Luke, 1882.
CHINESE AND JAPANESE MEDICINE
CHINESE medicine illustrates the condition at which a highly
intellectual people may arrive, among whom thought and speculation were
restricted by religious prohibitions. Perhaps the chief interest in its
study lies in the fact that we may see today the persistence of views
about disease similar to those which prevailed in ancient Egypt and
Babylonia. The Chinese believe in a universal animism, all parts being
animated by gods and spectres, and devils swarm everywhere in numbers
incalculable. The universe was spontaneously created by the operation
of its Tao, "composed of two souls, the Yang and the Yin; the Yang
represents light, warmth, production, and life, as also the celestial
sphere from which all those blessings emanate; the Yin is darkness,
cold, death, and the earth, which, unless animated by the Yang or
heaven, is dark, cold, dead. The Yang and the Yin are divided into an
infinite number of spirits respectively good and bad, called shen and
kwei; every man and every living being contains a shen and a kwei,
infused at birth, and departing at death, to return to the Yang and the
Yin. Thus man with his dualistic soul is a microcosmos, born from the
Macrocosmos spontaneously.
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