Chinese dreams in Romantic England The life and times of Thomas Manning by Edward Weech

Author:Edward Weech
Format: epub

From the centre A. at the distance A. B.

Describe the circle B. C. D.

At the distance B. A. from B. the centre

The round A. C. E. to describe boldly venture.²¹

With its ancient provenance, mathematics could hardly contrast more strongly with the study of Chinese, insofar as that could even be said to comprise an academic discipline in contemporary Europe. Perhaps the only thing the two subjects had in common was their great difficulty.

Manning’s mathematical research had no lasting impact, and this has encouraged historians to overlook his early career, seeing in his youthful achievements little more than general proof of his intellectual ability. But Manning’s mathematical studies are more revealing than we might expect. First, his psychological relationship with mathematics was similar to his relationship with languages. Both mathematics and linguistics became lifelong passions, and Manning experienced obsessive fits when he would pursue a line of inquiry for days on end while ignoring the outside world. Second, Manning’s response to the state of mathematical knowledge in 1790s England speaks to his intellectual openness and taste for cultural renewal. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw extraordinary advances in mathematical understanding across Europe, but these advances were unevenly integrated into the way the subject was taught in different countries. National culture was relevant even in a ‘pure’ field such as mathematics, and Manning displayed a willingness to benefit from foreign wisdom. In England, the field had been revolutionized by Sir Isaac Newton, who laid the foundations of classical mechanics in Principia Mathematica (1687). By the early nineteenth century, Newtonian fluxions and mechanics had been superseded on the Continent, but they remained the core of mathematical education at Cambridge. Mathematical education in England lagged behind France, and Manning reached out to French mathematicians for help with his own research.

Given that mathematics was Manning’s original area of expertise, we might wonder whether it helped to stimulate his interest in Chinese. Manning would certainly not have been the first European scholar to explore the relationship between mathematics and China. Others had already been drawn towards Chinese writing as ‘a possible embodiment of a form of notation beyond the realm of numbers alone that was not constrained by the specificities of natural languages’.²² The Sinophile philosopher Gottfried Leibniz exchanged letters with Jesuit missionaries who had introduced Western mathematics to China and (much to Leibniz’s delight) portrayed the Kangxi Emperor himself as a devotee of mathematics and philosophy.²³ Leibniz hoped for a mutually beneficial cultural exchange between Europe and China, with Western science complementing Chinese moral philosophy. He was particularly interested in the Yijing, an ancient divinatory work conventionally attributed to the legendary first ruler of China, Fuxi. Leibniz corresponded with the eccentric missionary Joachim Bouvet, who believed the hexagrams of the Yijing contained profound insights into the true nature of science.²⁴ In 1679 Leibniz invented the system of binary notation, and he noted when studying the trigrams of the Yijing that there was ‘an astounding relationship between the Chinese figures and his binary arithmetic’.²⁵ Through his

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