To apply the notion of language to the animal world is admissible only at the price of misusing terms. We know that it has been impossible until now to prove that animals enjoy, even in a rudimentary form, a means of expression endowed with the characteristics and functions of human speech. All serious observations made of animal communities, all attempts to establish or verify, by means of various technical devices, any form of speech comparable to that of man have failed. It does not seem that animals which emit certain kinds of calls are thereby displaying any behaviour from which we may infer that they are conveying ‘spoken’ messages to one another. The fundamental conditions for a strictly linguistic communication seem to be lacking even in the higher animal world.

Professor Toynbee's definition of the proletariat is an unusual one. To him, ‘proletarianism is a state of feeling rather than a matter of outward circumstance.’ Still more allusively, a proletariat is ‘any social clement or group which in some way is “in” but not “of” any given society at any given stage of such society's history’. Marx defined the word to mean the urban wage workers in modern society. To Professor Toynbee, Marx's definition is what a mathematician would call ‘a special case’; and although it is perhaps the largest, it is by no means the sole constituent of the proletariat by Professor Toynbee's definition. It is also possible on Professor Toynbee's definition—this is an essential aspect of the matter which he has not followed up and which is one of the principal subjects of the following article—that a man may be an urban wage worker without being a proletarian.

For about a century, Western culture has really been two cultures: the traditional kind—let us call it ‘High Culture’—that is chronicled in the textbooks, and a ‘Mass Culture’ manufactured wholesale for the market. In the old art forms, the artisans of Mass Culture have long been at work: in the novel, the line stretches from Eugène Süe to Lloyd C. Douglas; in music, from Offenbach to tin-pan alley; in art, from the chromo to Maxfield Parrish and Norman Rockwell; in architecture, from Victorian Gothic to suburban Tudor. Mass Culture has also developed new media of its own, into which the serious artist rarely ventures: radio, the movies, comic books, detective stories, science-fiction, television.

Suppose, for the sake of easy memory, that the Middle Ages begin in A. D. 313, finish in 1313. The first date is marked by Constantine's Edict of Milan, virtually establishing Christianity as the religion of the Roman world empire. The second date emphasises the sudden death of Emperor Henry VII at Buonconvento in Tuscany during his Italian campaign, as the irreparable failure of the last attempt that could be undertaken, with a reasonable chance of success, to enact the plan of Roman-Christian unity under whose spell the Latin West and the Germanic North had dreamed and laboured all through those thousand years. Of this phase of history Dante is the witness and an actor, a victim and the judge as well.

Now that the twentieth century has celebrated its fiftieth birthday, it can no longer plead youth and inexperience as excuses to avoid judgments on its achievements, least of all in its poetry, of which one chapter is practically closed and another has at least made its main point. Of course any survey of European poetry in the last fifty years is bound to be very general and superficial, but is perhaps worth attempting not merely as a matter of historical inquiry but because it may throw some light on the immediate present and the prospects for the near future. We may be still too close to recent developments to see them in their right perspective or to gauge them at their final worth, but much that has happened since 1900 already belongs to a past sufficiently remote for an independent judgment to be passed on it, while much else has revealed its main lines of development, with the result that we may perhaps form a clearer and juster estimate of what the poets have done than was possible when their works were too new to be rightly assessed and suffered alike from the ardent hopes of their protagonists and the shocked disapproval of their opponents.

For the scholar of ancient history, the ‘polis’ is the most important and most worthy subject of study. By ‘polis’ we mean that well-known type of Greek city which with its territory constituted an autonomous state and, in this respect, was quite similar to the centres of the Italian Renaissance. Ancient Hellas was made up of a great number of such ‘polis’ cities. Each of them had its own freedom, its individual pride as an independent republic. But in the over-all picture we recognise in the institution of the polis the ground that nourished the dynamic and in a sense revolutionary spirit of the ancient Greeks. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, Cleisthenes and Themistocles, Pericles and Alcibiades, Protagoras and Democritus, Plato and Aristotle were the sons of polis cities. We may even assert that these men could be what they were only in the emancipated and inspired atmosphere of the polis. No other ancient culture could have given them birth. If we consider the Greek polis from the point of view of universal history we come to a rather astonishing conclusion: the polis differs from all other comparable cultural institutions in Asia, Egypt, and Europe by a very fundamental and special trait: Europe knew only a primitive, barbarian, rustic way of life. People were either roving nomads or tillers of the soil who lived in simple villages.

