The antithesis between paganism and Christianity is usually resolved, in current opinion, into the theological antithesis between polytheism and monotheism. But a religious life means more than mere theology, and one has the right to ask oneself what is, in reality, the religious character of paganism.

Between polytheism and monotheism, the enotheism of Max Muller (and of F. W. J. Schelling) is not a mean term, and still less a moment of transition from one to the other, for the simple reason that it is situated on a different plane. In the fervour of prayer, under the impulse of devotion, the believer is so absorbed in the thought of the God he is adoring at that very moment-this is described as enotheism-that for him, at that moment, it is as if no other god existed. This will not prevent him, at another moment, from consecrating himself with equal fervour to the adoration of another god. The famous Egyptian hymn inspired by the religious ideas of Amenophis IV, and which invokes Aten, the Sun, as “sole God,” is just as far from true monotheism with its absolute negation of every divine being except the One, as are the Vedic hymns in which Indra is celebrated as the god “besides whom there are no others” (Rig-Veda, VI 21.10; cfr. I 81.5; 165.9; IV 30.1; VII 32.23).

Anthropology, as it developed in the latter part of the last century, took as its central, if not sole, field of interest the attempt to discover and explain human progress from the emergence of man before the Ice Age many millennia ago down to the complex life of civilised peoples in the modern world. It sought not only to range both living races and fossil remains of extinct forms in a succession of advancing forms, but to formulate broad sequences of discovery and invention by which new crafts and ways of life developed, and to trace the birth and development of cosmological, religious and moral ideas, and the elaboration of social institutions from the family to the state.

Such a programme was not new. It had been the subject of considerable speculation in classical thought and of more critical elaboration by the rationalist philosophers of the eighteenth century, who shared Hume's view that the history of mankind had been one of “gradual improvement from rude beginnings to a state of greater perfection.” The nineteenth century anthropologists had, however, the great advantage of being able to set their studies within the wider framework of the considerable geological and archaeological knowledge that was then accumulating and of the theories concerning biological evolution that were then being elaborated.

The influence of man on man is exercised sometimes to assemble a group of individuals moved toward common action, sometimes to remedy the antagonisms which naturally result from the conflict of human wills. These two situations give rise to two forms of authority which are seldom found in the same person, since one form is essentially exciting and the other essentially calming. The contrast between them can be illustrated by the two images of the bridge of Arcole and the oak of Vincennes.

The print which shows Bonaparte hurling himself at the enemy and urging his soldiers to follow sums up in a single scene all the influence toward action he had exercised on them since he had taken command. He had found troops low in morale and without any disposition to take the offensive; he breathed his own fire into them; his famous proclamation tended to imbue them with his own ambition, and united them as participants in his plan. By a remarkable feat of transference, impatient because he was without glory, he made them realize that they were without shoes, and he materialized for them his own vast dreams in the visible form of “the fertile plains of Lombardy.”

About twenty years ago a book entitled Umsturz im Weltbild der Physik (“The Revolution in the World-View of Physics”) appeared and was eventually widely read. It described the basic change which our views in the natural sciences had undergone during the first three decades of this century.

A similar book could be written today concerning the other, humanistic side of our conception of the world, for so radical a change has taken place since then in humanistic ideas as well, that it approaches complete revolution. This change can be briefly described as a transition from the part-whole synthetic point of view to whole-part, analytic thinking; from a Ptolemaic, egocentric standpoint to a Copernican, relativistic one; and from “thinking in terms of nations” to “thinking in cultures.”

Cybernetics has fallen prey to snobs and journalists, who, in dealing with it, tend to mix myth with science. In this study we shall try to sift out the chaff, which a regrettable sensationalism has needlessly mixed with the good grain. Concentrating our attention on the rational bases and some of the lines of force of this new field of study, we shall try to eliminate the element of fable, but we shall not prohibit ourselves from opening windows on any perspectives that seem reasonable.

The notion of “information,” cornerstone of cybernetics, sheds light on the theory of knowledge. What is science, indeed, but an interpretation, which tries to be objective, of the flood of signals with which the universe submerges us? A Protean notion, it permits us to discover a certain unity among the most disparate phenomena. But it is a dangerous notion, too, because of the multiplicity of senses one may give to it.

Professor Raffaele Pettazzoni is one of the most illustrious historians of religion of our time. He belongs to a type of scholar which is unfortunately becoming rare and is perhaps headed for extinction: those who have taken as their specialty the universal history of religion. At first sight such an ambition might seem to pose an impossible task; the historico-cultural field has become so wide that no single mind could pretend to assimilate and master a quantity of documents that is increasing every day. Let us therefore avoid misunderstanding on this point: there is no question of the historian of religions attempting to replace the Americanist, the Sinologist, the Africanist, or to master their knowledge of philology in order to study and interpret the Chinese, Aztec and Bantu religions: it suffices for him to record the results of research carried out by the specialists and to classify and evaluate these results in a perspective which is exclusively his own: that of the general history of religion.