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The Study of Comparative Civilizations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

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Scientific thought today is dominated by the spirit of synthesis, in contrast with eighteenth and nineteenth century works which were characterized by their analytical impulse. However, this movement is still lurking in the collective unconscious, and not having achieved as yet its complete flowering, it remains ignored by most of the intellectual élite. Not only because it is impossible to see the forest for the trees, but especially because, influenced by an academic tradition inherited from the great masters of past centuries, the élite today is loathe to open its eyes to the reality of our own times. Official science, most universities and specialists have been trained to feel a horror for general ideas. It would, therefore, seem that this intellectual tendency is not likely to favor the creation of vast conceptions, were it not for the fact, as we shall see later, that despite themselves, scholars and researchers are carried along by the same movement of ideas. For, in order to advance into the most varied domains of scientific thought in our time, it is sometimes necessary to establish such intimate relationships among special fields, widely separated from each other in terms of their subject matter, that actually the sketching out of veritable syntheses is taking place to some degree everywhere. It is really very simple; in the absence of such generalizations, one would be pawing the ground.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1961 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 See especially the introduction to his book: La science et l'hypothèse.

2 Even Descartes manifests this state of mind, which seems surprising since he, more than any other, contributed by his mathematics and philosophy to the development of the physical sciences. His testimony, therefore, assumes an au thority difficult to find among other seventeenth century authors: "As for classical mathematics and modern algebra, aside from the fact that they deal only with the most abstract, seemingly useless, materials… they have been made into an obscure art, encumbering the mind, rather than into a science cultivating it." Descartes, Discours de la méthode. Second Part.

3 "The Islamization of the Berbers raises an historical problem which we have no hope of resolving." Georges Marçais, La Berbérie musulmane et L'Orient au Moyen Age, Paris, Aubier, 1946, p. 35.

4 Eduardo Saavedra, Estudio sobre la invasión de los Árabes en España, Madrid 1892, p. 2.

5 Readers desiring more complete details may read in French the chapters concerning this epoch in our Histoire d'Espagne, Paris 1958, or, in Spanish, Chap. XIV, entitled "La révolution islamique," in the second volume of our work La decadencia erpañola, Madrid, Mayfe, 1950.