The study of the Russian Middle Age, utilizing archeology as a key, has scored great successes at Novgorod during these last years. The thick historical layer formed there over a period of a thousand years is at present being sifted by an important group of Soviet archeologists.

The Middle Ages, and in particular the twelfth century, with its monks who were philosophers, theologians, and mystics, hung upon biblical thought and through it did its thinking, its loving, and its acting. The Old and the New Testaments were studied and meditated upon together, though the Old Testament was more often commented upon than was the New. Both offered two successive stages, represented by the law and by grace. For the men of the twelfth century Holy Scripture was the basis of their symbolic mentality. Through Scripture they could distinguish a duality of meanings which can be stated precisely under the terms “letter” and “spirit.” This double terminology was comprehended on two different levels and depended on the degree of the individual's evolution. Saint Bernard understood it very well when he alluded to the ordinary mode of seeing and to the spiritual mode. The heart's vision sees in the mind (Sermon XLV, 5, on the Song of Songs. Just as that hearing which is not of the body but which belongs to the heart understands what the ears could not hear, there are, according to Saint Bernard, three kinds of language to which three modes of understanding correspond: the mode of the hireling, that of the son, and that of the wife (Sermon VII, 2, on the Song of Songs) ? The first stays on the threshold to knowledge, the second crosses it, but only the wife penetrates into true knowledge which designates a knowledge acquired more by intuition than by learning and which Saint Jerome called “scientia secretorum.” This stimulates another way of thinking and of loving and coincides with a new dimension of being. In regard to the comprehension of symbolic content, three steps or successive stages are involved here.

This note was written in the hope that it would make a small contribution to the revival, not of Hegel, but of a mental faculty which is in danger of being obliterated : the power of negative thinking. As Hegel defines it, “Thinking is, indeed, essentially the negation of that which is immediately before us.” What does he mean by “negation,” the central category of dialectic?

Are country people destined to disappear in the near future as a result of the constant advance of technical and urban civilization? Having discovered that three-fourths of mankind are country people, American ethnologists and sociologists are studying their “urbanization” and their “industrialization” throughout the world in an effort to see to what extent there is compatibility—or incompatibility—between their traditional “cultures” and the demands of industrial production and of life in a mass society. European writers appear to be less perturbed by this dilution of peasant civilizations through contamination from the cities. They are concerned rather with the gradual disappearance of country people themselves, drawn into the cities by the rural exodus.

Attempts to reconstruct the “psychology” of a past era always have a specious side which should properly be mistrusted. Was the “Renaissance man” a visualizer? Arguments for and against this thesis have been found, but nothing can be solved, because it will always be impossible to prove that a phenomenon, even if it is very widespread and completely characteristic of a given period, is symptomatic of a particular psychic constitution of the men of that time. If the writings and the art of the sixteenth century seem to us to include the elements of a complete logic of figurative thought, which would certainly be of interest for the history of intellectual methods, the fact as such must not be translated into terms of the psychology of individuals.

There is a periodic need for a general survey and stock-taking in almost every field, but in the domain of the pre-Islamic history of Iran, to my knowledge, there has been little scholarly assessment of the picture of the past in light of changes wrought by new source materials. One important reason is that the sources for this history have increased considerably in the past few decades, and scholars have devoted the bulk of their time to the elucidation of these sources, with little time left for a study of their historical consequences. Another point which should be made is the difference between the requirements, on the one hand, for the work of ancient and medieval historians and, on the other hand, for that of modern colleagues. Historians of more recent times like to emphasize the homogeneity of the historical profession and the continuity of methods in the entire field. But in practice it is the classicist who, in our universities, concerns himself with ancient history. I mean by this one who is trained in the methods of textual analysis and the tools of the classicist, and it is the Orientalist or philologist who writes the history of the pre-modern Orient. Given the difficulties of ancient oriental languages and the need to gather source material from the archeologist, epigraphist, numismatist, and art historian, one can understand the great demands on these specialists who would write history. It is no wonder that the methods of the modern historian, evolved from work with an abundance of material and the need for comparison of various sources in evaluating a multitude of factors and roles played by individuals in a given situation, are of a somewhat different nature from those of the scholar who investigates the more distant past. The modern historian is dependent on the economist and political scientist for aid in reconstructing his story. This is the result, of course, of the differentiation and great expansion of knowledge in modern times. The disciplines become defined, and specialization is a necessity in view of the great mass of documentation. Before the advent of writing, archeology, history, and other disciplines are undifferentiated. With its invention, however, the process of ordering subjects and fields at once begins. With the increase of material remains, archeology, for example, divides into the history of architecture, with art, epigraphy, numismatics, the history of technology, and so on. This is inherent in the process of understanding.

Definitions are often viewed with a skeptical eye. The most diverse definitions are successfully applied to a given subject; their discrepancies are noted, and conclusions are drawn concerning the vanity of quibbling over words. In the best of cases the writer, before beginning his own exposition, proposes the definition which he will follow exclusively, convinced that all terminologies are valid so long as they are explicit and respected.

The expression commonly employed, “history of philosophy,” often seems either inexact or incomplete, depending on whether the term “philosophy” is understood to mean a system of the sciences or whether it is taken in the historic sense. In the first case, what is in question is a certain ideal system of well-founded questions and of exact and logically demonstrated affirmations relative to the objects of a certain domain. So defined, philosophy is not the object of this study. In the second case, the historic sense, the term “philosophy” designates a collection of questions and affirmations growing and changing in time, effectively expressed in a given time and by specific men. They ought to concern the objects of the domain of philosophy in the sense of systematic exposition, whose content, however, itself underwent notable changes in the course of the development of philosophy in the historical sense—particularly of European philosophy. In the spirit of their authors they ought to be true. However, according to all probability, many of them are false or at least insufficiently founded. They are, moreover, the intentional products of a certain number of cognitive, human acts. But they result at the same time—in their properties, their content, their formulation, the mode of their justification—from the influence of other states and extra-cognitive attitudes of philosophers: various sentiments, desires, religious beliefs, etc. It is therefore improper to speak of the “history of philosophy” in the sense of a philosophic system, for, in this sense, philosophy insofar as it is an ideal, extratemporal product can have no kind of history. If, on the other hand, this expression is intended to involve a question of philosophy in the historic sense, it is necessary to complete it by specifying that in the given historic consideration we are dealing with the evolution of a given philosophy—for example, of Greek philosophy from Thales to the death of Aristotle. So understood, the history of philosophy is an empirical discipline relative to certain empirical facts which occur in time. It is necessary to bear clearly in mind the nature of these acts: Is it a question only of a certain collection of phrases, or of something more?

Every citizen has an equal right to culture. The development of the means of diffusion and of democratic ideas has unquestionably furthered a trend toward the unification of culture, but this process is often hindered and retarded. Profound disparities separate the cultural ideas and practices of society, the ideal or real cultural models of different social classes and categories, those of different groups, and, finally, those of the leaders and of the public. Imbalances result from this, and it is these imbalances that popular culture tends to modify. In order best to meet the continuously new cultural needs of industrial and democratic society, popular culture has adapted to modern life some of the features of traditional culture. It has initiated the masses into the elementary techniques of learning—writing and reading. An increasingly complex and extended primary education has become more widespread. Contemporary society raises problems that evolve so rapidly and are so intricate that popular culture must be continued after school and during a man's entire life. It finds its way into new systems of permanent instruction and training through the agency of large-scale means of diffusion, by means of groups or social relationships.