The Han’s ultimate embrace of Confucianism would end up changing the world for ever. Scholars such as Richard Nisbett argue that the flat and fertile landscape of China gave his ideas a kind of pre-destiny. In contrast to the Greeks, with their islands and city states, and their concomitant view of reality as a collection of individual objects, China’s rolling, isolated, conquerable plains and hills produced a species of self that worked best as part of a group. It also resulted in them viewing reality not as a mass of objects, but as a realm of interconnected forces. For the Confucian
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