We live in a world, varied and strange, where all the roads converge towards the knowledge of Man. This richness of variety, of colour, of originality we should cultivate and stress: without it happiness would have no depth and no brilliance, and earth would be a dull place.

There was one moment in History, the Renaissance, in which men decided to explore new fields for the pleasures of the mind, new spiritual links between the past and the present, new goals for action, new joys of life. Humanism brought a new sense of brotherhood among men, based on intellectual value, a wave of creative energies and spiritual audacity which produced through Europe some of its greatest works, a confidence on man’s powers that changed man’s condition and his future.

Later, Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, wrote his Discours, not with a speculative purpose, but for a practical one: “pour nous rendre maîtres de la nature”, Pascal comes after to affirm that “thought is our dignity”.

In Western Humanism are fused Greek philosophy, Roman juridical spirit and the Jewish-Christian theology. This humanism has brought to the liberation of the individual as well as to a theory of the State. Man becomes the measure of the universe, the spirit of a planetary man begins to dawn.

It was not a universal humanism, though, because it was confined to Europe. But, there, the wide river of new ideas flowed through all countries in the West, admitting no boundaries, creating a real community of writers and savants who above everything valued cultures. A stream of Lyric poetry had been initiated before by Petrarca and went through France, England, Poland, Spain and in Portugal produced, with Camões, its richest literary century. In Italy, besides literature, it produced the greatest painting and sculpture. Humanism had shaken universities with a vital new language: the world of culture lived a new hope. The movement was restricted to a few men among an ignorant mass, but has produced an amount of beauty and knowledge which has inspired the generations until today.

This was the foundation of a community of culture that has been enlarging through the centuries, from country to country, making easier the inter-influence between schools of thought, the links between writers and thinkers, Corneille has taken his “Cid” from Spain; Moliere, “Don Juan”; Le Sage, “Gil Blas”. Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau owe much to England and Renan, Madame Stael and all the French and English romanticists to Germany. The same things happened with the novelists of the naturalism and realism, with the symbolist poets and the impressionist painters. Literary genres became like international frames, inside of which influences, imitations, similar trends can be seen. The literary and artistic schools in Europe pass from country to country, offering their new forms into which the national originality pours its creations.

This interchange of ideas has been possible inside the Western world due to the spread knowledge that people have of each other’s culture and to the intense, prolonged humanist activity that took similar characteristics everywhere.

Everything shows today that the conditions of modern world are also requiring a task of bringing together the cultures of far-away countries, of intensifying the interchange of ideas necessary for building up a universal culture. The world today is already united in many aspects: the outstanding creations of art extend to every country; but all activities expressed by the word - literature, traditional legends, popular tales and poetry remain closed within their national frontiers. When all this will become known, an important amount of ideas will be revealed and will become a common patrimony of humanity. It will be a great age when East and West will meet in the lightened approach of their cultures.
 

We have seen how East and West have developed some fundamental ideas and even made sometimes the same scientific and aesthetic discoveries, though being separated and with no contact between them. We have found both in West and in East a background of wisdom and experience accumulated during thousands of years which shows a deep kinship. We could see that East and West followed similar paths and gathered similar experiences concerning the fundamental ancient truths, and that in modern basic concepts there is less separation than at first sight might appear.

This community of ideas, this similarity of aspects and trends, does not mean uniformity. On the contrary, it is in the rich, infinite variety that underlines such meeting of ideas and common features that lies the real value of an approach.

We have seen through the example of Japanese literature how often writers have been developing similar ideas, created schools of tendencies which are akin, derived from similar social conditions; but there is nothing like a complete similarity nor a mere repetition.

The gathering of these similarities and also of the prodigious variety that lies under them, of the infinite diversifications, of the unexpected and multiform abundance of the human spirit, can accumulate an invaluable capital of knowledge.

Toynbee admits that Christianity may come to receive new revitalizing elements from Eastern cultures and religions. We have talked of the active study which is being done in the research of concepts common between Christianity and Buddhism.

Indian philosophy has also been studied by Western thinkers, though a common measure has not yet been found between it and Western thought. In this field, we know how much Eastern thought has influenced the works of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

There are, in the field of culture, contradictions, as they exist in the nature of man. But there is no proof that they cannot be conciliated and harmonized. We saw in the field of political philosophy, how a school of modern Western thought, Marxism, was transplanted to the Far East, maintaining its essence, with only secondary alterations introduced by a national spirit, creator of variety.

