Eastern Thought China

EASTERN WISDOM (IV): CHINA (conclusion) Such mentalities (Confucianism, Taoism) made progress of the Western sort a theoretical as well as a practical impossibility. Prior to the arrival of Westerners, China was a closed society which regarded itself as perfect, as having nothing to learn from foreigners. Withdrawn behind an intellectual and moral “Chinese Wall,” the Middle Empire could not develop until the arrival of the barbarians, the European and American “devils.” Chinese mathematical thought was profoundly arithmetic and algebraic, but unlike the Greek mind it never developed an axiomatic and deductive geometry. Failing to conceive the idea of natural law, the Chinese did not develop the fundamental sciences until after the arrival of the missionaries from the West. Nature was a symbolism to be deciphered, and for this purpose a number of pseudosciences were constructed – numerology, astrology and physiognomy – all of which were incompatible with the discovery of physical laws. The Chinese never rose to the abstract idea of a homogeneous and isotropic space such as Euclid conceived and could express in geometric terms. Their physics remained caught in the metaphysics of Yin and Yang, the five elements, and their symbolic affinities. Hence their science never got beyond the pre-Galileo level. Joseph Needham, perhaps the greatest authority on Chinese science, observes: “When we say that modern science developed only in Europe and only in the time of Galileo at the end of the Renaissance, we are trying to say that then and then only were laid the foundations of the structure of the natural sciences as we know them today; that is to say, the application to nature of mathematical hypotheses, the full understanding and systematic use of the experimental method, the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, the geometrization of space and the acceptance of a mechanical model of reality.”