prize-winners at college.1 Women have a surer instinct of life than men, and the
Chinese have it more than other people. The Chinese depend largely upon their
intuition for solving all nature's mysteries, that same "intuition" or "sixth sense"
which makes many women believe a thing is so because it is so. And finally Chinese
logic is highly personal, like women's logic. A woman would not introduce a
professor of ichthyology as professor of ichthyology, but as the brother- in- law of
Colonel Harrison who died in India while she was undergoing an operatio n for
appendicitis in New York by that lovable old Doctor Cabot you should look at his
handsome forehead. In the same way, a Chinese judge cannot think of law as an
abstract entity, but as a flexible quantity as it should be personally applied to Colonel
Huang or Major Li. Accordingly, any law which is not personal enough to respond to
the personality of Colonel Huang or Major Li is inhuman and therefore no law at all.
Chinese justice is an art, not a science.
1 This refers, of course, to general womanhood as brought about by the present social
system.
Jespersen, in his well-known book, The Growth and Structure of English, once
referred to the masculine qualities of the English language by pointing to its love of
economy, common sense and forcefulness. Without wishing to contradict so great an
authority oji the English language, I beg to differ on a point which concerns the sexes.
Common sense and the practical mind are characteristics of women rather than of
men, who are more liable to take their feet off the ground and soar to impossible
heights. The Chinese language and grammar show this femininity exactly because the
language, in its form, syntax and vocabulary, reveals an extreme simplicity of
thinking, concreteness of imagery and economy of syntactical relationships.
This simplicity is best illustrated from pidgin, which is English meat with Chinese
bones, as we say in China. There is no reason why a sentence like "He come, you no
come; you come, he no come" should not be considered as clear as the more
roundabout "You needn' t come, if he comes, and he .needn't come, if you come." In
fact, this simplicity makes for clarity of expression. Moon, in Dean's English, quotes
an English Somerset farmer as testifying before the judge: "He'd a stick, and he'd a
stick, and he licked he, and he licked he; if he licked he as hard as he licked he, he'd a
killed he, and not he he," and this seems to me a much more sensible way of talking
than one with the Germanic case-distinctions. For according to the Chinese, the
difference between "I lick he" and "he lick I" is perfectly clear without the subjective-accusative complex, and the adding of the third person singular ending "s"
is as superfluous as is already proved to be in the past tense (I had, he had; I went, he
went). Actually lots of people are saying "us girls" and "them things" without ever
being misunderstood or losing anything except a meaningless "class" which has
nothing to do with the beauty of expression. I have great hope that English and
American professors will one day bravely and respectably pronounce a "he don' t" in
the classrooms and that the English language may one day become as sensible and
clear as the Chinese, through the influence of pidgin.
A certain feminine practical instinct has already guided the English to abbreviate all
their subordinate clauses as much as possible, like "weather permitting/5 "God
willing," "if possible/' "whenever necessary/' "as expected/' "if I don't (not shall not)
come back to-night/' and "if war breaks out (not shall break out) next week."
Jespersen already mentions such examples of Chinese simplicity in English as "first
come, first served/' "no cure, no pay," "once bitten, twice shy," which are all standard
pidgin. They are beginning to drop the "whom," too ("Who are you speaking to?").
English grammar is therefore not far from salvation. The Chinese love of simplicity is,
however, far ahead, as in the expression "Sit eat mountain empty" which to the
Chinese clearly means that "if you only sit and eat and do nothing, even a fortune as
big as a mountain will vanish." Therefore it will be some time before the English can
catch up with us.
The Chinese concrete way of thinking can also be illustrated by the nature of its
abstract terms and prevalence of proverbs and metaphoric expressions. An abstract
notion is often expressed by the combination of two concrete qualities, as "bigsmall"
for "size," "long-short" for "length," "broad-narrow" for "breadth" ("What is the
big-small of your shoes?"). "Long" and "short" also refer to the right and wrong of
parties in dispute, as the Chinese expression is whether "one's argument is long (or
short)" and therefore we have expressions like "I don't care for its long-short" (similar
to the English "the long and the short of it is. . . .") and "that man has no rightwrong"
meaning he is a good man because he preserves a God- like indifference toward all
questions, and does not get involved in private disputes. Abstract endings like "-ness"
are also unknown in Chinese, and the Chinese simply say, with Mencius, that "the
white of a white horse is not the same as the white of a white jade." This has a bearing
on their lack oi analytic thinking.
Women, so far as I know, avoid using abstract terms. This, I think, has been proved by
an analytical study of the vocabulary of women authors. (The analytical, statistical
methoc is in itself a habit of the Western mind, for the Chinese has fai too much
common sense to go to the trouble of counting word to prove it. When he feels the
truth directly that women's vocabulary in speech and writing is decidedly less abstract,
that is sufficient for him.) With the Chinese as with women, concrete imagery always
takes the place of abstract terminology. The highly academic sentence: "There is no
difference but difference of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference/3 cannot be exactly reproduced in Chinese, and a Chinese translator would
probably substitute for it the Mencian question: "What is the difference between
running away fifty steps and running away a hundred steps [in battle]?" Such a
substitute expression loses in definition and exactness, but gains in intelligibility. To
say, "How could I perceive his inner mental processes?" is not so intelligible as "How
could I know what is going on in his mind?", and this in turn is decidedly less
affective than the Chinese "Am I a tapeworm in his belly?"
