Great Throughts Treasury

"A number of modern students -- H. Wilhelm, Eberhard, Jablonski, and above all Granet ? have named the kind of thinking with which we have here to do, ?coordinative thinking? or ?associative thinking.? This intuitive-associative system has its own causality and its own logic. It is not either superstition or primitive superstition, but a characteristic thought-form of its own. H. Wilhelm contrasts it with the ?subordinative? thinking characteristic of European science, which laid such emphasis on external causation. In coordinative thinking, conceptions are not subsumed under one another, but place side by side in a pattern, and things influence one another not by acts of mechanical causation, but by a kind of ?inductance?. In the Section on Taoism I spoke of the desire of the Taoist thinkers to understand the causes in Nature, but this cannot be interpreted in quite the same sense as would suit the thought of the naturalists of ancient Greece. The key-word in Chinese thought is Order and above all Pattern (and, if I may whisper it for the first time, Organism). The symbolic correlations or correspondences all formed part of one colossal pattern. Things behaved in particular ways not necessarily because of prior actions or impulsions of other things, but because their position in the ever-moving cyclical universe was such that they were endowed with intrinsic natures which made that behavior inevitable for them. If they did not behave in those particular ways they would lose their relational positions in the whole (which made them what they were), and turn into something other than themselves. They were thus parts in existential dependence upon the whole world-organism. And they reacted upon one another not so much by mechanical impulsion or causation as by a kind of mysterious resonance."

"Although there is a very large literature, still growing almost daily, on the Chinese calendar, its interest is, we suggest, much more archaeological and historical than scientific."

"But nothing ever put 'Hoppy' in the shade. No one could fail to recognize in the little figure... the authentic gold of intellectual inspiration, the Fundator et Primus Abbas of biochemistry in England."

"But Chinese civilization has the overpowering beauty of the wholly other, and only the wholly other can inspire the deepest love and the profoundest desire to learn."

"Daoist thought is the root of science and technology in China."

"The whole history of calendar-making is that of successive attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable, and the numberless systems of intercalated months, and the like, are thus of minor scientific interest."

"The hierarchy of relations, from the molecular structure of carbon to the equilibrium of the species and ecological whole, will perhaps be the leading idea of the future."

"The dogs may bark, but the caravan moves on."

"Knowledge should be developed within a context of universal cosmic meaning, not simply for the purpose of domination and power over Nature. Knowledge and power have been too much separated from meaning and morality. But now the idea of man as the perfect observer, and hence the all-powerful controller, has broken down, because observation is known to imply perturbation, necessary paradigms are liable to be fundamentally incompatible, and science without ethics will clearly lead to self-destructive situations... How to combine wisdom with power is the great problem now before humanity."

"To put it in a nutshell, the Central and South American high cultures of antiquity were entirely worthy of comparison with what the Old World had achieved by the time of the Han, the Gupta, and the Hellenistic age. The fact is that the Amerindian high cultures were a human modality of their own, and those Spaniards who came among them first would have had the sensation, if they had ever heard of such literature, of treading in a world of imaginative science fiction. But it was real, and the Amerindian achievements deserve all our sympathy and praise."