Science and Society in Ancient China

Abstract

IN his Conway Memorial Lecture, "Science and Society in Ancient China", delivered on May 12, 1947, Dr. Joseph Needham attempts to sketch a pattern of the organisation of Chinese feudal society and its relation to Western European society (London : Watts and Co., Ltd. 2s. net). While the Taoist hermits who withdrew from human society to contemplate Nature had no scientific method, they tried to understand Nature in an intuitive and observational way, and the earliest chemistry and astronomy in Asia had Taoist connexions. In ancient China, although Taoist empirical mysticism favoured the development of science, Confucian ethical rationalism was antagonistic, and it could not be claimed that all through history rationalism had been the chief progressive force in society. While inventions and technological discoveries such as gunpowder, paper, printing, the magnetic compass and efficient animal harness, which changed the course of civilization, were made in China, modern science and technology did not develop them. Dr. Needham points out that the status of military technology may deeply affect the crystallization of social philosophy, and that a moral question such as slavery may be closely connected with technical factors. Philosophical and ethical thought, he believes, can never be dissociated from their material basis, and he thinks that Chinese civilization was basically inhibited from giving rise to modern science and technology, because the society which grew up in China after the feudal period was unsuitable for these developments. Dr. Needham concludes by commending a closer study of the great classics of Chinese philosophy and of the parallel course of technology in China.