It seems impossible to foresee man's future. However, we do see clearly that the past determines our present in many realms : language, concept of the world, religion, science, law. Moreover, certain biological and physiological conditions appear to be so characteristic of the human species that we would not really be concerned with humanity if men managed to free themselves of these conditions.

Intonation matters, in English as well as in Chinese. We may describe an item in the human record as historically (really) significant, or as (merely) historically significant. The distinction is between an empirical judgment of fruitfulness in time and a normative judgment of aridity in the here and now.

The rise and rapid progress of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries a.d. drew the East and West much closer than any force had yet done and opened out numerous channels of intrecourse, material and spiritual. Travel and trade increased when the first shocks of war and hostility subsided, and, thanks to the writings of Arab travelers, geographers, and historians, we possess a more than usually complete record of the transactions of the age. The early Arab geographers gained from India the notion that there was a world center which they styled arin, a corruption of the name of the Indian town of Ujjayinï, where there was an astronomical observatory and on the meridian of which “the world cupola” or “summit” was supposed to be located.

Informed Christians have learned in our day that Islâm is not a primitive desert religion spread by the sword, for which faith is reduced to fatalism and women have no souls. Yet Christian historians of religion who avoid such gross errors still tend to present Islâm as at best an imperfect and parochial version of Christian truth, lacking any distinctive genius truly worthy of its independent dignity among the world religions. But until modern times, when the Christianity (and Judaism) of Europeans has been radically transformed along with their secular life, Christianity must long have struck an observer from Mars as, compared to Islâm, the relatively localized faith of largely backward lands. Islâm was the vehicle of a complex and sophisticated sense of social order in a varied and highly creative civilization which was expanding continuously until its field of action encompassed half mankind; it was the only one of the major historical religions which had successfully displaced in large areas other major faiths such as Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism. The Martian observing human history in the later Middle Ages might find it easier to understand why Muslims have looked on Christianity as merely an abortive form of Islâm, as for instance in the approach of those Şûfîs, Muslim mystics, who see the perfection of Islâm in its uniting at once the dispensation of Law, which reflects the Majesty of God, and the dispensation of Grace, which reflects his Beauty, whereas Judaism and Christianity are limited to only the one or the other. This Muslim conception is as inadequate, however, as its Christian counterpart. Probably any widespread religious system will find a place for all major types of religious insight and practice and is in its own way complete. Yet, as each system has matured, it has revealed a characteristic persistent pattern of norms in the interrelation and subordination to one another of all the elements embodied in it. If Christians are to perceive the genius of Islâm, it must perhaps be through the comparison of such persistent patterns.

The tolerance which the Islamic tradition showed—not in theory alone but in practice as well—toward the infidels, the “protected” (dhimmi) Jews and Christians, is well known. In several places in the Koran, Mohammed proclaimed the inalienable right of these two “Peoples of Scripture” to worship the common God of Abraham in their very imperfect fashion. The passages in question ordinarily mentioned Christians and fetus, and the imprecations which in another context (in the “Sura of the Cow,” for example) the Prophet hurled against the Jews of Medina who would not recognize him, in no way altered the cardinal principle developed later by the commentators in the hadith (“tradition”). The two categories of dhimmi were placed under the same legal and political control. In conformity with the “pact” of Caliph Omar (the second successor to Mohammed) the dhimmis had to recognize Moslem supremacy, lavish many signs of subordination and respect upon the true believers, behave as loyal subjects, and above all, pay tribute. By this means the free exercise of their cult under the protection of Islam was assured.

The Middle Ages, and in particular the twelfth century, with its monks who were philosophers, theologians, and mystics, hung upon biblical thought and through it did its thinking, its loving, and its acting. The Old and the New Testaments were studied and meditated upon together, though the Old Testament was more often commented upon than was the New. Both offered two successive stages, represented by the law and by grace. For the men of the twelfth century Holy Scripture was the basis of their symbolic mentality. Through Scripture they could distinguish a duality of meanings which can be stated precisely under the terms “letter” and “spirit.” This double terminology was comprehended on two different levels and depended on the degree of the individual's evolution. Saint Bernard understood it very well when he alluded to the ordinary mode of seeing and to the spiritual mode. The heart's vision sees in the mind (Sermon XLV, 5, on the Song of Songs. Just as that hearing which is not of the body but which belongs to the heart understands what the ears could not hear, there are, according to Saint Bernard, three kinds of language to which three modes of understanding correspond: the mode of the hireling, that of the son, and that of the wife (Sermon VII, 2, on the Song of Songs) ? The first stays on the threshold to knowledge, the second crosses it, but only the wife penetrates into true knowledge which designates a knowledge acquired more by intuition than by learning and which Saint Jerome called “scientia secretorum.” This stimulates another way of thinking and of loving and coincides with a new dimension of being. In regard to the comprehension of symbolic content, three steps or successive stages are involved here.

Attempts to reconstruct the “psychology” of a past era always have a specious side which should properly be mistrusted. Was the “Renaissance man” a visualizer? Arguments for and against this thesis have been found, but nothing can be solved, because it will always be impossible to prove that a phenomenon, even if it is very widespread and completely characteristic of a given period, is symptomatic of a particular psychic constitution of the men of that time. If the writings and the art of the sixteenth century seem to us to include the elements of a complete logic of figurative thought, which would certainly be of interest for the history of intellectual methods, the fact as such must not be translated into terms of the psychology of individuals.