The art of handling university students is to make oneself appear, and this almost ostentatiously, to be treating them as adults... - Arnold J. Toynbee

Human nature presents human minds with a puzzle which they have not yet solved and may never succeed in solving, for all that we can tell. The dichotomy of a human being into 'soul' and 'body' is not a datum of experience. No one has ever been, or ever met, a living human soul without a body... Someone who accepts — as I myself do, taking it on trust — the present-day scientific account of the Universe may find it impossible to believe that a living creature, once dead, can come to life again; but, if he did entertain this belief, he would be thinking more 'scientifically' if he thought in the Christian terms of a psychosomatic resurrection than if he thought in the shamanistic terms of a disembodied spirit.

In our unidentified society when it was united under the Achaemenian Empire we can trace the process of the peaceful ejection of the elements of culture intruded by Assyrian in the gradual replacement of the Akkadian language and cuneiform script by the Aramaic language and alphabet.

If we take the antiquity of Man to be something like 300,000 years, then the antiquity of civilizations, so far from being coeval with human history, will be found to cover less than 2 percent of its present span: less than 6,000 years out of 300,000 . On this time-scale , the lives of our twenty-one civilizations-distributed over not more than three generations of societies and concentrated within less than one-fiftieth part of the lifetime of Mankind- must be regarded, on a philosophic view, as contemporary with one another.