In chapter 2 we watched Aristotle's Categories being transmitted to the Chinese as the focus of a monumental, centuries-old commentarial tradition. Even without the elaborate referencing system and syllogistic format of the original, much of the richness and power of this extraordinary exegetical machinery, with its forceful combination of authority and close reasoning, has come across in the Chinese version of the commentary – at times, it must be admitted, in the Chinese version of the Categories itself. For we have detected occasional blurrings between authorial text and explanatory armature which would be unacceptable today. It is tempting, of course, to ask whether that division was deliberately neglected; but perhaps this question would have been meaningless to the Jesuit, if he took his goal as conveying to a new readership ‘what Aristotle was really saying’. And that task could simply not have been accomplished (it was plainly assumed), whatever the audience, without the resources of a vast and sophisticated technical vocabulary and all its associated distinctions and definitions.

The reader's dominant impression must surely be one of enormous, and enormously ingenious, inventiveness: of language being put to new and difficult work with great skill and precision. (The list of Aristotelian Chinese jargon will reinforce that impression, if reinforcement is needed.) But the sheer scale of the achievement should not be allowed to dwarf or conceal signs of stress or mismatch, of forced or improper renderings, even, perhaps, of failures of translation, if they exist.