Sun Yat-sen's own exposition of the reasons for his desiring to limit the rôle played by Western science in China is quite clear.[97] In the first place, Sun Yat-sen was vigorously in favor of adopting the experimental method in attaining knowledge. He stood firmly for the pragmatic foundation of knowledge, and for the exercise of the greatest care and most strenuous effort in discovering it. Secondly, he believed in taking over the physical knowledge of the Westerners, although—in his emphasis on Chinese talent—he by no means believed that Western physical knowledge would displace that of the Chinese altogether. “We can safely imitate the material civilization of Europe and of America; we may follow it blindly, and if we introduce it in China, it will make good headway.”[98] Thirdly, he believed that the social science of the West, and especially its political philosophy, might lead the Chinese into gross error, since it was derived from a quite different ideology, and not relevant to Chinese conditions. “It would be a gross error on our part, if, disregarding our own Chinese customs and human sentiments, we were to try to force upon (our people) a foreign type of social government just as we copy a foreign make of [pg 081] machinery.”[99] Fourthly, even apart from the difference between China and the West which invalidated Western social science in China, he did not believe that the West had attained to anything like the same certainty in social science that it had in physical science.[100] Fifthly, Sun Yat-sen believed that the Chinese should profit by observing the experiments and theories of the West in regard to social organization, without necessarily following them.
The great break between Sun Yat-sen's acceptance of Western physical science and his rejection of Western social science is demonstrated by his belief that government is psychological in its foundations. “Laws of human government also constitute an abstract piece of machinery—for that reason we speak of the machinery of an organized government—but a material piece of machinery is based on nature, whereas the immaterial machinery of government is based on psychology.”[101] Sun Yat-sen pointed out, although in different words, that government was based upon the ideology and that the ideology of a society was an element in the last analysis psychological, however much it might be conditioned by the material environment.
Of these three elements—Chinese morality, Chinese social and political knowledge, and Western physical science—the new ideology for the modern Chinese society [pg 082] was to be formed. What the immediate and the ultimate forms of that society were to be, remains to be studied.
The Consequences of the Nationalist Ideology.
What are the consequences of this Nationalistic ideology? What sort of society did Sun Yat-sen envision? How much of it was to be Chinese, and how much Western? Were the Chinese, like some modern Japanese, to take pride in being simultaneously the most Eastern of Eastern nations and the most Western of Western or were they to seek to remain fundamentally what their ancestors had been for uncounted centuries?
In the first place, Sun Yat-sen's proposed ideology was, as we have seen, to be composed of four elements. First, the essential core of the old ideology, to which the three necessary revivifying elements were to be added. This vast unmentioned foundation is highly significant to the assessment of the nature of the new Chinese ideology. (It is quite apparent that Sun Yat-sen never dreamed, as did the Russians, of overthrowing the entire traditional order of things. His three modifications were to be added to the existing Chinese civilization.) Second, he wished to revive the old morality. Third, he desired to restore the ancient knowledge and skill of the Chinese to their full creative energy. Fourth, he desired to add Western science. The full significance of this must be realized in a consideration of Chinese nationalism. Sun Yat-sen did not, like the Meiji Emperor, desire to add the whole front of Western culture; he was even further from emulating the Russians in a destruction of the existing order and the development of an entirely new system. His energies were directed to the purification and reconstitution of the Chinese ideology by the strengthening of its own latent moral and intellectual values, and by the innovation of Western [pg 083] physical science and the experimental method. Of the range of the ideology, of the indescribably complex intellectual conditionings in which the many activities of the Chinese in their own civilization were carried on, Sun Yat-sen proposed to modify only those which could be improved by a reaction to the excellencies of Chinese antiquity, or benefited by the influence of Western science. Sun Yat-sen was, as Wilhelm states, both a revolutionary and a reconstitutionary. He was reconstitutionary in the ideology which he proposed, and a revolutionary by virtue of the political methods which he was willing to sanction and employ in carrying the ideology into the minds of the Chinese populace.
