Art. IX.—The Oldest Book of the Chinese (the Yh-King) and its Authors (Continued).

Abstract

The possibility of understanding certain parts of the Yh-King, such as the ethnological chapters and the legendary ballads, led early to the conclusion, that the whole of these documents could be currently read and interpreted. It is quite possible that the hexagrams were attached to them merely as a system of numerical classification to keep them in proper order; but it is more likely that the antiquity of these obscure documents, and the tradition that they contained a treasure of ancient wisdom, first led to their use as fateful and prophetic sentences, in which some glimmer of meaning was detected or surmised, and that the hexagrams were then applied to them for the purposes of divination.