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The foundations of a civilization are of several kinds: material, spiritual, social, and institutional.
The material ones include man himself and the setting in which he lives; the others represent man’s cumulative achievement in that setting, his response to its demands and to his own. Important as environmental factors have been, the unique patterns of Chinese life cannot adequately be explained by the struggle to maintain order while wresting a livelihood from the soil, for that was the common problem of early man everywhere.
