The progress of knowledge consists in part of avoiding superficial analogies and discovering profound kinships, less apparent perhaps, but far more important and significant. In the eighteenth century there still appeared zoölogical works which classed animals according to the number of their paws, grouping, for example, the lizard with the bat. Today the adder appears under the same rubric—a creature that has no paws at all but that, like the others, is oviparous and covered with scales. These characteristics have appeared, rightly, to be of more consequence than that which was singled out in the beginning—the number of paws. In the same fashion, it is well known that, despite its appearance, the whale is not a fish, nor is the bat a bird.

Nature and history are for us two diametrically opposed possibilities of organization, knowledge, interpretation, and evaluation of the reality around us. Since the Renaissance, the world can no longer be thought of as a structured and coherent whole, and its meaning always remains partial. The world bears within it a duality which nothing can surmount: Nature and mind represent the two poles of a reality which Jean Mair described as early as the end of the fifteenth century as non facientia unum. The being of Nature consists henceforth in being an object of representation, of scientific knowledge, and of technical exploitation. The being of man consists in placing himself as subject opposite the world, which is conceived as an object essentially foreign to man, “mute” in what concerns his ultimate destination. Up to that time, man knew himself by referring to an “objective,” undiscussed world; existence could be constantly shaken by the deepest terrors, but it was not problematical : man knew his natural place in a world ordered by a sovereign reason. Now with the destruction of the theophanic universe, it was not only man's place in the world which became problematical but the very idea of the universe; the experience of the living totality of the world was progressively drained of its substance. The new “situation of man in the world” is that of a being savagely freed of everything, profoundly isolated in the midst of an infinitely open world in which the global has less and less meaning and in which it is no longer a question of participating in being but of doing and of having. Rimbaud's remark, “We are not in the world,” began to be true; incapable of finding his support in the universe, placing all his pride in seeking his truth within himself, man then turned to history to ask of it those answers which the former wisdom, the former Weltweisheit, or revelation could no longer give him. In the “ocean of Cartesian doubt” Vico saw history as the only firmum et mansurum to which man could lay claim. As the work of a freedom progressively creating its own content for itself, as a return to itself of the mind lost or “alienated” in matter, history was becoming the only humanly possible way of conceiving the “natural” place of man in the world, the sole encompassing (τɛρι∊χoν) totality still capable of serving as a horizon for his triumphant self-certainty, the only world still conceivable after the suppression of transcendency and the loss of presence. According to Marx’ profound observation, history had the mission, “once the thither side of truth had vanished, to establish the truth of the hither side.” To the “dead” or “hidden” God and to “mute” or inaudible Nature, man opposed this derisory fragment of time which he had succeeded in making his and from which he hoped to derive at once the truth of his being and the norm of his action.

To read, to read a book, is, like all the other really human occupations, a Utopian task. I call “utopian” every action whose initial intention cannot be fulfilled in the development of its activity and which has to be satisfied with approximations essentially contradictory to the purpose which had started it. Thus “to read” begins by signifying the project of understanding a text fully. Now this is impossible. It is only possible with a great effort to extract a more or less important portion of what the text has tried to say, communicate, make known; but there will always remain an “illegible” residue. It is, on the other hand, probable that, while we are making this effort, we may read, at the same time, into the text; that is, we may understand things which the author has not “meant” to say, and, nevertheless, he has “said” them; he has presented them to us involuntarily—even more, against his professed purpose. This twofold condition of speech, so strange and antithetical, appears in two principles of my “Axioms for a New Philology,” which are as follows:

1. 1. Every utterance is deficient—it says less than it wishes to say.

2. 2. Every utterance is exuberant—it conveys more than it plans.

