ABSTRACT
While Chapter II on the Community versus Individual with the Factors and Apologists of Social Unity in the Ancient and Mediaeval West, for illustration, dealt with the domination of the community over the individual, this chapter is to expound the attempt of the individual to dominate over the community. With the Means of Social Control Propounded by Ancient Chinese Thinkers, for illustration, we are going to trace how the same community produces diverse types of mind. Amidst the same circumstances different individuals in their intellectual endeavour may have the same aim in view. The diverse stimuli discharged from such surroundings as full of chaos and turmoil as those in ancient China, will in the long run call forth different responses on the part of individual human organisms. In the course of development different outlooks of life and the world are made up. By looking at the same aim from different standpoints and approaching it from different routes, they formulate different attempts to solve the same problems. The most significant problem immediately confronting ancient Chinese thinkers during the ante-Ch‘in period (722–221 B.c.) was not, What is the ultimate reality underlying the phenomenal world as in the case with ancient Greeks? but, How to precipitate order out of chaos in the existing society? Social order was therefore the end, to which they undertook to seek for adequate means—means of social control.
