Excerpt from The Open Court, Vol. 5

The contributors to this monograph, with a single exception, are Chinese scholars of note. In interpreting for us the conditions and aspirations of modern China, the Chinese are naturally placed in a better position and are more competent than any of us, and whether right or wrong are entitled to a fair hearing. The December issue of The Open Court will contain an essay on art tendencies in present-day China by Teng Kwei, which was too long to be inserted in this number.

Greece and Rome are irrevocably dead, but China with a past of five millenniums is still alive and looms in our eyes like a giant. In the nineteenth century the western world was still dominated by the ideal of classical humanism based on the study of Greek and Roman civilizations and restricted to the Mediterranean. This is a thing of the past. We now live in the better and bigger era of the Pacific humanism that recognizes the Pacific ocean as the center of world history and is more broad-minded in embracing the study of all great Oriental civilizations.

The study of Chinese civilization is not merely a fad or a capricious hobby or just one out of many hundred specialties in which the modern scholar fondly indulges. We study the language, literature, and art of China because such study has a paramount educational and cultural value and is part and parcel of a truly humanistic education. We are confident that the study of China will contribute much to the renaissance of our own civilization and will mean an important step forward into the era of a new humanism and philosophy that is now in process of formation.

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