Chinese thought and institutions
- Chicago The University of Chicago Press 1957
- 438p.
SINCE 1951 the two editors of this series of publications have made use of grants of money from the Ford Foundation to extend and improve studies of cultures, and especially of the great civilizations, that they might become more truly comparable with one another. The undertaking has taken several directions: the encouragement of research with methods likely to be applicable cross-culturally; the criticism and testing of such methods already proposed or in use; and the provision of assistance to groups of specialists who might be advancing studies of one civilization in ways leading to a less compartmentalized and more nearly integrated description of that civilization and to dependable comparisons with others.
Such a group of specialists happily appeared to us in the Commit tee on Chinese Thought (as it is now known) of the Far Eastern As sociation. Here was a body of specialists, self-organized and vigorous, whose work led along just the paths conducive to the ends of our more general and inclusive project. These specialists in Chinese civili zation were a continuing group with similar interests and assumptions, disposed to exchange ideas and results and to do so at length and more than once. They would continue in effective intellectual co-operation. Next, they had a conception of their inter a conception of their subject matter that was favorable to the general ends in view: they were concerned, not with Chinese philosophy as a segregate body of propositions ex pressed by Chinese thinkers, but with "Chinese thought the "relations between political and biographical events and the development of ideas."