This study is not devoted either to the institutions of mutual aid, philanthropy, or charity within modern capitalism, or to the donations individuals make to them.

Mostly, the past has been for men a strange country. Remote and inaccessible, its existence is accepted but not important. Known through the curious tales of occasional observers, it is meaningful only to the extent that it affords those who regard it reflected images of their own society.

The first Americans were little occupied with the past. Although they read history, and wrote it, it was the history of their own times; the term in the seventeenth century referred more often to contemporaneous events than to those that had receded out of the memory of living men. Indeed, in a universe in which divine Providence interceded directly in the affairs of men, there was little purpose to the quest for antecedents; behind every action was the same ultimate cause.

Can our present-day anxieties be stated in terms of the ancient world ? Can this be done without risking the accusation of self-deception or pedantry? That is the question.

Hellenism in en vogue; there is satisfaction in defining in ever more exact terms a new aspect, long underestimated, of Greek grandeur. A certain ‘modernism’ cannot be denied to Greek thought: a tendency that existed then as it does now. Two millennia and more have trimmed down what was pretensions: tricks and scandals of innovation become less important ; the essence of contributions becomes apparent, distilled by the labour of preceding centuries. It remains sure that the Greeks faced new human circumstances with the vigour of youth and with intelligence, and launched themselves freely upon the path of world discovery. This is truly modem: modern for us as it was for the Greeks of the third century B.C. A comparison between such experiences may be worth while.

Thirty-four years have passed since the Discorso de recepcion of the then young Arabist, don Miguel Asin Palacios, was presented in the Spanish Academy; and I still recall the impression of astonishment, admiration and almost alarm which the first reading of the Escatologia musulmana en la Divina Comedia aroused in my father, one of the first to spread the ideas of Asin in Italy—such was the impact of the novelty, the audacity, and the wide range of his thesis and his conclusions. I vaguely recall the discordant voices of both Orientalist and Dante criticism in the heated atmosphere of the centennial celebrations of 1921, the enthusiasm of the neophytes, the scandalised consternation of the idolators, and the profound echo of agreement and disagreement which Asin's book aroused, as surely no other publication of the centenary. Then, everywhere to some extent but above all in Italy, the voices of dissent prevailed, from those of the more or less reasoning and reasonable disbelievers to those of the early believers whose faith began to vacillate, as was the case of my father. Asin answered these, with lively and often cogent dialectic, in his Historia y critica de una polemica. Then the dispute languished and expired, leaving on both sides, as usually happens in these cases, a whole series of misunderstandings which had not been clarified. Among Asin's non-Orientalist critics—even among the most learned of them, and perhaps in the very measure of their learning—the initial prejudice against that strange world remained invincible: that world aberrant in language, custom, place, and civilisation, which the erudite Spaniard had brought into abrupt contact with the Christian-Latin world, the only background against which the figure of Dante had customarily been seen. On the other hand, the conviction was firmly planted in Asin's mind that the opposition to his theory, especially from the Italian point of view, was moved not only (as was indeed quite true) by mental laziness, by horror novi, by intellectual vitalde in the face of the bitter new truth he proposed, but also and above all, by cultural nationalism, by the set purpose of defending at any price a national glory whose originality and hitherto unquestioned greatness had been disparaged. He had been at pains to point out at the end of his book that the poetic glory of Dante was in no way compromised by the close, continuous, and fundamental dependence which he believed he had found between Dante's vision of the other world and Islamic eschatology; even so, Italian pride in the absolute originality of the sacred poem had been hurt, and this, Asin thought, more than any other motive, had inspired the Italian reaction.

Quantum mechanics, even in its early and simple phases, has often been regarded as a non-causal discipline. The argument supporting this view cites the uncertainty principle as prohibiting the ascertainment of complete knowledge concerning physical states upon which causal prediction could be based. Recent developments in atomic physics have added new and puzzling features to the problem of causality insofar as they operate, not only with intrinsically unmeasurable states, but also with time reversals which have been interpreted to mean that the effect can be prior to the cause. Feynman's theory of quantum electrodynamics is particularly rich in unorthodox suggestions which tantalise philosophers. The purpose of the present paper is to exhibit them, appraise their methodological function and see in what manner they violate the rules of causal description. This purpose, it seems, is best achieved by a sequential discussion of three questions: What does causality mean in physics? What is the new method of quantum electrodynamics? Is this new method compatible with the causal doctrine in some satisfactory form?