In an introduction to Louis J. Halle's Civilization and Foreign Policy, Dean Acheson notes with approval that Halle believed a group of men, formerly members of the Policy Planning Staff of the United States State Department, to be seeking a new theory of foreign policy which would lie outside the traditional theory. Halle's work, like that of the others whose names were mentioned (George F. Kennan, Paul Nitze, and C. B. Marshall), represented a serious and searching analysis of the conceptual frame of American foreign policy, a search largely accompanied by a demand for a more realistic consideration of problems of power. The members of the Policy Planning Staff were by no means the only, or even the first, Americans to question American thinking on foreign policy from the standpoint of power politics. Without going back to Alexander Hamilton, we must consider, in particular, Hans J. Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr. This kind of thinking is still being advanced; and, more recently, the warning that Americans misunderstood the problem of power was put with some forcefulness by Robert Endicott Osgood : “More than any other great nation, America's basic predispositions and her experience in world politics encourage the dissociation of power and policy.” There is no doubt that work of recent years has shown the increased seriousness of American interest in the problems of foreign policy and civilization. The contribution which these and other writers have made is a very great one. Despite many differences among themselves, their trend seems to embody a certain oneness, which lies in a perception of the problems of power. Acheson points to the practical experience of the State Department group and their intention to “see life steadily and see it whole,” in Matthew Arnold's famous phrase. Yet, a few years after these writers, whom Acheson so highly regarded, had tried to acquaint the American people with the realities of power in foreign policy, one of them, George F. Kennan, was publicly criticized by Acheson himself for “never having understood the realities of power politics.” Shortly thereafter, Acheson, in his latest book, reiterated the charge that “power politics” was, for Americans, still a derogatory term. Kennan, one of our most thoughtful and sensitive writers on foreign policy, and Acheson, one of our most articulate and eloquent secretaries of state, had failed to satisfy the American people, and Kennan had failed, apparently, to satisfy Acheson regarding the significance and the reality of power politics. Yet in the light of some of the literature which has appeared since the rise of these writers, whom we may call “realists” though they do not necessarily so characterize themselves, one may question whether the danger is still that which Acheson described. One who reads Henry A. Kissinger's Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy may wonder not whether Americans understand the realities of power but whether, indeed, some of them understand anything else. We face the danger that the wheel may come full circle, that a naïve idealism may be replaced by a purely methodical realism, and that the very words “politics” and “strategy” may become interchangeable terms. We face that danger, but let no one suspect that Americans, in general, have succumbed to it.

The word “revolution” has acquired, of recent years, a very broad meaning. It has been applied to any innovation entailing substantial economic and social change. For example, the term “neolithic revolution” is currently used to designate the transition from a hunting and gathering the fruits of the soil type of economy to the relatively sedentary life of the agriculturist. The acquisition of metal—copper, bronze, and, later, iron—also gave rise to all kinds of technical as well as social transformations. The patient researches of archeologists enable us to assess the impact of this “revolution of metal” which so profoundly altered the life of our ancestors. We have a general notion of the social changes that resulted from it, thanks to our knowledge of such things as the layout of villages or cities and the details of funeral accoutrements. Here again ethnology comes to the aid of archeology.

During the first half of the twentieth century geographers analyzed at length the individual's relationship with his natural environment. The French school of humanist geography must be credited with stressing the influence of environment which, in proportion to its pronounced characteristics, becomes more and more powerful. Thus we came to understand the causes which determine a way of life, the customs, psychology, and idiosyncracies of those who inhabit the mountains, plains, forests, deserts, or seas. Our task has been a more daring one : we have studied the relationships established in the past between a certain geographical environment and the civilizations which formerly flourished there. In recognition of their meaning we labeled these relationships “geopolitics.” The term, coined by the German school, enjoyed a tremendous vogue because it was so apt. However, as critics have amply demonstrated, of and by itself it was really meaningless because the subject matter with which it must be concerned belonged to other, previously established and independent disciplines, such as economics or political geography. An inexact term, the word “geopolitics” crept into our present-day language. We, however, have chosen it to designate a determinate historical relationship.

There are two pitfalls which constantly threaten the literary historian who seeks the origins or beginnings of works of the mind such as species of literature or forms of religion, as well as the examples which partake of both. One danger is that the study may become an artificial construction without sufficient concrete basis in proved historical facts; the other is that the author may prefer experience to such constructions and may be too much influenced by what he has known and been impressed with as origin and beginning in his own time. The latter has at least one advantage: where there is no experience at the outset of an investigation, not even that minimum of empeiria which I shall call, with the Greek poet Aleman, peira (peira toi mathesios archa, “experience is the beginning of knowledge”), then there can be no scholarship in the fields of literature, art, and religion. In the history of those three fields we can be competently guided only by “veterans”—not mere theoreticians but men who in a sense are also “practitioners” in the creating of works of the mind. Experience takes first place not only in the natural sciences but also in modern scholarship in these areas, even with the risk that it may be too personal, too time-bound, too small in scope.