Though the main creations of the West are known to many cultured people in the East, it is true that very little of the great Eastern creations is known by educated Westerns. No doubt if the life of Eastern creations were present in the work of Western writers and artists, a fertile influence would be provided. Ezra Pound, when he discovered Liu Ch’e, Chu Yan, Chia I and the great vers libre writers before Li Po, thought they “are a treasure to which the next centuries may look for as great a stimulus as the Renaissance had from the Greeks”.

The men of the Renaissance suddenly discovered a constellation of great writers, some of them completely unknown to them; as in the Renaissance the circulation of great books, until then ignored, increased the capital of European ideas. The discovery of great men and great ideas, which are today completely ignored in the other half of the world, may produce a world movement of incalculable consequences.

Western thought is, as we saw, characterized by tension. There is a tension between man and God, which is reflected in a tense contradiction between science and religion, between philosophy and art. This tension which generated the force that produced some of the great symbols and great works of art of the West, threats to exceed soon the borders of human possibilities. Man himself, says Gabriel Marcel, - not only the human individual - is exposed to the temptation of suicide.

The East has always known how to harmonize the needs of men with the ideals of God: there were never in China nor in Japan religious wars; from the beginning, Buddhism has tried to conciliate its ideas with the scientific truths, and today Buddhists are stating that Buddhist doctrine has to be adapted to the modern conditions of the industrial world, as they are convinced that the Dharma cannot be understood in a world dominated by modern science and technical progress. Some far-sighted Zen masters, like Yasutani Roshi, are passing their knowledge to Westerners, ordaining American Zen-priests, because they see in the West the next natural field for their creed, which passed from India to China and from China to Japan, where it is presently declining.

This moderate attitude of conciliation and wide understanding of the impositions of our modern age, should give inspiration to the West, still torn by religious division and hate, still afflicted by irreconcilable contradictions between science and religion.

These contradictions rise also in the West between art and philosophy. Modern philosophy tends to identify experience with reality, knowledge with life. As Emile Brehier puts it, contemporary thought “knows but the concrete man in whom are inseparable united body and soul, conscience and external world, self and others”. Contemporary philosophy has its origin in an energetic movement towards the concrete; it has aversion for the abstract and for analysis.

But modern art goes exactly the opposite way. It meanders mainly in the abstract, despising completely the human form, which until our time had kept a sacred value. I am convinced that this abolition of form and style is a deviation from which art will one day recover, after profiting the rich experience of its actual bold experiments; something similar happened in Spanish poetry with the formal excesses of Gongorism in the seventeenth century and in architecture in the eighteenth century France, which was followed by a neoclassicism in which the Greek and Roman forms exerted their sober influence. Abstract art will develop its baroque complexity until the point where it will find new ways in renovating simplicity. Some characteristic aspects of modern life, its mechanical emptiness, its vagueness of ideals, its dreamy impotence, its cold despair, the fatigue of our world, are given with ability by abstract art. But most of the aspects of real life today are missing in it, specially the constructive, concrete ones. If the idea of contemporary man, of his works and of his days, is going to be left to future generations through abstract art, we should fear their judgement.

For the East, abstract art brings nothing new. It can be seen in the great masters of sumi-e in China and in Japan since many centuries ago. But the few examples we find cannot of course justify this absorbing trend, today also predominant in some Eastern countries for mere imitation of the West.

 

Man is varied and rich in nature, but fundamentally the same all over the world. This convergence of ways and results brings us to think that it is possible to build, on such a vast ground of things common, a human understanding and a new edifice of life, out of the renewed creative power of man, by the combination of all the rich and varied elements of which we are still unaware.

How this harmonization of diversities will be made is mainly for the artists to find out. But only to have a consciousness of these diversities can be in itself very important. To give an example, the act of creation of man is a theme which has attracted many European artists since the Middle Ages, reaching its highest expression in Michelangelo; it was never treated in Chinese nor in Japanese art, which, like Oriental religions show little or no interest in the birth of man or in the creation of the universe. By contrast, in China and Japan the idea of relinquishing from the world of men is expressed with a skill and frequency that has no counterpart in the West: by placing a single branch or a small bird on a large void space the Oriental painter expresses the feeling of the withdrawal from the society and his perception of emptiness.  In the Middle Ages Christian monks asked to be buried naked, covered by a simple white sheet; in this humility of going to the earth in the same simple state as man comes into world is implicit a deep reverence for life and for the human figure. This does not exist in the East, where several religions prescribe the destruction of the body by means of cremation or even by being devoured by vultures. I do not know if a great artist will be able to conciliate these two opposite attitudes, but certainly the simple bringing them together can bring out the extraordinary power of affirmation of the theme of creation in Western art, as well as it stresses and carries further the meaning of Oriental self-abandonment and of longing for death and emptiness, which are deeply linked with the yearning for purity and righteousness. The act of bringing these two concepts together and exploring their significance in parallel, not only adds depth to both but also strengthens and deepens the feeling of inter-relationship of men through so diversified expressions.

