A dream, or perhaps a nightmare, could conceivably haunt the historian's night, in which he imagines that by some chance the agencies in our society which pour forth largesse to subsidize research should undergo a startling conversion and, frightened by social problems or wearying of the senseless march of technology, permit themselves for a moment to doubt whether what our civilization needs most is more and more instruments of destruction, trips to the moon, ever faster and noisier airplanes, etc. Suppose in sheer desperation they turned to the historian for help? What would he answer? It is perhaps comforting to know that such a turn of events is all but inconceivable. Still, the mere thought leads one to reflect, and to remark how little systematic consideration is given to this simple and obvious question. What can historians and history contribute to the solution of existing political and social problems?

Unlike positivism, which took the form of a protest by the individual against the canonization of the general, and unlike existentialism, which expressed a revolt of the concrete against abstraction erected into a dogma—structuralism is an ideology of capitulation to the bureaucratic and technocratic supremacy of means over ends and of society over individuals. The dogmatic systems of the last decades have finished by creating an intellectual atmosphere in which “the whole” is put in the foreground, leaving its component “parts” in the shade.

Structuralism idolizes structure at the expense of its components, and structural analysis at the expense of induction and generalization. For the structuralists, supporting elements are seen merely as interrelated elements, and things related to one another are swallowed up by the relations between them. In their eyes, the elements that make up a structure are in themselves meaningless; they exist only by virtue of being grouped according to a certain pattern of organization. Only relations are regarded as constant, and thus as proper objects of a science; properties are merely ephemeral and illusory.

The traditional morality of conscience, according to Freud, is based for the most part on the suppression of the instincts. His psychoanalytic theory provides a genetic and functional account of how and why this is so. Genetically, the theory purports to explain the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of the traditional morality of conscience. Functionally it attempts to explain the failure of this morality and propose an alternative theory which will work out better in practice. Each part of his theory can be discussed separately, but neither can be divorced completely from the other. Freud's theory is not only an explanation of what morality in fact is from a descriptive scientific point of view, but also what morality ought and ought not to be from the normative standpoint of psychoanalysis. Thus, each part of the theory is integrally related to the other.

The transformation of a traditional society into a modern well-knit organic structure can be demonstrated in various ways. In this paper an attempt will be made to study a village in North Bihar, in the district of Saran. This village, Dharampur, is about 8 miles north-east of Chapra the chief town of the district, and some 10 miles from Khairah, the nearest station on the North Eastern Railway. The old people claim that originally their ancestors inhabited another village, Panchpatra, about a mile to the south of the present settlement. There, according to legend, ghosts used to shower bones onto the roofs the houses. The inhabitants, disturbed at their work, and terrified, decided to seek the help of a Sâdhu Ramadas who lived in a nearby monastry. The saint indicated a site which he blessed, and the construction of the new village began. Thus it is clear that the migration as well as the site of the present village were linked with traditional factors, represented in this instance by the intervention of ghosts and by the Sâdhu. This incident may have happened about 200 years ago; today the former village is known as Dīha, meaning ancient dwelling place.

Giovanni Morelli (1816-91), the Italian connoisseur, in the 1870’s and 1880’s, writing under the pseudonym Lermolieff worked out a method for distinguishing original works of art from copies. His method was a curious one, involving the study of small and unimportant details of the painting in order to discover the authentic touch of the master. An illustration from his book, Italian Masters in German Galleries shows ears from paintings by the Florentines Leonardo da Vinci and Lorenzo di Credi, and through the differences in form between these two details, Morelli believed he could distinguish two artists of the same school. A second illustration from Morelli's book shows that conversely, two different parts of the body bear a family resemblance to one another—here the hand and ear are both long, thin and tapering forms. In his study of paintings in the Borghese Gallery, Morelli explained how such details could help the connoisseur identify a master: “Copyists can never have any character or style, for ‘form’ in their works is not due to their own idea … As most men, both speakers and writers, make use of habitual modes of expression, favourite words and sayings, which they often employ involuntarily and sometimes even most inappropriately, so almost every painter has his own peculiarities, which escape him without his being aware of it … Anyone intending to study a painter more closely and to become better acquainted with him, must take into consideration even these material trifles (a student of calligraphy would call them flourishes), and know how to discover them …”

What is art? —That which is common to all the arts. —But what do they have in common? —This (or especially this): their products invariably lend themselves to value judgements which stem from Aesthetics.

This reply, usually tacit but invariably understood, cannot, however, repress a further question, this time a rhetorical or an ironic one: and what does not lend itself to such judgements? The consensus omnium, acquired during the last two hundred years, can do no more than at best to mark an initial approach to the desired definition.

It is not as easy as one thinks to define the new dimension created by science in the life of modern societies; a considerable number of prejudices, resulting from conceptions which are often directly inspired by science itself, produce an unsuspected degree of resistance in this respect. Our only means of overcoming them seems to lie in isolating the real implications of the current scientific revolution, in breaking with the clichés which ensnare us, in becoming aware that research plays a very different part from the one that the preceding generation saw fit to attribute to it, so much so that one of the great barriers erected between art and science dissolves. Thus the hope placed by Gyorgy Kepes in “a new awareness of the interdependence of knowledge and feeling,” in “the links between the intrinsic characteristics of natural and artistic forms” would be justified, together with the efforts of such men as Buckminster Fuller to erect “a bridge between our conception of the constitutive principles of nature and the application of this knowledge to the creation of man-made forms,” and with the will to “renew the ancient marriage of art and science.”