The multiplication of documentary sources (books or objects) from which the various disciplines glean their data has made the machine an indispensable tool of scholarship today.

The horizons of research are broadening continually. The traditional sciences have widened the field of their investigations. Linguistic studies, for example, are no longer limited to a few languages, but encompass all dialects which have ever been spoken or are spoken today throughout the world. Archaeology is armed with methods of prospecting undreamed of yesterday, and uses the airplane and aerial photography to locate sites. A submarine branch of archaeology, exploring the beds of the seas, has sprung up alongside of land-based archaeology. New sciences have come into being relatively recently, like demography, or even very recently, like experimental psychology. All of these sciences owe something to humanistic studies, not only the applied sciences and industry but even the pure sciences such as mathematics, methodology, heuristics, for scholars are men, integrated into groups, and their intellectual activity falls into the domain of psycho-sociology.

For many people in the United States the designation of the first part of the twentieth century as the Age of Analysis does not seem strange or even overstated. They know immediately that the phrase refers to psychoanalysis and not spectrum analysis or content analysis or market analysis. Psychoanalysis as a therapy, as a way of looking at the world, undeniably caught on in this country and in this hemisphere to a far greater extent than it has anywhere else in the world. Yet today many signs indicate that its influence has leveled off and perhaps even declined, while in Europe and Japan the boom may be just getting under way. This current disparity between the Old World and the New provides fresh impetus for speculation about the forces that implemented the acceptance of psychoanalysis in this country and for illustration of how this acceptance became in part a silly infatuation. Some of these factors should be outlined both from the point of view of phychoanalysis as a cultural phenomenon and from the point of view of psychoanalysis as potentially the most inclusive general psychological theory. To spell out some of the conditions that did and do obtain in the United States in regard to psychoanalysis may supply a baseline from which to study the similarities and differences in the growth, in other countries, of psychoanalysis as an institution and as a system of thought, as well as a part of medicine along with its barely legitimate offspring, dynamic psychiatry. This vast task can be undertaken here only in the broadest possible terms. Hence historical, sociological, and psychological generalizations will be offered without the necessary noting of ever-present exceptions and disagreements.

An attempt is made here to consider poetry as one of the aspects of language. It is not the first attempt and certainly not the last.

At first glance we are startled by the multiplicity of additional formal laws restricting the poet's free choice of expressions: intricate rhyming schemes, equal number of syllables in a line, regular distribution of short and long, stressed and unstressed syllables, alliteration, prevailing in both ancient Germanic and modern American poetry:

(E. E. Cummings, All in green)

The word “structure” is now too often used as a password. But in linguistics it appears to have been adopted independently, before the current vogue. Here it has retained its most narrow connotation. The study of linguistic structures means the study of the construction of certain linguistic fragments: the attempt to uncover, according to their linguistic function, the real units that make up these fragments and the rules for using these units in constructing the fragments. This method of analysis, functional and structural, forty years ago transformed the description of language, whether it was a question of phonemics, of morphology, or even of syntax. But for a long time the structuralists themselves insisted upon the resistances that semantics raise—and its most apparent formal manifestation, the lexicon—to any attempt at analysis of this sort.

In 1957 American linguistics seemed to have reached a plateau of achievement and acceptance on which its practitioners could pause in retrospective pride. That year saw the publication, under the aegis of the American Council of Learned Societies, of a sampling of papers, edited by Martin Joos (Readings in Linguistics) and documenting, according to its subtitle, “The development of descriptive linguistics in America since 1925.” In a period of about five years around that date H. A. Gleason, Jr., Charles F. Hockett and Archibald A. Hill published textbooks which summarized and extended current views on linguistics, while another leading linguist, Kenneth L. Pike, summed up his considerable experience in a preliminary version of a major work on Language. In the same year there appeared a slim volume which was to have a startling impact on linguistics. Its author, Noam Chomsky, was a student of Zellig S. Harris who himself had codified the methods of structural linguistics in 1951 and was one of the leading proponents of the assumptions and goals of American linguistics attacked so sharply by its new critic. Truly a paradigm of the Hegelian myth of history.

I

Unilateralism is a big word. Like Moliere's comment on prose, it is something we have been using all of our lives without knowing its exact nature. Perhaps this is because unilateralism is a notion which we have measured in terms of degree rather than kind. The rub seems to be in the word “degree.” Thus, to understand the significance of “unilateral initiatives,” and perhaps to appreciate the complexities in working out an intelligent strategy for winning international peace, it might be worthwhile to explain the varied aspects that attach to a concept of unilateralism.

The well-known German mathematician D. Hilbert wrote : “A nation in isolation cannot progress unless neighboring nations are also progressing, the interests of the different states require not only that order should reign within each of them but also that the relationship between these states should be correctly maintained; the same is true in the case of the different sciences.”

