A summary prepared by Mrs. Aghni al-Dibs of the valu-able lecture she delivered at the "Lebanese Cénacle."

Man was favored above the animals with the gift of speech — that is, with mind and thought — and he has gone on perfecting this growing essence ever since he was blessed with life, striving after knowledge, eager to bring the unknown to light, deducing one truth from another and linking ring to ring, advancing in his evolution generation after generation, and taking from his age whatever seat his awareness fits him for and his activity secures him.

The fact is that the human race has differed in its understanding of life, and the measures by which it profits from the examples life sets before it and the lessons it teaches have varied; so men raised some of their number above others by degrees, divided themselves into strong and weak, and sorted themselves into masters and slaves.

Living creatures are formed by nature to love conquest and superiority, and life at its roots rests upon force and might; among the strong there is no place for the weak, nor do they hold with them any standing or account. And here is Western civilization, having reached its zenith at the middle of this century: before force, every logic and consideration of hers shrinks away, and in her actual world unarmed right goes down before mighty falsehood. The two powers that today wrestle and con-tend for the rule of the world and mastery over it rely in their combat upon force — the force of the individual, the force of the machine, the force of production, the force of exploitation — and they harness to their purposes every means and possibility that comes into their hands, no spiritual values or human considerations restraining them from their aim. However the principles that each of these two blocs proclaims and invokes may differ, rule is the goal and conquest is the purpose, and everything short of that is means, pretext, and varnish.

And just as life runs in successive phases, and knowledge by consecutive degrees, and nature through alternating seasons, so social progressivism has its successive stages: the primitive stage, the middle stage, and the high stage.

In the primitive stage man lived on dependence and submission, accepting nature's gifts, contented and resigned. His activity went no further than a morsel to swallow and a garment to put on. He did not run after knowledge, nor did he master the forces of nature; so the waters of the rivers rushed out over the land in harm and havoc, the fortunes of the crops were mortgaged to whatever rain and mercy the sky might grant, the treasures of the earth stayed in its depths, neither reached nor brought forth, and pestilences went on slaughtering and killing the living, neither understood nor exposed. Veils were drawn over men's

inner sight; thought froze and mind stagnated, and man lived an animal though he spoke — poor however rich he grew, mean however high he climbed, blind even though he saw.

In the middle stage this man shook the dust of torpor and stupor from his shoulders and tore the film of ignorance and dullness from his eye and his thought. He communed with nature, made her speak, and imitated her. He saw motion, and found bodies driven with force and running in balance; he beheld the flash of lightning, and was guided to a light that neither steals the reason nor snatches away the sight; he watched the birds swimming in space and the fish diving in the water, and he copied them, outstripped them, and defied them. He tracked down crimes and uncovered them, and diseases and fought them. Then he looked at his needs and defined them, and at his aims and fixed them; and he lived honored, knowing no abasement — strong, overtaken by no weakness.

As for the high progressive stage, there are nations pressing deep into it today, taking the lead of the human race and imposing upon it thereby a will, a policy, and an interest. It is not in our power to set a term to their course, nor to draw limits to their progress, nor to declare that they have reached the summit; this high progressivism may yet prove primitive and elementary beside what the creative human mind may attain after centuries upon centuries.

Those are the stages of coherent social progressivism. And I declare — while sorrow saws at my breast — that the Arab nation in this age of ours has not yet crossed the bounds of the primitive stage. The Arab people, by virtue of its former share in human civilization, could not be blotted from the register of peoples; yet it has