In this approach, a great role may be reserved here for literature to play, through the intelligence of national characters and by bringing together the inner exploration of man; only the poet and the novelist can penetrate, with a heightened insight, into those recesses of human reality where the philosopher and the historian never descend. The contact between national literatures can not only bring to a general literature, as far as the study of common ideas, schools, fictional characters are concerned, but also to a fertile inspiration in alien sources: Goethe had already affirmed that “let to itself, every literature will exhaust its vitality if is not refreshed by the interest and contributions of a foreign one”.

Universality does not mean to reduce, nor to erase the differences that are the bases of originality and singularity. It does not mean either to prefer extension to depth. Universality is essentially the understanding of all that belongs to man, including the diverse manifestations of his nature anywhere on earth. Probably there will never be a planetary conscience, but love of men and love for truth can unite the world if we make of this a universal cause and fight for it with good will and clear mind.

While East and West were treading separate ways, both aimed at disaster: the East, after a brilliant florescence, in China and in India, fell into such a sterile imobilism that since the fifteenth until the beginning of our century these two countries were completely retired from the world; the West, with the accelerated development of its science, was brought to the abyss of a possible atomic annihilation. Both results appear to be in the logic development of the leading lines of these civilizations: the deadlock in the natural issue of their inner forces - in the first case, of the Confucian ritualism and conformity and of Hindu nirvana, and in the second case, of the explosive accumulation of physical power loosen from a spiritual control.

This fundamental issue shows once more the need for East and West to meet in a creative understanding. The West is only a half-world. It is from the consideration of Western and Eastern values that a great culture can rise, one which will solve the acute problems of man, in the modes they assume in the East and the West.

Toynbee talks about the dwarfing of Europe - Europe is becoming smaller, while its culture expands over the world. Diez del Corral has written a book about “The Rapt of Europe”, in which he contends that not only the objective forms of European culture were taken away, but also the most secret impulses, of Europe, their own fertility, the impulsive “vis” of her creative past. Europe spread her spiritual possessions through the world; now, new countries, in their fiery youth, ravish her fervorous soul.

The excess of energies of Europe and the passive receptivity of the rest of the world, the Asian lack of resistance and its rapid accommodation to European ideas, explain this too rapid expansion of European values. On the other hand, Europe, in the euphoria of this universal success, did not pay enough attention to the real values created elsewhere. With the European culture went everywhere an enthusiasm, an exaltation of national passions and civic duties which Asian countries ignored.

The scientific-industrial revolution has provoked, with the discovery of agriculture, the main changes in economic and social living since the first days of men. During the human history until the twentieth century the rate of social changes has been very slow. So slow that it passed unnoticed in a man’s lifetime. The rate of change has increased with an amazing speed, and will probably continue increasing its pace. The pace of time has changed completely, and the acceleration of history is a phenomenon which has been emphasized after Daniel Halevy, characterizing our time more than any other epoch in history. Economic productivity has increased: between 1800 and 1850 four times, and after 1950 it doubles every ten years. This progress is due to the advancement in physical sciences. The machine today is entirely automatic, it makes itself all work needing unconscious repetition. Thus man can specialize in what is human. It is easy to say that the acceleration of progress is going to exceed the previsions of the boldest imagination.

Its Unitarian character made technique the great vehicle of Western expansionism. Technical progress and the forms of production and social organization makes possible for a backward area of Africa or Asia to pass, in some years, from a neolithic level into a most advanced technical stage; civilizations retarded thousands of years can thus jump into the middle of twentieth century.

Technology is much easier to assimilate than other fields of Western culture. It offers the only hope to the poor. But it needs capital. And the poor countries do not posses it. It has to come from the rich and powerful countries, mainly the United States and Russia. The world cannot have peace as it is now half rich and half poor. The actual situation has to be solved - the gap is widening every day between the people of industrialized countries which are getting richer, and those in the non-industrialized countries, which are getting poorer. In spite of this, it is technically possible to carry out in Africa, South-East Asia, India, the Middle East, Latin America, a scientific industrial revolution which in fifty years could create general prosperity.