Homer, the first and greatest of Greek poets, depicts a society which may be loosely described as feudal. Power is in the hands of kings, who are bound to each other by ties of marriage and traditional friendship. Their nobles are men of equally good blood and high repute; the common people appear to have no function but to serve their lords and masters. The operation of the government is but sketchily indicated. The kings and princes meet in council, decisions are taken and are reported verbally by messengers. There is not the slightest hint that administration involves paper work, nor is there anything that can be called a “civil service.”

The laying-aside of resources, or saving, is a basic phenomenon among men, as it is among bees. It is a basis of material civilization.

Toynbee has demonstrated the existence of twenty-nine human civilizations. He has studied these in a monumental masterwork.

We believe that on the material level this effort can be expressed in one sentence: There is a close correlation between the rate of investment by a group or community and the expansion of its civilization.

This conviction is the starting point of our short analytical essay on the phenomena of investment. The essay is far from exhaustive. The reader will judge whether it is nonetheless useful.

In a very penetrating paper on “The Concept of Jewish Culture,” presented to the World Congress of Sociologists held in Zurich in 1950, Professor Henrik F. Infield pointed out that “some people born in one culture may find attractive the offerings of another culture.” Men born into some European cultures have for centuries experienced a special attraction not only toward tropical cultures but also toward tropical existence, life, and nature, with tropical women subsumed in nature and culture.

The symbol is a form composed by man more unconsciously than consciously. With primitive peoples, this form seems to have been born from the desire to penetrate to the kernel of supernatural or magical power by means of a concise formula, all-inclusive or ambiguous, particularly through a magic incantation or a song. This penetration, however, is only possible if one understands the inner structure of such a power. According to primitive belief, the true seat of this power is not found in the world of our direct experience but in a magical area in which it rests in a completely abstract, latent state. In this condition it has not yet spread out into various shapes which it has to assume for concrete manifestation but appears completely homogeneous and solid. Moreover, the innermost substance (kernel) of this power is always organized antinomically. From this fundamental tendency to include opposites in a dualistic way, thunderstorms for example emerge as a dual combination of fire and water. Also dualistic is the “fiery stream of volcano and smithy,” the light-dark, hermaphroditism, etc. Psychologically, the original dual event is expressed in the fusion of love and hatred or the combination of a lust for power with inferiority.

In the last century and in the first decades of the present century the historians of India laid stress on the isolation of the subcontinent by the mountains and seas surrounding her on all sides and cutting her off as a separate universe. The progress of modern research has shown how mistaken this view was. We now see the true facts much more clearly than ever. The mountain barriers, though formidable at many points, are broken by gaps which have always allowed a considerable intercourse across the frontiers on the northwest as well as the northeast and at some points due north as well. By her position in the center of the littoral of the Indian Ocean, India enjoyed ample facilities for communication by sea with the countries lying to her west and east, and we now know that she and her neighbors availed themselves of these facilities from time immemorial. The Indian Ocean was navigated freely from very early, even prehistoric, times, and there was a series of lively maritime exchanges—migratory, commercial, and cultural—among the peoples of Africa, India, and Indonesia, or more generally Southeast Asia. Western Asia and the lands adjoining the Levant also took, from the beginning, a prominent part in this commerce of goods and ideas between India and the world. It is the aim of this paper to trace briefly the ancient contacts between India and the Western countries to the time when the rise and spread of Islam and the Islamic impact on India ushered in a new epoch.

Picture a vast territory whose soil is peopled by European colonists, while military conquest places the natives in a position of total dependence. Settlers from all parts of the parent state and from other countries as well form, at first, an inorganic mass of families arbitrarily placed side by side and differing from one another in all aspects as to place of origin, mental attitudes, habits, way of life.

At the conference on scientific psychology held in Strasbourg in the autumn of 1956, Professor Leontiev of the U.S.S.R. gave a highly anticipated report on the present trends of Russian psychology. He emphasized the now recognized necessity of going beyond the simplistic schemas of Pavlov and of studying complex systems of adaptation, which are the constitutive elements of the mental life in its richness and which are expressed particularly on the speech level. The elite of the French scientific psychologists listened to him in a kind of anguished confusion, mixed with admiration. One of them, expressing the general feeling, exclaimed: “You tell us that we must not hesitate to approach that formidable domain, before which we shrink back—the conscious ….” And one knew not whether to laugh or to cry at the sight of psychologists thus confronted with a subject so unusual for them as to be quite out of the question.

