been so committed that stopping it now would count against the person who stops.