During the time when East and West followed different paths it was Europe, and later the West, that led the main trend of differentiation and development. The first stage in this process consisted in the disappearance of the simple unity of the ancient societies and the development of a new tradition by communities in Greece, Palestine, Italy, and elsewhere. This new European tradition was marked by definite characteristics, some of which we have already considered. It developed from three main components which may be summarized as Greek thought, Christian religion, and Roman law. This radical simplification of a complex but unitary process offers a convenient starting point. These components may not have been specially emphasized in the life of the three communities, but they represent broadly what Europe has absorbed from each. The possibility of their combination in one tradition is partly due to the fact that they correspond to three complementary aspects of the mind: thought, emotion, and will. Europe absorbed from Greece the tradition of the free contemplative intellect seeking harmony in nature, from early Christianity the tradition of an independent community of individuals each seeking personal harmony in an experienced relation to a universal god, and from Rome the conception of an ordered society in which the wills of individuals are co-ordinated by tradition and law. As these three elements represented complementary aspects of the mind they could combine to form a balanced tradition. Though Europe was also affected by Jewish, Moslem, barbarian, and other influences, these three were its fundamental components. They were the necessary and sufficient materials for a Europe.

In the ancient civilizations these aspects had been inseparable; in the new period they are expressed in independent institutions. "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and unto God that which is God's" is the manifesto of the new type of community in which secular and religious power are divided. Academies are also founded, devoted to the furtherance of learning as an independent activity not necessarily subservient either to religion or to politics. The growing complexity of the social tradition invited this differentiation which continued through the history of Europe while thought, religion, and politics still possessed a basis stable enough to permit them to develop independently. Only recently has this basis been prejudiced and the total unification of authority reappeared in Europe.

But if different components are to blend and form a stable tradition, it is not enough that they represent complementary aspects of the mind; they cannot fuse into one system unless they represent aspects of the same general kind of man; their forms of organization, or the state of differentiation and integration which they represent, must be similar. Alien components may co-exist, and even be a source of vitality or of originality in an individual, but a community can only absorb into its tradition elements whose structure is appropriate to its own state of organization.

It was no coincidence that the three main European components had similar structures, since they had developed simultaneously as expressions of the unitary transformation which had affected most of the societies around the eastern Mediterranean. Greece, Rome, and the Christian centers each emphasized and developed different aspects of the new social order resulting from that transformation. It lies beyond the scope of this study to consider why the first mature forms of the new society appeared in certain areas. But we may note the westward and expansive tendency which links the sequence of the leading communities in history: the small farmer colonies of the first urban communities of the Near East; the city states of the eastern Mediterranean; the group of peoples and nations in Europe; and now the world group of major centers of power.

The process of social development, as of evolutionary selection, is favored in communities which combine unity with variety and the leading communities of each historical epoch are marked by this combination. As the technique of travel, trade, and communication improved, larger areas acquired the degree of cultural unity within which local variety could provide the stimulus of fertile exchange. It is probable that in the Bronze Age, about 2000 B.C., Europe had already achieved a moderately uniform type of culture, subject nevertheless to a wide range of local variation. If this is true, and the geographical conditions of Europe certainly provided the opportunity for it, then Europe constituted the most favorable field for the development of the new kind of man. While in the East civilization was spread through the expansion of military empires, in Europe it was carried by the trader and colonizer. In China or India where conditions were more uniform, the forms of the ancient world would develop more slowly. These areas avoided some of the maladaptations of Europe, but sooner or later they were bound to fall under the spell of the European mind. Europe was the first testing ground of what seems to be the only path of continuing development; the fate of the species turns on the outcome of the European experiment.

It has not always been evident that this was an experiment of uncertain result; during many periods European or western civilization has seemed, at least to some of its own more fortunate inheritors, to offer the clear line of a progressive development. European civilization has displayed a unique capacity for stable development as a system capable of undergoing great changes and of producing a vast variety of forms without loss of continuity. For two thousand years Europe has continued to develop its own characteristic institutions: colonial empires, churches, political institutions, professional societies, schools of art, and systems of thought. Wars, revolutions, migrations, and plagues have not affected the core of this tradition. Until recently the Bible, the Platonic dialogues, and Roman history still provided the basis for Europe's highest education. Even today when this inheritance is doubly challenged by the attack of its enemies and by the doubts of its heirs, there remains in many the sense that Europe stood for more than an ephemeral civilization, was more that yet another experiment which failed. Beneath all that was transient in Europe there may have been some positive human principle which can be identified, re-formulated as a universal truth and realized in the coming world system.