This means that the expansion of the West created conditions that now impose a continuous and wider wave of expansionism, though of a character different from the initial impulse.

We have mentioned, before, Japan as the Eastern country which, carrying ahead this impulse, has already overtaken the West in some technical fields. The westernization of Japan is highly significant for our study, as it was the first Eastern country to assimilate European technique and the only one to reach an economic development comparable with the great industrialized countries of the West. If we consider here the specific conditions for this quick assimilation, we see that Japan repeats the conditions that gave rise to technical development in Europe: Japan’s small size, its social and cultural homogeneity, its aristocratic and monarchic tradition - like England - its theistic and national religion. To these conditions, should be added the favourable opportunities of an internal crisis and a disintegration of the old political system in the Meiji Era and, again, after the last war. (1)

Japanese intellectuals have been the first to realize that the nations of the East, as Nishida Kitaro puts it, “cannot content with having their own peculiarities, because the world is becoming truly one”.

Japanese scientific and technological advancement is one of the most important factors in the movement of exchanges between East and West.

The wheel of civilization has been turning from the East to the West. The previsions of great thinkers since Spengler is that it will come to the East again.

Political power has never stayed long in the hands of one nation. In modern times, no great nation was able to keep at its height for more than half a century. “The great men have failed to do it; even the luckiest ones, writes Paul Valery, have brought their nations to ruin: “Charles the Fifth, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Metternich, Bismark, medium duration: forty years. No Exception”.

The rising of China into a great power is in the line of historical evolution. At the end of this century, the East will have a much greater importance in international life and culture than today, probably disputing the primacy of power and spreading new ideas in a new condition of the world.

The great expansion of the West started at the time of the industrial revolution, which began in the middle of the eighteenth century and lasted until the early twentieth, bringing an increasing mass of the population from agriculture into factory work. After this came the scientific revolution consisting of the application of the real science to industry, beginning in the 1930’s or 1940’s, at the time when atomic particles were first made industrial use of. (2)

To science and technique is mainly due to the economic, social and even spiritual revolution of our age. This revolution is not limited to the political field, as the French Revolution was, it alters fundamentally the position of man in the cosmos and his capacity of knowledge in regard to nature and to society. We are before a new utilization of knowledge and a new sense of human dignity, of man’s confidence upon himself, upon his creative capacity. It is a moral challenge to man, to his spiritual power, this extraordinary physical power he conquered upon the material world. Man risks to be annihilated by the same forces he has created, to be buried under the shambles of his own victory. Goethe warned that everything that liberates the spirit without corresponding progress of man’s inner discipline, is a danger. We have seen already in our Age the realization of this danger: when Nazis made use of scientific and technical progress for degrading human beings; these “vilifying techniques” were massively and systematically employed for humiliation human dignity, for erasing in man every trace of humanity, for instilling in men the horror of men and the contempt of themselves.

This vileness and that grandeur has the West brought everywhere with its technique. Technique has spread the forces for the salvation of the world and also the seeds for its destruction. It brought the remedies against starvation and disease; the know-how for promoting economic development, education, social rising and liberty for many millions, and also inflicted wars without and with atomic bombs.

There is a serious lack in technique, as it tends to destroy the object it creates. May be this destructive impulse, this tragic void can be filled by what exists in Eastern culture, in a rhythm of knowledge that searched happiness, independently of technical progress, for thousands of years.

The conditions of Western expansion, its confidence, efficiency and vigour together with its extortions and cruel inequalities can be explained in great part by the character of Western capitalism that has given the impulse. According to Sombart, European capitalism has produced its immense technical superiority due to its constitutional elements: “individual ethics and war, luxe and asceticism, thirst for adventure and American gold, financial calculation and the love of risk, state and private enterprise, science and the impulse of power”. Until the end of last century, European capitalism is a unique phenomenon, the development of which is due to the special conditions of European soil and atmosphere. In its roots, technique owes its nature to the humanist ideas from which it derived. We can see that machines, in the time of Dickens - and not only then, but still today, in a small scale, - have caused misery and exploitation of poor people and even of children; we see today some pure intellectuals talking with superior contempt of machines, as we see others, rising them to the prestige of a myth. Technique, as well as science, have their source in a humanist ideal, and they concur to spread today this humanist ideal which is instilled in them since their origin.

To the humanist ideal marked in technique must be attributed the higher standard of living in most of under-developed countries. Great works have given bread to millions; radio and cinema brought education to the most backward areas; but, again, these have also their reverse, as they are also responsible for lowering the intellectual level of the masses everywhere, spreading inferior ideas and often giving the most afflicting banalities the privilege of ubiquity.

