Page:Columbia University Lectures on Literature (1911).djvu/88

74 woman. The English language, it is true, has almost emancipated itself from that prejudice; but in quite a number of other languages even inanimate objects are represented as being either masculine or feminine, if not neuter. In these languages gender may be indicated by inflection or by the article. The Chinese language knows nothing of the kind; but, to make up for it, the idea of gender has survived among the people in its natural philosophy as a popular science. For even the non-educated in China know that the sun is male and the moon female; that heaven and earth, day and night, north and south, white and black as opposites, are respectively male and female. Mysterious influences are attributed to the two sexes, and the preponderance and relative position of the one or the other in the " Eight Diagrams " expresses conditions which it would require a complicated commentary to describe.

The original "Eight Diagrams," each of w-hich consisted of three lines, male or female, and which were held to denote certain elements of nature, such as earth, water, etc., were doubled up and made to consist of six lines each so as to yield, with all the possible permutations, sixty-four combinations. Each of these corresponded to a certain condition of life or nature, which has been explained and extended in a copious commentary. This somewhat complicated system of occultism, if it may be so called, is ascribed to Won-wang, the heroic duke of a palatinate on the western frontier, who is supposed to have written its main text while being held in prison by Chou-sin, the vicious last monarch of the Shang dynasty, whose downfall was brought about by Won-Wang's son Wu-wang, the first emperor of the Chou dynasty in 1122 b.c, according to the Chinese standard chronology. The Chinese have for thousands of years looked upon the "Canon of Changes" as their chief instrument of auguration; but from our point of view, it is merely the reverence with which it is regarded in China and its supposed high antiquity that cause