Feng Shui

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Ernest J. Eitel. Feng Shui

Feng Shui

Table of Contents

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY

CHAPTER II. THE LAWS OF NATURE

CHAPTER III. THE NUMERICAL PROPORTIONS OF NATURE

CHAPTER IV. THE BREATH OF NATURE

CHAPTER V. THE FORMS AND OUTLINES OF NATURE

CHAPTER VI. THE HISTORY AND LITERATURE OF FENG-SHUI

CHAPTER VII. CONCLUSION

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Ernest J. Eitel

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Natural science has never been cultivated in China in that technical, dry and matter-of-fact fashion, which seems to us inseparable from true science. Chinese naturalists did not take much pains in studying nature and ferreting out her hidden secrets by minute and practical tests and experiments. They invented no instruments to aid them in the observation of the heavenly bodies, they never took to hunting beetles and stuffing birds, they shrank from the idea of dissecting animal bodies, nor did they chemically analyse inorganic substances, but with very little actual knowledge of nature they evolved a whole system of natural science from their own inner consciousness and expounded it according to the dogmatic formulæ of ancient tradition. Deplorable, however, as this absence of practical and experimental investigation is, which opened the door to all sorts of conjectural theories, it preserved in Chinese natural science a spirit of sacred reverence for the divine powers of nature.

Though modern Confucianism has long ago discarded the belief in one supreme personal God, of which their classical writings still preserve a dead record, and though they substituted, for the personal God whom their forefathers worshipped, an abstract entity, devoid of personality, devoid of all attributes whatsoever, yet they look upon nature not as a dead inanimate fabric, but as a living breathing organism. They see a golden chain of spiritual life running through every form of existence and binding together, as in one living body, everything that subsists in heaven above or on earth below. What has so often been admired in the natural philosophy of the Greeks,--that they made nature live; that they saw in every stone, in every tree, a living spirit; that they peopled the sea with naiads, the forest with satyrs,--this poetical, emotional and reverential way of looking at natural objects, is equally so a characteristic of natural science in China.

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