They have produced one of the greatest and most remarkable accumulations of literature the world has ever seen, and the finest porcelain; some music, not very fine; and some magnificent painting, though hardly any sculpture, and little architecture that will live.

CHAPTER II

On Chinese Mythology

Mythology and Intellectual Progress

The Manichaest, yin-yang (dualist), idea of existence, to which further reference will be made in the next chapter, finds its illustration in the dual life, real and imaginary, of all the peoples of the earth.  They have both real histories and mythological histories.  In the preceding chapter I have dealt briefly with the first—­the life of reality—­in China from the earliest times to the present day; the succeeding chapters are concerned with the second—­the life of imagination.  A survey of the first was necessary for a complete understanding of the second.  The two react upon each other, affecting the national character and through it the history of the world.

Mythology is the science of the unscientific man’s explanation of what we call the Otherworld—­itself and its denizens, their mysterious habits and surprising actions both there and here, usually including the creation of this world also.  By the Otherworld he does not necessarily mean anything distant or even invisible, though the things he explains would mostly be included by us under those terms.  In some countries myths are abundant, in others scarce.  Why should this be?  Why should some peoples tell many and marvellous tales about their gods and others say little about them, though they may say a great deal to them?  We recall the ‘great’ myths of Greece and Scandinavia.  Other races are ‘poor’ in myths.  The difference is to be explained by the mental characters of the peoples as moulded by their surroundings and hereditary tendencies.  The problem is of course a psychological one, for it is, as already noted, in imagination that myths have their root.  Now imagination grows with each stage of intellectual progress, for intellectual progress implies increasing representativeness of thought.  In the lower stages of human development imagination is feeble and unproductive; in the highest stages it is strong and constructive.

The Chinese Intellect

The Chinese are not unimaginative, but their minds did not go on to the construction of any myths which should be world-great and immortal; and one reason why they did not construct such myths was that their intellectual progress was arrested at a comparatively early stage.  It was arrested because there was not that contact and competition with other peoples which demands brain-work of an active kind as the alternative of subjugation, inferiority, or extinction, and because, as we have already seen, the knowledge