Max Weber was one of the very few to integrally work through Chinese thought on the one hand and empirical Chinese society on the other. To link as it were the transcendental and the empirical. The transcendental of Daoism on the one hand and the empirical of Confucianism on the other. The wuming on the one hand and the zhengming. And probably the most penetrating juxtaposition of the West on the one hand and China on the other. The Western trinity of creation, revelation and redemption, on the one hand, and China where there is neither Creation nor redemption but which is ‘trapped in an infinity’.