China and the West

Lin, Yutang. My country and my people [ID D13801].
Lin Yutang turned Irving Babbitt's name into an adjective 'Babbittian' to describe his intellectual system, an early and perhaps first usage of the word. In doing so, he once again compared Babbitt with Confucius. He observed the common sense of Confucius 'dismisses supernaturalism as the realm of the unknowable and expends extremely little time on it' and that Confucianism is 'equally emphatic in the assertion of the superiority of the human mind over nature and in the denial of nature's way of life, or naturalism, as the human way'. The Confjucian conception that 'heaven, earth and man' comprise 'the three geniuses of the univers' Lin then compares to 'the Babbittian threefold distinction of supernaturalism, humanism and naturalism'.