cal sequence is resumed in China. In the period 1030–1200, Neo-Confucianism
is created out of a revival of Han dynasty cosmologies infused with Taoist
divination schemes. The discussion picks up again at a more abstract level,
formulating the overarching cosmic-metaphysical concepts of the world sub-
stance ch’i and the logos/principle li. After a detour, during which Confucian
philosophy is largely static and cut off from the much more abstract terrain
of medieval Buddhism, Chinese metaphysics reemerges at approximately the
point reached by the Greek Stoics.
occultism and natural science: two side-channels
Comparing China with the rest of the world shows that the several versions
of the abstraction-reflexivity sequence are indeed analytically distinct, and can
be combined in different orders in time. How far each world intellectual
network progresses in the sequence is variable. So are the starting times and
the length of the periods of arrested movement. In all three indigenous cases,
India, Greece, and China, the cosmological sequence branches after it reaches
the level where metaphysical abstraction is first reached. One branch continues
further into ontological questions, blending with the metaphysical abstraction
reached by the sequence of epistemological discussion; this happens most
notably in India, as well as in Greece and its textual continuations in Islam
and Christendom. A second branch turns aside to systematic speculation and
empirical investigations of the natural world, which eventually become science.
This branch was very active in China, as well as in Greece and its Western off-
shoots, formulating the specialized cosmologies of astronomy, medical physi-
ology, chemistry, and so forth. A third branch, a blend between concrete
empiricism and conceptual abstraction treated in a reified mode, leads into
occultism, a system of portents and correspondences combining the natural
and the symbolic, the human moral-political-psychological realm with a cos-
mology of concrete nature.
The cosmology sequence may run straight through to high levels of philo-
sophical abstraction. The other two branches pose the likelihood of arresting
or reversing the level of abstraction and reflexivity. The occultist path does so
by holding to a lower-middle range of reified abstraction; occult forces, por-
tents, and significances make sense precisely because they come from a level
of conceptual abstraction that could only have been reached by the accumu-
lation of intellectual sophistication across the generations. At the same time,
its adherents link it to practices which appeal to lay audiences and concerns,
sometimes for political faction fighting or state legitimation, sometimes in the
retail sale of popular magic. In either case, the autonomy of the internal
intellectual discussion space is lost; the abstraction-reflexivity sequence is pre-
vented from moving further.
Sequence and Branch in the Social Production of Ideas^ •^805