Page:Eminent Chinese Of The Ch’ing Period - Hummel - 1943 - Vol. 2.pdf/96

 colored by views derived from Buddhism and Taoism. This Sung philosophy maintained its hold throughout the Ming period because it had the patronage of a powerful bureaucracy and at the same time offered to the individual a subjective emotional release from extreme autocratic rule. According to the Sung world view, the universe has as its constituent elements: (1) ch'i 氣, ether, the primordial element, physical and psychical, of which the universe is made, and (2) li 理, the reason, principle, or law which inheres in all things and which every human being possesses from birth. Man therefore has a dual nature (性): a material one derived from ch'i which is responsible for his passions and feelings and evil propensities, and a spiritual endowment, li, which he derives from Heaven and which is basically good. The aim of education is to free man from the less desirable impulses and help him to recover the principle, the law, or the reason, which he has at birth, but which is often beclouded by extraneous influences. One way to recover this li is by the exercise of quiet meditation—techniques which the seventeenth century thinkers perceived had been derived in part from Buddhism. Another method is by systematically lessening or suppressing the desires, as advocated, for different reasons, by both the Taoists and Buddhists.

This doctrine of the Sung philosophers, that li is Heaven-imparted and lodged in man, gave to their teachings a subjective approach which they then saw no way to overcome, but which some teachers stressed less than others. The school of Wang Yang-ming (see under ) went so far as almost to give up the search for knowledge from without, placing reliance almost wholly on inward techniques of meditation and introspection. The school founded by the Ch'êng brothers and Chu Hsi (see under ) talked much about pushing investigations to the limit to find the reasons or principles in things but, lacking the techniques of hypothesis and verification which alone make experimentation fruitful, the proponents of this school, too, gradually turned from the study of 'things' in the outer world, to 'things' recorded in the literary heritage of the nation.

The inadequacy of this subjective and literary approach was brought forcibly home to the thinkers of the seventeenth century but, with the exception of and, none of them attempted to discredit it, as Tai Chên did in the eighteenth century, on purely philosophical grounds. The method of attack employed by the seventeenth century thinkers was historical, philological and literary. They attempted to prove on textual grounds that the Sung cosmology was not ancient, that some of the texts on which it was based were late or spurious, and that the conclusions reached were often erroneous and purely subjective (see, , and ). This type of textual study was called Han-hsüeh 漢學 and the men who practiced it were said to belong to the Han-hsüeh p'ai (派), or School of Han Learning, because they strove to base their conclusions on texts older than the Sung—namely, those of the Han period.

Tai Chên inherited from his predecessors all the approved techniques of this school and, as already stated, applied them with rigorous exactness to the study of the laws of phonetic changes, etymology, textual criticism, mathematics and astronomy. He went further than his predecessors, however, for he had the conviction that these studies were not ends in themselves but must be used to develop a new philosophy whose aim should be the betterment of society. For him, the supreme use of the Classics is the truth they convey; and to display those truths he was as ready to go beyond "Han Learning" as his predecessors had gone beyond "Sung Learning."

In place of the old Sung dualism Tai Chên propounded a rationalistic monism of a type foreshadowed, to be sure, in the pragmatic writings of Yen Yüan and Li Kung, but never before erected into a philosophy. He boldly thrust aside the concept of li as a Heaven-sent entity, lodged in the mind, and took the outright materialistic position that ch'i alone is sufficient to account for all phenomena—not only the basic instincts and oft-condemned emotions of man, but all the highest manifestations of man's nature. Chu Hsi had identified li with tao 道, regarding them both superior to matter. But Tai, basing himself on certain passages in the Classics of Changes, interpreted tao as the activity of nature as shown in the interaction of Yin and Yang and the Five Elements. In the natural world it displays continuous change, resulting in the unending production and reproduction of life; but in man it manifests itself in the relations that men have to one another. Everything produced in this process has its own structure and this internal structure is what Tai Chên designates li. He found from his philological studies—as Li Kung and Ch'êng T'ing-tso (see under ) had before him—that the word li meant originally the texture or fiber in things, like the 698