Page:China- Its State and Prospects.djvu/214

188 established. Then the purer influences ascended, and became the expansive heavens, while the grosser particles descended, and constituted the subjacent earth. From the combination of these two, all things were produced; and thus heaven is the father, and earth the mother of nature."

The principle of the Chinese cosmogony seems to be founded on a sexual system of the universe. That which Linnaeus found to exist in plants, the Chinese conceive pervades universal nature. Heaven and earth, being the grandest objects cognizable to human senses, have been considered by them as the parents of all things, or the superior and inferior principles of being. These they trace to an extreme limit, which possessed in itself the two powers combined. They say that one produced two, two begat four, and four increased to eight; and thus, by spontaneous multiplication, the production of all things followed. To all these existences, whether animate or inanimate, they attach the idea of sex; thus every thing superior presiding, luminous, hard, and unyielding, is of the masculine, while every thing of an opposite quality is ascribed to the feminine gender. Numerals are thus divided, and every odd number is arranged under the former, and every even number under the latter sex. This theory of the sexes was adopted by the ancient Egyptians, and appears in some of the fragments ascribed to Orpheus, while the doctrine of numbers taught by the Confucian school resembles in some degree the monad and dead of Pythagoras, of which some have spoken as the archetype of the world.

The Chinese system of cosmogony is connected with their scheme of the diagrams, which they say was