Joseph Needham, biochemist and historian, is ninety-two and has not yet completed the most remarkable academic career in twentieth-century England. His memorial will be Science and Civilization in China, which ranks with Toynbee’s A Study of History, Frazer’s The Golden Bough, and Havelock Ellis’s The Psychology of Sex among the monuments of liberal scholarship. Like all such monuments, Needham’s major work drives a small number of ideas about thought, politics, knowledge, and religion through an extraordinary range of material. The questions that arise are about the continuity between the vatic quality with which Needham has surrounded his interest in China since the 1940s and the vatic quality of his interest in biochemistry, science, religion, and politics before that.
By the time he began a four-year stint as Scientific Counsellor to the British Embassy in Chungking in 1942, Needham had published a large scientific work and what were to be the last of his research articles. Thereafter, he abandoned science and research articles. Almost all his future writing was to be an application to science, religion, and society in China of a doctrine which had originally been applied to science, religion, and society in England.
Volume I of Science and Civilization in China, which appeared in 1954, described China’s economic geography and political history, and the contacts which China had had with India, Islam, and Western Europe, up to the fifteenth century. It also announced the structure at which Needham was to aim from
