It would be idle to pretend that Mr. Macdonald's article is not about a most serious problem. In this age of disillusion one of the most serious grounds for concern, one of the deepest sources of the disillusion is the state of popular culture, if by culture we mean anything more than the sum of intellectual, moral, aesthetic habits of a people in any given moment of historical time. For to many observers who are hostile to the political movement of democracy, the present state of popular culture justifies all their fears, and to believers in democracy, the state of popular culture deceives some of the most profound hopes of the democratic movement since the French Revolution. And at this stage of the argument it is not, I think, worth making the distinction between popular and mass culture that Mr. Macdonald usefully insists on. Where the optimists have been deceived and the pessimists confirmed in their pessimism has been in the kind of culture that the people now choose or accept, and it does not, at the moment, matter whether the ‘people’ and the ‘masses’ are identical concepts.

Some observers are surprised by the fact that economic phenomena occupy an increasing place in the average man's concerns. Has not economic life been the necessary basis for man's physical existence since the most distant times? Have not agriculture, industry, business and finance been in existence for thousands of years ? Do not the nations’ standards of living, and even their manner of life, depend necessarily on their production?

About 1910 it became customary to call Bergsonism and all related tendencies ‘new philosophy’. This term was designed not only to contrast an apparently revolutionary idea with the classical intellectualism of the Franco-German academic tradition and with the platitudes of a philosophy that affirmed and believed itself to be inspired by positive science; the concept of ‘new philosophy’ was meant, above all, to imply that, starting with Bergson, philosophy intended to change its position in regard to human experience. No longer an explanation from afar of the world and of consciousness, philosophy professed to be henceforth one with this experience; not satisfied to shed light on man and his life, it aspired to become this life, now at the stage of complete self-awareness. It seemed that this ambition constrained the philosopher to renounce philosophy's ideal—to be an exact science—since this ideal is not only inseparable from the idea of an impartial and detached spectator, but also from that of a reality so constituted as to be an object of pure vision. On the other hand, however, to abandon this ideal proved less acceptable than ever. The startling progress of positive science gave birth, or rather rebirth, to the illusion of a total explanation: how then could one admit that philosophy would triumph over its secular uncertainties by drawing away from this brilliant example? The relative failure of Bergsonism is possibly due precisely to the fact that it never was willing to make any clear statement of choice in this matter.

It has sometimes been said that it is useless to try to prevent wars since man has an ineradicable combative instinct. The term instinct is very ambiguous in its application to humans, and it may be interesting to see what occurs amongst the insects, many of whose species show the highest development of instinctive behaviour.

Many insect species are predatory, but if they depend on other distinct species, the relation is analogous to hunting or to a crude form of agriculture. Aggressive behaviour to be comparable with war must concern the different members of one species. There are many laboratory experiments which illustrate the effects of competition when a population begins to exceed the capacity of its food supply. In Flour beetles, for instance, the adult beetles and the larvae eat any egg or pupae which they happen to meet in their ceaseless burrowing through the flour. There is thus a fixed population density at which eggs are eaten as fast as they are laid. In Grain weevils, the effect of crowding is to reduce the rate at which eggs are laid by the females who appear to suffer from overstimulation when crowded. Other effects, usually harmful, may be produced by the accumulation of the products of respiration or of digestion. Finally, if the food supply is too small, there will be death from starvation. If, for instance, too many blowfly eggs are added to a piece of meat, the flies produced will either be small, weak, and infertile or, if the excess has been too great, the larvae may all starve when half grown. Thus, a piece of meat which could have produced 100 normal flies may produce none at all if a tenfold excess of eggs is laid on it.

Fritz Kern, the well-known anthropologist and historian has stated in his work: ‘It is impossible to arrive at a comprehensive knowledge of mankind from any study of history that omits primitive peoples. Once this broad basis of the history of man is given due consideration, we arrive at a historia perennis of all human existence. ‘ Though the more general significance of this pronouncement cannot be denied, it becomes particularly valid with reference to the beginnings and primitive forms of man's social and community life. In the following short exposition the main emphasis will be laid on these. It is innate in man to regard the early phases of his own race as something exceptional, one might say something normative. Without doubt this holds equally true for the forms and characteristics of primitive society and of the primitive state, in short, for every aspect of community life as it was at the dawn of man's existence —so far as we can know it.

This survey of Old-World prehistory may conveniently begin with the melting of the Pleistocene ice-sheets some 15,000 years ago; for the latest enlargement of our knowledge of the evolution of man and of his earliest cultures were very properly included in the ‘Panorama of Anthropology’ published in Diogenes 2. Even with that limitation of range, a survey cannot be a summary. Prehistorical archaeologists aspire to recover the history of preliterate societies all over the Old World during ten thousand years. But not even the history of England in a single century could usefully be condensed into twenty pages. Nor should our panorama be a descriptive catalogue of exciting new discoveries. Striking additions to our knowledge have of course been made during the last eight years both as a result of excavation and to reward less spectacular research in museums and libraries. (For instance, the first object, undeniably manufactured in and imported from Mycenaean Greece to be recognised in the British Isles or indeed anywhere north of the Alps was noticed in 1948 in a Cornish museum where it had been lying neglected for a hundred years since it had been dug from a barrow near Pelynt. Again the oldest metal helmet found north of the Alps has just been identified by searching through files of German newspapers of 1847!) Some of the finds in question no doubt have an immediate appeal as beautiful or bizarre. Many, including the scientifically most significant, can only be appreciated by specialists or after a tedious technical explanation. Yet some recent discoveries and publications have promoted, if not the final solution, at least the formulation in soluble form, of familiar problems that have preoccupied archaeologists and intrigued historians for nearly a century. I shall therefore try here, after indicating some modern general trends in research, to present the position of those old problems in the more definite and precise form which they have now assumed. Quite a number of new discoveries can then be mentioned in an intelligible context.

Greek tragedy is still acted in the original and in translations; it has inspired such modern drama as The Family Reunion and La Machine Infernale; in Norway and France Sophocles’ Antigone helped to give hope to the resistance. Greek tragedy was produced originally at a religious festival by a poet who was poet, musician, producer, and sometimes actor too. The plays were meant to be seen; they had staging and costumes, dancing, and dramatic technique. They were meant to be remembered; they had language, style, and thoughts which the poet desired to communicate at that particular time. The poet himself knew well the leading artists, thinkers, and politicians of the small society in which he lived. Production, metre, technique, style, and thought are the chief elements which the scholar must study if he would make these ancient plays as intelligible as possible to modern readers.

These four volumes, reviewed together solely because of their respective publication dates and their vaguely related subject matter, represent, for the reader interested in myths and symbols, just so many exercises in style that are not equally commendable. In each we find a different lesson which, for the sake of simplification, we will designate respectively as a lesson in innocence, a lesson in impudence, a lesson in science, and a lesson in imagination. This is perhaps the proper order to follow, although we feel a slight uncertainty in regard to the relative position of the first two.

The manuals on Indian philosophy, very rare until about thirty years ago (you still had to rely on Deussen and Max Mueller at that time), have multiplied since then. The years between 1922 and 1925 saw the publication of the first volume of Dasgupta's study as well as of Radhakrishnan's, of the shorter treatises by Masson-Oursel, by Grousset, and by Otto Strauss. Slowly it became clear that philosophy was not the monopoly of the Greeks and their successors and that, since the beginning of historical time, India in particular had handled in its own way and most worthily the notions which form the nucleus of our own speculations. It will become increasingly more difficult to set aside the role of India when a worldwide picture of the facts is to be presented.