Europe has stood for freedom, truth, equality, personality. Even if the European attempt to express these aspects of the maturing of human life was faulty, the attempt proves the existence of a tendency which being brought to light may provide a general human principle. If this is so, then we have to ask what was this permanent truth within the European tradition and why did Europe fail to express it in a form whose continuing influence might have saved the continent and the world from continued disaster? Our analysis of the biological organization of man during the first three periods has already provided the background for the answer. But the clue to the strength and the weakness of Europe can only be found in a more detailed examination of the components of the tradition.




V

The European Tradition

Whether monotheism spread from one source or sprang up independently in several areas, its rapid extension proves that the soil must have been ready. We have seen that there prevailed about the opening of the third period a degree of differentiation in thought and behavior which invited a compensating development of methods of integration. The formative tendency had always been at work leading man to develop new modes of behavior, and with them ideas of increasing generality; the novel feature was that the next step led to the establishment of methods and ideas of universal scope. The immediate stimulus came from the collapse of an ancient traditional society or from the wider vision brought by the expansion of an empire. The polytheism of family and tribal images faded under the ascendancy of the one god of a larger community. The first example was the most splendid of all: the Pharaoh Akhenaton, in a dazzling prophecy of all subsequent monotheisms, proclaimed the universal god Aton. Soon after him Moses led his people away from pagan images to recognize theirs as the one true God. Zeus gradually dominated the rivalties of the Olympian family. The time had come when the further development of mental processes was bound to produce universal principles, and since these could best be conceived as a person there appeared: Aton, Yahveh, Zeus, Jupiter.

Whatever is truly universal is unique, and whatever pretends universality cannot admit challenge. But a universal god must be an impostor, for a god is a principle of perfection which compensates the imperfection of each individual man, and there are countless varieties of men, each with their own imperfections and their corresponding gods. So long as gods are needed, there will be not one, but many. This plurality can be overcome only when the individual forgets his personal limitations in a more comprehensive unity. Then gods are no longer necessary and an impersonal and universal principle can take their place. Europe, true to its own path, gave its god a special personal form which could not be universal. But this fact could not be admitted; the one God was a jealous God. With the ideal of universality appeared intolerance.

For a moment we will ignore the religious significance of the conception of God, and treat these divine names as examples of the many verbal symbols that were being used in the organization of experience and behavior. Such symbols are not abstract ghosts of a transcendental world, but the very organs of human power, developing within, facilitating, and dominating the organizing processes in man. Viewed from this point of view the idea of the one god has a unique status: it was the first concept which was conceived as standing in a direct relation to everything. Within the frightening indifference and complexity of nature, God appeared as the guarantee of fertility; the universal father and mother; the supreme innocence, wisdom, and power; and beneath these conscious factors as the key to all relationships, the universal correlator. God was not merely a protective rationalization of human fears; he was equally an expression of the need to organize thought, to find order in fact and harmony in the self. Fear is the sign of a situation in which the attention of the individual leads to no adequate response; where action is adequate there is no fear. Fear can therefore only be overcome by a principle which determines the proper response to every situation. God provided an acceptable answer to every question; that was his function. But it is a positive act to expect or demand a universal answer, to establish an idea of this scope. To develop the need to give a name to one universal relationship uniting everything great and small -- this was an achievement beyond parallel.

Without the formative tendency which expressed itself in the conception of God, scepticism has no opportunity. Doubt has no meaning, except as an aspect of the search for a uniting truth. The establishment of the idea of the one god and the development of monotheism set human thought its standard and put scepticism to work. This was the essential fact. The narrower aspects of which man was aware: the specifically religious significance of God; the selection of a person-God; the differences between Aton, Yahveh, and Zeus -- these things were of lesser consequence. The symbol of the monotheistic God was of unlimited potentiality; like the dominant center of a new and dominant organ it was at once the point of most rapid growth and the most vulnerable and easily misused component of the new man. Monotheism is neither good nor bad; so long as it aided the development of man, he remained loyal to it and benefited from it. As a mode of co-ordinating the passions and will, it became easily a means of subduing man. But it was not only opium, it was also bread and wine.

We have already examined the conflict which was developing between the deliberate and the spontaneous life, and the tendency of the organizing processes to develop universal integrating ideas. This tendency was experienced as the appeal of simple, general ideas, and the tendency for the new conceptions to dominate the organization of life was experienced as the need for faith in a personal God, since at that stage the authority which man could most easily conceive was a father or person. The increasing control over behavior of the integrating principle was experienced as the need to act in conformity with God's wishes, and the process whereby instinctive or traditional tendencies came under this new central control was known as the surrender of the person to God.

