Abstract

This book deals with the impact of science on Chinese intellectual life and the contribution of its bastard daughter, scientism, to the change in official ideology from individualistic Confucianism to collectivist Marxism. "Scientism" might be defined, in shorthand, as a positivistic, mechanistic, utopian materialism derived by illicit generalization from the method and assumptions of science. Kwok traces the history of this dogma, outlining the career and thought of leading proponents: Wu Chih-hui, "philosophical materialist"; Ch'en Tu-hsiu, "dialectical materialist"; and Hu Shih, "empiricist." He also discusses a geologist, a mathematician, and a psychologist-empiricists who advocated science as the basis for morality and a life of true spirituality. Extensive quotation exhibits the character of the debates, which was aphoristic and often polemical. The empiricists who understood science, were pragmatic and moderate, and made science respectable. In time they lost ground on the right to the Nationalists, who rejected scientism, and on the left to the materialists, who tended to be political journalists and to understand neither science nor the philosophical issues. The materialists became increasingly dialectical and wrote endlessly on the stages into which a science of society might analyze Chinese history. The Communist theoreticians were their heirs and the revolution was the triumph of a developed scientism. Since Kwok has written a chronicle, and since the disputants applied labels and stated conclusions rather than developing arguments, the book is of little interest philosophically. It has value as an account of the influence of the West on Chinese thought and as a manifestation of the limits of that influence.--J. B. L.