There are two cultural principles operative in contemporary Japan; one is a relatively new principle derived from the West, and the other a traditional Eastern principle.

These two principles are, at least in contemporary Japan, contradictory to one another: the Western principle is considered to be an anti-naturalistic one stressing technique, while the traditional Eastern principle is essentially one founded on naturalism.

Earthly civilization has now entered a phase of development which requires urgent need of imagination to discern its eventual evolution.

Demographic problems occupy a considerable place in global development. Numerous authors interested in the future of the planet have referred to the important factor of population increase. Nevertheless their attitudes toward demographic problems, the manner in which they conceive their own roles, their forecasts are all diverse and reflect a wide range of ideas from serene optimism to nihilistic pessimism.

The distance, as the crow flies, between the two poles can be covered in twenty hours. Thanks to cartography, telecommunications and the precise measurement of distance, we have exhaustive knowledge of the globe. Nevertheless, we are still so removed from each other that everything, or almost everything, remains to be discovered. Just as the past is not clear to us when it takes the historical route, the present brings us no understanding of human ways. The more we advance in knowledge the more proof we have, as Pascal said, that we know nothing.

China was the first country beyond Europe with an important civilization to receive scientific theory from the West in the modern era. Neither in India nor in Japan (where the first Western works arrived from China and were quickly banned) nor a fortiori in other missionary countries was there an early acquaintance with European sciences. In China the first handbook of Western geometry was printed in 1607, the first treatise of astronomy in 1614. After 1584 a map of the world, inspired no doubt by that of Ortelius of 1570, was engraved in stone. Printed versions spread quickly in China and continued into Korea and Japan. The algebraic notation of Viète, plane and solid trigonometry, logarithms (called then the rules of Neper), the cosmology of Aristotle and the methods of astronomical calculation of Tycho Brahe were all introduced into China during the course of the 17th century.

Until fairly recently, psycholinguists and linguists have tended to provide an understanding of language without due concern to the situation in which it was spoken; it is as though they have largely considered context to be a static given. Such a viewpoint is rather surprising when most of us could recount instances during a day when our style of speech has changed. For instance, we are aware how often our speech becomes grammatically less complex with our children, that we tend to speak more formally, enunciate more precisely with our superiors, talk more slowly for foreigners, and so forth. Indeed, the nature of the setting, the topic of discourse and the type of person to whom we are talking all interact to determine the way we speak in a particular situation. In many ways, sociolinguistics emerged as an attempt to fill this yawning gap in the language sciences and it has made a tremendous impact on psycholinguistic theory in the last decade. For example, people are now looking at language development not only with an emphasis on how children acquire rules of grammar (their linguistic competence), but also on the process which enables them to use these rules appropriately in different social situations (their communicative competence). Such thinking has also made a contribution to foreign language dearning techniques as educators seem more aware that if people are to become really skilled in another language they should not only know the grammatical rules for its use but the social ones as well.

“The world of life which is comprised of the lithosphere, the hydrosphere and the atmosphere”: this definition of the biosphere is not complete since it does not express the determining influence of living organisms on its composition, on its structure and on the processes of its continuing evolution. The part of living matter in the biosphere is relatively small (about 0.25%), but this part has a considerable influence on its structure.

The biosphere should be considered as the universal source of all food products without exception. Mankind's ability to feed itself depends on the productivity of this biosphere in the first place. Moreover, its condition determines not only the quantity but also the quality of nourishment. The problem is a critical one today because of the increasing pollution of the biosphere by products poured into it by various human activities.

At its birth, a new scientific discipline is baptized with the names of the two parent disciplines, Science X and Science Y. Subsequently, usage tends to shorten this compound name by giving preference to one or the other of the constituting terms so that the new term is less disconcerting and novel. Take biophysics, for example. Is it more closely related to physics than to biology, or the other way round? Today this question seems naive but it did not appear so a scarce thirty years ago, that is, at the beginning of the creative activity of the most, eminent scientists in the field of biophysics: it was then the subject of intense discussion.