INTRODUCTION

The late Ming period is taken here to begin in the 1520s and cover the final six reigns of the dynasty before it collapsed in Peking in the spring of 1644. There were several moments of significant change in what might be called the political standing of those engaged in the sort of intellectual activities which attracted contemporaries' and historians' notice. In the 1520s, the newly enthroned Chia-ching Emperor succeeded in asserting his will over the leadership of the bureaucracy and alienating a significant cohort of officials and literati in the process. In the same decade, Wang Yang-ming gathered large numbers of followers to his new teachings before he died in 1529. Wang's ideas were criticized while he was still alive for deviating from the imperially sanctioned version of Neo-Confucianism. Twenty-five years later, his ideas were being taken more seriously than the official version by thousands of literati. In 1553 and 1554, for the first time in the North, large gatherings of literati and officials in Peking discussed Wang's teachings. The years 1529 to 1554 witnessed continued growth of the influence of the ideas of Wang and his disciples. During the next twenty-five years, from 1554 to 1579, there was a proliferation of versions of ideas stimulated by Wang's teachings. Men who were barely literate, as well as literati and officials, became involved in discussions of these teachings in all provinces, although they were most influential in Chekiang, Kiangsi, and the Southern Metropolitan Area (Nan Chih-li). In 1579, the powerful Grand Secretary, Chang Chü-cheng (1525–82), sought to suppress much of what he disparaged as vain philosophic chatter about morality.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter outlines the general socio-economic development of rural China during the Ming period. Because I use the term “socio-economic” in its precise meaning, I treat only the most salient aspects of social and economic developments insofar as they interact in the countryside. This chapter examines the ways in which economic factors were reflected in, and sometimes contributed to, the changes in social groupings and organizations during the Ming dynasty. Conversely, the ways in which social factors were reflected in, and sometimes contributed to, economic development are also examined. The taxation and corvée structure is portrayed in some detail. The social and institutional foundation of the li-chia system is discussed for two reasons: first, it offers a window through which we can come to understand some idiosyncratic features of the Ming socio-economic landscape; and second, it was in and of itself a significant cause of change. The possibilities for tax and corvee evasion or exemption were a major force behind social and economic developments during Ming times, as was the government's chronic inability to keep land and population records up to date. This shortcoming was recognized by officials at many levels of the government, and Ming officials implemented many reforms aimed at redistributing tax and corvée levies more equally and at facilitating tax collection. As a result of these changes, although the li-chia structure continued to exist well into the Ch'ing dynasty, by the early seventeenth century in many areas it was radically different in content from the institution envisioned by Chu Yüan-chang, the first Ming emperor.

Of the alternatives represented in the intellectual scene in late Ming, the westerners' Learning from Heaven (T'ien hsüeh) was the least well precedented. In spite of efforts to assimilate some of it to vocabulary and concepts in classical texts, the Learning from Heaven could not escape also being labeled as western Learning (Hsi hsüeh). It was foreign, whereas the other main intellectual alternatives to the Learning of the Way (Tao hsüeh), including Buddhism, were only different (i). Although critics of the missionaries cited foreign origins in attempts to discredit the Learning from Heaven, its foreignness remained less an issue in late Ming than it became in the K'ang-hsi period in early Ch'ing. With no obvious detriment to his contemporary reputation, Ricci was well known under the name Li of the Far West (Li Hsi-t'ai). He and his confreres published books about that different part of the world, the Far West, from which they had come. Ricci reported being told in 1599 by a censor in Nanking that, having lived in Kiangsi and other places, he was “no longer a foreigner in China. Can there be any objection to his residing in Nanking, where there are so many Hui-hui [Muslims]?” Ricci had been proceeding since 1595 with the tactic of acting “as though we were men of China” (come uomini già della Cina). Especially in the early phase of the mission, there was a self-conscious effort by a few of the missionaries to be Chinese, but an important aspect of their impact on literati with whom they had contact was that they were from a distant, unknown place.

