Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 3.djvu/78

tory describes as a patriot and hero, a legislator and philosopher, took up the work at the point where his father had left it. Wan had synthesised; Tan analysed. The father treated each hexagram as a whole; the son treated each line separately, and made it suggest "some phenomenon in nature or some case of human experience from which the wisdom or folly, the luckiness or unluckiness, indicated by it could be inferred." It seems impossible now to determine what degree of esoteric significance attached to the original digrams and trigrams, but certainly the various figures ultimately elaborated by Wan and Tan, figures owing their dissimilarities to slight yet cardinal alterations in the positions and grouping of two short lines and one long, typified to those philosophers the perpetually changing fashion of the universe and of the beings that inhabit it. They conceived a primordial essence, which has been compared to the animated air of the Grecian thinker Anaximenes, and to "the spirit of God moving on the face of the waters" in the Christian cosmogony. This essence they supposed to be divided into a strong and a weak principle, which, acting and reacting upon each other, produced metamorphoses comparable to the four digrams, the eight trigrams, and the sixty-four hexagrams. Again, since success and failure in life are obviously the resultant of certain compositions of moral and material forces, relations, or conditions, the permutations of these conditions,