Their fundamental mistake was not the belief that the State should be organised according to natural laws, but rather the conviction that these laws could be ascertained by the study of human tradition and history alone. (查看原文)
In so far, then, as natural law came to be overwhelmingly dominant in China, and positive law reduced to the minimum, one would expect that so different a balance might have had important effects on the development of the formulation of the regularities of Nature in the natural sciences. The weaker the role of the earthly ruler as lawgiver for man, the more difficulty there might have been in conceiving of a divine ruler as lawgiver for Nature. No lawgiver, no law. Or conversely, the stronger the role of (juristic) natural law, the greater facility there might have been in conceiving of the Laws of Nature as a kind of inescapable natural li in which the whole non-human world concurred. An order, though no ordainer. Such is the problem which will present itself to us at the conclusion of th... (查看原文)
(page 238)... we have the essence of the half-scientific, half-political doctrine with which the Naturalists were able to frighten the feudal lords. (查看原文)
(page 237) (3).... As circumstances change, so these things must change. Those who insist on adhering to particular arrangements and will not change with the times, will never attain perfection in the art of ruling. (查看原文)
(page 237)(4)....They asked Master Tsou(邹衍) about it(白马非马). But he refused to discuss it, saying: " To speak about the Five Conquerors and the Three Completions is the type of discussion proper to the mundane world. But distinguishing different kinds or species(categories) to prevent them hurting(i.e. overlapping with) each other, showing up so-called heretical ideas in order to prevent their getting confused with so-called true doctrine, expressing thoughts by means of "universals" and particulars, finding artful words with which to contradict others, making clever analogies to upset each other's ideas, and stimulating people to argue until they themselves no longer know what they should think - all these are harmful to the Great Tao. And this jousting with words cannot but bring harm to... (查看原文)
(page 288) "Numbers did not have the function of representing magnitudes, they served to adjust concrete dimensions to the proportions of the universe."
(page 292) Whitehead has termed algebra the mathematical study of pattern. Could it be, therefore, only a coincidence that (as we shall later see) while geometry was characteristic of Greek, algebra was characteristic of Chinese mathematics? From the Han onwards the whole effort of Chinese mathematicians could be summarised in one sentence; how to fit a particular problem into a certain pattern or model problem and solve it accordingly. (查看原文)
(page 295) Nature was organised after the pattern of man's body, water-courses corresponding to veins, air-passages to arteries, geological substances to various kinds of flesh, and earthquakes to convulsions. (查看原文)
(Page 290) "...he emphasized the concept of Order as at the basis of the Chinese world-picture. Social and world order rested, not on an ideal of authority, but on a conception of rotational responsibility. The Tao was the all-inclusive name for this order, an efficacious sum-total, a reactive neural medium; it was not a creator, for nothing is created in the world, and the world was not created. The sum of wisdom consisted in adding to the number of intuited analogical correspondences in the repertory of correlations. Chinese ideals involved neither God nor Law. The uncreated universal organism, whose every part, by a compulsion internal to itself and arising out of its own nature, willingly performed its functions in the cyclical recurrences of the whole, was mirrored in human society by... (查看原文)
(page 325) There is underlying these diagrams a recognition of the truth that things are groups of relations. The diagrams themselves are, to my mind, clearly ideal constructions, expressing real facts, and built up from the real elements of experience, though imperfect and fanciful. The diagrams are simply abstract types, substituting an ideal process for that actually observed in Nature. They are formulae in which the multifarious phenomena are stripped of their variety, and reduced to unity and harmony. Causation is here represented as imminent change, as the constant interaction of the bipolar power of Nature, which is never at rest, balanced or free, the mutually sustaining opposition of two forces which are essentially one energy , and in the activity of which diverence and direction... (查看原文)
