The Greeks’ focus on the salient object and its attributes led to ① their failure to understand the fundamental nature of causality. Aristotle explained that a stone falling through the air is due to the stone having the property of “gravity.” But of course a piece of wood ② tossed into water floats instead of sinking. This phenomenon Aristotle explained as being due to the wood having the property of “levity”! In both cases the focus is ③ exclusively on the object, with no attention paid to the possibility that some force outside the object might be relevant. But the Chinese saw the world as consisting of continuously interacting substances, so their attempts to understand it ④ causing them to be oriented toward the complexities of the entire “field,” that is, the context or environment as a whole. The notion ⑤ that events always occur in a field of forces would have been completely intuitive to the Chinese.

* salient: 현저한, 두드러진 ** levity: 가벼움