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.

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.

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.

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.

Although I am by no means a specialist in this field, I was struck with the ideas presented in Roger Caillois's work, Les feux et les hommes. In it he has attempted to classify games according to their basic character and the principles from which they stem. He has also tried to demonstrate that a certain kind of society corresponds to a certain category of games. In chapter viii of his book we encounter the transition from primitive societies, where games that Caillois classifies as mimicry and ilinx (“mimicry” and “vertigo”) are the rule, to highly developed societies characterized by agôn (“regulated competition”) and alea (“chance”). The ideal toward which all modern, democratic societies aspire is total achievement of the requisite conditions for the proper evolution of agôn, not only in the realm of games, but in all of life, by guaranteeing equal opportunities to all citizens in their competition for wealth and power. However, as we can readily understand, this ideal can never be truly achieved, even in societies that are, theoretically, the most egalitarian. To this fact the author attributes the extraordinary passion for all forms of alea, which we witness today almost everywhere in the Western world. Chance offers compensation for the disappointments inherent in agôn, for the inevitable inequalities among members of any human group. Caillois provides a penetrating analysis of all the forms that alea asumes in our times (games of “double or quits,” betting, lotteries, beauty contests, infatuation with movie stars), and he cites examples to illustrate the passions they arouse. I was all the more impressed because they are practically non-existent in Finland. This is due, in my opinion, to the fact that in Finnish society opportunities for agôn are equally distributed among its members; thus they do not feel the need to seek compensation in the whims of alea.

The prospect of a science of history that would chart the past and enable the future to be projected has invariably intrigued the historian. Technically, this would leave history unencumbered by its mass and the historian concerned only with lines of development delineated by historical science. With the road map of the future before him, the status of the historian would grow as indispensable counselor of politicians and statesmen, bringing the science of human development to bear upon their deliberations. Henry Adams imagined a situation in which state and church, capital and labor, and all other important social groupings and institutions would ask anxiously of the historian: Am I justified in history and will I live on?