ficient level of generality. But it is hardly an aboriginal or eternal item of
Chinese culture. Its classic statement, the appendices to the Yi Ching added
during the Ch’in or early Han, was produced at the very end of ancient Chinese
philosophy. This remained a set of particularistic portents, and was raised only
ephemerally to the level of a general assertion of a universe of change, in the
short-lived movement of philosophers at the time of the Dark Learning. There-
after, once again the metaphysics was slighted until the classic texts became
materials for the Neo-Confucian networks.
From here quite different intellectual paths were possible. By abstracting
from their use as a magical practice, the Yi Ching hexagrams could be turned
into a proto-science. In this direction, the emphasis was no longer on the
reality of change but on the underlying elements which in combination gener-
ate the empirical world. It became something like a chemistry, equivalent to
the element theories of the Presocratic Greeks which led in the direction of
atomism. And indeed Sung Neo-Confucianism developed in connection with
an upsurge in physical science. When the hexagram sequences were asserted
as governing empirical events, they became the content of an empirical science,
but a scientific theory whose elements are fixed without the refinements of
observation and experiment. The Neo-Confucian thinkers were often better
scientists than this; Chu Hsi in particular includes a level of concrete investi-
gation which involves some accumulation of empirical information.
Yet a s philosophy this kind of proto-science is a bringdown from the path
of metaphysical creativity. To be sure, science and metaphysics are not mutually
exclusive; the Sung experience fits with abundant evidence from Greece, Islam,
and Europe that creativity can take place on both fronts in the same genera-
tions, and sometimes by the same individuals. Ch’eng I’s vision of the universe
as a vast furnace, continuously burning up matter/energy while creating it
anew, is more appealing as an abstract cosmology than as a scientific theory.
In Chu Hsi, the metaphysical payoff seems comparatively banal; the realm of
principle existing within things gives us a doctrine supportive of scientific
investigation, but not much of a exploration of constructive metaphysics.
The episodes of idealism with Lu Chiu-Yüan and Wang Yang-ming show
that there was more to be poured from that pot. But the creative networks
were broken off, leaving no sustained intellectual argument to carry philosophy
onward in its own right. With Sung Neo-Confucianism, Chinese philosophy
had traversed, in bursts interspersed with long periods of lay-oriented ideolo-
gies, a range of abstract philosophical development equivalent to that of the
Greeks from the early Presocratics up through approximately the generation
of Plato or a little later, the predominant Chinese position resembling Stoicism
without its technical logic. Why were there such long periods of stagnation,
even retrogression, on the plane of abstract philosophy? It was not simply a
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