China and the West

Bacon, Francis. Sylua syluarum [ID D26979].
Er schreibt :
“And to help the matter, the alchemists call in likewise many vanities out of astrology, natural magic, superstitious interpretation of Scriptures, auricular traditions, feigned testimonies of ancient authors, and the like. It is true, on the other side, they have brought to light not a few profitable experiments, and thereby made the world some amends. But we, when we shall come to handle the version and transmutation of bodies, and the experiments concerning metals and minerals, will lay open the true ways and passages of nature, which may lead to this great effect. And we comment the wit of the Chinese, who despair of making of gold, but are mad upon the making of silver : for certain it is, that it is more difficult to make gold, which is the most ponderous and materiate amongst metals, of other metals less ponderous and less materiate, than via versa, to make silver of lead or quicksilver…”

“It differeth much in greatness ; the samllest being fit for thatching of houses, and stopping the chinks of ships, better than glue or pitch. The second bigness is used for anglerods and staves ; and in China for beating of offenders upon the thigs.”

“And we understand farther, that it is the use of China, and the kingdoms of the high Levant, to write in 'Characters Real', which express neither letters nor words in gross, but things or notions ; insomuch as countries and provinces, which understand not one another's language, can nevertheless read one another's writings, because the characters are accepted more generally than the languages do extend ; and therefore they have a vast multitude of characters, as many, I suppose, as radical words.”

Sekundärliteratur
Saussy, Haun. Great walls of discourse and other adventures in cultural China [ID D22144].
In classifying Chinese writing as 'ideographic', nineteenth-century grammatologists repeated Francis Bacon's view of Chinese 'Characters Real', which is to say, they repeated Aristotle. In 1605 Bacon observed of the Chinese character : For the organ of tradition, it is either Speech or Writing : and Aristotle saith well, 'Words are the images of cogitations, and letters are the images of words'.
For Bacon, Chinese writing brought the possibility of eliminating one of the levels of mediation through which the 'De Interpretatione' had constructed its picture of mind, language, and world. If indeed words symbolized affections in the soul and phonetic writing symbolized words, then a writing that symbolized affections in the soul would symbolize things themselved, since both things and affections were 'the same for all'.
Bacon divided such 'notes of cogitations' into 'two sorts : the one when the note hath some similitude or congruity with the notion ; the other 'ad placitum', having force only by contract or acceptation', and he put Chinese characters into the latter category – as indeed did most European writers on China before Fenollosa. For Bacon, at least, ideogrammatism does not imply resemblance.
The fortunes of the 'Chinese model' of writing promoted by Bacon – the direct notation of reality, through conventional characters, without the interference of spoken words.
Bacon, with debts to Aristotle, initiates a nonphonetic and potentially wholly conventional model of writing, for which Chinese script serves as the chief ethnographic example, seconded by gesture and numbers. Bacon supposed that a universal character might, but need not necessarily, express some 'similitude or congruity' with the things signified. For a rival understanding of universal conceptual writing in Bacon’s period and afterwards, convention was inadequate, because no set of conventional marks could ever equal the power of a language grounded in a prior kinship between signified and signifiers.