Science and technique have created the bases for a new dignity of man and advanced the welfare of humanity. The power over things inspires man with a new joy and a new strength; the accuracy of his action gives him a tonic self-confidence. Man feels his superiority over a shapeless world.

##Under today’s humanism two main ideas are lying: the free development of individual personality and the idea of freedom. The first came to us after an evolution of five hundred years, from the Renaissance, through Locke, Voltaire and Rousseau. It proclaims the full development of human personality, prized for itself, and sees man’s creative powers as the core of his being. This self-fulfilment of man is unattainable without freedom, so that these two main ideas are linked together. (3)

The essence of all humanist ideas is contained in the definition of Protagoras, a Greek philosopher contemporary to Buddha: “Man is the measure of all things”. Terence, the Latin comic poet, gave it a new turn: “I am a man, and nothing that concerns men is indifferent to me”.

These ideas of a deep brotherhood of men do not belong to Western man alone. In Asia, Buddhism had spread ideals of human love and compassion, which have the same noble and uplifting quality. Chinese philosophers and poets have praised the joys of life, were in love with life, were in love with this earth, which they “will not forsake for an invisible heaven”. (4)

In spite of their marvellous achievements science and technique cannot satisfy the deep need of man’s inner self. The economic underdeveloped man of the Middle Ages felt an agonizing fear of the world after death. Today, man suffers from the fear of destroying himself and his own world. This anguish which is in the heart of Western civilization has also been spread over the world. It is a feeling of frustration or at least of incomplete victory. Still, twentieth century man could feel proud of his Age, which is one of the most brilliant in History. Not only for its economic achievements but also for its poets like Rilke and Pessoa, its writers, like Proust and Kafka, its philosophers, like Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Freud. It is also the age of great revolutions of far-reaching historic consequences, in Russia and in China, of important social reforms in every country, a new era of discovery in space. In the field of science, twentieth century man has reached his greatest height. The solution of the difficulties which first surrounded the mathematical infinite is probably the greatest achievement of our age, says Bertrand Russell: there is no age, except perhaps the golden age of the Greeks, “which has a more convincing proof to offer of the transcendent genius of its great men”.

Many reasons are being given to explain the anguish of modern man. I think that the main one is that man has lost the ground on which he rested his personality: he has not yet got used to his new condition, in which time and space are completely different from what they were for the generations whose hereditary experience still lives in his unconscious mind. He has no time to reflect about life and about death, nor to get the intimate knowledge of his surroundings indispensable for pondering the acts he is planning to do, for making a moral judgement of his behaviour, for taking stock of his own personality. Man is lost because he has no time and no serenity to find his own self, no place in nature to rest and muse in those moments of fertile solitude in which all great works were conceived. Man ignores himself and that is why he feels lost and suffers.

The intimate attachment to a certain place, the feeling of being deeply linked to a certain place, of suffering durably the influence of certain local conditions, is nearly completely lost. And this loss weakens the basis on which personality firms and strengthens itself. That is why the power of individuality is today generally so weak and why man becomes uncertain of his fundamental aims and of his individuality. The attachment to a certain place brings man closer to his neighbors, makes human relations tighter and richer in substance, because contact between people becomes more frequent, warmer and deeper. By deepening the knowledge of others a man comes to know better himself. This self-knowledge can only be attained by a process of maturing in an environment reasonably durable and within a reasonable continuity of time.

The impermanence in place and in time, of which our life suffers, is responsible for the lack of depth in modern life. It is difficult for a man to be sincere today, as sincerity goes always together with a strong character. And this needs permanence and certitude. Only men capable of deep emotions can have deep thoughts.

If we consider the extraordinary development that tourism has taken, it is easier to realize the truth of these considerations. Tourism has become the process of running from place to place, looking hurriedly at the mere surface of things, with little emotion, and a pre-judgement read in some travel book. The language of a newly visited country is only one more object of picturesque and curiosity - there is the method of learning German in thirty hours or Japanese in a Hurry. The tourist is not a traveller brought by serious interest, careful observation, enjoyment and attentive study to discover a new country, but a mere collector of picturesque curiosities and vues listed in a guidebook. No doubt that the tremendous expansion of tourism has an increasing influence in international understanding. But these beneficial results could be much larger if the links of man with space and with time were not sacrificed to speed - every one wants to see too much in the shortest time. The world has become too small for modern man because he does not stop time enough to enjoy the beauty of every wonderful thing which lays along his path.

