Since the heroic age of Pierre Duhem, to whose amazing energy and learning we owe the revelation of medieval science, much work has been devoted to the study of that subject. The publication of the great works of Thorndyke and Sarton, and, in the last decade, of the brilliant studies of Anneliese Maier and Professor Marshall Clagett, not to mention countless other monographs and papers, has tremendously enlarged and enriched our knowledge and understanding of medieval science in its connection with medieval philosophy—toward whose understanding and knowledge even greater progress has been made—and of medieval culture in general.

The twentieth century will be known as the period of the discovery of African-Negro civilization. At first it was the sculpture alone that provoked amazement, shock, and finally admiration. But soon Europe discovered stories, poetry, music, painting, and philosophy, in turn.

Now that the first surprise has had its effect, we must define the spirit of the civilization; that is to say, of African-Negro culture. There is nothing more revealing in this regard than the literature and the art of this singularly “machineless civilization.” Philosophical reflection on art, by which aesthetics is defined, is all the more necessary, since the admiration of certain European intellectuals for African-Negro literature and art is not devoid of confusion; it often consists of misconceptions, if not of contradictions in terms.

Among the multiple aspects that are apparent to us in the religious life of the ancients, our attention is quite naturally directed toward the extremely important occurrences which interrupt the normal course of things and reveal the intrusion of the sacred into the life of men. These phenomena, called τέρατα in Greek, prodigia a in Rome, are of diverse, but always significant, value, according to the particular case. They sanction the privileged state of being of people who are marked by the imprint of the divine, they adduce irrefutable confirmation of the will of the gods, they interpret the joy and, far more frequently, the anger of the all-powerful beings who decree the course of the world.

The hobo is a man of many legends; these legends are contradictory because they “serve” opposite goals. Like Snow White, Mickey Mouse, or Sherlock Holmes, he has become a hero of comic-strip cartoons for children. Sometimes he is a bugaboo, whose mournful fate serves as an example of punishment for “laziness, that mother of vices.” At other times he is the protagonist of proud and lofty freedom. And is not freedom the purpose of our actions and the reward for the greatest virtues?

A considerable body of corroborative evidence, of a linguistic as well as a cultural order, attests to the authenticity of traditional tales referring to contacts between the islands of Oceania and the American continent during the pre-Columbian era.

In the first place, it is well known that there is close resemblance between some words in the languages of the western watershed of South America and those of Oceania, notably the Polynesian. These similarities have to do with words designating certain cultivated plants and other objects.

American ethnologists are currently discovering a type of man and a “culture.” Their attention had been focussed for a long while on the various Indian tribes as a favored field of investigation, and, more recently, on the inhabitants of large or middle-sized American cities. This scientific “isolationism” had, therefore, effectively hidden from them the condition of the two-thirds of humanity who are neither “primitives” nor city-dwellers but, rather, peasants.

Robert Redfield, whose first inquiries took him to Mexico, there encountered what he called “folk culture.” Dispersed about the globe, his students brought back studies which led him to think that “peasant society and culture have a generic quality. This species of human organization has a certain uniformity throughout the world.” Studying the life of Polish, Chinese, European, Latin-American, and Hindu peasants, he noted what he calls “this imperturbable sameness.”

In the long history of man, not the least interesting moments have been those ebullient and often creative occasions when two of his civilizations have met and mingled. One thinks most readily of the Hellenistic period, that entrancing millennium in the Near East from Alexander to Muhammad, which gave rise to so much ferment and so much of permanent and profound consequence for all our lives. One might think also, perhaps, of “Indo-China,” as designating not a political entity today but a cultural occasion and achievement in the classical past; or of the Muslims of India, who also for a millennium have for good or ill been the children as it were of a broken home—itself based on a shotgun wedding. These, it might be argued, would repay intensive study in our day, for an understanding of intercultural contact, more richly than can the oversimplified instances, dear to the anthropologist, of the one-sided impact of massive, dynamic “civilization” on the so-called underdeveloped cultures of our contemporary “primitives.” Yet these occasions in the past of civilizations in mutual impingement, fascinating though they be and instructive, and deserving, I think, of much more attention than they currently command, nonetheless adumbrate only partially what is happening in our world today. It is something unique that is going on before our eyes.