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Part of the distrust of the law—and of legal doctrine—is explained by the general Chinese dislike of abstraction. The Chinese intellect tends not to distinguish between general and particular ideas. The Chinese resists logical analysis in the Aristotelian either/or sense. He reasons in what, to the Western mind, seems a chain of non sequiturs. Similarly, the Chinese tends to regard events, not as a matter of cause and effect, but in terms of symmetrical patterns.
The lack of analytic thinking helps explain the almost magical power individual words seem to have. In his concept of cheng ming, "the rectification of names," Confucius pointed out that names and terminology must be correct, otherwise "the people do not know to move hand or foot." This idea, suggest Edwin Reischauer and John Fairbank in a joint book on Asia, really means not so much that theory should correspond to reality, but "that reality should be made to conform with theory." Similarly, the problem of appearance is involved in the concept of face. Partly, face is a preference of form over reality. Partly, it is a cautious avoidance of precise commitments or statements to avoid the later embarrassment of being wrong.
Like words, numbers have near-occult importance. This is apparent from the ancient Book of Changes, according to which all the laws of nature can be condensed into eight tri-grams and 64 hexagrams, down to such didactic concepts as the five relationships, the six domestic animals, the seven apertures of the head, etc. The mystical rather than analytical preoccupation with numbers, plus a practical concern with ethics, explains in part why China failed for so long to develop natural sciences. In a society where scholarship emphasized rote memory of officially interpreted historical accounts rather than deductive reasoning, there was little room—or need—to seek new knowledge; everything under the Chinese sun had already happened, and all one had to do to cope with a situation was to find an example in the classics and follow that precedent.
It was the lack of science, the absence of intellectual equipment or desire to accept change that proved so disastrous when, in the 19th century, the West broke through the Great Wall of Chinese isolation. The Mandarins, that elite corps of scholar-officials who had so long governed under the Emperors—in the words of one Western scholar, as "managers before their time"—finally lost their power to manage. Always opposed to specialization, in the belief that the really wise man can know and do everything, they were unable and unwilling to cope with modern knowledge. Suddenly, the old formulas no longer worked. Numbers, concepts, labels could not prevail against modern guns and machines. So long unshaken in its sense of superiority, China in the last years of the Manchu rule suffered military defeat and economic exploitation. A social order based on harmony with nature was shattered by the West's promethean energy. Suddenly, it was devastatingly clear that the Middle Kingdom was not really at the center of the universe.
Mandate of History