Brinton interprets this as expressing in "Platonic language the One as distinguished from the Many," and adds that as the Chinese believed in the mystic power of numbers and that that which reduces all multiplicity to unity naturally controls or is at the summit of all things, therefore the Tai-Kih expresses the completest and highest creative force. Thus the universe being made up of opposites was brought into fructifying union by the Tai-Kih. "Abstractly the latter would be regarded as the synthesis of the two universal antitheses which make up all phenomena." I The circle is sometimes divided by three lines resembling the Chinese Y, the latter a symbol of vast antiquity. Used in this way it carries the same suggestion.
The symbolism of the inter-action of the famous Eight Trigrams is found in the Yi King or Book of Changes. "These trigrams determine good and evil, and good and evil cause the great business of human life. 1
Everything being produced by Yang and Yin, the Celestial and Terrestrial Breaths, the outcome for good or ill is in exact mathematical proportion to the way these are combined.. The struggle between and different admixtures of these two contrasting, elementary forces make all the conditions that prevail.
1 The Ta-Ki, the Swastika and the Cross in America, D. G. Brinton.
