Walter Henry Medhurst

Walter Henry Medhurst appears in the commentator’s discussion not as a figure in a narrated life but as a consequential interpreter of the Yijing. His explanations of kwei-shăn are considered in two passages: one concerning the components of the name and human life, the other connecting spirit-like agencies with the numerical patterns used to form the lines. The commentator finds Medhurst’s first explanation substantially close to his own, yet the comparison also makes visible how competing translations can shift the text toward different accounts of soul, nature, and spiritual power.

Identity and interpretive context

Medhurst is identified as Dr. Medhurst and as a foreign scholar of Chinese texts. The book gives no biographical narrative beyond this scholarly role; its evidence concerns his interpretation and translation. He is situated among interpreters who repeat Chinese commentators’ assumptions about the meaning of yin and yang, but the discussion of kwei-shăn gives him a more specific place in the argument: his reading is compared directly with the commentator’s and with Canon McClatchie’s.

The distinction matters because the commentator is resisting a retrospective cosmology. He argues that the Yijing’s Great Treatise addresses changing phenomena in nature and experience, not a fully formed theory of primordial matter later developed in the Confucian school. Against that background, an interpretation of kwei-shăn is not merely a choice of English equivalents. It helps determine whether a passage is read as describing human life, cosmic principles, or divine beings.

The two passages on kwei-shăn

In the first passage, the commentator assigns a separate significance to each part of the name: kwei denotes the animal soul or nature, while Shăn denotes the intellectual soul. Their union constitutes the living rational person. He translates the pair as “the anima and the animus,” and reports Medhurst’s explanation that the kwei-shăns are the expanding and contracting principles of human life. In Medhurst’s account, the human frame dissolves; the expanding and ascending shăn ranges through space, while the contracted kwei returns to earth and nonentity.

The commentator judges this explanation “pretty much the same view as my own,” though he says he would not use the language of expansion and contraction in this context. That qualification is important: agreement concerns the broad account of differentiated aspects of human life, not every term used to describe them. Canon McClatchie, by contrast, consistently renders the characters as “demons and gods,” a translation that presents them as supernatural beings rather than as aspects of the living person.

The second passage is harder to settle. It says that the odd numbers assigned to Heaven and the even numbers assigned to Earth effect changes and transformations, while the spirit-like agencies are kept in movement. The commentator reads this as an account of how numbers enable the formation of spirit-like lines on a scale capable of picturing the changing phenomena of nature. Medhurst, following an explanation attributed to Kû Hsî, understands kwei-shăns here as the contractions and expansions, retreats and approaches, of the productive and completing powers associated with even and odd numbers.

Translation, disagreement, and significance

The contrast between the passages reveals a change of interpretive scale. In the first, Medhurst’s explanation concerns the dissolution of the human body and the distinct fates assigned to shăn and kwei. In the second, the same term is related to the movement of numerical powers through which changing patterns are produced. The commentator treats the latter passage as difficult to determine precisely, and does not collapse it into the first. Medhurst’s account supplies a way to understand the “spirit-like agencies” through paired processes—expansion and contraction, retreat and approach—rather than simply naming gods or demons.

The notes also preserve a divergence between Medhurst and McClatchie in the second passage. McClatchie does not repeat his “demons and gods” rendering there; he instead gives “the Demon-god (i.e. Shang Tî).” The commentator postpones discussion of that version until the fifth Appendix. Medhurst therefore figures in a continuing interpretive comparison, not as the subject of a settled verdict but as a scholar whose explanations help expose the consequences of translating the same term in different ways.

The book further notes that the single character shăn occurs more than twenty times, used as a noun, adjective, and verb, and directs readers to the translation and notes for its various senses. That wider range cautions against treating any one English equivalent as a universal key. Medhurst’s readings are most significant here as precise, context-bound attempts: in one passage they clarify a distinction within human life; in another they connect spirit-like action with the changing numerical structure of the lines. Through the comparison, the commentator keeps the Yijing anchored in the transformations it describes rather than turning its vocabulary automatically into a doctrine of gods or primordial substance.