Law in traditional China derived from the emperor's commands, and codes of law were instructions to the emperor's magistrates instructing them how to impose punishments for behavior that ran counter to the emperor's interests. Ming law came into existence with the first commands issued by the founder of the dynasty when he ascended the throne in 1368. Written law took the form of rules and collections of descriptions of specific punishments for specific crimes. These were promulgated by order of the emperor. Early in his reign, the first Ming emperor was careful to insure that his dynasty would enjoy the benefits of a body of written law known as a lü or code. His close attention to the compilation of a code was a product of his perception that the preceding Yüan dynasty, during which the Mongols ruled China, had been defective in its lack of a formal legal code. The founder of the Ming felt that a code was valuable to a ruler because it assisted him in maintaining bureaucratic discipline, public order, and permanent institutions that centered around his line of descent. A code was, furthermore, a symbol of the legitimacy of his rule.

Because the founder of the Ming devoted a fair amount of attention to compiling formal codes, a number of versions appeared during his reign. The Ming dynasty's first codified laws were promulgated in 1368 under the rubric lü-ling, or code and commands. Although an integrated version of the text has not been found, we do have the 1368 version of the ling or “commands,” sometimes translated “ordinances,” consisting of 145 separate articles. The no longer extant 1368 version of the lü or “statutory code” had 285 articles.

INTRODUCTION

By the time the Ming dynasty was founded, Buddhism had existed in China for more than fourteen centuries. Of the major schools of Buddhism established during the Sui (581–618) and Tang (618–907) dynasties, the T'ien-t'ai, Hua-yen, Wei-shih, Lü, Pure Land, and Ch'an continued to exist in the Ming, just as they had during the Sung (960–1279) and Yüan (1206– 1368) periods. Like all mature world religions, Buddhism is, as W. C. Smith puts it, a “cumulative tradition.” Ming Buddhism shared many characteristics with the Buddhism of earlier dynasties. It is, therefore, not possible to demarcate a clearly defined entity called Ming Buddhism. Furthermore, the task of writing a general history of Buddhism during the Ming dynasty is made harder by the paucity of existing scholarship. Since, for a long time, Buddhist scholars and historians of Chinese Buddhism (with the exception of Japanese scholars) regarded Buddhism after the T'ang, “the golden age of Buddhism,” as a period of decline, they did not devote much energy to its study. Only within the last few decades has Western scholarship on Ming Buddhism begun to appear. Therefore, our knowledge about Ming Buddhism is, in many respects, still preliminary and incomplete.

One can, however, offer several generalizations about Ming Buddhism. First, a close relationship existed between the Buddhist sangha, or monastic communities, and the government. This is evidenced in the government's attempts, from the time of the first Ming emperor, to exert strict administrative control over every aspect of the sangha; in the continuous, and at times, lavish patronage of Buddhism by the imperial court; and in individual monks' involvement with the court and politics.

Ming China, having just endured a century of Mongol rule, sought to avert further occupations by a people or state from Inner Asia. Court policy was, therefore, generally based on restricting relations with foreigners, particularly those from across the northern and northwestern borders. Fear of future invasions conditioned the Ming's attitudes and policies toward Central and Inner Asia. The court was determined to reinstate the Chinese world order so as to maintain control over the conduct of foreign relations. Yet the economic benefits to be garnered from dealings with the peoples north of China could not be discounted. Merchants and some officials who profited from trade naturally attempted to support an increase in commerce. When court restrictions on commerce persisted, these merchants and officials even evaded the regulations and continued to trade with the peoples and tribes across the borders.

