All languages share certain categories of expression which seem to correspond to a constant model. The forms which these categories assume are listed and classified in linguistic description, but their functions become clear only when they are studied in action—in the practice of language and the fabrication of discourse. These categories are fundamental, independent of all cultural determination. They reveal the subjective experience of speakers who establish and situate themselves in and by language. Our effort here will be to clarify two basic and necessarily associated categories of discourse, that of person and that of time.

In approaching contemporary art it is useless to try to determine to what extent it conforms or not to a previously conceived notion of art acquired from past centuries. It is more advisable instead to understand what idea, perhaps even an original one, this art imposes on us. In other words, when faced with a new experience, we should draw from it the original “problematic,” that is, formulate appropriate ideas to explain it. If we limit ourselves to the first years of the twentieth century, we can observe both in its content and style one particular characteristic: the importance of play. Artists have sought in related activities, such as dance or music, an image analogous to their own. They have sometimes looked for it in activities like those that interested Vermeer: The Weigher of Pearls or Lady with a Spinet (in Buckingham Palace), or in this inscription of the artist in one of his paintings relating to music: Musica laetitiae comes, medicina dolorum, which we are tempted to take as a motto and to apply to the activity of the painter himself. The same impression is given by some of the paintings of Watteau, the Musician or the Indifferent, in which we feel that the painter wanted to say something about himself. Through this catalogue of images of music or dance the artist seems to have acquired with particular pleasure an awareness of the possibility of his own art. These somewhat remote images are the ancestors of a family of buffoons, harlequins and clowns, which multiply to an extraordinary extent at the beginning of the twentieth century.

At the centre of Chinese affairs lies a profound paradox. China is governed, with unquestioned authority, by the most dogmatic Marxians in the world—Russian communists, to them, are weak-kneed backsliders. The central principle of Marxian doctrine, to which they adhere with religious intensity of conviction, is the Materialist Conception of History—the doctrine that changes in the methods of production, and in the relationships between economic classes, peasants, wage earners, and capitalists, determine the whole course of politics, culture, religion, everything else in human affairs.

But in their actions the rulers of China have shown themselves fanatically concerned to demonstrate the exact opposite, namely the belief that political decision and agitation, backed by sufficient force, will enable them to over-ride all the facts of economics.

Model children—the painter and his model—a model of a foundry—a miniature model of an aeroplane—Bohr-Rutherford's model of the atom. If one seeks the common element of these various objects and concepts, it would appear to be a comparison between two things displaying some common characteristics, one of which, at least, is the result of a creative effort on the part of man. One of these objects is called a model. But it can be the man-made one or the other which will be, for example, a given thing, either natural or artificial. A similar ambiguity exists in French with the word hôte; it is the notion of hospitality which prevails rather than the identification of one of the parties. In the case in question the relation is that of a form or structure which in both parties corresponds in some aspects, if not in all, to the supplementary criterion of human and voluntary origin of one of them. It also often happens that the thing called model in the relationship is single, whereas the other is multiple and varied both in its homologous characteristics and the additional ones it may possess. In the particular case of models used in science, the models themselves are a result of the creative effort of man.

The least that could be said about myth is that it is something “which makes one think.” This is not by any means to say nothing. Spelled out it means “that the nature of myth requires that it be included in the context of contemporary philosophy, and that its urgency, which is noted everywhere, be founded on its essential nature.” There is such an urgency about myth—or more precisely, about a serious occupation with it—because quite apart from the philosophical context, myth now appears in a great many publications. These remarks are taken from a Catholic writer on the theory of myth, Gonsalv Mainberger. The following pages fit into this context by placing the determination of the nature of myth on the broadest possible foundations. The earlier investigations by André Jolles, the Germanic linguist, and by Walter F. Otto, a classical scholar, as well as by myself, in which I begin with an exact philological interpretation of the Greek word mythos, have all labored under initial self-imposed limitations which can now be removed without abandoning the earlier results.

