Chinese Science:

>Nevertheless ... Chinese science remained too practical in its orientation and did not formulate a theoretical outlook which assumed a rational, orderly universe guided by universal laws.

Chinese science did not contain the idea of a natural world governed by laws in the mathematical sense; it spoke neither of the ultimate, constituent elements of nature nor of a law-governed reality underlying the appearences of the senses (Needham). Instead of "elements", Chinese thinkers spoke of "phases" and recurring "cycles", and instead of "causes" they spoke of "correlations" or analogies. It also had no concept of a "cosmos", a single entity called "nature", and it did not employ a deductive method of a rigorous demonstration according to which a conclusion, a theorem, was proven by reasoning from a series of self-evident axioms.<

TUoWC, Ricardo Duchesne, p250