In the second place, Sun Yat-sen proposed to modify the old ideology not only with respect to content but also with regard to method of development. The Confucians had, as we have seen, provided for the continual modification and rectification of the ideology by means of the doctrine of chêng ming. It is a matter of dispute as to what degree that doctrine constituted a scientific method for propagating knowledge.[102] Whatever the method of the ancients, Sun Yat-sen proposed to modify it in three steps: the acknowledgment of the pragmatic foundations of social ideas, the recognition of the necessity for knowledge before action, and the introduction of the experimental method. His pragmatic position shows no particular indication of having been derived from any specific source; it was a common enough tendency in old Chinese thought, from the beginning; in advocating it, Sun Yat-sen may have been revolutionary only in his championing of an idea which he may well have had since early childhood. His stress upon the necessity of ideological clarity as antecedent [pg 084] to revolutionary or any other kind of action is negatively derived from Wang Yang-ming, whose statement of the converse Sun Yat-sen was wont to attack. The belief in the experimental method is clearly enough the result of his Western scientific training—possibly in so direct a fashion as the personal influence of one of his instructors, Dr. James Cantlie, later Sir James Cantlie, of Queen's College, Hongkong. Sun Yat-sen was a physician; his degree Dr. was a medical and not an academic one; and there is no reason to overlook the influence of his vocation, a Western one, in estimating the influence of the Western experimental method.[103]
The overwhelming preponderance of Chinese elements in the new ideology proposed by Sun Yat-sen must not hide the fact that, in so stable an ideology as that of old China, the modifications which Sun advocated were highly significant. In method, experimentalism;[104] in background, the whole present body of Western science—these were to move China deeply, albeit a China that remained [pg 085] Chinese. There is a fundamental difference between Sun's doctrine of ideological extension (“the need for knowledge”) and Confucius' doctrine of ideological rectification (chêng ming). Confucius advocated the establishment of a powerful ideology for the purpose of extending ideological control and thereby of minimizing the then pernicious effects of the politically active proto-nations of his time. Sun Yat-sen, reared in a world subject to ideological control, saw no real necessity for strengthening it; what he desired was to prepare China psychologically for the development of a clear-cut conscious nation and a powerful government as the political instrument of that nation. In spite of the great Chinese emphasis which Sun pronounced in his ideology, and in spite of his many close associations with old Chinese thought, his governmental principles are in a sense diametrically opposed to Confucianism. Confucius sought to establish a totalitarian system of traditional controls which would perpetuate society and civilization regardless of the misadventures or inadequacies of government. Sun Yat-sen was seeking to build a strong liberal protective state within the framework of an immemorial society which was largely non-political; his doctrine, which we may call totalitarianism in reverse, tended to encourage intellectual freedom rather than any rigid ideological coördination. The mere fact that Sun Yat-sen trusted the old Chinese ideology to the ordeal of free criticism is, of course, further testimony to his belief in the fundamental soundness of the old intellectual order—an order which needed revision and supplementation to guide modern China through the perils of its destiny.
Before passing to a brief consideration of the nature of the society to be developed through this nationalist ideology, it may be interesting to note the value-scheme in the ideology. There was but one value—the survival of the Chinese people with their own civilization. All [pg 086] other considerations were secondary; all other reforms were means and not ends. Nationalism, democracy, and min shêng were each indispensable, but none was superior to the supreme desideratum, Chinese survival. That this survival was a vivid problem to Sun, almost any of his lectures will testify. Tai Chi-tao, one of the inner circle of Sun Yat-sen's disciples, summarized the spirit of this nationalism when he wrote; “We are Chinese, and those things that we have to change first lie in China. But if all things in China have become worthless, if Chinese culture no longer has any significance in the cultural history of the world, if the Chinese people has lost its power of holding its culture high, we might as well wait for death with bound hands—what would be the use of going on with revolution?”[105] Sun Yat-sen made concessions to cosmopolitanism, which he saw as ideal to be realized in the remote future. First and last, however, he was concerned with his own people, the Chinese.