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changes. It must be admitted that in China and the western world the pioneer
philosophers‘ concepts about the becoming in the universe as well as the factors and
elements accounting for these changes constitute the rudiments of metaphysical
thinking.
Many nations hold mythical world views, but metaphysics has been developed in
only a minority of nations. This is because not all nations possess the conditions
indispensable for the myths to be evolved into metaphysics. The evolvement of
language basically follows these stages: firstly there were barely verbal signs
referring to a few objects or expressing feelings; then written forms were created
based on the verbal signs, so that thoughts and concepts besides facts could be
conveyed in written words, which enabled the thoughts to be enshrined in the
classics to be imparted and reviewed critically. But it doesn‘t follow that each nation
has witnessed its language evolved through these stages. Even those nations of
which the language has undergone these stages do not necessarily enjoy the social
and historical conditions for the birth of metaphysics. The metaphysics will assert
itself only in those nations of which the language has gone through the
above-mentioned stages and in which a series of abstract concepts were in need to
explain the complicated natural and social phenomena.
As it happened, both the ancient Greece and China enjoyed the necessary
conditions for the evolvement of metaphysics. The pioneer philosophers in China
and the western countries condensed the reasons of motion and change in the most
common concepts such as ―the origin or the root‖, ―the unity‖, ―the Way or the logos‖,
and made accounts of the nature and the orientation of each and every phenomenon
through antithesis. While the mythic world views were born out of the complicated
situations encountered by the mankind in the pre-historic period or the initial period
of civilization, the rudimentary metaphysics braced human beings to take prompt
measures and cope with the even more intricate circumstances attendant on the
mature civilization. The Chinese and Greek civilizations are blessed with ever-lasting
vigor and vitality by the Most Sacred God of metaphysics. Though some other
cultures left behind magnificent and resplendent sanctuaries and temples, they went
into doom because of the lack of the metaphysics. The evidence from both the
positive and negative sides indicates that metaphysics is a thinking mode of human
beings when the civilization is well-developed.
The function and characteristic of metaphysics is dependant not only upon the
universality and inevitability of human psychological mechanism, but also upon the
specific historical conditions such as the linguistic carriers and social functions of the
concepts. The unique historical conditions contributed to most of the distinction
between the Chinese and western metaphysics. There is a formal contradiction
between the judgment of the transmutation principles according to the Greek original
metaphysics and the definite meaning of the judgment copulative in Greek, which
has given rise to the question about how to identify the transmutation. The Euclidean
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