Charles Taylor: Very recently, no one can explain really why this happens, the latter couple of decades of the 20th century, a number of very important scholars began to look at this history, in the light of the history of civilizations, and I wanna mention particularly the Israeli scholar Schmuel Eisenstadt and the Icelandic scholar Johann Arnason, see that comes from small countries, who started off a certain number of lines of thought. Now Shmuel started off the line of thought, which went back to another major figure, I want to mention here, who wrote at the end of the Second World War, and that's Karl Jaspers and Karl Jaspers laid down this theory of 'the axial period': of a moment in history, roughly the middle of the last millennium BCE, in which, in a number of different civilizations, similar movements arose, which open new ethical directions and possibilities, in a very clear way. This is very mysterious phenomenon, as he points out, because they're quite different from each other. But at the same time, they have a great deal of affinity between them. And on top of that, we can't explain the affinities very easily by the ordinary process of diffusion in history. Isn't that Confucian? I had a friend who wandered over to India and whispered in the ear of Buddha or the other way around. They seem to be happening, this seems to be happening with very similar impact at roughly the same time, without it being possible. Now those of you who watched the other night Rupert Sheldrake, I think there's something here for his conception of morphological resonance. Somehow, there's some way in which these different civilizations were drawn together around these insights, something circulated in a way which we don't understand in the ordinary process of diffusion. And so that's one speculation.
