Note 60 — Chapter VII · FALLACIES IN POPULAR ARGUMENTS
Reading edition
As to there being no such thing as an atheistic people, are we to take no account of the cultured classes? Mark the following: “The polytheism and pantheism of the lower classes of Chinese are matched in the upper classes by what appears to be pure atheism.... There never was on this earth a body of educated and cultured men so thoroughly agnostic and atheistic as the mass of Confucian scholars.60... Its absolute indifference to the profoundest spiritual truths in the nature of man is the most melancholy characteristic of the Chinese mind—its ready acceptance of a body without a soul, of a soul without a spirit, of a spirit without life, of a cosmos without a cause, a universe without a God.”61