The Legalists

Among those who believed in an activism shunned by the Taoists were scholars who would be called Legalists. These scholars saw themselves as realists. They saw Confucian worship of the past as a waste of time and Mencius' theory about the goodness of humanity as misguided. The Legalists saw goodness as people cooperating with authority. They believed that to keep people from deviating from this cooperation, authority had to threaten punishment. Society, they believed, had to be organized by the state. They accepted as a fact of life that power was in the hands of autocratic monarchs, and they approved of this authoritarianism. They saw power in the hands of a single rational ruler and his ministers as better than exercising power that was a product of compromise.

Seeing rivalries between various states as a fact of life, the Legalists believed in strengthening the state. They believed a society benefited from military strength, and some among them advocated expansion as a means of strengthening their state. To strengthen the state they also believed in being frugal, and some among them believed in a devotion to agriculture and restrictions on commerce. And, seeing Confucian teachings and other rival theories as unessential and divisive, they favored restricting these.

During the time of wars between the petty states, there was a pursuit of knowledge that rivaled Taoism's belief in withdrawal, impulse and banishment of sageliness. And, unrelated to what Confucianists were advocating, there were developments in mathematics, physics, technology and the economy. Someone discovered the relationship between radius and circumference. Someone else re-invented what a Greek named Pythagoras had discovered about the sides of a right-angled triangle, and someone invented quadratic equations and formulas for measuring prisms, cones, and cylinders. Astronomy was being studied in the belief that the heavens affected human affairs, and, pursuing this, someone discovered how to calculate the distance between the sun and the earth. Using the principles of hydraulic engineering, intricate irrigation works and numerous dams and dikes were constructed that were to function into modern times. New canals and roads were built. Crop production had increased. And with this came the usual increase in populations and growth in the size of towns.

But science in the North China Plain remained a matter of private learning and not widely, or publicly, taught. Many, including the Confucianists, still believed that it was the gods that made things work. And technological progress remained hampered by secrecy. New techniques most often remained a trade secret among a family's males, kept from the women so it would not spread to another family through marriage.

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