To read, to read a book, is, like all the other really human occupations, a Utopian task. I call “utopian” every action whose initial intention cannot be fulfilled in the development of its activity and which has to be satisfied with approximations essentially contradictory to the purpose which had started it. Thus “to read” begins by signifying the project of understanding a text fully. Now this is impossible. It is only possible with a great effort to extract a more or less important portion of what the text has tried to say, communicate, make known; but there will always remain an “illegible” residue. It is, on the other hand, probable that, while we are making this effort, we may read, at the same time, into the text; that is, we may understand things which the author has not “meant” to say, and, nevertheless, he has “said” them; he has presented them to us involuntarily—even more, against his professed purpose. This twofold condition of speech, so strange and antithetical, appears in two principles of my “Axioms for a New Philology,” which are as follows:

1. 1. Every utterance is deficient—it says less than it wishes to say.

2. 2. Every utterance is exuberant—it conveys more than it plans.

There are two pitfalls which constantly threaten the literary historian who seeks the origins or beginnings of works of the mind such as species of literature or forms of religion, as well as the examples which partake of both. One danger is that the study may become an artificial construction without sufficient concrete basis in proved historical facts; the other is that the author may prefer experience to such constructions and may be too much influenced by what he has known and been impressed with as origin and beginning in his own time. The latter has at least one advantage: where there is no experience at the outset of an investigation, not even that minimum of empeiria which I shall call, with the Greek poet Aleman, peira (peira toi mathesios archa, “experience is the beginning of knowledge”), then there can be no scholarship in the fields of literature, art, and religion. In the history of those three fields we can be competently guided only by “veterans”—not mere theoreticians but men who in a sense are also “practitioners” in the creating of works of the mind. Experience takes first place not only in the natural sciences but also in modern scholarship in these areas, even with the risk that it may be too personal, too time-bound, too small in scope.

In the last century and in the first decades of the present century the historians of India laid stress on the isolation of the subcontinent by the mountains and seas surrounding her on all sides and cutting her off as a separate universe. The progress of modern research has shown how mistaken this view was. We now see the true facts much more clearly than ever. The mountain barriers, though formidable at many points, are broken by gaps which have always allowed a considerable intercourse across the frontiers on the northwest as well as the northeast and at some points due north as well. By her position in the center of the littoral of the Indian Ocean, India enjoyed ample facilities for communication by sea with the countries lying to her west and east, and we now know that she and her neighbors availed themselves of these facilities from time immemorial. The Indian Ocean was navigated freely from very early, even prehistoric, times, and there was a series of lively maritime exchanges—migratory, commercial, and cultural—among the peoples of Africa, India, and Indonesia, or more generally Southeast Asia. Western Asia and the lands adjoining the Levant also took, from the beginning, a prominent part in this commerce of goods and ideas between India and the world. It is the aim of this paper to trace briefly the ancient contacts between India and the Western countries to the time when the rise and spread of Islam and the Islamic impact on India ushered in a new epoch.

If we wish to speak of the widening of the idea of causality, we must first specify the exact meaning of this concept, the modification of which is now being considered by many contemporary philosophers and scientists. In order to shed light on the classical concept of causality, it is almost impossible to avoid approaching it from the genetic point of view. Without a historical perspective we have only a very limited understanding of the content of the classical concepts by which this philosophic as well as scientific tradition has been constituted. By showing the deep and tenacious roots of our belief in rigorous determinism, we shall better understand certain types of resistance which today are opposed to any attempt at making determinism more flexible.

Scarcely fifty years ago the “Indian sphinx” posed enigmas that seemed simple. Known pre-Columbian civilizations were relatively few, and their past, however obscure, could be considered recent in contrast to the millenniums that separate us from the cultures of the ancient Orient. Today this is no longer true. The emergence of new archeological horizons has singularly transformed our summary view of the history of man in the Western Hemisphere. The date of the first human migrations through the Bering Straits has been put back some twenty or thirty thousand years—to the Aztec, Mayan, and Incan civilizations which the Spaniards knew in their full flower. Others have been added which, in turn, give rise to fresh enigmas.

When he hears about automation, automatic factories, and unmanned manufacture, the worker wonders with a certain anxiety what will be his fate in an industry which is undergoing transformation and whether the trade from which he draws his livelihood today does not risk becoming useless tomorrow and leaving him without work. No doubt he has been told that the machine will never be able to replace man entirely, that there is no danger of unemployment, since new machines create new jobs, and that he will be freed of heavy labor and fatigue, thanks to the automatized factory. But these arguments are not all valid for the man whose job is eliminated or modified and who must find another situation or adapt himself to a different kind of work. It makes no difference if the over-all perspectives are reassuring—they are less so on the individual's level. The economy may continue to experience a cycle of full employment, but the individual may have to face the depressing hunt for a new job or start at the bottom in a different trade.