The Yung-lo emperor (r. 1403–24), however, often sided with the advocates of trade and increased contact with Inner Asia. His reign nonetheless was unique, and his policies were exceptions. Unlike the other Ming emperors, he actively encouraged an expansion of commerce and attempted to augment the number of embassies arriving in China. His usurpation of the throne and the ensuing questions about his legitimacy may have inspired him to seek such a flow of foreign emissaries, for, in the Confucian view, a good emperor naturally attracted the so-called barbarians to “come and be transformed” (lai-hua) – that is, to acknowledge the superiority of Chinese civilization by becoming increasingly sinicized. The more embassies, the more legitimate the Yung-lo emperor would appear to his own people.

Taoists and Taoist beliefs and activities were present throughout Ming society. Given the present state of scholarship, however, only a fragmentary picture of the role Taoism played during the Ming can be reconstructed. The Tao, or Way, has historically assumed many different forms. Research has uncovered isolated tableaux of Taoism in Ming society at various levels and in various regions. Taken together, these tableaux constitute a picture of Taoism similar to the pictures in a Chinese handscroll, which, as it is unrolled, reveals a succession of clear vistas that fade into long stretches blanketed in mist. However disconnected these Taoist scenes may appear, it would be a mistake to assume that current fragmentary knowledge reflects reality, and that the disparate faces of Ming Taoism are, in fact, unrelated. The Way may indeed have parted during the Six Dynasties, but, by the Ming, the separate paths of Taoism had conflated. Potential patrons or devotees had expectations of “Taoists” based on their perceptions of the powers and roles of Taoism. The expectations and perceptions of all levels of society and the beliefs and practices of trained Taoists interacted to create Ming Taoism.

Nathan Sivin has lamented the ambiguities of the term “Taoist,” warning all who use it to be very specific about its intention in each particular context. To Sivin's admonition must be added the caveat that the Ming Chinese themselves had perspectives on Taoists which complicate neat definitions: they ignored or collapsed fine distinctions between schools and ritual techniques. Research has progressed far enough to provide glimpses of the interrelationships among the various aspects of Taoism.

Volumes 7 and 8 of The Cambridge History of China are devoted to the Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644. Volume 7 provides a narrative account of Ming political history, and Volume 8 collects together various topical studies of that period. Both volumes were planned more than fifteen years ago at two successive summer conferences, generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and held in the summers of 1979 and 1980 at Princeton University. These meetings were attended by more than twenty potential authors and senior graduate students. They and the volume editors discussed the field of Ming studies for several weeks in each of those successive summers. A plan for the volumes was drawn up and chapters allocated to authors. It was decided to follow the model of the volumes on Sui and T'ang, the first of which was the only volume on the pre-modern period then published, and to produce a narrative volume followed by a second volume containing a collection of topical studies.

These meetings not only began the process of writing the Cambridge History volumes; they also stimulated a new level of interest in Ming studies among western scholars. And, coming as they did just as Chinese academe was emerging from the dark shadows of the 1960s and 1970s, they also helped lay the foundation for the fruitful collaboration between Chinese, Japanese, and western historians engaged in a common historical enterprise which we now take for granted.

A number of unforeseen circumstances delayed the schedule originally adopted for completing the two Ming volumes. Volume 7 appeared in 1988; an unauthorized Chinese translation appeared from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, in 1992. Now at last Volume 8 has finally made its way through the protracted process of writing, replanning, and editing.

The rulers of Ming China would not have recognized the region known today as Southeast Asia. They considered the archipelago east of Brunei (modern Borneo) to be part of that area they termed the Eastern Oceans, while all other coastal states they considered part of the Western Oceans, which, for long periods in their nomenclature, also included countries bordering on the Indian Ocean. Those states which comprised what are now modern Burma, Laos, and northern Thailand, were grouped quite differendy from the other nations comprising the Eastern or Western Oceans.

