The results of Palestinian parliamentary elections are in, and Hamas has achieved apparent victory. Today's New York Times carries President Bush's response, as he urged Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, to stay in office. A government has not yet been formed, and the president has stated that "a political party that articulates the destruction of Israel as part of its platform is a party with which we will not deal."

Things are changing faster than ever before, it seems. Compare a map of the world today with one 20 years old. A new web site is created every two seconds. The world's store of knowledge doubles every eighteen months. More knowledge has been accumulated in the last thirty years than in the preceding 5,000. Not long ago my two sons got my father's World War II manual typewriter out of the closet and looked at it. One said, "Dad, what is it?" I've never felt so old.

Yet human nature does not change. A newspaper article described change this way: "Try as you will, you get behind in the race, in spite of yourself. It's an incessant strain, to keep pace…and still, you lose ground. Science empties its discoveries on you so fast that you stagger beneath them in hopeless bewilderment. The political world is news seen so rapidly, you're out of breath trying to keep pace with who's in and who's out. Everything is high pressure. Human nature can't endure much more!"

Sounds like yesterday's news, doesn't it? It is--from the Atlantic Journal, June 16, 1833.

Despite all that has changed about our culture, our most basic questions remain unanswered today. What happens when we die? How can we live meaningful lives? What are the best ways to raise our children? How do we govern ourselves as individuals and as a nation?

The most influential answers ever proposed for these perennial, ultimate questions came from a man nicknamed "the Broad," and his most unruly pupil. And everything else in Western philosophy is largely a footnote.