drudgery, while the Chinese believe in flashes of common sense and insight. And inductive reasoning, carried over to human relationships (in which the Chinese are
primarily interested), often results in a form of stupidity not so rare in American
universities. There are to-day doctorate dissertations in the inductive method which
would make Bacon turn in his grave. No Chinese could possibly be stupid enough to
write a dissertation on ice-cream, and after a series of careful observations, announce
the staggering conclusion that "the primary function of sugar [in the manufacture of
ice-cream] is to sweeten it/'1 or after a methodical study in "Time and Motion
Comparison on Four Methods of Dish-washing" happily perceive that "stooping and
lifting are fatiguing";2 or that, in "A Study of the Bacterial Content of Cotton
Undershirts,33 "the number of bacteria tends to increase with the length of time
garments are worn."3 A newspaper report several years ago stated that a University of
Chicago student, after making a "comparative study" of the impressional power of
various types of lettering, found that the blacker the lines, the more striking they are
to the eye.
This sort of stupidity, although useful to business advertisement, could really be
arrived at, I think, just as correctly by a moment of Chinese common sense and
"intuition." The best cartoon I have ever seen in Punch is that of a congress of
behaviourists who, after passing a number of pig "subjects" through a test, with a
thermometer in the snout and a pearl necklace dangling in front, unanimously resolve
that pigs do not respond to the sight of jewellery. These things cannot be merely
prostitution of the scientific method, for we find that Professor Cason of Rochester
University read a paper at the Ninth Annual International Conference of Psychologists
on the "Origin and Nature of Common Annoyances," in which he had noted 21,000
kinds of annoyances, which, after deducting duplications and "spurious annoyances,"
were later reduced to 507 (!), and in which he succeeded in grading these
"annoyances," like 26 marks for "hair in food," 2 for "the sight of a bald head" and 24
for "cockroaches."
1 Teachers* College Record, Columbia University, Feb., 1930, p. 472, quoted by
Abraham Flexner: Universities, American, English and German.
s Flexner, ibid. "A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in candidacy for
degree of Master of Arts," University of Chicago.
8 Flexner, ibid. "A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of
Kansas State Agricultural College for Degree of Doctor oi Science."
A certain amount of stupid drudgery is of course part and parcel of true scientific
work. Only true scientific discipline can enable a scientist to take delight in the
discovery that an earthworm has a certain protective covering, for it is on the
accumulation of such minutely observed facts that science grew from generation to
generation to its present magnificent attainments. Without that scientific outlook, and
with a large share of humour and common sense, the Chinese must necessarily consider the study and observation of the life of an earthworm or of a gold- fish as
beneath the dignity of a scholar.
IV. LOGIC
This brings us to the problem of Chinese logic, which is based on the Chinese
conception of truth. Truth, according to Chinese, can never be proved: it can only be
suggested. Chuangtse long ago pointed out the subjectivity of knowledge in his
CKiwulun:
In an argument between you and me, you think you have got the better of me, and I
will not admit your superiority. Then are you really right, and I really wrong? I think I
have got the better of you and you will not admit my superiority梩 hen am I really
right and you really wrong? Or perhaps are we both right, or perhaps are we both
wrong? This you and I cannot know. Thus we are encircled in darkness, and who is
going to establish the truth? If we let a man who agrees with you establish it, the n he
already agrees with you, so how could he establish it? If we let one who agrees with
me establish the truth, then he already agrees with me, so how could he establish it? If
we let one who disagrees with both of us establish the truth, then he already disagrees
with both of us, so how could he establish it? If we let one who agrees with both of us
establish the truth, then he already agrees with both of us, so how could he establish it?
Thus you and I and other people cannot know the truth, and how can we wait for the
other one?
According to this theory of knowledge, truth cannot be proved, although it may be
grasped by the mind in a "dialectic without words" (Chuangtse). One "knows it is so
without knowing why it is so." "Tiz0, or truth, is that which we know not the manner
of," It can therefore be felt only by a sort of intuitive perception. The Chinese, without
all consciously accepting this Chuangtsean epistemology, essentially agree with it.
Instead of relying on logic, which is never developed as a science, they rely on the
perhaps healthier common sense. Anything like cogent reasoning is unknown in
Chinese literature, for the Chinese inherently disbelieve in it. Consequently no
dialectic has been evolved, and the scientific treatise as a literary form is unknown.
Bernhard Karlgren recently wrote a paper showing the fallacies of many arguments
used by Chinese "higher critics" in proving the genuineness or spuriousness of ancient
works. Some of the mistakes really seem childish, but they only seem so after the
application of the Western method. A Chinese never writes a treatise of ten thousand,
or even five thousand, words to establish a point. He puts down only a note about it,
leaving it to be sustained or disproved by posterity on its intrinsic merit. That is why
Chinese scholars always bequeath to us so many collections of "notebooks," called
shuipi orpichi, consisting of unclassified paragraphs, in which opinions on the
authorship of literary works and corrections of errors in historical records are mixed up with accounts of Siamese twins, fox spirits and sketches of a red-bearded hero or a
centipede-eating recluse.
A Chinese author presents you with one or two arguments and then states his
conclusions: in reading him, you seldoir see him arriving at the conclusion, for the
arguments anc evidences are never long, but you see in a flash that he already has it.
