I purpose to deal with the subject literally: to what extent is Spanish-American art an adaptation and to what extent is it spontaneous?

If one considers the immediate reaction of the artist faced with the complex reality that surrounds him, our question is addressed on the one hand to the Spanish artist who found himself facing the new American reality and, on the other hand, to the Indian artist who had to find his mode of expression within this new reality, created by the Spanish conquest.

Very rarely does the statement of its basic doctrines and demands truly define the individuality of a religion. It certainly does not in Islam. The particulars by which both believer and outsider will identify the Muslim faith are hardly of a kind to account for its striking distinctiveness. This distinctiveness is customarily circumscribed in terms of the so-called “pillars of the faith;” but to repeat for the thousand and first time that, to the Muslim, there is but one God whose Messenger is Muhammad, that five daily prayers are enjoined as are one month of fasting, an alms-tax and, when possible, the pilgrimage to the central sanctuary at Mecca, the Messenger's birth-place, will not convey much of the uniqueness and the unmistakability of Islam. Even when we realize that originality is not a value specific to the religious life—where innovation to be valid must always mean uncovery of, or recourse to, an eternal verity—the formulation of the “pillars” contains nothing that could have startled the world into which Islam was born long accustomed as it was to the ideas of monotheism and the prophetic messenger and the devotional practices of prayer, fasting and pilgrimage.

Is the experience of the primitives fundamentally different from ours, or is there only a difference of degree? What is striking at first is that this experience presents two aspects. On the one hand, the primitives understand and think as we do; they distinguish objects and their relationships by localizing them in the space and time of the exterior world, by separating them from the subjective “I”, in short by objectifying them in a rational manner. This is the “natural” aspect of primitive experience.

The unity and continuity of Indian civilization is both a commonplace and a problem. It is usually taken for granted as a truth too evident to require proof. Yet when scholars begin to inquire into the exact nature of this unity and continuity and into the ways in which it is attained, they quickly encounter many unanswered questions. In a recent paper on “The Content of Cultural Continuity in India,” the American indologist Professor W. Norman Brown concludes that, while there has been a highly developed civilization on the Indian subcontinent since the third millennium в. с. with many elements of cultural continuity, it remains a problem to say what has given this Indian civilization its distinctive character and vitality. He himself does not believe that this question will be answered by making a catalogue of the hundreds of cultural traits (such as the use of the swastika, the sacredness of the pipal tree and of the cow, the joint family and the caste system, ascetism, the doctrines of karma and rebirth and of ahinsā) which persist across large spans of Indian civilization. Even if the historical and ethnic origins of these traits could be traced, this knowledge would not be sufficient, he thinks, to discover the vitalizing principle of Indian civilization. That principle, he suggests, lies in the field of values and attitudes and not in the material productions of arts, literature, and the sciences, or in particular skills, customs, institutions, or forms of thought. He analyzes, as one example of such a basic value, the notion of duty and the stress on correct action.

The myth (whose different definitions we need not enumerate here) cannot be categorized. It has an autonomous status. Imbued as it is with religious ideas, it is in practice an indispensable part of the African liturgy. It is often a necessary component of the rite, sustaining the thread of certain ceremonies. What we call drame sacré is, with all its implied formalism, a dramatization of the myth, or what amounts to the same thing, an actualization of holy scriptures.

India's ancient contacts with Europe receded from the sixth century A.D. The crotchety Byzantine monk Cosmas Indicopleustes (the man who sailed to India), a merchant engaged in the Far Eastern trade whose business took him as far as Ceylon and who in later life retired into a monastery of Sinai where he wrote the Topographia Christiana, a Christian account of the geography of the world (c. 640 A.D.), was the last to report on Indian conditions. Only a few Christian missionaries visited India during the Middle Ages, but their attention was centered on winning the heathen lands to Christianity and their writings contribute little to the history of cultural exchanges. In fact India, and generally the East, had become so remote from the European mind that Marco Polo's account of what he saw in the East was long distrusted as a fable, though much of it was quite authentic and factual, as modern research has shown. The more significant contacts between India and the West in modern times began with the arrival of the Portuguese in the last years of the fifteenth century. But they too concentrated more on religion than on trade; however, when their claims to a monopoly of trade relations with the East, based on a preposterous Papal bull, were soon challenged, and the Dutch, English and French entered the Indian ocean, there ensued a brisk competition among the rival European trading companies for securing trading privileges from the Indian powers, and this, by force of circumstances, led to their increasing interference in the political relations of the native kingdoms and principalities. By their readiness to learn from the experience of others, their astute capacity to take calculated risks, and by their good fortune, the English gained the most signal successes and became the rulers of all India by the beginning of the nineteenth century. The story of this political expansion has been told often and is well known. Our primary concern here will be with the social and cultural changes that accompanied this historic expansion of British colonial power, the influx of Europeans and other westerners for trade, conquest and other ends pursued in India, their mutual relations and their relations with the children of the soil, the social contacts and the mutual cultural influences that resulted, and the abiding results, material and spiritual, so far as they can be traced, for the civilizations of the West and the East, as they may be observed particularly in England and India.