The view of other nations held at the imperial capital at Nanking or Peking was always sinocentric. Foreign countries were considered to have no meaningful existence unless their rulers had a relationship with the emperor of China. Such factors as the country's distance from China's capital, whether the country shared a border with the empire or not, and whether the country was important to the empire's defense were also deemed significant. There were held to be technical differences between nations as well: countries which sent missions through Ch'üan-chou in Fukien were distinguished by the court from countries whose missions entered China through Canton in Kwangtung; and countries sending overland missions from beyond the provinces of Kwangsi and Yunnan were considered yet different again from the others. Certain general principles concerning the proper conduct of foreign relations that the Chinese court continually emphasized notwithstanding, what remained most important in determining Chinese foreign policy toward Southeast Asia were the political conditions prevailing at the particular time during the dynasty.

INTRODUCTION

Mill would have found it entirely appropriate that, in a collection on his philosophy, attention should be paid to his political writings and to their reception, which itself had a strong political dimension. Mill saw his political ideas as an integral part of his philosophy, and his philosophical battles as also political battles whose outcome had great practical importance. He stated this explicitly in his Autobiography in the survey of his aims in writing his principal philosophical books, A System of Logic and An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy. He thought it crucial to set out in the Logic the true philosophy, deriving all knowledge from experience, because it was “hardly possible to exaggerate” the practical mischiefs done in morals, politics, and religion by the false philosophy that “truths external to the mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and experience”. The latter was “the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions” because it allowed “every inveterate belief and every intense feeling, of which the origin is not remembered... to dispense with the obligation of justifying itself by reason....” “There never was”, Mill concludes, “such an instrument devised for consecrating all deep seated prejudices.”

John Stuart Mill's views about arithmetic and geometry have probably attracted more ridicule and disdain than the positions of any other thinker in the history of the philosophy of mathematics. I believe that the unfavorable assessment of Mill is quite unwarranted, resting in part on misunderstandings of his position born of hasty misreading (sometimes, one suspects, of reading only the scornful remarks of his influential critics), in part on commitments to a view of philosophy quite different from that which moved Mill. In this chapter I shall try to set the record straight.

Because it is essential to any clear appreciation of Mill's ideas about mathematics to recognize the problems he attempted to address, we should begin by contrasting two large conceptions of philosophy in general and of the philosophy of mathematics in particular. One of these conceptions, which I shall call “transcendentalism”, believes that a central task of philosophy is to identify fundamental conditions on human thought, representation, or experience, and that this enterprise is to be carried out by special philosophical methods that yield knowledge quite independently of experience or of the deliverances of the natural sciences. Prime examples of transcendentalist philosophy can be found in Kant, in Frege, and, in recent philosophy, in the writings of Michael Dummett.

Mill's essay On Liberty had both the good and the ill fortune to become a “classic”on first publication. The immediate success of the book, dedicated as it was to preserving the memory of Harriet Taylor, could only gratify its author. Yet its friends and foes alike fell upon it with such enthusiasm that the essay itself has ever since been hard to see for the smoke of battle. That it is a liberal manifesto is clear beyond doubt; what the liberalism is that it defends and how it defends it remain matters of controversy. Given the lucidity of Mill's prose and the seeming simplicity and transparency of his arguments, this is astonishing; ought we not to know by now whether the essay's main target is the hold of Christianity on the Victorian mind or rather the hold of a monolithic public opinion of whatever kind; whether its intellectual basis lies in utility as Mill claimed or in a covert appeal to natural right; whether the ideal of individual moral and intellectual autonomy is supposed to animate everyone, or only an elite; and so indefinitely on?

INTRODUCTORY

Mill's theory of meaning is couched in the syntax of syllogism rather than that of modern, post-Fregean logic, whereas the advance of logic has been a pivotal element in the story of twentieth-century philosophy. But this should not blind us. A Millian semantics and epistemology of logic can be stated as well in a modern as in a syllogistic framework; in fact the modern framework allows it to be stated more perspicuously. Mill's doctrine of connotation and denotation and his thoroughgoing empiricism remain robust. And it was as a defender of empiricism in the epistemology of science - including logic and mathematics - rather than as a contributor to logic or science as such that he wrote.

