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Poverties and Triumphs of the Chinese Scientific Tradition
- Indiana University Press
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POVERTIES AND TRIUMPHS OF THE CHINESE SCIENTIFIC TRADITION Joseph Needham The historical civilization of China is, with the Indian and the European-Semitic, one of the three greatest in the world, yet only in recent years has any enquiry been begun into its contributions to science and technology. Apart from the great ideas and systems of the Greeks, between the first and the fifteenth centuries the Chinese, who experienced no "dark ages," were generally much in advance of Europe; and not until the scientific revolution of the late Renaissance did Europe draw rapidly ahead. Before that time, however, the West had been profoundly affected not only in its technical processes but in its very social structures and changes by discoveries and inventions emanating from China and East Asia. Not only the three which Lord Bacon listed (printing, gunpowder and the magnetic compass) but a hundred others-mechanical clockwork, the casting of iron, stirrups and efficient horse-harness, the Cardan suspension and the Pascal triangle, segmental-arch bridges and pound-locks on canals, the stern-post rudder, foreand -aft sailing, quantitative cartography-all had their effects, sometimes earthshaking effects, upon a Europe more socially unstable. Why, then, did modern science, as opposed to ancient and medieval science (with all that modern science implied in terms of political dominance), develop only in the Western world? Nothing but a careful analysis, a veritable titration, of the cultures of East and West will eventually answer this question. Doubtless many factors of an intellectual and philosophical character played their part, but there were certainly also important social and economic causes which demand investigation. • • • In what follows an attempt will be made to describe some of the elements of strength and weakness in the growth and development of the indigenous Chinese tradition of science and invention, in contrast with that of Europe. • Both East and West had strengths and weaknesses now well discernible as we POVERTIES AND TRIUMPHS OF THE CHINESE / 31 look back along the course which man's knowledge of nature and control of nature took in the diverse regions of the Old World. • • First of all it is essential to define the differences between ancient and medieval science on the one hand, and modern science on the other. I make an important distinction between the two. When we say that modern science developed only in Western Europe at the time of Galileo in the late Renaissance, we mean surely that there and then alone there developed the fundamental bases of the structure of the natural sciences as we have them today, namely the application of mathematical hypotheses to Nature, the full understanding and use of the experimental method, the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, the geometrisation of space, and the acceptance of the mechanical model of reality . Hypotheses of primitive or medieval type distinguish themselves quite clearly from those of modern type. Their intrinsic and essential vagueness always made them incapable of proof or disproof, and they were prone to combine in fanciful systems of gnostic correlation. In so far as numerical figures entered into them, numbers were manipulated in forms of "numerology" or numbermysticism constructed a priori, not employed as the stuff of quantitative measurements compared a postiori. We know the primitive and medieval Western scientific theories, the four Aristotelian elements, the four Galenical humours, the doctrines of pneumatic physiology and pathology, the sympathies and antipathies of Alexandrian proto-chemistry, the tria prima of the alchemists, and the natural philosophies of the Kabbala. We tend to know less well the corresponding theories of other civilizations, for instance the Chinese theory of the two fundamental forces Yin and Yang, or that of the five elements, or the elaborate system of the symbolic correlations. In the West Leonardo da Vinci, with all his brilliant inventive genius, still inhabited this world; Galileo broke through its walls. This is why it has been said that Chinese science and technology remained until late times essentially Vincian, and that the Galilean break-through occurred only in the West. That is the first of our starting-points. Until it had been universalized by its fusion with mathematics, natural science could not be the common property of all mankind. The sciences of the medieval world were tied closely to the ethnic environments in which they had arisen, and it was very difficult, if not impossible, for the people of those different cultures to find any common basis of discourse. That did not mean that inventions of profound sociological importance...