The problem of spontaneity and the capability of adaptation in the development of civilizations, which is the subject of the current issue, is in my view inseparable from the problem posed by the relations between reality and the images of reality. Two cultures existing side by side confront each other in many ways and in countless sectors. And in every case this confrontation gives rise in each of them to a particular image of the other. Unstable, changing images succeed each other, and from the moment they appear condition the terms of the confrontation to the extent to which they constitute the key that every culture possesses for judging the singular characteristics of the other. It is this image that gives meaning to each of the isolated elements and consequently to the whole. Judging—or prejudging—on the basis of this established meaning, the social groups through which two cultures make contact with each other accept or reject the peculiar characteristics of their opposite number, and react in this confrontation with conditioned attitudes. Thus, the image of a cultural reality has become an established fact of the reality and operates as such. What appears spontaneous in one culture, which has become merged with another, or what results from adaptation, may derive from certain genuine forms of the other culture but also from the idea that one culture may have gained of another. And as this belief —which operates as a given factor of the reality—has been elaborated through very obscure psycho-social processes, it is indispensable to start from the basis of the accepted forms that have created it and to follow from there the process of its formation.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is closely linked to the ethno-linguistic research of the American school of anthropology, which can take pride in its number of leading scholars, all more or less formed or influenced by F. Boas. The anthropological and linguistic interest in the life of the American Indians is understandable within the framework of the social problems posed by the existence of numerous and varied Indian communities in the United States. From this stem the first attempts to transcribe and understand the languages of the Indian tribes which by no means can be separated from later theoretical research. On this practical basis an especially active school of anthropology was founded and has developed. It collected the empiric materials on the basis of which the theoretical generalizations of what is now called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis were built.

It would be foolhardy and fruitless to try to cover in a few pages all the aspects of the development of Celtic civilization during the period of Roman domination. In effect, the civilizations involved were extremely heterogeneous, and the contacts among them highly complex. This pageant of transfer, mutation, amalgamation and revival stretched over more than half a millenium and varied significantly according to time and place. Only a superficial observer, judging from a few broad common characteristics, would be so bold as to speak of a unified Celto-Roman civilization. In reality, the Celtic territory subjugated by the Romans comprised a good number of well-differentiated provincial civilizations : the civilization of Roman Galicia is not the same as that of Brittany, the civilization of Provence differs considerably from that of Northern Gaul, and the Danubian provinces, in their turn, are distinguished by certain characteristics which cannot be confused with those of Galatia or Cisalpine Gaul. Yet all these regions were inhabited by Celtic tribes at the time of the Roman conquest; the cultural divergences can be accounted for by variations both in the pre-Celtic substrata of these areas and in the way in which their inhabitants reacted to the contact of Roman civilization.

Exorbitant attention has been paid to the nature of gods, whose character it is to be inacessible to examination, but relatively less attention has been paid to the impresarios of gods, viz. prophets and shamans and priests—the de facto sources of all our religious information—who are available for study. It is our contention that the nature of deities is to be sought in the psychic disposition of their exponents and, more than this, that the ancestor of the god is the shaman himself. The vatic personality is often known to be psychologically abnormal, or perhaps only temporarily in such a state as the dream or the vision, and doubtless often in response to the pressure of some current crisis, personal or social or both. But the conditions for hallucinatory contact with spirits and gods may easily be gained by psychically quite ungifted persons, through the use of psychotropic drugs. It is this second situation we would wish to examine in the present study.

The achievement of the independence of India in August 1947 was an event of epochal significance. It has meant that about four hundred million human beings have become concerned with finding a worthy place for themselves in the political and economic map of the world. The work of rehabilitation, solidification, reconstruction and development done in diverse departments of life in the country in the past nineteen years has been an eye-opener both to Indians and outsiders and is slowly revealing the tremendous energy of the Indian population, which had also expressed itself before through the hard and agonizing process of the years of struggle for freedom. India's independence has also had a pronounced intellectual and cultural consequence. 1 It has given a heightened stature to the great prophets, heroes and statesmen of India's struggle for liberation (1857-1947). It has invested the political parties and movements of this country with an Asian and even international significance. India has embarked upon the colossal task of transforming an under-developed agrarian economy and static society to the status of a modern industrialized country within the framework of parliamentary democracy, and this imparts to the political and economic experiments of this country great significance even for outsiders. The number of books on modern India is rapidly increasing. It is satisfying to note that some of these books are bound to have an influence for decades.

Probably the most momentous experience in the contacts and mergings among civilizations in the Far East—one shared by China, Japan and Korea—is the introduction of Buddhism from India. This is, of course, a subject on which much has already been written, and even when narrowed to China alone its complexities do not lend themselves readily to summary treatment. Ideally one should have a clear conception of what “Chinese Buddhism” and the “Chinese tradition” represent before proceeding to discuss their interrelations. The most that we can hope for here is that by examining specific points of contact or friction batween Buddhism and the more articulate spokesmen of Chinese tradition some reciprocal identification may emerge.

Many scholars who have thought hard about the problems of peace and war in the thermonuclear age have concluded that mankind is faced with an unprecedented situation. Thus Kenneth Boulding (Conflict and Defense, p. 336) has remarked that “Our hope for the future of mankind… lies first in the human imagination, which can create the forms of things unknown and so create the image of possible futures that have not been previously imagined.” Thermonuclear war and world disarmament are both thought to be unprecedented possibilities. And from this belief has sprung the notion of many war-peace researchers that study of the past is unlikely to contribute much to understanding of an unprecedented future. Perhaps partly for this reason, few professional historians have become involved in the kind of peace research that has interested many economists, political scientists, and—perhaps preeminently—psychologists.

In chapter 79 of his Doctrina pueril Raymond Lull, a professional educator whom Jaime the Conqueror engaged to tutor the future king of Majorca, describes “the mechanical arts” at about the middle of the 13th century as “sciences” peculiar to men who “do physical work.” Here the treballan in the Catalan text has obviously lost all reference to the tripalium, the instrument of torture reserved for slaves, and the word is no more pejorative than the Latin laborant. For Lull the mechanical arts were not the exclusive province of a lower class of society (the class that Plato had placed on the margin of his “Republic”).