The pioneers of European prehistory marched under a banner inscribed Ex Oriente Lux, assuming as an axiom that all the fundamental inventions and discoveries like farming and metallurgy were brought to Europe from the East. The Frenchman Salomon Reinach first challenged the dogma, branding it as le mirage orientale, and then the Germans set about inverting the roles of Europe and Asia till under Hitler it was seriously contended that conquering invaders from Europe had spread to the valleys of the Nile and of the Tigris in time to create there the Sumerian and Pharaonic civilisations! Only now is it really possible to test the conflicting claims of the opposing schools by reference to objective data.

At the library of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, the dissertations in the Humanities are arranged in chronological order. A single glance suffices to tell us that this classification by years coincides almost exactly with a classification by bulk. As we pass along through time, year by year, the volumes grow thicker; pamphlets merge imperceptibly into modest books, these into larger books, these in turn into weighty tomes; until finally we come across works embracing several volumes, each volume imposing in its own right. The explanation is simple: every author is normally led to consider the opinions of his predecessors in the same field or in neighbouring fields; these opinions he discusses, contests, approves, or amends; and finally this leads to the growth in bulk, gradual but unlimited, so evident on the shelves at the library.

Mrs. Langer is to be warmly congratulated on this monumental work on the philosophy of aesthetics, a sequel to her Philosophy in a New Key. She brings all the equipment of her trained and firstrate philosophical mind to bear upon the fundamental problems of art and the arts. In Part I she speaks generally of aesthetics. In Part II she writes of the ways in which aesthetic symbolism works out in visual arts, in music, in song, and opera, in dance, in poetry and other forms of literature, and in drama both comic and tragic. The book concludes (Part III) with a suggestive essay on ‘The Power of the Symbol’.

With the practically complete cessation of ethnological inquiries conducted in the field tinder the sponsorship of the French School of the Far East, monographs on South East Asia have become, since the end of the 1939-45 war, somewhat rare. Hence it is a pleasure to welcome the work of Mr. Evans on the religious life of the Dusuns of North Borneo. With its shortcomings and its merits, this book shows what can still be accomplished by the researcher who works alone, at a time when the fashion is team-research. Mr. Evans visited the Tempasuk Sub-District in 1910, as a Cadet of the Chartered Company. From 1912 to 1933, he was curator of the museum of Perak in Malaya, and after a period of retirement in England between 1933-1938, he returned to Borneo and began to gather up the materials of the present study. Interned by the Japanese during the war, he could not resume his work until he was sixty years old. In his previous books he had given some information on the peoples of Malaya which supplemented the thick and still classic volumes of Skeat and Blagden. The present work, which resumes and sometimes corrects the documentation furnished in his Studies in Religion, Folklore, and Custom in British North Borneo and the Malay Peninsula, is divided into three parts: I, General Beliefs; II, Ceremonies, i.e., agrarian rites (one of the parts of the book which will be most interesting to specialists) and communal rites for the village with, among others, some interesting data on head-hunting, which was formerly practiced and which, according to the author, may spring into activity again. This part also includes some individual and domestic ceremonies (for cases of illness, bad dreams, etc.). Many of the rites involve the exposure and the donation of a sacrificial animal to the evil spirits supposed to be gathered outside of the houses. Part III is ‘Folktales’, and contains sixty-five tales which are closely related to the other two parts of the book. In the appendix are texts in the sacred language used by the Priestesses, with attempts at translation, as well as detailed descriptions of these priestesses’ ordination rites, and the details of a fertility rite. The materials of the book are thus rich from a functional point of view. Having lived for the most part by himself and without access to a specialised library, Mr. Evans has not undertaken the comparative analysis of his material. To do so would have increased considerably the size of an already long book; but one cannot help thinking that a discussion of his manuscript with other specialists would have avoided a certain number of repetitions and curtailed some minute descriptions. The author is always careful to tell us what he did not see as well as what he did see, and must be praised for this procedure. We have here, in fact, a truly descriptive work: the reader does not find reference to odier works on Borneo in the European languages, besides those of the author. Within these limits, however, the book justifies its publishers’ claims: it constitutes one of the most detailed descriptions we have of the religious life of a Borneo people.

The French School of the Far East has recently published under the above title an important study in comparative law, the conclusions of which go far beyond the juridical framework to which its tide and the author's background would appear to assign it. For this reason, it seemed necessary to call the work to the attention of readers of this journal, especially those who are interested in the problems of the relationships between the original indigenous infrastructure and the Indian and Chinese superstructures in South East Asia.