ABSTRACT
I N Sung and Ming intellectual life, idealist philosophies came to the fore. Later, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to a number of Chinese thinkers, that predominance of idealism seemed a disaster, and they formally disavowed it. What does the existence of these early materialists mean? Does it indicate that the seemingly stable, traditionalistic Chinese society was likely to develop under its own power, without a catalytic intrustion of Western industrialism, into a society with a scientific temper?
