SCIENCE AMONG TEE CHINESE 31 



no taste for as a people. No such instrument as modern mathematical 

 analysis, or even their stock of algebraic notions, has ever been used by 

 Chinese philosophers or even conceived of as an instrument of research 

 in their attempts to solve nature's riddles. 



Besides the failure to adopt an inductive method of inquiry, the 

 spirit of inaccuracy, and the lack of mathematical genius or training, 

 there are other potent causes of China's scientific backwardness as com- 

 pared with European nations, chief among which has been the character 

 of the language and the method of instruction. 



4. The Language. — Meager as our knowledge of the language is, we 

 have yet had sufficient direct and indirect contact with the people to be 

 convinced that the lack of inflection which would enable number, 

 tense, gender and mood to be briefly expressed, operates to produce 

 ambiguity and hence inaccuracy in the very places where definiteness 

 may be most needed. To be precise requires a clumsy use of words and 

 thus the character of the language has inhibited precise statements 

 and so precluded accurate thinking, without which there can be no 

 proper science. On the other hand, the European tongues existed in a 

 highly inflected state as derived from the more ancient Greek and Latin, 

 and hence by their very character aided in the conquest of nature by 

 affording clearness and precision in the expression of thought, and thus 

 fostered the validity of the conclusions reached. But the Chinese mind 

 has been hampered by a language the most tedious and inflexible, and 

 has been wearied with a literature abounding in unsatisfactory 

 theorizings. 



The non-alphabetical character of the language prevents the assimi- 

 lation of new terms from European tongues and makes the introduction 

 of modern scientific terminology and thought extremely difiicult. To 

 attempt to translate even where possible means cumbersomeness and 

 circumlocution ; to try to represent the new term phonetically by using 

 Chinese characters that sound nearly the same — means that additional 

 characters must be added to signify that phonetic value alone is in- 

 tended, otherwise the apparent " meaning will be meaningless " and 

 even if this sign is added, there is no hint of the real meaning of the 

 term thus represented. In many cases the best that can be done is but 

 a rough approximation, since there are many sounds in European 

 tongues entirely unknown to the Chinese and difiicult for them to 

 acquire. About the only safe method in many cases is to introduce the 

 foreign word as such in its own alphabetical form in the midst of the 

 Chinese context — and thus necessitate the learning of it as a new 

 " character " written on an entirely strange system. 



5. The System of Education.^ — (a) The spirit of inquiry has been 



^ See "The Content of Chinese Education," The Popular Science 

 Monthly, January, 1906, and "The Passing of China's Ancient System of 

 Literary Examinations," The Popular Science Monthly, February, 1906. 



