At the centre of Chinese affairs lies a profound paradox. China is governed, with unquestioned authority, by the most dogmatic Marxians in the world—Russian communists, to them, are weak-kneed backsliders. The central principle of Marxian doctrine, to which they adhere with religious intensity of conviction, is the Materialist Conception of History—the doctrine that changes in the methods of production, and in the relationships between economic classes, peasants, wage earners, and capitalists, determine the whole course of politics, culture, religion, everything else in human affairs.

But in their actions the rulers of China have shown themselves fanatically concerned to demonstrate the exact opposite, namely the belief that political decision and agitation, backed by sufficient force, will enable them to over-ride all the facts of economics.

The least that could be said about myth is that it is something “which makes one think.” This is not by any means to say nothing. Spelled out it means “that the nature of myth requires that it be included in the context of contemporary philosophy, and that its urgency, which is noted everywhere, be founded on its essential nature.” There is such an urgency about myth—or more precisely, about a serious occupation with it—because quite apart from the philosophical context, myth now appears in a great many publications. These remarks are taken from a Catholic writer on the theory of myth, Gonsalv Mainberger. The following pages fit into this context by placing the determination of the nature of myth on the broadest possible foundations. The earlier investigations by André Jolles, the Germanic linguist, and by Walter F. Otto, a classical scholar, as well as by myself, in which I begin with an exact philological interpretation of the Greek word mythos, have all labored under initial self-imposed limitations which can now be removed without abandoning the earlier results.

In the eighteenth century all the philosophers were moralists, whatever their philosophy, whatever their religion. They were not pious, they were not devout, certainly they were not orthodox, but they had a religion all the same. It was the religion of happiness. That is what they were after in morals, politics, society; that is what they were after in life itself. Not the answer to the old question, what shall I do to be saved, nor the more familiar question, what is man's whole duty to God. No, theirs was a secular religion. What must man do to be happy? What should government do to assure happiness to its citizens? Pope had made this clear, Pope who summed up so neatly what the age thought:

(Essay on Man, IV, I, 1 ff.)

This study is divided into two distinct sections, introduction and elaboration.

The reader will undoubtedly notice a disproportion in this article because the introduction is as long as the section intended to prove the hypothesis which it develops. This is due to the fact that we Chinese have no very clear awareness of our logical processes and hence of our so-called reasoning. We must therefore track down those arguments that are entirely free from verbal misrepresentation and try to make clear their structure. Our comparative research enables us to state the following: in contrast to Western reasoning, which is always very explicit in form and whose logical sequences are closely knit, Chinese thought is but a series of independent experiments that add up to no well-defined order and have no internal interrelationship. From this lack of logical sequence all Chinese philosophers derive their initial inspiration; they then enlarge their understanding by analytical thought. This basis, which is common to all Chinese thinkers, no matter how divergent or antithetical their tendencies, is nothing more than the concrete and indivisible whole, which we will investigate, in our own fashion, in the introduction. We mention this merely to caution the reader who is unaccustomed to the confusing complexity of Chinese thought.

When the Western Empire collapsed under the impact of the barbarians and from its own internal corrosion, the people of Western Europe were playing without being aware of it a game of “whoever loses wins.” Roman theocracy developed out of the ruins of the Empire, inheriting its ambition and its universality, and gradually undertook through the sole means of the faith the reconquest of the world. Its pioneers penetrated even further than the eagles of Rome had ventured. Christ's labarum flew triumphant over lands from which Rome in its time had been unmercifully driven. While the victorious church broadened the limits of the antique world, everywhere under its domination the lay, local and national forces organized and consolidated their power, taking full advantage of the Pauline and Augustinian doctrine favoring the separation of church and state. After several centuries of painful anarchy the characteristic profile of the West emerged: two symmetrically organized powers, the spiritual power of the church, universal in ambition or vocation, and the lay, local or national power. A society unique in the annals of history was born from the balance of these two powers, a society that succeeded where much richer and more civilized societies had failed miserably, notably in preparing the way for the advent of industrial society, master of science, nature and technique.

The word “structure” is now too often used as a password. But in linguistics it appears to have been adopted independently, before the current vogue. Here it has retained its most narrow connotation. The study of linguistic structures means the study of the construction of certain linguistic fragments: the attempt to uncover, according to their linguistic function, the real units that make up these fragments and the rules for using these units in constructing the fragments. This method of analysis, functional and structural, forty years ago transformed the description of language, whether it was a question of phonemics, of morphology, or even of syntax. But for a long time the structuralists themselves insisted upon the resistances that semantics raise—and its most apparent formal manifestation, the lexicon—to any attempt at analysis of this sort.