Leaves from my Chinese Scrapbook/Chapter 15
CHAPTER XV.
THE SOPHISTS OF CHINA.
The philosophers of Greece and the philosophers of China are all more or less familiar even to those whose reading on such subjects is superficial. Everybody of ordinary education knows something, at any rate, of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; and most people, at all events in China, have a rough acquaintance with the names of Confucius, Mencius, and Lao-tzŭ. But while the great teachers who have founded schools of thought have now a world-wide fame, the empirics who opposed them in their day have fallen into something very much like oblivion. And yet the Sophists did good service. Superficial prattlers though they were, confessedly arguing for the mere love of argument, and playing with logic much as a clever conjurer plays with peas and thimbles, it cannot be denied that they encouraged the exercise of independent thought, and afforded considerable assistance in bringing the art of ratiocination to perfection. Their very sophisms afforded material for true philosophers to work upon, and the exposure of their clever fallacies was a favourite and by no means unproductive pastime even among those whose object was more to discover truth than to juggle successfully with words. A study of Plato's Dialogues is all that is necessary to prove the justice of this assertion, for it is to Sophists that we owe some of the finest exhibitions of dialectical skill that the Greek philosophers have bequeathed to us.
Now, just as there were Sophists during the golden age of philosophy in Greece, so were there Sophists, or "garrulous quibblers," as the Chinese call them, during the golden age of philosophy in China. And, as we shall prove, the two classes of men bore a very striking family resemblance to each other, even to the point of advancing almost the same theories and attempting to prove the same paradoxes. Most of our readers are no doubt familiar with the famous fallacies which the Greek Sophists loved to fabricate. "That is my dog. That dog is a father. Therefore, that dog is my father." "If, when you speak the truth, you say you lie, you lie; but you say you lie when you speak the truth; therefore in speaking the truth you lie." "Bread is better than nothing. Nothing is better than Elysium. Therefore bread is better than Elysium." Such were the word-quibbles in the production of which the sophistical quacks of Greece delighted about the time of Socrates; and when we turn to the corresponding period in China we find very much the same phenomenon existing here. There was one very famous Sophists named Hui Shih, who is attacked in a spirited and lively style by Chuang-tzŭ, himself regarded as a Sophist by the orthodox followers of Confucius. "The works of Hui Shih," says his critic, "are numerous and extensive; he has published a great collection of books. But his doctrines are unpractical and contradictory, and his words do not hit the mark; he says just what comes uppermost, without regard to accuracy, affirming that that which is unsurpassably great, and outside which there is nothing, is the Great Unit; and that that which is infinitesimally small, and inside which there is nothing, is the Atom. He says that the whole universe may be filled with matter even though there be no foundation for anything to rest upon; that heaven is no higher than the earth; that a mountain is as level as a pool; that sunset is the same as the meridian, in that one is the result of the other; that life comes from death, and death from life; that general resemblance is different from resemblance in details, and that this detailed resemblance should therefore be called a difference, while the final resemblances and differences in the universe only amount to saying that the differences are less than the resemblances." Hui Shih is said to have looked upon all this as a very fine performance, about which all his fellow-Sophists delighted to talk and argue. These men would undertake to prove a variety of absurdities—for instance, that there is no heat in fire; that the eye does not see; that a wheel does not triturate the ground; that when you have arrived at the farthest extreme there is nothing to prevent your going farther still; that there is hair upon an egg; that if the half of a stick a foot long be cut off every day, it will take ten thousand generations till there is nothing left. Chuang-tzŭ condemns all this as so much foolish, wordy babble, saying that the Sophists would argue with each other in a circle ceaselessly, puzzling people's minds to no purpose, and simply bent on showing off their own cleverness in disputation. His criticism on the arch-Sophist Hui Shih is dignified and to the point. "He talks away about everything without reflecting; the more he talks the farther he is from finishing. If he were to confine his attention to one thing only, it would be well enough; then he might be said, by his additional reverence for truth, to have almost attained to it. But the man is incapable of thus setting his mind at rest; he diffuses his mental powers abroad over everything without getting any satisfaction; he just acquires a reputation for controversial skill, and nothing more. Alas for the talents of Hui Shih! He employs them lavishly enough, yet reaps no advantage; he pries into everything, but never thinks of penetrating to the root of anything; he is like a body which runs after its own shadow in hopes to catch it up and stop it." It is difficult to realise that there used actually to be men in this stolid, conservative country, this stronghold of platitudinarian orthodoxy, to whom such a description was applicable. Yet here is the proof of it; and not only were their methods analogous to those of the Greek Sophists, but the theories they advanced were very similar too. The arguments of the Sophist Gorgias on the mysteries of existence remind one very curiously of the speculations which Chuang-tzŭ puts into the mouth of the God of the Northern Sea. The aim of Gorgias is to prove that nothing exists; that if anything does exist, it cannot be an object of knowledge; and that if even anything exists and can be known, it cannot be imparted to others. If anything is, says Gorgias, as quoted by Sextus Empiricus, it must be either being or non-being, or even at one and the same time both being and non-being. All these cases are impossible; for a non-being cannot be, because it is the opposite of being; and therefore, if the latter is, the former cannot be; because if it were, it must be at the same time being and non-being. Chuang-tzŭ's North-Sea God is similarly paradoxical and abstruse. "What is said to exist," he argues, "is so spoken of because it does exist; and, if so, there is nothing in the universe that does not exist. Similarly, what is said not to exist is so spoken of because it does not exist; and, if so, there is nothing in the universe which is not non-existent." This follows close upon the enunciation of a theory which is not without its bearing upon both speculative and practical mathematics. The argument is, briefly, as follows:—"Subtlety is the occult part of the minute. Be a thing subtle or gross, it seems to me that it must have a form. A formless or unsubstantial thing cannot be distinguished as gross or subtle, discriminate as minutely as you will. What can be spoken of is the gross or palpable part of an entity; what can be imagined only is its subtle part or essence; but I take it that what is neither gross nor subtle can neither be talked of nor imagined." Some time ago there died, at Peking, the greatest Chinese mathematician of the present century. His name was Li Shan-lan, and he was Professor of Mathematics at the T'ung Wen Kuan. But he differed from the mathematicians of Europe in this respect, that he denied the non-existence of a point. A point, said Professor Li, is an infinitesimally small cube; and in saying so he only reproduced the theories put into the mouth of the sophistical God of the Northern Sea, two thousand years ago, by Chuang-tzŭ.