One of the characteristic features of our time is the growth of its historical sense. The reason for this development is clear : we have lived more history than any other epoch in the evolution of mankind. In the past, during that short period of historical stability which—cum grano salis— characterized the forty-three years between the French-German War of 1870-71 and World War I, a person could live without being interested in history. In our days such an attitude is no longer possible. We may try in vain to take no interest in history. History takes interest in us, in each of us. The last half-century showed us that to understand history is of equal importance to those who make it and to those who endure it. After having gone through two world wars and being confronted with the threat of a third one, people of my generation finally learned to understand that history is a perpetual collective becoming, of which each individual is, willy-nilly, a part. At the cost of great sacrifices we have acquired a new sense unknown to our fathers : a historical sense which guides us in life. As the seagull has a sense for meteorological storms, man, in the middle of the twentieth century, has developed a sense for historical storms : he feels the coming of wars and revolutions.

Although urbanism in terms of “a relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals” is not a general characteristic of traditional life, it is far from being unique in West Africa. In 1911 there were already twenty-nine towns of over 3,000 inhabitants in what is now southern Ghana, and this degree of urban concentration is small compared with western Nigeria. The Yoruba of that region have six cities of more than 100,000, including Ibadan, which is the largest Negro city in Africa. In 1931 some 28 per cent of the Yoruba lived in nine cities of 45,000 inhabitants, while 34 per cent of the population lived in sixteen cities of over 20,000 inhabitants. In addition, there were twenty-seven centers with populations between 10,000 and 19,999. Bascom has calculated that the estimated index of urbanization of Yoruba cities falls between that of the United States and Canada and that the distribution of population in urban centers is very similar to that of France.

Following the Grammarians, the Poets in ancient India concerned themselves with certain problems of semantics, the solution of which, they felt, would make possible a better perception of the relationships between language and thought. Thus they distinguished the meaning of words, depending upon whether it was directly expressive or indirect and allusive. The indirect meaning, they said, is introduced whenever the primary meaning has been hampered by some sort of incompatibility. At times it retains its connection with the primary sense : this is precisely what is termed “metaphoric” meaning; at others, it frees itself from the primary sense entirely or in part, and this constitutes the gamut of “implicit” meaning. In addition, the indirect meaning is “internal”; the other is “external.” This, to be sure, can signify that one is concealed and the other apparent; but what is indicated above all is that one is profound or essential while the other is superficial or minor.

It would be romanticism to evoke the Middle Ages from its tomb to serve as a model for our own thinking about political morals. However, quite apart from the specific and characteristic medieval features, there is another element which goes back to antiquity and forward into our modern epoch—the great continuity of ideas embraced in the terminology and the practical rules which make for their efficiency. It may be worthwhile to study these ideas instead of dismissing them as unimportant generalities.

“Jewish emancipation”—the term itself started to come into common use after the achievement of the Catholic emancipation in England in 1828—is a weighted phrase. Like the corresponding Roman legal concept, it connotes the release of Jews from previous bondage into a state of freedom. As such it has represented a major stage in the struggle of liberal forces for the attainment of equality of rights for all men and was the dominant factor in the political and legal evolution of modern Jewry. From that standpoint modern Jewish history has often been equated with the progress of legal equality. In fact, most historians have dated its beginning with the emancipatory legislation of the French Revolution, that is, with the proclamation by the French National Assembly in January, 1790, of the equality of rights of Sephardic (Spanish-Portuguese) Jews and of the Ashkenazic (German-Polish) Jews in September, 1791. So widely accepted was this periodicization that it was considered an expression of American nationalism when, some three decades ago, two American Jewish historians, Max L. Margolis and Alexander Marx, pushed back the inception of that period a few years to the era of the American Revolution.

The study of the Russian Middle Age, utilizing archeology as a key, has scored great successes at Novgorod during these last years. The thick historical layer formed there over a period of a thousand years is at present being sifted by an important group of Soviet archeologists.

There is a periodic need for a general survey and stock-taking in almost every field, but in the domain of the pre-Islamic history of Iran, to my knowledge, there has been little scholarly assessment of the picture of the past in light of changes wrought by new source materials. One important reason is that the sources for this history have increased considerably in the past few decades, and scholars have devoted the bulk of their time to the elucidation of these sources, with little time left for a study of their historical consequences. Another point which should be made is the difference between the requirements, on the one hand, for the work of ancient and medieval historians and, on the other hand, for that of modern colleagues. Historians of more recent times like to emphasize the homogeneity of the historical profession and the continuity of methods in the entire field. But in practice it is the classicist who, in our universities, concerns himself with ancient history. I mean by this one who is trained in the methods of textual analysis and the tools of the classicist, and it is the Orientalist or philologist who writes the history of the pre-modern Orient. Given the difficulties of ancient oriental languages and the need to gather source material from the archeologist, epigraphist, numismatist, and art historian, one can understand the great demands on these specialists who would write history. It is no wonder that the methods of the modern historian, evolved from work with an abundance of material and the need for comparison of various sources in evaluating a multitude of factors and roles played by individuals in a given situation, are of a somewhat different nature from those of the scholar who investigates the more distant past. The modern historian is dependent on the economist and political scientist for aid in reconstructing his story. This is the result, of course, of the differentiation and great expansion of knowledge in modern times. The disciplines become defined, and specialization is a necessity in view of the great mass of documentation. Before the advent of writing, archeology, history, and other disciplines are undifferentiated. With its invention, however, the process of ordering subjects and fields at once begins. With the increase of material remains, archeology, for example, divides into the history of architecture, with art, epigraphy, numismatics, the history of technology, and so on. This is inherent in the process of understanding.

The expression commonly employed, “history of philosophy,” often seems either inexact or incomplete, depending on whether the term “philosophy” is understood to mean a system of the sciences or whether it is taken in the historic sense. In the first case, what is in question is a certain ideal system of well-founded questions and of exact and logically demonstrated affirmations relative to the objects of a certain domain. So defined, philosophy is not the object of this study. In the second case, the historic sense, the term “philosophy” designates a collection of questions and affirmations growing and changing in time, effectively expressed in a given time and by specific men. They ought to concern the objects of the domain of philosophy in the sense of systematic exposition, whose content, however, itself underwent notable changes in the course of the development of philosophy in the historical sense—particularly of European philosophy. In the spirit of their authors they ought to be true. However, according to all probability, many of them are false or at least insufficiently founded. They are, moreover, the intentional products of a certain number of cognitive, human acts. But they result at the same time—in their properties, their content, their formulation, the mode of their justification—from the influence of other states and extra-cognitive attitudes of philosophers: various sentiments, desires, religious beliefs, etc. It is therefore improper to speak of the “history of philosophy” in the sense of a philosophic system, for, in this sense, philosophy insofar as it is an ideal, extratemporal product can have no kind of history. If, on the other hand, this expression is intended to involve a question of philosophy in the historic sense, it is necessary to complete it by specifying that in the given historic consideration we are dealing with the evolution of a given philosophy—for example, of Greek philosophy from Thales to the death of Aristotle. So understood, the history of philosophy is an empirical discipline relative to certain empirical facts which occur in time. It is necessary to bear clearly in mind the nature of these acts: Is it a question only of a certain collection of phrases, or of something more?