This study is not devoted either to the institutions of mutual aid, philanthropy, or charity within modern capitalism, or to the donations individuals make to them.

It is with the Greeks that I shall be mainly concerned. I know much less about those sons of Aeneas, the Romans, whose mother was Venus (so legend and Lucretius tell us), but with whom, for all that, I have never fallen so much in love as I have with the Greeks. In speaking of elections among the Greeks I shall be concerned with their ideas about principles, mainly as those ideas are recorded by Plato and Aristotle, rather than with the methods which actually they used: in other words, I shall attempt an analysis of the general political thinking that lay behind their behaviour, rather than a description of the working of their particular electoral systems. But I must first of all lay a foundation—a foundation of distinctions and definitions—before I attempt that analysis.

Diogenes has set itself the task to present to its readers the most recent developments in all important branches of the Humanities. Among the most burning questions in the sphere of contemporary political sciences is the one raised by the almost universal demand for the ‘Welfare State’.

The twentieth-century state owes to man not only order, peace, and justice, it owes him also material well-being. The search for and the study of the means by which public power can provide for such well-being have added an important chapter to the history of political theory and the art of government.

Professor A. C. Pigou has had a decisive part in the genesis of this great intellectual and moral mutation. He is the uncontested master of the new technique. Diogenes is proud and happy indeed to have the privilege of presenting his original and deep thoughts on the idea of the State as the producer of well-being, on the origins of this concept and the methods of its development. These ideas throw new light on the evolution of the great modern states and put a new and efficient tool into the hands of those who strive to understand and explain this evolution.

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.

Cultural phenomena never exist except in connexion with the agents of human life that make them possible and endow them with their authentic value. Culture is not of itself a fertilising rain—nothing human can be ‘of itself, an island of abstraction. Literary themes, then, are things that happen in and to someone's historical life. Their value is manifested to its full extent when the theme that interests us is seen as the expression, through an individual, of a particular people, who, in giving life to the literary theme, achieves its self-realisation in terms of a value structure. We have rather too frequently thought about comparative literature as if its motivating force were always some theme common to several literatures, and as if these literatures were limited to the historico-geographical space in which the migratory theme takes up residence and progressively ‘evolves’. This over-abstract and anti-vital idea leads to another, the notion of the theme in its pure state, the Urtema, in many comparative studies.

I remember when I was a youth and excitable, I went to a performance of Ibsen's Ghosts. The question may be asked, excitable in which direction. Certainly it was not the one Ibsen intended. The truth is, I had absorbed (second or third hand) The Decline of the West, and was all for the spiritual expression of the early cultural ages and the sweep and energy of the first secular expansion (the Renaissance), but I would have run blocks to avoid the romantic and nineteenth century, or any of the products of the conscious and disillusioned selfhood. Under these circumstances it was manifestly absurd to go to Ghosts anyway. I came away with no very amiable remembrance. Such a play I refused to call tragedy, the name was too noble. I coined another word, ‘pathody’, the story of pathetic suffering, and dubbed it so.

Mostly, the past has been for men a strange country. Remote and inaccessible, its existence is accepted but not important. Known through the curious tales of occasional observers, it is meaningful only to the extent that it affords those who regard it reflected images of their own society.

The first Americans were little occupied with the past. Although they read history, and wrote it, it was the history of their own times; the term in the seventeenth century referred more often to contemporaneous events than to those that had receded out of the memory of living men. Indeed, in a universe in which divine Providence interceded directly in the affairs of men, there was little purpose to the quest for antecedents; behind every action was the same ultimate cause.

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?

Can our present-day anxieties be stated in terms of the ancient world ? Can this be done without risking the accusation of self-deception or pedantry? That is the question.

Hellenism in en vogue; there is satisfaction in defining in ever more exact terms a new aspect, long underestimated, of Greek grandeur. A certain ‘modernism’ cannot be denied to Greek thought: a tendency that existed then as it does now. Two millennia and more have trimmed down what was pretensions: tricks and scandals of innovation become less important ; the essence of contributions becomes apparent, distilled by the labour of preceding centuries. It remains sure that the Greeks faced new human circumstances with the vigour of youth and with intelligence, and launched themselves freely upon the path of world discovery. This is truly modem: modern for us as it was for the Greeks of the third century B.C. A comparison between such experiences may be worth while.

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.

We have learned by now not to see myth as simple entertainment or a babbling. Where the nineteenth-century eye could find only an out-of-date toy left behind by childish peoples or a cultural stage-set for leisured social circles, the human sciences have taught us to recognise an authentic expression of man: myth says with utmost seriousness something that is of essential importance. What is more, it is a way of living in the world, of orienting oneself in the midst of things, of seeking an answer in the quest for the self. We owe this alteration of perspective to a whole group of scholars: Cassirer, Van der Leeuw, Unger, Preuss; we owe it in a quite special way to Maurice Leenhardt and to the original work which his recent death left uncompleted.

The spread of Western and Christian civilisation all over the world, during the last four hundred years, has been marked, on all continents, by the disappearance of large numbers of technically less advanced peoples, or by their numerical regression, which in turn was accompanied by the decadence and crumbling of their cultural inheritance. But such feats of extinction are not the prerogative of the white man of modern civilisation. Every point on the globe, at all times, has witnessed struggles for life, where victory went to the stronger. The extinction of Neanderthal man, some thirty thousand years ago, was probably due to the appearance of Cro-Magnon and Chancelade man, who entered Europe at that time and had attained a more advanced technical civilisation than their predecessors. In historic times, we know of several cases in which peoples were driven back and annihilated by neighbours whose civilisation was more advanced and who were endowed with a greater expansive force. The Negritos of South-east Asia had been ousted from a part of their original territory by the Malayans and Chinese long before the arrival of the Europeans. Several Melanesian tribes were exterminated in the course of the ancient Polynesian migrations. These examples could be multiplied. They are in fact so numerous that it has become customary to consider them almost as manifestations of a biological necessity, against which human will remains impotent.

