greater part of the China of that time was already in the hands of
Ch'in, and in 256 B.C. the last emperor of the Chou dynasty was
compelled, in his complete impotence, to abdicate in favour of the ruler
of Ch'in.
Apart from these more or less political speculations, there came into
existence in this period, by no mere chance, a school of thought which
never succeeded in fully developing in China, concerned with natural
science and comparable with the Greek natural philosophy. We have
already several times pointed to parallels between Chinese and Indian
thoughts. Such similarities may be the result of mere coincidence. But
recent findings in Central Asia indicate that direct connections between
India, Persia, and China may have started at a time much earlier than we
had formerly thought. Sogdian merchants who later played a great role in
commercial contacts might have been active already from 350 or 400 B.C.
on and might have been the transmitters of new ideas. The most important
philosopher of this school was Tsou Yen (flourished between 320 and 295
B.C.); he, as so many other Chinese philosophers of this time, was a
native of Shantung, and the ports of the Shantung coast may well have
been ports of entrance of new ideas from Western Asia as were the roads
through the Turkestan basin into Western China. Tsou Yen's basic ideas
had their root in earlier Chinese speculations: the doctrine that all
that exists is to be explained by the positive, creative, or the
negative, passive action (Yang and Yin) of the five elements, wood,
fire, earth, metal, and water (Wu hsing). But Tsou Yen also considered
the form of the world, and was the first to put forward the theory that
the world consists not of a single continent with China in the middle of
it, but of nine continents. The names of these continents sound like
Indian names, and his idea of a central world-mountain may well have
come from India. The "scholars" of his time were quite unable to
appreciate this beginning of science, which actually led to the
contention of this school, in the first century B.C., that the earth was
of spherical shape. Tsou Yen himself was ridiculed as a dreamer; but
very soon, when the idea of the reciprocal destruction of the elements
was applied, perhaps by Tsou Yen himself, to politics, namely when, in
connection with the astronomical calculations much cultivated by this
school and through the identification of dynasties with the five
elements, the attempt was made to explain and to calculate the duration
and the supersession of dynasties, strong pressure began to be brought
to bear against this school. For hundreds of years its books were
distributed and read only in secret, and many of its members were
executed as revolutionaries. Thus, this school, instead of becoming the
nucleus of a school of natural science, was driven underground. The
secret societies which started to arise clearly from the first century
B.C. on, but which may have been in existence earlier, adopted the
politico-scientific ideas of Tsou Yen's school. Such secret societies
have existed in China down to the present time. They all contained a
strong religious, but heterodox element which can often be traced back
to influences from a foreign religion. In times of peace they were
centres of a true, emotional religiosity. In times of stress, a
"messianic" element tended to become prominent: the world is bad and
degenerating; morality and a just social order have decayed, but the
coming of a savior is close; the saviour will bring a new, fair order
and destroy those who are wicked. Tsou Yen's philosophy seemed to allow
them to calculate when this new order would start; later secret
societies contained ideas from Iranian Mazdaism, Manichaeism and
Buddhism, mixed with traits from the popular religions and often couched
in terms taken from the Taoists. The members of such societies were,
typically, ordinary farmers who here found an emotional outlet for their
frustrations in daily life. In times of stress, members of the leading
_elite_ often but not always established contacts with these societies,
took over their leadership and led them to open rebellion. The fate of
Tsou Yen's school did not mean that the Chinese did not develop in the
field of sciences. At about Tsou Yen's lifetime, the first mathematical
handbook was written. From these books it is obvious that the interest