Philosophical titan Feng Youlan's contemplation on the banks of the Hezhen River

Hudson River to the west of Columbia University, Hu Shi translated as Hezhen River. When Hu Shi was studying in the United States, he wrote "The Sons Are Not out of the Theory of The King's Official", which was appended to the text with the inscription "April Grass in the Sixth Year of the Republic of China on the Hezhen River".

In September 1982, at the invitation of his alma mater, Feng Youlan returned to Columbia University to receive an honorary doctorate in literature and wrote a poem:

A farewell to the Sixty Springs of the Zhenjiang River,

Q Jiang can recognize the next person?

Zhishan Huihai fax fire,

Willing to follow the previous salary as the next salary.

Probably influenced by Hu Shi, Feng Youlan also called the hudson river next to Columbia University as HeZhenjiang in his poem, and asked HeZhenjiang with the poet's interest and language whether he remembered him, a Chinese student at Columbia University Research Institute. Returning to her alma mater after 60 years, Feng Youlan was full of emotions. For Feng Youlan, the study abroad life on the banks of the Hezhen River is an important experience in his life journey, which cannot be forgotten and can never be forgotten. Because in Feng Youlan's view, his study abroad life at Columbia University Institute meant the beginning of his philosophical activities in the following decades. The sign of this beginning is that he began to think about Chinese and Western cultural issues from a philosophical level.

Feng Youlan believes that there are many similarities in the development history of Chinese and Western philosophy.

The rise of Christianity in the West and the rise of Buddhism in China have a very similar ideological background.

The flourishing era of Western Greek philosophy was, by and large, the era of the rise of the Warring States sons in China.

In the development of Greek philosophy, while skepticism negated philosophy, in China there was the burning of books by Qin Shi Huang, and even the emergence of the cumbersome classics of the Han Dynasty;

The result of these cultural phenomena is that people doubt reason and attribute it to religion.

What is even more interesting is that Feng Youlan believes that the Qing Dynasty scholars' examination method is in line with the western scientific spirit, and although the Qing Confucian examination is different from the object of western science, the scientific spirit contained in the Qing Confucian examination method should not be denied.

Feng Youlan's ideological motivation for believing that Chinese and Western cultures have similarities is that he is unwilling to easily accept the backward concept of Chinese culture.

Feng Youlan does not deny that China's modern science is backward, but he attributes the reason for this backwardness to the values of Chinese tradition.

According to Feng Youlan's understanding, china's modern science lagged behind the West, not because Chinese could not, but because Chinese did not do anything. Such a cultural concept makes Feng Youlan firmly believe that there is a possibility of reconciling the contradictions between Chinese and Western cultures, and the tradition of Chinese culture can still make its own contribution to the development of human civilization in the future.

Feng Youlan once wrote an article entitled "On The Comparison of Chinese and Western Cultures" as an article on the discussion of Chinese and Western cultures and nationality issues by a student studying in the United States, which was published in the magazine (Xueyi) in 1922 as an introduction to Chinese academic circles about Chinese and Western cultures and ethnic issues. In his deliberations on Chinese and Western cultures, he wrote Moriei an interpntation of bitiry and consepaence of chinese ilooply, first as a paper presented at the Columbia University Philosophical Society in the fall of 1921, and later published in the United States (International Journal of Ethics).

"Why There Is No Science in China- An Explanation of the History of Chinese Philosophy and Its Consequences" is the result of Feng Youlan's thinking about Chinese and Western cultural issues during his studies at Columbia University, forming an earlier understanding. Because Feng Youlan in this article, has begun to weigh on its own, breaking the boundary between the East and the West, distinguishing the differences between different academic schools in culture from the boundaries of regions and nationalities, using concepts such as "nature" and "man-made" to examine the cultures of the East and the West, and to describe the ideological characteristics of the schools of academic culture. Therefore, after the paper was read at the Columbia University Philosophical Conference, it was praised and praised by Professors such as Woodbridge and Dewey.

Later, Feng Youlan wrote his doctoral dissertation on the basis of the article "Why There Is No Science in China - An Explanation of the History of Chinese Philosophy and Its Consequences": "The Theory of Profit and Loss of Heaven and Man".

The paper makes a specific comparison between the different philosophical schools of China and the West, and concludes that the development of human philosophy is not divided into things, but only "seeing" and "hiding". This is a work written Chinese the 1920s to systematically compare Chinese and Western philosophy, the understanding of the similarities and differences between Chinese and Western philosophies of life in the book is unreasonable, well-founded, and highly distinctive, reaching a fairly high theoretical level, and is an important cognitive achievement of the Chinese academic community in the 1920s to compare Chinese and Western cultures and explore the similarities and differences between Chinese and Western philosophies.

The completion of "The Theory of Profit and Loss of Heaven and Man" enabled Feng Youlan to successfully pass the defense of his doctoral thesis and draw a satisfactory end to his study abroad life at Columbia University Research Institute.