The director of the National Gallery in London told me recently that the most popular pictures in his museum are Piero della Francesca's ‘Baptism of Christ’ and ‘Nativity’, and it is common knowledge that art-lovers sensitive to the present trends of taste nowadays go to Arezzo to see the frescoes in the Church of St. Francis rather than to Rome for the sake of Raphael's Loggias or Michelangelo's ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

In his book on the myths of the African peoples Hermann Baumann sums up the myths of a primeval paradisial era. In those times, he says, men did not know of death: they understood the language of the animals and were at peace with them; they did not work, and found abundant nourishment at hands’ reach. Following upon a certain mythical event—which we will not undertake to discuss—this paradisial stage ended and humanity became what we know it to be today.

Literature and art, which previously had been considered as cultural traditions, became, during the nineteenth century, objects of historical knowledge; the feeling of contemporaries was ‘that history would be the hallmark of the nineteenth century, and would lend it its name, just as philosophy had given its name to the eighteenth’. Of the many perspectives from which a work of art can be viewed, there was none more constant thereafter than that of history.

In concluding his treatise on human geography Jean Brunhes put the question, ‘What would the earth have been like had not mankind appeared and spread over it?’ In making a response, we undoubtedly are both judge and party.

By the nineteenth century the struggles in Europe against those forms of authority which go back to the Middle Ages resulted in giving everyone a standard of freedom perhaps without precedent in history.

Between the numbers of men (or their ‘pressure’) and the domination which is exercised upon them, various relationships exist, the knowledge of which seems to be very useful to an understanding of historical evolution. These relationships are often of so markedly reciprocal a nature that, as against the difficulty of separating cause from effect, it seems preferable to speak simply of accommodation, or even of relative harmony.

The letter of Professor John U. Nef in the first number of Diogenes cites, en passant, a formula concerning the seventeenth century that has become traditional among modern critics of the present position of science in our intellectual outlook. In the perspective of what has happened since, it is now easy to speak of the scientist's emphasis on quantity destroying the understanding of quality and values, which in turn have been relegated to the sphere of personal intuition, intangible and therefore beyond the realm of rational and objective discussion.

When we say Europe, what do we mean? Perhaps it has never been more necessary than it is today to apply not emotion but scientific method in answering this question. If we ask the politicians they will tell us of the continuity of Europe and its function in world politics. The geographer will speak of the special qualities of the soil and the flora. Might we not usefully regard the map of Europe from the point of view of the other, so much more extensive continents? From that point of view, would the continent of Europe seem to be an annex of Asia or Africa? No, certainly not. There are grounds of paramount importance which make such a view impossible: reasons, determined by the common history of the European nations and the common civilisation which was the product of their historical development.

