Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 3.djvu/76

tion as related in the Book of Genesis. But in another prayer the creative process is particularised: "O Ti, when Thou hadst opened the course for the inactive and active forces of matter to operate, Thy making work went on. Thou didst produce, O Spirit, the sun and moon and five planets; and pure and beautiful was their light. The vault of heaven was spread out like a curtain, and the square earth supported all on it and all creatures were happy." It is in the operation of these active and inactive forces that the Chinese cosmographist finds food for speculations bizarre and even grotesque in the eyes of Christians, who are content to think that the sole agent of creation was a supreme being's fiat. In the I-king, or Book of Changes—which is generally placed first among the Five Classics, though inferior in point of antiquity to both the Shu-king and the Shih-king—an attempt is made to reduce the working of the creative factors to symbolic form. Its compiler was Wan, king of the State of Chou, who, being thrown into prison (1185 B. C.) by his suzerain, passed his time devising a series of figures which should represent the qualities of nature, the principles of human society, and the conditions, actual or possible, of the kingdom. He took for the bases of his task two lines,—one whole, the other broken,—which represented the two forms of the subtle matter composing all things. In one form this matter is active, and called yang; in the other passive, and