Is our title as paradoxical and unrealistic as it sounds? More than a little argument and persuasion would no doubt be necessary to convince anyone that a world wracked by economic conflict and distress, by the aftermath of war and by war itself was on the verge of any kind of Golden Age. But it is not Utopia that is in the making, nor, whatever it is, will it be born suddenly. What we are aware of in the significant changes of direction in human affairs is not the infant's first wail but the first shocking deed of what is already a youth, who strides to the center of the stage and will not thereafter be silenced. The Renaissance is a classic example. We do not know the ultimate origins of that change which is already mature in Sir Francis Bacon's Novum Organum. In hindsight it reads like something already far advanced and in fact like a protocol of conspiracy by scientists to make over the world in a new image, a world in which the pursuit of knowledge will be justified by its being a pursuit of power. To achieve this “I have submitted my mind to things,” says Bacon.

Contemporary study of language has turned to questions of linguistic structure and cognitive psychology of a sort that aroused little interest in the immediately preceding period. The extent to which this is a return to long neglected topics rather than an innovation is not widely appreciated, however, and I would like to comment briefly on this matter here.

A central topic of much current research is what we may call the “creative” aspect of language use, that is, its unboundedness and freedom from stimulus control. The speaker-hearer whose normal use of language is “creative,” in this sense, must have internalized a system of rules that determines the semantic interpretations of an unbounded set of sentences; he must, in other words, be in control of what is now often called a generative grammar of his language. A generative grammar must determine the structural description of each possible sentence, where the structural description of a sentence is a formal object of some sort that contains what information the rules of the language provide concerning the semantic content and phonetic form of this sentence.

Psychotherapy and psychiatry have long been regarded as proper to the domain of medicine, both by their practitioners and by society at large. According to a statement issued by the American Psychiatric Association in 1958, “Psychotherapy is a form of medical treatment and does not form the basis of a separate profession.” Noyes and Kolb define psychiatry as “that branch of medicine which deals with the genesis, dynamics, manifestations and treatment of such disordered and undesirable functionings of the personality as disturb either the subjective life of the individual or his relations with other persons or with society.” Implicit in such definitions is the belief that the approach used by physicians in treating and investigating physical illnesses can be used by psychologists and psychiatrists in treating and investigating mental disturbances. Like many other psychiatrists and psychologists, we find this approach open to question.

Competitive games form a distinct category of games. They are in contrast first of all to the sensory-motoric games of small children, who play with a foot, utter inarticulate sounds or throw things on the floor for the simple pleasure of acting upon the surrounding world, games of make-believe or acting out a fictitious situation, and emotional games, the best known of which are those whose object is to make you dizzy or lose balance, and sexual games.

Philosophers who have studied games to determine their nature have evidently established two hypotheses: on the one hand, that all games can be studied collectively, as though the essence of the game were common to all, and on the other hand, that the answer to the problem lies in the subject, or who plays, and not in the game itself considered as an object. The question then is to determine the psychological, biological or social reasons that induce men or animals to play, the inclinations that are involved, but not the external structures to which games must conform in order to please or to be adopted.

Since “in human speech, different sounds have different meaning,” Leonard Bloomfield's influential manual of 1933 concluded that “to study this coordination of certain sounds with certain meanings is to study language.” And one century earlier Wilhelm von Humboldt taught that “there is an apparent connection between sound and meaning which, however, only seldom lends itself to an exact elucidation, is often only glimpsed, and most usually remains obscure.” This connection and coordination have been an eternal crucial problem in the age-old science of language. How it was nonetheless temporarily forgotten by the linguists of the recent past may be illustrated by the repeated praises for the amazing novelty of Ferdinand de Saussure's interpretation of the sign, in particular the verbal sign, as an indissoluble unity of two constituents—signifiant and signifié— although this conception jointly with its terminology was taken over entirely from the twelve-hunded-year-old Stoic theory. This doctrine considered the sign (sêmeion) as an entity constituted by the relation of the signifier (sêmainon) and the signified (sêmainomenon). The former was defined as “perceptible” (aisthêton) and the latter as “intelligible” (noêton) or, to use a more linguistic designation, “translatable.”