The problem to which this article tries to supply an answer, in any case for the time being, is the following: was the political collapse of the Greek world the result of a slow internal disintegration or of the destructive action of the Roman conquest?

In other words: did the Graeco-Macedonian states, constituted after the conquest of Asia by Alexander, die ‘their own splendid deaths’ or were they ‘assassinated’ by Rome?

Thirty-four years have passed since the Discorso de recepcion of the then young Arabist, don Miguel Asin Palacios, was presented in the Spanish Academy; and I still recall the impression of astonishment, admiration and almost alarm which the first reading of the Escatologia musulmana en la Divina Comedia aroused in my father, one of the first to spread the ideas of Asin in Italy—such was the impact of the novelty, the audacity, and the wide range of his thesis and his conclusions. I vaguely recall the discordant voices of both Orientalist and Dante criticism in the heated atmosphere of the centennial celebrations of 1921, the enthusiasm of the neophytes, the scandalised consternation of the idolators, and the profound echo of agreement and disagreement which Asin's book aroused, as surely no other publication of the centenary. Then, everywhere to some extent but above all in Italy, the voices of dissent prevailed, from those of the more or less reasoning and reasonable disbelievers to those of the early believers whose faith began to vacillate, as was the case of my father. Asin answered these, with lively and often cogent dialectic, in his Historia y critica de una polemica. Then the dispute languished and expired, leaving on both sides, as usually happens in these cases, a whole series of misunderstandings which had not been clarified. Among Asin's non-Orientalist critics—even among the most learned of them, and perhaps in the very measure of their learning—the initial prejudice against that strange world remained invincible: that world aberrant in language, custom, place, and civilisation, which the erudite Spaniard had brought into abrupt contact with the Christian-Latin world, the only background against which the figure of Dante had customarily been seen. On the other hand, the conviction was firmly planted in Asin's mind that the opposition to his theory, especially from the Italian point of view, was moved not only (as was indeed quite true) by mental laziness, by horror novi, by intellectual vitalde in the face of the bitter new truth he proposed, but also and above all, by cultural nationalism, by the set purpose of defending at any price a national glory whose originality and hitherto unquestioned greatness had been disparaged. He had been at pains to point out at the end of his book that the poetic glory of Dante was in no way compromised by the close, continuous, and fundamental dependence which he believed he had found between Dante's vision of the other world and Islamic eschatology; even so, Italian pride in the absolute originality of the sacred poem had been hurt, and this, Asin thought, more than any other motive, had inspired the Italian reaction.

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.

About a hundred years ago a student of the University of Berlin would have been able to hear Boeckh lecturing on Enzyklopädie und Methodologie der philologischen Wissenschaften and Droysen lecturing on Enzyklopädie und Methodologie der Geschichte (Historik). He could also hear Ranke, whose Epochen der neueren Geschichte were delivered, not however in Berlin, in 1854·

Man can be ‘good and evil’ in his actions, reasonable and unreasonable— not to say, insane: this is his liberty. Hence his responsibility, which is born of this liberty. There can be no liberty without responsibility.

The question: is Man rational in his actions? cannot be answered by a simple ‘yes’: that some of his actions are rational is proved by the very fact of our existence; that not all of these actions are rational is proved by our present situation. On the other hand, if we do not perish, this is no proof of Man's rationality. Nor is it proved by the evolution of all creation, which undoubtedly moves from low to high. But it is not difficult to see that of all living beings Man alone is capable of acting rationally. Where Man's reason does not reach, there rules the law of selection. This latter prevails, likewise, wherever Man acts irrationally. Out of a senseless ‘urge to be’-as Schopenhauer calls it-that being asserts himself who enjoys some kind of primacy, who is superior in no matter what sphere-whether by his force, velocity, protective colouring, or any other way, it does not matter, except in the individual case.

Quantum mechanics, even in its early and simple phases, has often been regarded as a non-causal discipline. The argument supporting this view cites the uncertainty principle as prohibiting the ascertainment of complete knowledge concerning physical states upon which causal prediction could be based. Recent developments in atomic physics have added new and puzzling features to the problem of causality insofar as they operate, not only with intrinsically unmeasurable states, but also with time reversals which have been interpreted to mean that the effect can be prior to the cause. Feynman's theory of quantum electrodynamics is particularly rich in unorthodox suggestions which tantalise philosophers. The purpose of the present paper is to exhibit them, appraise their methodological function and see in what manner they violate the rules of causal description. This purpose, it seems, is best achieved by a sequential discussion of three questions: What does causality mean in physics? What is the new method of quantum electrodynamics? Is this new method compatible with the causal doctrine in some satisfactory form?

The following article is an excerpt from Professor Gerhard Ritter s contribution to a Symposium on the origins and methods of National Socialism. This Symposium, whose publication in English translation is forthcoming, was organised under the auspices of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies.

The International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies has assured complete freedom of expression to all participants while obviously not endorsing any of the opinions expressed in the Symposium.

In presenting the material of this Symposium the publishers wish to make it clear that the opinions expressed are those of the authors themselves and do not represent the policy of Intercultural Publications or the views of its personnel.

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.