CO129-531-10 Hong Kong University- encouragement of Chinese students to counteract American influence 30-5-1931 - 1-9-1931 — Page 83

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Dr. Hu Shih points out the situation was to a certain extent,

hough not wholly, parallcled in Europe in the period before the

renaissance when the international language of Culture was Latin.

This meant that the thoughts of the scholars circulated among

Scholars and were not accessible at all to the massos of Europc.

Probably the closest parallel to the intellectual supremacy

of Confucius in China, is that of Aristotle in the Middle Ages

just before the renaissance. It was a sufficient answer to 211

argument at one time to say that the statement made was not to

be found in Aristotle and could not therefore be true.

universities, it is said, students were fined for contradicting

Aristotle's doctrines. From this tyranny of authority Europe

In some

was rescued by Peter Ramus who presented a thesis for his M.A.

degree in 1536, in which he und er to ok to prove that everything

Aristotle said was false. When the Senate some weeks afterwards

recovered from the shock it invited him to support his thesis in

public but he refused to do so, for he said the doctors of the

Sorbonne were too prejudiced in favour of Aristotle, and therefore

he could not hope for a favourable verdict. He was later condemned

by the King's Court and in 1572 was murdered. He was thus the

first secular martyr to the claims of reason as the standard of

truth, over authority which could not be so supported, and he

paved the way for the system of Descartes and Bacon. This is

precisely what Young China claims to be doing today, in accordance

with the teaching of The Three Principles. A student of this

University, whose father was a close friend of Sun Yat Sen

informed me that when the latter was a young man he applied to

Li Hung Chang the Governor of Chil-Li for a post. He was invited

to submit an essay by way of showing his fitness for Government

employment but the effort fell so far below the recognised

classical standards, that he had to be rejected. From that moment

it is said that Sun Yat Sen formed the resolve to overthrow this

P.T.0.

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