By dint of close adherence to mere applications, principles would be lost sight of; and when the principles were wholly forgotten, the methods derived from them would be ill-pursued.

New methods could no longer be invented, and men would continue to apply, without intelligence, and without art, scientific processes no longer understood.
When Europeans first arrived in China, three hundred years ago, they found that almost all the arts had reached a certain degree of perfection there; and they were surprised that a people which had attained this point should not have gone beyond it.

At a later period they discovered some traces of the higher branches of science which were lost.

The nation was absorbed in productive industry: the greater part of its scientific processes had been preserved, but science itself no longer existed there.

This served to explain the strangely motionless state in which they found the minds of this people.