Functional Classification of Visual Behavior by Chinese Characters

Chinese language is the only ideographic language still used.Its elements number more than fifty thousand characters.Consulting a voluminous Chinese-Japanese dictionary, it was found that there exists about 350 characters which related to vision or use of visual apparatus.After redundant ones were omitted, 250 characters were classified into morphology, physiology, pathology, psychology, and miscellany sections.The psychology section was further divided into five modes of vision.Oriental thinking was revealed in the varieties of the character classification.Chinese language which is used in Mainland China and Formosa is the only ideographic letter system in the world.A written Chinese sentences are completely composed of rows of single ideograms, so-called Chinese characters.The number of characters produced throughout three thousand years of Chinese history may be more than fifty thousand.The needs or necessities for such mass production are uncertain.We think ritual needs in ancient mystic society, political needs of the sovereign in feudal ages, and communicative needs of sophists, poets, and clerks should be considered probable.At present, one fifth of the total number of characters, about ten thousand, are still used in Mainland China, Formosa, Korea, and Japan.People's Republic of China has simplified systematically the characters which are frequently used.We can find them by consulting the one popular pocket dictionary published by Xlnhua bookstore in Peking.The total number of characters printed in this book is eighty five hundred.Japanese language has a mixed style and is composed of about one hundred phonographic letters and two thousand Chinese ideographic letters.These have survived among several thousand ideograms propagated from China.But older generations of Japanese who had been educated before the Second World War can read and write much more than five thousand characters, and they may be the last people who can compare the ideogram with the phonogram, and furthermore, recognize the merits of Chinese characters.As a chemical substance is crystallized under extremely high pressure and high temperature, so Chinese characters, more than fifty thousand, have been crystallized in the sociopsychological atmosphere of the Asian Continent.It is not necessary to say that the aim of consulting a dictionary is to understand