The best of such notebooks, like the Jih-chih- lu of Ki Yenwu (beginning of the
seventeenth century), establish thei] reputation, not by their logic but by the essential
correctnesi of their statements, which can only be proved or disproved b^ posterity.
The writing of two or three lines in Ku's Notebooi was sometimes the result of years
of research and investigation enouerh. and the determination of a singL point of
historic fact might have involved repeated trips and an encyclopaedic erudition, but
his errors are difficult to check and the fact that he is correct is not immediately
visible, and can only be appreciated because no writer in the three centuries after him
has been able to establish a point against him.
Thus we see an opposition of "logic" versus common sense, which takes the place of
inductive and deductive reasoning in China. Common sense is often saner because the
analytic reasoning looks at truth by cutting it up into various aspects, thus throwing
them out of their natural bearings, while common sense seizes the situation as a living
whole. Women have a more robust common sense than men, and in times of any
emergency, I always depend on the judgment of a woman rather than that of a man.
They have a way of sizing up a situation in its totality without being distracted by its
individual aspects. In the best Chinese novels, like the Red Chamber Dream and the
Tehsao Paoyen (An Uncouth Old Man's Chats), the women are pictured as the
soundest judges of situa'tions, and their speech has a way of putting it as a rounded
whole which is extremely fascinating. Logic without such common sense is dangerous,
because when a man holds an opinion it is easy enough for him, with his academic
brain, to evolve arguments "a," "b" and "c" to his own satisfaction, and yet he may be
like the scholar, Mr. Casaubon, in Middlemarch who fails to perceive what every man
could perceive in the life of his own wife.
This religion of common sense has a philosophic basis. It is interesting to note that the
Chinese do not judge the correctness of a proposition by the appeal to reason alone,
but by the double appeal to reason and to human nature. The Chinese wo rd for
"reasonableness" is cKingli> which is composed of two elements, cKing (jencKing)^
or human nature, and li (fienli), or eternal reason. CKing represents the flexible,
human element, while li represents the immutable law of the universe. Out of the
combination of these two factors comes the standard of judgment for a course of
action or an historical thesis.
Something of this distinction may be seen in the English contrast between "reason"
and "reasonableness." It was Aristotle, I believe, who said that man is a reasoning, but
not a reasonable, being. Chinese philosophy admits this, but adds that man should try to be a reasonable, and not a merely reasoning, being. By the Chinese, reasonableness
is placed on a higher level than reason. For while reason is abstract, analytical,
idealistic and inclined toward logical extremes, the spirit of reasonableness is always
more realistic, more human, in closer touch with reality, and more truly understanding
and appreciative of the correct situation.
For a Westerner it is usually sufficient for a proposition to be logically sound. For a
Ch nese it is not sufficient that a proposition be logically correct, but it must be at the
same time in accord with human nature. In fact, to be "in accord with human
nature,35 to be chinch' ing, is a greater consideration than to be logical. For a theory
could be so logical as to be totally devoid of comf&oa sense. The Chinese are willing
to do anything against reason, but they will not accept anything that is not plausible in
the light of human nature. This spirit of reasonableness and this religion of common
sense have a most important bearing on the Chinese ideal of life, and result in the
Doctrine of the Golden Mean, which I shall discuss in the following chapter.
V. INTUITION
Nevertheless, this type of thinking has its limitations, too for the logic of common
sense can only be applied to humar affairs and actions; it cannot be applied to the
solution of th( riddles of the universe. One can use reasonableness to settle a d ispute
but not to locate the relative positions of the hean and liver or determine the function
of the pancreatic juice Hence in divining nature's mysteries and the secrets of th<
human body, the Chinese have to resort largely to intuition Strangely enough, they
have intuitively felt the heart to b< on the right and the liver to be on the left side of
the humai chest. An erudite Chinese scholar, whose voluminous Note books1 are
widely read, came across a copy of Human Anatomy translated by the Jesuits Jacob us
Rho, James Terrence, anc ^icolaus Longobardi, and finding that in the book the heart
s placed on the left and the liver on the right, decided that /Vesterners have different
internal organs from the Chinese, ind deduced therefrom the important conclusio n that
since heir internal organs are different, therefore their religion nust be also different梩
his deduction is in itself a perfect sxample of intuitive reasoning梐 nd hence only
Chinese whose nternal organs are imperfect could possibly become Christian ;o nverts.
The erudite scholar slyly remarked that if the Jesuits >nly knew this fact they would
not be interested in preaching Christianity in China and in making converts of
half-normal Deings.
Such assertions are made in perfect seriousness and in fact are typical of Chinese
"intuition" in the realms of natural science and human physiology. One begins to
believe that there is something after all in the scientific method, for with this method,
though one might be seriously concerned in the findings that the "primary function of
sugar [in the manufacture of ice-cream] is to sweeten it,53 yet one could be saved
from the other sort of puerile thinking represented by the author of the above Notebooks. He could at least have felt the palpitation of his heart by his own hand, but
evidently the Chinese scholar never descended to manual labour.
Free thus from stupid drudgery in the use of his eyes and his hands, and having a
naive faith in the power of his "intuition," the Chinese scholar goes about explaining
the mysteries of the human body and the universe to his own satisfaction. The whole
science of Chinese medicine and physiology is based on the Taoistic philosophy of the
Five Elements?Gold, Wood, Water, Fire and Earth. The human body is in itself a
symbol of the universe in its composition. The kidneys represent the water element,
