Page:The Spirit of the Chinese People.djvu/57

Rh fact which has made superficial foreign students of China think that the Chinese have made no progress in their civilisation and that the Chinese civilisation is a stagnant one. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that, as far as pure intellectual life goes, the Chinese are, to a certain extent, a people of arrested development. The Chinese, as you all know, have made little or no progress not only in the physical, but also in the pure abstract sciences such as mathematics, logic and metaphysics. Indeed the very words "science" and "logic" in the European languages have no exact equivalent in the Chinese language. The Chinese, like children who live a life of the heart, have no taste for the abstract sciences, because in these the heart and feelings are not engaged. In fact, for everything which does not engage the heart and feelings, such as tables of statistics, the Chinese have dislike amounting to aversion. But if tables of statistics and the pure abstract sciences fill the Chinese with aversion, the physical sciences as they are now pursued in Europe, which require you to cut up and mutilate the body of a living animal in order to verify a scientific theory, would inspire the Chinese with repugnance and horror.

The Chinese, I say, as far as pure intellectual life goes, are to a certain extent, a people of arrested development. The Chinese to this day live the life of a child, a life of the heart. In this respect, the Chinese people, old as they are as a nation, are to the present day, a nation of children. But then it is important