In the eighteenth century all the philosophers were moralists, whatever their philosophy, whatever their religion. They were not pious, they were not devout, certainly they were not orthodox, but they had a religion all the same. It was the religion of happiness. That is what they were after in morals, politics, society; that is what they were after in life itself. Not the answer to the old question, what shall I do to be saved, nor the more familiar question, what is man's whole duty to God. No, theirs was a secular religion. What must man do to be happy? What should government do to assure happiness to its citizens? Pope had made this clear, Pope who summed up so neatly what the age thought:

(Essay on Man, IV, I, 1 ff.)

By a model I understand some familiar kind of object the idea of which we extend by an analogy or metaphor in order to assist our understanding of other things. When we say, “All the world's a stage,” we are using the familiar antics and attitudes of the theatre as a model for thinking about our woes and joys and our activities.

Sometimes a complex model is used by a thinker, by a group, or by a whole age as a guiding pattern suggesting ways of thinking in many areas. One model may even determine an inclusive view about the world from which derive emotional attitudes as well as ruling concepts and ways of thinking for our knowledge of the world. It is often said that the mechanism of a clock served in this way as a ruling model for much thought in the 17th and 18th centuries. Despite their novelty, clockworks were then becoming well known, and they were peculiarly fascinating. Reflection on them made very vivid such notions as regular motion, interchangeable parts, precise mechanical connection, influence by push and pull, and design for specific function.

This study is divided into two distinct sections, introduction and elaboration.

The reader will undoubtedly notice a disproportion in this article because the introduction is as long as the section intended to prove the hypothesis which it develops. This is due to the fact that we Chinese have no very clear awareness of our logical processes and hence of our so-called reasoning. We must therefore track down those arguments that are entirely free from verbal misrepresentation and try to make clear their structure. Our comparative research enables us to state the following: in contrast to Western reasoning, which is always very explicit in form and whose logical sequences are closely knit, Chinese thought is but a series of independent experiments that add up to no well-defined order and have no internal interrelationship. From this lack of logical sequence all Chinese philosophers derive their initial inspiration; they then enlarge their understanding by analytical thought. This basis, which is common to all Chinese thinkers, no matter how divergent or antithetical their tendencies, is nothing more than the concrete and indivisible whole, which we will investigate, in our own fashion, in the introduction. We mention this merely to caution the reader who is unaccustomed to the confusing complexity of Chinese thought.

Not long ago, when general linguistics tended to be identified with the philosophy of language, a linguist entitling a short article “The Word” would have been rightfully accused of unbearable presumptuousness. Any discussion of the word involved, in fact dealing with the relationship between thought and language, that is, penetrating into an area which the linguist neither dared nor desired to exclude from his researches but in which he felt ill-equipped to accomplish anything worthwhile alone. In the second place, it involved all the questions raised by the nature of the sign, in other words, semiology in its entirety. Finally it led to reconsidering the relationships between the “word” and the sentence on the one hand, the word and the “lower” elements of the sequence, syllables and “phonemes” on the other. The question, however, that the linguist could not ask was whether criteria existed that permitted, for all languages and all cases, the identification and delimitation of a segment of the sequence as a determined word. For this it would have been necessary for a linguist to feel that it was his duty to define precisely the terms he used. He would also have needed enough courage to foresee that the term “word” itself might have to be put aside if his researches showed that this term could not be given a universally applicable definition.

Mime expresses a condition suffered by all men: the physical condition. Since here is the seat of all consciousness and the implicit support of the mind's most delicate constructions, mime is the original and universal language. Learning to talk is mimicry at the beginning, and the small child repeats the words before he has understood their meaning. The adult never stops resorting to it; sympathy, love are born and avowed in a mimetic exchange; and relaxation results from the freedom of movement which most games entail. Mime is also a means of social communication; it gives birth to pity, which is awakened by physical sympathy. Pity in turn is the most binding sentiment of all : Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and anthropology consider it fundamental to the condition of society.

