Spectrum of the Mind: Spiritual Optics in Late Qing and Early Republican China

Abstract

This paper traces how the spectroscope—a nineteenth-century instrument for identifying chemical elements through their characteristic spectral lines—framed the optical imagination of mental and spiritual light in late Qing and early Republican China. In an era when optical technologies were widely refurnished for spiritual ends, this paper shows how the spectroscope’s visual logic first inspired the envisioning of live mental images in late Qing scientific exchanges and science fictions, and how it then shaped the classification of numinous light and the process of inner cultivation in the spiritualist movement in the early Republican decades. Across these steps, the spectroscope served not merely as an optical instrument but as an epistemic model that mediated both the external observation and the internal experience of mental process.