中国人的精神2.3
方疏桐
Now it is because the Chinese live a life of the heart, the life of a child, that they are so primitive in many of their ways. Indeed, it is a remarkable fact that for a people who have lived so long in the world as a great nation, the Chinese people should to this day be so primitive in many of their ways. It is this fact which has made superficial foreign students of China think that the Chinese have made no progress in their civilisation and that the Chinese civilisation is a stagnant one. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that, as far as pure intellectual life goes, the Chinese are, to a certain extent, a people of arrested development. The Chinese, as you all know, have made little or no progress not only in the physical, but also in the pure abstract sciences such as mathematics, logic and metaphysics. Indeed the very words “science” and “logic” in the European languages have no exact equivalent in the Chinese language. The Chinese, like children who live a life of the heart, have no taste for the abstract sciences, because in these the heart and feelings are not engaged. In fact, for everything which does not engage the heart and feelings, such as tables of statistics, the Chinese have a dislike amounting to aversion.
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