All this becomes more serious when we consider the progressive increase of population. It is not only the economic, moral, religious problems it rises. It is also the old bases of relationship between man and community that are attained. Human space is also becoming narrower and thereby relations between men lose more and more of their quality and density. The links that attach man to space, to time, to other men, become loser, emptier. There are already signs that the increasing density of population can decrease the individual’s moral value and that there is a threat that human dignity may suffer on account of the existence of too many people living on a land to scarce.

The changes in modern life have been too rapid and the writers and philosophers have not given us the intellectual help to prepare for those changes. Science goes ahead of man, while literature, philosophy and religion seem to keep the pace far behind. New forms of human relationship are created through the expanse of population, the rising of the masses, and the subordination of the individual to enormous organizations where man becomes anonymous and personality is annihilated. Our poets and novelists did not prepare us for this, and still do not assist us. Man feels a stranger in the world he created.

“The milieu built up by our intelligence and by our inventions”, writes Alexis Carrel, “is adjusted neither to our stature nor to our form. We are there unhappy. We degenerate the morally and mentally”. It is for the artists and writers to fill this gap and find out the remedies for our errors. We can already see a new frontier where science meets up with art.

Space explorations and their immense perspectives bring new moral implications for our fundamental conceptions on the place of man in the universe. Can we hold, asks Joad, that the “universe is a process in time, seeking perfection of the human spirit as its goal, and that the preparation for this perfection of a certain number of individual souls, conceived in the likeness of twentieth century men, is the object for which the whole creation travails?”

Man is at the threshold of probably the greatest adventure of his existence, and is still so far of a clear conscience of his place on his planet. That is why it is becoming urgent for him to widen his views and discard the parochialism of national quarrels. “From now onwards”, said Teilhard de Chardin, “in the field of politics and of history, as well as in the field of pure philosophy, we must think planetarily or to renounce to understand man and the universe.

A new humanism must rise, widening its spirit to the new frontiers won by science, to the new knowledge man is acquiring of the universe, and also to the more complete knowledge and understanding every man is having of other men on different countries.

Our time seems destined for surpassing the classic concept of humanism, which has chiefly meant till today the essence of Mediterranean culture. Though it can be said that this culture contains more qualities of universality than any other. It is also true that there are in Asia rich humanisms equivalent to the European one. The Arabo-Persian humanism is closely linked with the Mediterranean civilization - it is due to the Arabic philosophers of the Middle Age that Aristotelic philosophy was kept and recovered to the West. In Asia, Buddhist humanism has spread a spiritual civilization which has produced the greatest works of art of that continent and moulded its cultural physiognomy. Chinese thought, through its three greatest representatives, Lao-Tse, Confucius and Mencius, has spread through South East Asia and Japan a humanism tending to moral betterment, to a concept of human dignity through the respect for oneself and for the others, to the organization of a harmonious society. During centuries, the Chinese Empire has entrusted its supreme administration to its literate men, which is a highly humanist step, in the line of what Plato recommended for Athens.

A true exchange of values and human experience among men of all countries will fill life with a new meaning. Here, Western man will be obliged to drop the disdainful superiority based on his science and technique, because in what concerns wisdom, he has been mostly a receiver from the East, since the times of the civilizations of the Nile and the Euphrates of Israel. But even in science: the compass, the printing, gunpowder (invented for amusing firecrackers and adapted in the West for the games of war) - main bases of Western progress and political power - came from China; the capital concept of zero in mathematics and the numbers we used, came from India. When in the West, the knowledge of Eastern literatures, religion and philosophical thought will be spread as it is today in the main Eastern countries the knowledge of the ones in the West, a great step will be made for a world understanding.

This exchange of thought will help men in the East and in the West to find the new sense of time appropriate to our age, a meaning of life creative of new values, fostering of a new Renaissance.

All understanding comes through love, said Wagner. The meeting between East and West cannot be done only through the recognition of mutual needs and reciprocal interests: in every work that lasts man’s heard is engaged.

It is for Art to open ahead the strange roads to a new world. It is the only excuse for its anxious search for new forms, for the abstruse confusion of its contemporary experiments, on which it can be seen already dawning the astonishing glow of the future.

I do not mean by all I have said that I see the conditions for a universal Renaissance now and soon. What I mean is that all the suspicious signs and also the material conditions to make it possible exist for the first time in History and are in our hands. The trend towards a universal humanism can be already seen. It is our duty to rise to a clear consciousness of this paramount trend and to help it to come to pass through our own efforts.