Chinese thought, therefore, always remains on the periphery of the visible world, and
this helps a sense of fact which is the foundation of experience and wisdom. This
dislike of abstract terms is further seen in the Chinese names for classifications which
usually require sharply defined terms. Instead, the Chinese always seek the most
expressive names for different categories. Thus in Chinese literary criticism there are
different methods of writing called "the method of watching a fire across the river"
(detachment of style), "the method of dragonflies skimming the water surface"
(lightness of touch), "the method of painting a dragon and dotting its eyes" (bringing
out the salient points), the method of releasing a captive before capturing him"
(playing about a subject), "the method of showing the dragon's head without its tail"
(freedom of movement and waywardness of thought), "the method of a sharp
precipice overhanging a ten-thousand-feet ravine" (abruptness of ending), "the
method of letting blood by one needle-prick" (direct, epigrammatic gibe), "the method
of going straight into the fray with one knife" (direct opening), "the method of
announcing a campaign on the east and marching to the west" (surprise attack), "the
method of side-stabs and flanking attacks" (light raillery), "the method of a light mist
hanging over a grey lake" (mellow and toned-down style), "the method of layers of
clouds and hilltops" (accumulation), "the method of throwing lighted firecrackers at a
horse's buttocks'5 (final stab toward conclusion) etc., etc. Such names suggest
picturesque terms like the "bow-wow," "pooh-pooh" and "sing-song theories" of the
origin of speech.
This profuseness of imagery and paucity of abstract terminology has an influence on
the style of writing and, consequently, on the style of thought. On the one hand, it
makes for vividness; on the other, it may easily degenerate into a senseless
decorativeness without exact content, which has been the besetting sin of many
periods of Chinese literature, and against which Han Yu in the "Fang Dynasty set up a
revolt. Such a style suffers from lack of exactness of expression, but at its best it
brings about, as in the best "non-classical" novels, a sauntering prose, racy, idiomatic
and smelling of the soil, like the prose of Swift and Defoe, "in the best English
tradition," as we say. It also avoids the pitfalls of a type of academic jargon which is
rapidly growing in American university circles, especially among the psychologists
and sociologists, who talk of human life only hi terms of "factors," "processes,"
"individualization," "departmentalization," "quotas of ambition," "standardizat ion of
anger" and "coefficients of happiness." Such a style is practically untranslatable into
Chinese, although some ludicrous efforts have been made in it under the slogan of "Europeanization of Chinese," which is rapidly dying out of vogue. Translatio n
from English into Chinese is hardest in scientific treatises, while translation from
Chinese into English is hardest in poetry and decorative prose, where every word
contains an image.
III. LACK OF SCIENCE
Sufficient discussion of the characterist ics of Chinese thinking has been made to
enable us to appreciate the cause of their failure to develop natural science. The
Greeks laid the foundation of natural science because the Greek mind was essentially
an analytical mind, a fact which is proved by the striking modernity of Aristotle. The
Egyptians developed geometry and astronomy, sciences which required an analytical
mind: and the Hindus developed a grammar of their own. The Chinese, with all their
native intelligence, never developed a science of grammar, and their mathematics and
astronomical knowledge have all been imported. For the Chinese mind delights only
in moral platitudes, and their abstract terms like "benevolence," "kindliness,"
"propriety" and "loyalty" are so general that in such discussions they are naturally lost
in vague generalities.
Of all the ancient philosophers of the Chou Dynasty, only Motse and Hanfeitse
developed a style akin to cogent reasoning. Mencius, who was undoubtedly a great
sophist, cared only for such big words as "utility" and "righteousness." All the rest of
them, like Chuangtse, Liehtse and Huainantse, delighted in graceful metaphors. The
disciples of Motse, Huei Shih and Kungsun Lung, who were great sophists, were
interested in spinning scholastic conundrums, and in endeavouring to prove such
propositions as "eggs have hair on them," "horses lay eggs," "a dog may be a lamb,"
"a chicken has three legs," "fire is not warm," "the wheel never touches the ground,"
"a tortoise is longer than a snake," etc. The scholars of the Han Dynasty, which soon
followed, were interested only in making Alexandrian commentaries on the classics of
the preceding period. The Ch' in scholars after them revived Taoism and depended on
their "intuition" for the solving of the mysteries of their own bodies and the universe.
Experimentation was never thought of, and no scientific method had been developed.
The Sung philosophers reinterpreted Confucianism in the light of Buddhism, and
transformed it into a system of mental discipline and moral hygiene. They developed
a reputation for grasping the general content of a book "without wanting to know it
thoroughly." The Sung scholars had therefore the most unscientific philology, or no
philology at all. Only as late as the Ch' ing (Manchu) Dynasty was there developed a
comparative method, which at once put the Ch' ing philology on a height unattained
before. Ch' ing philology was the nearest approach to a scientific method in China.
It is easy to see why the Chinese mind cannot develop a scientific method; for the
scientific method, besides being analytical, always involves an amount of stupid
