Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/252

 the evolution of written ideas in China could be traced in the growth of ideographs, which were simply linear combinations, partly systematic, partly arbitrary, so the authors of the Yih-King, when they sat down to ruminate on the processes of nature and the operations of the intellect, instinctively turned to the grouping of long and short lines as a vehicle for the construction of philosophical formulæ. If the mystical numbers in which Pythagoras sought the elements of realities had been themselves necessarily resolvable into lines, it is probable that he too would have shaped his fancies into diagrams and trigraphs instead of expressing them in numerals. Thus much premised, an explanation may be given of the simplest manner of divination, as prescribed by the Yih-King, since by following the process a tolerably clear idea is obtained of the manner in which the sexual principle and the trigraphs serve for purposes of prediction. The Japanese have a very pithy proverb, Ataru mo hakke ataranu mo hakke, which means that whatever the event may prove to be, the eight trigraphs are right; in other words, that the diviner always leaves a margin for his own justification. But it is not to be denied that the faith of an immense number of people is belied by such an aphorism, and that failures to obtain true glimpses of the future by means of divining rods arc generally attributed not so much to inefficacy in the doctrine as to imperfections in the mood of the disciple. The