has proved during the past two decades, a delicate and dangerously explosive element in the relations between the more powerful segments of mankind. Asia moreover is gaining rapidly in power in its own name. The Japanese during the Second World War and the Chinese Communists in a more limited way during the Korean War gave some indications of this Asian surge to power. It is quite possible that within the next few decades the present tensions between East and West within the Occident will have paled into relative insignificance in the face of the more fundamental tension between the Occident and Asia, and it seems altogether probable that, barring an atomic cataclysm, the relationship between the West and the non-Western two-thirds of the world will prove to be the greatest human problem of the coming century.
The case for the study of Asia, however, is not based entirely on the immediately practical grounds of world tensions. There is another more fundamental argument, which, if I may borrow an analogy from the natural sciences, can be compared to the case for pure research. The source material for our study of the problems of mankind, is of course, human experience itself, and well over half of this source material lies in the non-Western part of the world, the bulk of it in geographic Asia. As we have seen, more than half of the population of the world lies outside the West today, but, if we go back a thousand years, we find that the balance then was more like ten to one in favor of Asia. And the record of human experience is as detailed in many parts of Asia as in Europe; in fact it is very much more detailed in some periods of history and in certain phases of human activity.
To exclude this vast source of prime factual data from our studies of man is like attempting to base one’s knowledge of the natural world on the phenomena of some small geographic sector. The scientist limited to a South Seas atoll might come to some very different conclusion about geology and climatology than would one whose sole source of information was Greenland.
Such an analogy, of course, overstates the case. In fact, it can be argued that considerable attention has already been given in the West to Asia and its human record. We do have a rough, over-all knowledge of most of Asia and its past and have delved quite deeply into certain aspects of the subject. For example, the early philosophies and religions of Asia have attracted much attention, as have also some phases of its classical art. The sum total of Western studies of Asia is by no means inconsequential, and much of it has been work of a high order. It has even become fashionable in recent years to include mention of Asia in the broader, more generalized type of scholarly study, and most of those who write on “history” or “civilization” as a whole now pay lip service at least to the still somewhat novel concept that the