The real criticism of Mill remains much the same as that made by his nineteenth-century critics. He does not reflect enough about the content of his empiricism and its overall coherence. The same criticism, it is true, can be made of many contemporary naturalists. We shall come back to it in section VI. But first the outlines of Mill's position must be set down and some influential misconceptions set aside.

Mill is an empiricist in that he holds that no informative assertion about the world is a priori. In the System of Logic he distinguishes between Verbal' and 'real' propositions, and between 'merely apparent' and 'real' inferences. The assertion of a purely verbal proposition conveys no information about the world, though it can convey information about the language in which the assertion itself is couched. Similarly, a merely apparent inference moves to no new assertion - its conclusion has been literally asserted in its premises.

Much has been written, admiring and dismissive, on Mill the preeminent champion of individuality. And appropriately so; On Liberty is likely to remain the most widely known of his social and political writings, one that seems never to lose its power to stimulate both thought and emotion. Analysis of Utilitarianism and his other writings on ethical questions properly centres on what he says about individual motivation and behaviour. And as one of the greatest of Classical economists, Mill was in the tradition whose analysis and values were based on the individual's selfinterest. This insistent concern for individuality should not, however, preclude attention to his portrayal and evaluation of humans as social animals.

It is significant - to touch only on the most contentious area, economics - that the full title of Mill's major treatise is Principles of Political Economy with some of their applications to social philosophy. And that after finishing his other great treatise, A System of Logic, he told Alexander Bain that his next project was a work on ethology (Bain 1901, 159; Bain 1882, 78-79), one that L. S. Feuer thought would have been a "masterpiece of sociology" (Feuer 1976, 87). What he had in mind was an analysis and exposition of "the science which corresponds to the art of education; in the widest sense of the term, including the formation of national or collective character as well as individual" (System of Logic, CW VIII:869). Though he never wrote this work, it is not fanciful to look for his views of civilization and culture in this context.

THE FALL AND RISE OF A REPUTATION! MILL AND MODERNISM

So Henry Sidgwick wrote after John Stuart Mill's death on 7 May 1873. Several days later he continued:

This indicates Mill's influence at its peak as well as presaging its decline. Four decades later, Balfour wrote that Mill's authority in the English Universities had been “comparable to that wielded... by Hegel in Germany and in the middle ages by Aristotle”, and Dicey noted that “John Mill was between 1860 and 1870 at the height of his power. His authority among the educated youth of England was greater than may appear credible to the present generation”. It was already becoming necessary to explain how influential Mill had been.

A GRAND PROJECT

John Stuart Mill undertook to rehabilitate the utilitarian radicalism of Bentham and his followers, “to show that there was a Radical philosophy, better and more complete than Bentham's, while recognizing and incorporating all of Bentham's which is permanently valuable”.To carry out his grand project, he studied the insights into will, imagination, and character offered by German Idealists (including Goethe, Kant, and Schiller) and their British disciples (notably Coleridge, Frederick Maurice, John Sterling, and Carlyle). He was also far more open than his utilitarian predecessors to egalitarian social Utopias of the sort proposed by French 'socialists' (including Saint-Simon, Fourier, Comte, and Louis Blanc). Moreover, at his death in 1873, he was lampooned as a 'feminine philosopher' for his insistence that justice demanded equal rights for women as well as men independently of race or colour. In his view, as they gained equality with men, women would tend to demand more prudent family practices (including birth control measures) than had hitherto been observed or could otherwise be expected under the prevailing system of male domination.

Such psychological insights and improved ideas of society, Mill believed, could somehow be integrated with the basic tenets of the Benthamite approach. Bentham, James Mill, and Ricardo, whatever their other differences, analyzed political and economic affairs by assuming that any agent is motivated by his own particular interests as he conceives them. In addition to universal education, therefore, they generally advocated social institutions (including majoritarian democracy and competitive capitalism) designed to give predominantly self-interested individuals adequate incentives to act so as to promote the general happiness (understood as the sum or perhaps average of the enlightened self-interests).