ABSTRACT
Still, the appearance of survivals is by no means just a trick of the eye. Many bricks of the old structure are still but not the structure. Fragments may survive because they meet a modern taste, not because (more than the fragments forgotten) they must be conveying the essence ofan invincible tradition. And the taste, the language of the culture, cannot be explained as created by the fragment. Rather, the language is being enriched in its vocabulary. We have seen (Volume One) that Europe and pre-modern China, reaching each other only through intellectual diffusion, had only broadened each other's cultural vocabulary-that the Chinese cultural language changed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when social subversion, not just intellectual diffusion, was set off by the West. So, too, when the original social associations were stripped from intellectual creations of the Chinese past, these creations, carrying with them mind but not society, might come down to modern China as vocabulary enrichment, without determining the language.
