Then thirdly, there is the organic view, characteristic of China. In this, there is no real thought
 of there being a divine creator or a divine actor behind the world, but rather the world
 is thought of as being self-moving and self-creating. The word for nature in Chinese means "world"
 is what is of itself so. When in the West a child asks its mother, "Who made me?" and
 she replies, "Darling, God made you." And the child asks, "But who made God?" She has
 to say, "Nobody made God." And that is a great puzzle to the child who thinks of the world
 as a construct. And it may be explained to the child, if you like, that God makes himself.
 He exists of himself because he is existence. To put it in more theological language, he
 has the attribute called arseity, from the Latin arse, by himself. Perhaps some kind
 of enfant terrible would ask the question, "Well, if that's true of God, why couldn't
 it be true of the world in the first place? Why did you have to make that additional step?"
 If he did so, he would be thinking more or less in the Chinese way, which does not think
 of the world either as an artifact of some maker or as a mask or appearance worn by some
 sort of deeper reality. He doesn't, in other words, have a two-level view of nature as
 an appearance underneath which there is something else to explain it. He sees it all rather
 as self-evident, as being something which regulates itself and indeed orders itself.
 There is a certain sense, you see, in which the Chinese view is fundamentally, or you
 could almost call it anarchical, or if you don't like that word, you could call it democratic.
 A world which is self-governing, not even through a president, but self-governing in
 every way, a great and colossal anarchism, which moves itself in the same way as you
 and I move our fingers without directing them in the sense that we know exactly what we
 are doing and how we move them. We don't.
 Now I've said that the Western view is probably what made it possible for us to develop our
 highly advanced technology. By thinking about the world as a construct, we could think about
 the laws or principles or plans or regularities upon which it was based. We could think, for
 example, of the calculus of number as the basic characteristic of the law upon which
 nature is based. By doing that, we caught on to the idea of thinking of all things as
 reducible to atoms, to parts, to bits. And then by thinking of bits, we found that we
 could measure the world very accurately, describe its regularities very accurately. And that
 gave us an astonishing degree of control over it.
 But this is a point of view which is successful to a certain degree. It goes well up to a
 certain level after which it begins to develop complications. For one thing, you could say
 it has complications which are psychological on the one hand and practical and technical
 on another. From the psychological point of view, its complication is that when it becomes
 commonsensical to us to look at the world as a mechanism, we begin as humans, as people
 capable of feeling and love, to feel the external world rather alien to us. Yes, it's a machine.
 It's a great, big, automatic, mechanical arrangement which in essence is simply stupid energy.
 We thereupon feel that it has nothing in common with ourselves. And perhaps even though we
 try to give the same sort of account of ourselves and try to reduce our brains and emotions
 to some kind of neurological computer mechanism, that makes us in a way hate ourselves. For
 as soon as we start thinking of ourselves as automata, we begin ethically and psychologically
 treating ourselves as automata. We lose respect for ourselves. And thereupon feel that what
 is central to us, the feeling center, the person, is trapped in a cosmos that is a mechanical
 nightmare, foreign and strange. We can see ourselves as a kind of ghastly accident. And
 I don't wonder that this engenders certain kinds of suicidal tendencies in our culture,
 so much for the psychological point of view. From the technical point of view, the analogy
 of nature with mechanism, it develops its own disadvantages after a certain point. That
 is to say, the disadvantage of trying to manage the physical universe as if it were indeed
 an assemblage of separate parts, or separable parts. The first sort of person to notice
 this mistake would be the extreme surgical or medical specialist who knows, for example,
 all about hearts or about stomachs, but very little about brains or lungs or glands, and
 who treats one organ at a time and becomes unaware of the imbalances inflicted upon other
 organs by what he's done to the organ in which he specializes. Or so, in the same way, the
 specialist always tends to see the units of nature and to be unaware of their connections
 or relationships, which are, after all, inseparable relationships with all the other parts. There
 is, you might say, also another technical disadvantage, again, which develops only in
 the course of time to this particular mechanical analogy. And that is that when you begin to
 rely more and more upon minute and careful description of the world for dealing with
 it, and that, of course, involves the reduction of the world to describable units, the world
 then becomes terribly complicated, and it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track
 of all the minute units that you've described. Hence the difficulty of specialists in the
 various sciences communicating with each other, and the difficulty of the scientific specialist
 in communicating with the layman. The whole thing becomes much too complicated to manage.
 And this then means that


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