These words of D. Hilbert, written many years ago and in which he stresses the prime importance of the interdependence of the sciences, take on a special significance at the present time when cybernetics, which is developing at an increasingly fast rate, makes it possible to discover profound analogies with far-reaching implications, between spheres of knowledge which a priori are unrelated.

Until a few decades ago the study of the peoples and civilizations of the Orient did not appear to require any apology, since it was considered one of the most uncontroversial and innocuous branches of the science. The orientalist was, and still is in some of the less up-to-date sectors of European communis opinio, a scholar who chooses as the object of his research one of the most remote fields of knowledge, far removed in space or time, or both, barred from access by incomprehensible languages and writings, whose religions, philosophies and literatures are quite apart from the main stream of classical and Western tradition. This was the conception of orientalism among the Bouvards or Pecuchets of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In reality, the interest in oriental civilizations itself constitutes a brilliant chapter in contemporary European culture and civilization, developing from this modest level of estimation to a more important historical concern. This is illustrated in certain respects, if not yet in its entirety, by works that are at the same time a history of ideas and a balance sheet of the results achieved. Orientalism has been respectively an aspect of Enlightenment and of Romanticism, of Positivism and of European historicism, and to sketch its complete history would be tantamount to going through the entire evolution of Western culture. It was precisely in this latter field that it had projected itself outside of itself, toward something other than itself, and by this very act (this should appear obvious and should not be the object of polemics or raised eyebrows) establishing its own view of civilization and history, politics and religion, society and poetry.

Speech—both audible and inaudible—is always speech about something. The subject matter may be natural reality, social reality, or psychic reality (the manifestations of a person's spiritual life exist for us objectively, i. е., outside us and independently of us, and thus form part of reality which we investigate). The epistemological controversy up to this day has been over which element is primitive : language, which creates our image of reality, or reality, which is mirrored, reflected, mapped by language. Two solutions are possible: either the linguistic process is an act of creating an image of reality, or it is an act of mirroring, reflecting, etc.

We speak because we live in society: this might seem a truism, the statement of which scarcely needs any lengthy justification; all those involved in the study of social groups, under whatever aspect, know that the knowledge of language is one of the conditions at the basis of their research and one of the essential means at their disposal for successfully carrying out their task, delving more deeply into the facts, and verifying their results. It would seem that those linguists who do not conceive of language as an interpretation, but rather as the pure subject material of their science, also have to express their agreement with regard to the evidence of the proposition; in fact, if the sociological character of the linguistic fact has never been denied, the attention which has been devoted to it has varied considerably.

Antoine Meillet demonstrated in 1906 that language corresponds exactly to the definition of a social fact. “Language is… eminently a social fact.” In effect, this is explicitly implied in the definition proposed by Durkheim. A language exists independently of the individuals who speak it, and although it has no reality outside the sum of these individuals, it is nevertheless, due to its general character, exterior to each of them, thus proving that it does not depend on any single person to modify it and that every individual deviation from common usage provokes a reaction.” Meillet shows moreover that the causes for semantic changes are social in character and can be classified into three main types. They are explained by changes in the thing meant, by the transfer of words from one social group to another, and, thirdly, by intrinsic linguistic conditions. In fact the causes are outside the linguistic system itself—the causes for changes of the third type are not the linguistic conditions themselves but lie in whatever has induced these conditions—and this is true of every linguistic system (by system of a language I mean also the relationships between the words and their sense). The division of a society into classes or castes produces differences in vocabulary, grammar, phonetics and phonemics, in style, etc. The adoption of a new language by a people can lead to profound changes through the agency of the substratum. The material and spiritual evolution of a society is followed by the appearance of a great number of new words and new meanings which have repercussions on other parts of the linguistic system, a characteristic aspect of the linguistic development of Europe and of the languages of every society of our time which has become industrialized and has adopted modern Western civilization.

Although language is at least as old as mankind, its mysteries have as yet hardly been scratched and whatever we may hold as its ultimate nature, origin and destiny would remain at present highly speculative. Indeed, a bylaw of the Linguistic Society of Paris is mentioned to rule out of order any formal paper on the origin of language. What is more, socially accepted perspectives on language have altered in the course of ages and while it is true that a “scientific” study of linguistic phenomena has been confined to ancient India and recent times, it may very well be that the fundamental and really controlling level of these phenomena, as distinguished from the level of their habitual use and description, lies in that spontaneous power latent in the psychic reality whereby it is able to attain self-expression in lower media through inducing in them rhythm and pattern. Behind the pattern of the audible sound waves of speech lie the patterns of articulation and neural activity. Despite the operation of chance in the choice of convention in language and in its actual use, there are discernible in it patterns of a statistical and logical nature.