We still cannot speak of a Bantu philosophy today—or, more generally, of a Negro-African philosophy—without referring first of all to a pioneer work: La philosophie Bantou, by R. P. Tempels, which in 1948 created for the first time an orthodoxy in this hitherto unexplored, or nearly unexplored, field. The fact that this orthodoxy has become accepted would certainly not be enough to justify a heresy. But there may, however, be good reasons to reject it.

In its time R. P. Tempels' work was well received, on the whole with sympathy by the Europeans whom it endeavored to reach, and with unreserved enthusiasm by the intellectuals of Central and West Africa, for whom it opened a way back to their native roots. Quite apart at the moment from any question of philosophy, the author interpreted something essentially and inherently African.

The day Niepce successfully achieved a “view-point” for the first time, it was possible for man to believe that a century-old dream was being fulfilled: the dream of obtaining a reproduction of reality that would be absolutely faithful and could be preserved. The people of the time, surprised to see that in a daguerreotype, the first widely diffused form of photography, they could “count the tiles on a roof,” somewhat naively believed that they had succeeded in catching hold of reality. Confronted with this new picture, which was of a still unknown kind and must understandably have been illusive at first glance, they were carried away by a childish enthusiasm and hence did not realize that what they had before their eyes was only a simulacrum.

When the Western Empire collapsed under the impact of the barbarians and from its own internal corrosion, the people of Western Europe were playing without being aware of it a game of “whoever loses wins.” Roman theocracy developed out of the ruins of the Empire, inheriting its ambition and its universality, and gradually undertook through the sole means of the faith the reconquest of the world. Its pioneers penetrated even further than the eagles of Rome had ventured. Christ's labarum flew triumphant over lands from which Rome in its time had been unmercifully driven. While the victorious church broadened the limits of the antique world, everywhere under its domination the lay, local and national forces organized and consolidated their power, taking full advantage of the Pauline and Augustinian doctrine favoring the separation of church and state. After several centuries of painful anarchy the characteristic profile of the West emerged: two symmetrically organized powers, the spiritual power of the church, universal in ambition or vocation, and the lay, local or national power. A society unique in the annals of history was born from the balance of these two powers, a society that succeeded where much richer and more civilized societies had failed miserably, notably in preparing the way for the advent of industrial society, master of science, nature and technique.

If from the etymological point of view the term category denotes a class of objects sharing a common feature, under linguistic category we generally understand a class of linguistic units (chiefly words) sharing a common meaning or syntactical function, expressed by a common external (phonetic) form. Thus the words room-s, table-s, pencil-s, match-es, glass-es… are representative of the category of the plural number; (be) describe-d, contrive-d, share-d, found-ed, assert-ed… represent the category of the past tense. Forms like men, children, etc., on the one hand, (he) rode, went, etc., on the other, are also members of the category of the plural or past, respectively, in spite of the lack of the characteristic feature -(e)s or -(e)d, since functionally (i.e. as regards meaning) they lean upon the pattern of the productive -s and -d forms, thus:

the semantic difference between man and men (child and children) is the same as that between e.g. room and room-s, rendered by the sign -s versus zero;

the semantic difference between rides and rode (goes and went) is the same as that between describe-s and describe-d, rendered by the sign -d as against -s.

History records innumerable assaults by the barbarian nomads of the steppes and deserts on the realms of civilization. In some cases, the invaders overturned an organized state, as the Hyksos did Egypt, the Ephthalites northern India, and the Kin northern China. In others, they were thrown back, as the Huns were from the Roman Empire and the Avars from Byzantium and Frankland. Some shed their barbarism and acquired the arts of civilization, like the Magyars and the Ottoman Turks, others remained illiterate pastoralists to the end, like the Scythians and the Cumans. Two created world empires as a result of conquests the scope and magnitude of which still grip the imagination. These were the Arabs of the seventh century and the Mongols of the thirteenth, whose spectacular achievements pose problems concerning the interrelationship of nomadic and sedentary societies and of the nature of the “drives” which impel pastoral peoples to burst out of their homelands not simply to raid and plunder but to establish political domination over their civilized neighbors. The Arab and Mongol conquests also raise the question why the former cleared the ground for the erection of a distinctive new world culture and the latter did not.