BOOK REVIEW:EASTERN AND WESTERN CULTURE AND THEIR PHILOSOPHIES（LIANG SHUMING.SHANGHAI.1922.）
Those who are familiar with contemporary China know that there recently has happened something known as the“New Culture Move-ment.”To those who fear nothing but change and those who, as Ber-trand Russell said, take“moralization for philosophy, ”this movement is thought to mean the complete destruction of the ancient Chinese culture, and therefore is too radical. But, in fact, it means an evolution rather than a revolution of the Chinese culture. The“new”culture movement may be, after all, simply the self-consciousness and self-examination of the old. Mr. Liang's book is the first conscious and serious attempt to grasp the central idea and to show the excel-lences and the defects of the old Chinese culture in comparison with the European and the Indian.
William James said that every great philosopher has his own vision, and that if one gets that, one can easily understand his system.This is Mr. Liang's method in treating the different types of the world culture. To Mr. Liang the fountain of life is the ever struggling and never ceasing Will. All peoples have this Will but every people has its own direction to lead it to. There are three possible directions:
1. To struggle to get what we want; to try to change the environ-ment in order to satisfy our desires.
2. Not positively to solve the different problems of life, but to find satisfaction in the given situation; not to realize but to harmonize our desires.
3. Not to solve the problems, nor to leave them unsolved, but to try to get rid of the desires that cause them.
Proceeding along these three different directions and using these different methods, the European, the Chinese, and the Indian peoples work out independently their respective cultures, which, according to Mr. Liang, are but moods of life. Thus the fundamental spirit of the European culture is the realization of desires; that of the Chinese is the harmonization of desires; that of the Indian is the negation of de-sires（pp.62-72）.
Since the European mood of life is to struggle forward, the Euro-pean culture is characterized by ability in controlling nature, the sci-entific method, and democracy in the sense that each and every indi-vidual claims his own right to oppose authority. These are its excel-lences. With them side by side come its defects. There is too much intellect, calculation, and self-assertion along with selfishness. The individual stands in the centre of the universe and treats everything outside of him as either material or rivals. Means is for the end; pres-ent for the future. There is too much to do, but too little to enjoy（p. 232）.
The Chinese mood of life, of which Mr. Liang chose Confucianism as the representative, is just the opposite. Its fundamental idea is to repudiate calculation and intellect. It teaches not doing for something, but“doing for nothing.”Following natural feeling, or what Mr. Liang called intuition, a mother loves her baby, and a baby loves its mother. This love is not means for the future, but the end in and for itself（pp. 174-176）.
Confucius also said：“I have no course for which I am predeter-mined and no course against which I am predetermined.”This means that one must not make any foregone conclusion and not insist on one reasoning. If one holds one reasoning and does not admit change, one has to push to the extreme and thus miss the mean. For instance, if one adhere to the doctrine of universal love, like Jesus, one has to love one's enemies and, like Buddha, to refrain from kill-ing any animal. Furthermore, one must not destroy anything in this world; there is no reason to stop midway. But, according to Confu-cianism, since by nature one loves one's parents more and others' less, so ought one to. The degree of one's love of different people ought to be different, because towards others in one's intuition there is a different intensity of love. To Confucius, it is wrong to insist be-forehand on any objective, changeless doctrine, but right to follow one's natural feeling and let it go（pp.160-161）. These aspects of Con-fucianism are included in the conception of Jen（this Chinese word is often translated“benevolence”but is more than that）. Jen means the sensitiveness of the natural feeling or intuition and the pursuit of it without calculation of the consequence or reasoning about a general rule. Thus life is not dependent upon what is without, but upon itself. So there can be nei-ther gain nor loss. There is always joy, but never sorrow.
As the European people have too much calculation, the Indian have too much insistence. The Indian people want to get rid of the problems of life, because they want to seek a fundamental solution of them. They want to solve problems that are unsolvable. Life itself is a flux, but they worry about its uncertainty and change. They are too sensitive to the affairs of life, so they fall back to the complete nega-tion of it（p. 135）. So the Indian mood of life, of which Mr. Liang chooses Buddhism as representative, is to try to return to the state of pure sensation or pure experience. According to Mr. Liang, in pure experience there is no change and distinction. In pure experience ev-ery impression of a flying bird is a motionless image. It is our feeling that connects these successive images together and puts them in mo-tion. In pure experience there is no distinction between object and subject. It is our intellect that makes this sharp demarcation and an-tithesis. If we return to the state of pure experience, we shall have knowledge of nothing. There is real eternity, since there is no change. There is real One, since there is no distinction. This is Abso-lute. This is Wisdom（pp.108-112）.
These are the salient points of the three types of the world's culture as Mr. Liang sees them. Mr. Liang advises the Chinese people to accept completely European sciences and to resume critically the Confucianistic attitude towards life. He also sees that the European's life of calculation is near its end and that the Western people are bound to change their way and to follow Confucius. But that is not all. There must be a time when mankind will become very sensitive to the unsolvable problems of life such as death, old age and sickness; they will then begin to appreciate the Indian culture and to adopt it. In fact, the three cultures, according to Mr. Liang, represent the three successive stages of human development pp.259-263）. But since science, as Mr. Liang points out, is an organic part of the West-ern individualistic and utilitarian mood of life, how can it be com-bined organically with Mr. Liang's Confucianism? Science for science's sake; we may invent science for nothing; but it is through and through a product of pure intellect. A life of feeling and intuition is for art, not for science. I see quite clearly that Confucianism is possible for science, but not the Confucianism of Mr. Liang's inter-pretation. Mr. Liang's Confucianism presupposes too much the pre-existing harmony of man's feeling and the goodness of man's nature.
Mr. Liang considers Bertrand Russell's appeal to man's instinct of creation as an indication of the fact that the Western peoples are going to assume the attitude of“doing for nothing.”I may also say that Professor Hobhouse's“rational good”and Professor Dewey's“good of activity”are no less strong indications. Still I do not quite see why the Western peoples should adopt Confucianism completely and why future mankind should all be followers of Buddha. It seems that Mr. Liang, being always a student of Buddhism, has too strong a monistic preconception that leads him to suppose that the three exist-ing types of culture have exhausted all the possible ways of life and that mankind is bound to take or reject one or the other as they are.
Since Mr. Liang's book is dealing with so comprehensive a subject matter and his prediction of the fate of the cultures is so far in the fu-ture, it is unnatural to expect that every one should agree with him. It seems to me that his interpretations of Buddhism and Confucianism are of interest and value, no matter whether Buddhism and Confu-cianism are really as he says or not. I think nobody can read these two parts of his book without being impressed by his originality and conscientiousness. Mr. Liang certainly has his vision. This is enough for a philosophical work to justify its existence.
YU-LAN FUNG.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.
Reprinted from The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 19, No. 22, Oct. 26,1922