If we wish to speak of the widening of the idea of causality, we must first specify the exact meaning of this concept, the modification of which is now being considered by many contemporary philosophers and scientists. In order to shed light on the classical concept of causality, it is almost impossible to avoid approaching it from the genetic point of view. Without a historical perspective we have only a very limited understanding of the content of the classical concepts by which this philosophic as well as scientific tradition has been constituted. By showing the deep and tenacious roots of our belief in rigorous determinism, we shall better understand certain types of resistance which today are opposed to any attempt at making determinism more flexible.

Goethe resisted all attempts on the part of his critics and admirers to draw oversimplified and final messages from Faust—an understandable reaction, since why should anyone bother with the dramatic trappings if the meaning can be summed up in a few abstract statements? He told Eckermann that people constantly came to him asking the meaning of Faust—as if he knew! It was not in his line, he said, to try to embody anything abstract. Goethe's thought process is dialectical, and for almost every one of his aphorisms which seems to illustrate one side of a matter there is another illuminating the opposite side. Goethe carried this tendency so far, in fact, that he once remarked to Eckermann that his Philemon and Baucis had nothing to do with the traditional couple. He added, almost in the same breath, that the persons and the situation were nevertheless similar. Before examining the meaning of Goethe's verse in detail, a brief summary of the action taking place in the fifth act of the second part of Faust is necessary:

A Wanderer returns to a land, now Faust's kingdom, where he had been ship wrecked long ago and had found shelter in the home of Philemon and Baucis. He learns from the old couple, who are still alive, that their house on the hill now stands in the shadow of Faust's castle. Faust wants them to move to the lowlands, which he has reclaimed from the sea with the aid of Mephistopheles, but they have so far refused to obey him. Faust's animosity toward the old couple is then depicted. In the end he assigns to Mephistopheles the task of eviction. Philemon and Baucis resist. They are killed, the Wanderer is dispatched along with them, and the house is burned down. Faust's blindness and death soon follow, but not before he attempts a final project, the construction of a canal.

The cultivated Westerner has such a strict conception of the nature and the ends of artistic creation that even the hypothesis of a collective creative act seems aberrant to him. In a word, our official music is the property of an informed milieu or an elite. It is transmitted by writing; and, if this writing becomes more and more detailed and elaborate as one approaches the present, that is because it has the task of conserving intact (one might say forever) the thought of the creator, whose “personality,” as Schumann has already remarked, is the supreme good.

Cross-cultural comparisons are more difficult in intellectual than in economic or social history both because patterns of belief vary even more than patterns of society and because there is no valid way to prove the relative importance of different ideas. In Asia, perhaps even more than elsewhere, the borders between intellectual history and political expediency are also often cloudy, so that it may be necessary to deal on the same terms with new ideas and with political propaganda which may not even be firmly believed by its author. The particularly close ties between intellectual, political, and social issues in modern Asia, however, mean that analytical studies of intellectual history can shed light on the whole transformation of Asian society. The very difficulty of finding valid comparisons should encourage attempts to do so in order to help explain the bewildering series of intellectual changes which have occurred in each Asian culture. A scholarly comparative study of intellectual history would require extraordinary linguistic ability and patience. The growing number of works on various aspects of modern Asian intellectual history and of translations of sources, however, enables scholars to attempt generalizations regarding the basis of material available in Western languages. Such generalizations can illuminate specific problems of intellectual history and can indicate basic similarities and differences in the Western impact on different Asian countries.

The modern engineer, because of his tendency to express himself in language which, even in reference to very simple things, systematically retreats into mathematical symbolism—strictly incomprehensible to the average man—enrols himself, unconsciously or deliberately, in a jealously closed caste in which those we call “technocrats” shut themselves up. This is the caste which seeks to be the sole elite and necessary heir of the former nobility in the new social “pattern.”

Scarcely fifty years ago the “Indian sphinx” posed enigmas that seemed simple. Known pre-Columbian civilizations were relatively few, and their past, however obscure, could be considered recent in contrast to the millenniums that separate us from the cultures of the ancient Orient. Today this is no longer true. The emergence of new archeological horizons has singularly transformed our summary view of the history of man in the Western Hemisphere. The date of the first human migrations through the Bering Straits has been put back some twenty or thirty thousand years—to the Aztec, Mayan, and Incan civilizations which the Spaniards knew in their full flower. Others have been added which, in turn, give rise to fresh enigmas.