Our mind strives for statements of configuration and statements of consequence. Where different things stand in relation to one another, that is configuration. How successive events arise from one another, that is consequence. We grasp far more easily disposition in space than process in time; further an incomplete “geographic” account can be valid as far as it goes while an incomplete “historic” account can be highly misleading. The difference in difficulty and reliability between “where” and “how” statements is at a maximum in politics. It is therefore not surprising that political science should have dealt mainly with configurations.

NatoHas appeared under many labels since its creation — Guardian of Peace, Pawn of Power Politics, Savior of the West, and Harbinger of War. All of them probably have some validity. But no matter which sobriquet is most applicable, the most significant feature of the alliance may be that it has survived twelve years of continuous challenges. By its survival it has become the symbol of America's abandonment of isolationism. In an age in which foreign policy plays the kind of role in domestic politics that would have been unthinkable in the nineteenth century, NATO represents a coherence in foreign policy that transcends party differences. Conceived under the Republican 80th Congress, put into effect by President Truman and Secretary Acheson, and expanded by President Eisenhower and Secretary Dulles, NATO now takes its place with the New Deal as a major factor in American life in the mid-twentieth century.

ThePast fifty years have shown a marked tendency toward the suppression of any consideration of the mysterious as a part of history. R. G. Collingwood's categorical remark that “the blind forces and activities in us” are not parts of the historical process merely reflected, in a particularly distinguished quarter, an assumption that has since gained widespread support. In social studies this trend has favored the accumulation of extensive data of the kind, for example, that lies behind the growth-of-learning S-curve postulated by industrial psychologists who have made detailed studies of “cycles” in a wide variety of industries. Such accumulations of solid quantities of data that lend themselves to statistical interpretation are reassuring, and it would be foolish to disparage either the method or its results. But it is important, and especially appropriate in studying a complex topic like the morality of a culture, to recognize that if one examines closely even those more limited social patterns that lend themselves to statistical analysis, there often seems to be, as Walter Bagehot argued a hundred years ago, a point somewhere along the line of development where the individual, or a creative minority, emerges as the real source of the breakthrough which establishes the pattern.

TheOrganic nature of all philosophic reflection can easily be obscured by the otherwise laudable efforts of specialists in such fields as the philosophies of ethics, political theory, and art. Granting the great speculative philosophers of the past, seeking a unified view of the totality of human experience, erred though an excess of undisciplined imagination, it is questionable whether the less ambitious, piecemeal work of the analytic specialist has saved philosophy from mysticism or has so truncated it that all vital connections with a humanity in search of meaning have been severed. The tendency to compartmentalize philosophy is not limited to any area of experience but in this article I should like to restrict myself to a consideration of the consequences of separating philosophy of history from inquiries into individual and political values. In order to appreciate these consequences we must first agree on the nature of a philosophy of history and the role it plays, or should play, in determining our estimation of human values.

Among the revolutions in France since 1789 one, the Revolution of 1830, has been singularly neglected by historians in this century, and neither in this century nor the preceding one has it attracted much attention from any but the political historians. No monograph on the whole story of the Revolution has ever been published, and the standard account, in Lavisse's Histoire de France contemporaine, appeared nearly forty years ago. The economic and sociological dimensions of the event have been generally ignored. Consequently, the Revolution of 1830 is ordinarily seen as a political movement arising out of the unpopularity of Charles X and his ministers and out of their attempt to arrogate the sovereign power to the crown.

Philippine foreign policy is important to the United States for several reasons. The epigram describing the Filipinos as the most occidental of the Orientals and the most oriental of the Occidentals, emphasizes the Philippines as potentially one of the world's most important cultural bridges between these two worlds. It combines some of the best features of both areas and offers the possibility of giving each world an insight into the other. From the American standpoint the Philippines is often thought of as a show window in the Orient, and this country has a stake not only in the success of Philippine democracy, but also the Philippines provides some testimony to the fairness of American colonial policy.