“We must try with our thoughts to meet the scope of a sentence”

“We must try with our thoughts to meet the scope of a sentence” is the interpretive maxim that anchors the translator’s method for rendering the Yî. It defines translation not as a word-for-word transfer, but as a disciplined effort to grasp the thought expressed through Chinese characters and make it intelligible in another language.

From literalness to thought

The maxim arises from the failure of the translator’s first attempt. In 1854 he tried to make his English as concise as the Chinese, producing passages composed of words with little or no marked syntactical connection. He had followed the example of P. Regis and his collaborators; he judged their Latin version nearly unintelligible and his own no better. The problem was not solved by greater fidelity to the visible sequence of words. It required a different account of what written Chinese represented.

The translator’s conclusion was that Chinese characters are symbols of ideas, not representations of words, and that their combination presents what a writer thinks rather than simply reproducing what the writer would say. A literal version therefore cannot serve as the governing ideal. The translator must first let the symbolic characters bring the mind into contact with the author’s; only then can the ideas be expressed in English as clearly as possible.

The maxim and its limits

The wording of the maxim comes from Mencius’s counsel on interpreting ancient poems: “We must try with our thoughts to meet the scope of a sentence, and then we shall apprehend it.” The translator applies that advice to classical reading as a movement from the written sign toward the thought it conveys. His description of the process as a meeting of minds makes interpretation active, but not arbitrary: its purpose remains to express the original meaning as exactly and concisely as possible.

That distinction matters because understanding may require words that the source leaves implicit. The translator allows himself to introduce a word or two when needed to indicate what he believes the author’s thought supplied for itself. He generally marks such additions with parentheses, while acknowledging that he might have dispensed with them because he believed the added sense was already present in the writer’s thought. The maxim thus authorizes clarification, not free invention.

A method shaped by the Yî

The method responds to the unusual difficulty of the Yî. Its compressed, enigmatic style makes it especially hard to render intelligibly, and the translator argues that even its authors had to write in the manner of diviners. In explaining the structure of its Text, he describes sixty-four short, symbolic essays grounded in figures of six whole or divided lines. King Wen interprets each hexagram as a whole, while the Duke of Zhou explains its individual lines; the interpretation of the whole is meant to accord with the combined significance of those six lines. A translation has to make these relations legible without mistaking a bare sequence of signs for a complete English sentence.

The maxim also bears on how a reader connects a figure to its meaning. The significance of a line varies with the hexagram in which it appears, its position, and its relationship to other lines. The translator stresses the importance of understanding the hexagram’s name and the condition it denotes before assigning significance to its lines. Reading for the scope of a sentence therefore parallels reading the figures: meaning emerges through relation and context, not through isolated elements.

Clarity without overclaiming

The translator presents the maxim as a practical rule for intelligibility, not as permission to make every difficult passage seem profound. He anticipates that readers may find some explanations of the hexagrams to be “much ado about nothing,” but says that the translator should not be held accountable if that judgment is warranted by the original. His position combines interpretive responsibility with a limit: he must make the author’s thought clear, yet cannot claim that clarity will remove every obscurity in the source.

That restraint also governs his treatment of later philosophical readings. Discussing the Great Treatise, he rejects the assumption that its account of yin and yang already contains a fully developed theory of primary matter. In his view, such a theory took shape much later, and reading it back into the earlier text puts the last first. The maxim’s demand to meet the author’s thought consequently includes a historical caution: interpretation should illuminate what the text supports, not import a later system simply because it offers a ready-made explanation.