Introduction (Part II)

But all these things being agreed, a formidable question then presents itself. If the Chinese were so advanced in antiquity and the Middle Ages, how was it that the Scientific Revolution, the coming of modern science into the world, happened only in Europe? This is what we call the "sixty-four thousand dollar question", and it may be remembered that it was precisely this problem which presented itself to me so forcefully when I first met the Chinese scientists who came to Cambridge in 1937. The fact is that in the seventeenth century we have to face a package deal; the Scientific Revolution was accompanied both by the Protestant Reformation and by the rise of capitalism, the ascendancy of the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie. Distinctively modern science, which then developed, was a mathematization of hypotheses about nature, combined with relentless experimentation. The sciences of all the ancient and medieval worlds had had an indelibly stamp, but now nature was addressed for the first time in a universal and international language, the precise and quantitative idiom of mathematics, a tongue which every man and woman, irrespective of color, creed or race, can use and master if given the proper training. And to the technique of experiment the same applies. It was like the merchant's universal standard of value. How one looks at the primary causative factor in all this depends on one's own background; if one is a theologian one probably thinks that the liberation of the Reformation was responsible, if one is an old-fashioned scientist, one naturally thinks that the scientific movement occurred first and powered all the others, and if one is a Marxist, one certainly thinks that the economic and social changes bear the main responsibility.

One factor which must have great relevance here is the undeniable circumstance that the feudalism of Europe and China were fundamentally different. Europe feudalism was military-aristocratic: the peasantry were governed by the knights in their manors, and they in turn were subject to the barons in their castles, while the king in his palace ruled over all. In time of war he needed the help of the lower ranks in the feudal hierarchy who were bound to rally to him with stated numbers of men-at-arms. How different was the feudalism of China, long very justifiably described as bureaucratic. From the time of the first emperor, Ch'in Shih Huang Ti, onwards (third century BC), the old hereditary feudal houses were gradually attacked and destroyed, while the king or emperor (as he soon became) governed by the aid of an enormous bureaucracy, a civil service unimaginable in extent and degree of organization to the petty kingdoms of Europe. Modern research is showing that the bureaucratic organization of China in its earlier stages strongly helped science to grow; only in its later ones did it forcibly inhibit further growth, and in particular prevented a breakthrough which has occurred in Europe. For example, no other country in the world at the beginning of the eighth century AD could have set up a meridian arc survey stretching from south to north some 2500 miles. Nor could it have mounted an expedition at that time to go and observe the stars of the southern hemisphere to within 20 ° of the south celestial pole. Nor indeed would it have wanted to.

It may well be that a similar pattern will appear in the future when the history of science, technology and medicine, for all the great classical literary cultures, such as India or Sri Lanka, comes to be written and gathered in. Europe has entered into their inheritance, producing an ecumenical universal science and technology valid for every man and woman on the face of the earth. One can only hope that the shortcomings of the distinctively European traditions in other matters will not debauch the non-European civilizations. For example, the sciences of China and of Islam never dreamed of divorcing science from ethics, but when at the Scientific Revolution the final cause of Aristotle was done away with, and ethics chased out of science, things became very different, and more menacing. This was good in so far as it clarified and discriminated between the great forms of human experience, but very bad and dangerous when it opened the way for evil men to use the great discoveries of modern science and activities disastrous for humanity. Science needs to be lived alongside religion, philosophy, history and esthetic experience; alone it can lead to great harm. All we can do today is to hope and pray that the unbelievably dangerous powers of atomic weapons, which have been put into the hands of human beings by the development of modern science, will remain under control by responsible men, and that maniacs will not release upon mankind powers that could extinguish not only mankind, but all life on earth.