Thucydides excuses the possible dullness of his history on the ground that he means it not for a passing entertainment but for a ‘permanent possession’ which may be of practical use in future times when some similar situation occurs again. We tend to smile at the idea. We all know that history never repeats itself. But surely we know also that though exactly the same situation or problem never recurs, yet elements are constantly recurring which, in different contexts, with all sorts of different accompaniments, are essentially the same; and though, obviously, the old parallel never provides an answer to the new problem, it may well help to its understanding. The differences between any problem of ours and those of Thucydides are of course enormous. Our civilisation, immense in scale, dazzling in its scientific inventions and its power over matter, is extremely different from the small-scale city state of fifth-century Athens with no electricity, no gas, no steam, no buttons, no drainage even, and a standard of food and comfort which would produce instantaneous strikes in any Western community. Yet the essential situation which Thucydides had to face was the overthrow of a very high and peculiar civilisation by a long and all-absorbing war, a war to which men could find no end, from which they could never keep aloof, and under whose influence they found themselves sinking to standards of barbarism which filled them with horror. We in modern Europe share the experience of that sort of war; and we share perhaps more fully than any age between that time and our own the special quality of that civilisation. How can we find words to describe it? It was a free civilisation, proud of its freedom of life and thought, its advance in knowledge, art, literature; with flourishing commerce, with wide command of the sea, with an acknowledged superiority over ‘barbaric’ or non-Greek communities and over some that were Greek; and open, evidently, to the kind of criticism that is always provoked by a combination of commercial wealth and high culture, of democracy and empire. Thucydides has left us a wonderful picture of Athens, not of course exactly as she was but as she conceived herself to be or as she was in the eyes of those who loved her. It is not quite as we now see her; to us, living two thousand years afterwards, Athens is chiefly remarkable for its ever-living achievements in art, philosophy, and poetry; but Thucydides hardly mentions such things, though in one famous half-sentence, ‘We seek beauty without luxury’, he doubtless implies them. He writes not as a critic of art or poetry; and his philosophy is only the philosophy of a statesman.

On the basis of studies of the last fifty years, the term ‘Mediterranean’ has come to acquire an ethnographic, linguistic, and religious value, besides its purely physical and geographic meaning. If anthropology today speaks of a ‘Mediterranean race’—located between the extreme west of Europe and the peninsula of Malacca—archeology speaks of a ‘Mediterranean civilisation’. Of this civilisation, perhaps even the Indian revelations of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa do not mark the ultimate limit. It derived from a particularly evolved Neolithic, reached its apogee on the island of Crete in the Bronze Age, and spread from there all through the basin of the Mediterranean, continental Greece and Asia Minor (where alternate contacts and conflicts, not necessary to specify here, had characterised for millennia the relations between peoples of various races). This civilisation was succeeded by a more composite one, called the Mycean, with the Achaeans as its fulcrum, a people who had already proved their maritime and warlike skill in Anatolia, between the shores of the Black Sea and the Sporades. Linguistics, in turn, speaks of a ‘Mediterranean idiom’.

Von Frisch's discovery of the methods by which bees communicate is a landmark in human achievement comparable with Champollion's elucidation of hieroglyphics, and Professor Benveniste has performed a service in introducing it to the notice of readers of Diogenes. Nevertheless the very importance of the facts discovered makes it desirable to discuss their interpretation from a somewhat different standpoint.

Of all the sciences pertaining to Man it is the science of prehistoric man which has made the most sensational progress during the last fifty years. With this in mind it seems possible to construct a synthesis of all the facts known at the present time, in spite of the risks incurred by such an attempt. It is surely necessary at certain times to be rash, and in science as well as in life one must be willing to dare greatly, to act dangerously.

Specialists in genetic psychology, and especially in child psychology, do not always suspect what diverse and fruitful relationships are possible between their own subject and other more general kinds of research, such as the theory of knowledge or epistemology. And the converse is even more true, if that is possible: that child psychology has for long been regarded as a collection of case histories of infants. The necessity has not always been recognised, even in the field of general psychology, of considering all problems from the standpoint of development, and it is still true, in certain countries, that ‘child psychologists’ are a group apart, having no contact with the main currents of experimental psychology. Even less, as a rule, do students of the theory of knowledge suspect that, within reach as it were, in the field of psychogenetic experience, they can sometimes find solutions to the most general questions on the formation of ideas or on the analysis of intellectual activity. Yet they have been known to show inexhaustible patience when trying to reconstruct some unknown passage from the history of science for the sake of its epistemological significance.

Indian studies, as other branches of Orientalism, date back to the time when the first decipherings of texts, achieved in Europe, or at any rate by Europeans, made the treasures of Indian antiquity directly accessible to us.