In certain circumstances this process of surrender might be innocuous. There is no a priori reason why the symbol of an ideal person might not provide the most effective dominant form for the organization of behavior and thought. If the idea of a "person" were at once simple and universal in application, monotheism might have offered a permanent organizing principle. But the idea of a personal God lacks any universal standard of validity, and surrender to such a god left the way open for religious and temporal interests to misuse divine authority for their own ends. This has been and will remain the failing of every theistic church; there is no guarantee against the abuse of faith by those who have either a different faith, or none at all, and in its place the ambition for power.

But monotheism, in its characteristic European form, displayed another more serious defect. As we have seen, the religious life, being an integration of deliberate, long-delayed responses, conflicted with the instinctive tendencies, and the development of the religious consciousness was accompanied by the appearance of that state of uneasy tension which is called the sense of guilt. The appearance of the sense of guilt in the monotheistic religions, though it was absent in primitive and ancient man, is evidence of a state of conflict between the spontaneous instinctive tendencies and the deliberate behavior expected of the individual in accordance with the prevalent social ideals. The transformation from innocence to guilt is the result of the exploitation of instinctive satisfactions in a materially rich community, which is then condemned by the new social conscience since it conflicts with the proper balance of individual and social life. In extreme cases this conflict and tension may lead to a state of exhaustion in which the instinctive tendencies which seem to be the cause of so much pain cease to dominate behavior, never appear openly in the field of attention, and leave the person apparently dominated by the new devotion to God. This transition from guilt to faith is known as conversion, and it can only happen to a previously unintegrated individual. Conversion, in this form, changes a morbid state of conflict on which the attention of the individual is focused, into a superficially harmonious condition which nevertheless conceals a dissociation so painful as to be permanently withdrawn from attention.

"Religion," in the European sense, is the operation of an incomplete substitute for complete organic integration. The individual exchanges a conflict of which he is partly aware for a dissociation of which he is unaware. This at least is the nature of complete conversion to an absolute Christian faith; in most persons the change is incomplete and the struggle to overcome the spontaneous desires may continue without respite or success. There is also the possibility of the conversion of conflict into whole-hearted harmony, but that is not a religious process and here we are only concerned with the influence of the European tradition which did not facilitate any such complete integration. The load of guilt may have been conscious in some and unconscious in others but it has sometimes lain so heavily on European man that he believed it to be inherent in his manhood, though an elementary knowledge of other human types is sufficient to disprove this.

There are two main aspects to the new self-awareness which appeared at the opening of the third period, both of which are reflected in the structure of monotheism. The individual became aware of himself as a thinking person with freedom of choice, and also aware of his own separation from the rest of nature. Monotheism met this situation by personalizing God, and by treating the personal God as a mediator between man and nature. In the age of magic, man, not being self-aware or separated from nature in his own thought, believed that through magic he could control nature directly. But in the self-conscious age of theism, man places God between himself and nature, and seeks to influence nature through the mediation of God. At the same time he seeks to use God as a protection against his own instinctive nature. Thus on both sides of the double separation of the conscious subject, from external nature and from his own instinctive nature, God is introduced as a controlling link. The idea of God helped to maintain this double separation which was the origin of man's need of God. Muscles atrophy where a splint takes the strain. The power of God the Father compensated for the weakness of his children, and tended to maintain that weakness. The European religious consciousness cast a veil between man and the unprejudiced recognition of the forms both of external nature and of internal human nature.

But this self-awareness led also to a more vivid sense of the precariousness of the individual life. To become self-aware is to become conscious of the perpetual threat of nature to the security of the self, and of the inescapable fact of death. So long as man is fully part of the whole, no demand for permanence can arise, but once alone and afraid, man fears to return within the action of the whole, and instead desires eternal life. God denies him escape from the sense of separation, but as recompense promises immortality.

To be made content with so spurious a substitute was the inevitable price of man's misunderstanding of his own nature and of his part in the whole of nature. But it is interesting to note that all great religions have not made this frivolous promise of personal immortality. The Jewish people, for example, emphasized the spiritual value of the community tradition rather than of the individual person, and demanded from their God a guarantee of their survival not as individuals but as a people. In place of the Christian hope of joining God in heaven, he was to descend and live within their tradition on this earth. This was a more reasonable expectation, because capable of partial fulfillment, but also a more dangerous one, for the same reason. The illusion of personal survival is relatively harmless, because meaningless in a unitary world, but the permanent distinction from all other peoples which was an essential element in the Jewish faith has been granted to them as a curse which will continue until the Jewish and Christian attempts to monopolize the truth have dissolved within a broader vision.

The relation of Jewry to Christendom is of special importance in the interpretation of the European tradition. Here we reach a point so sore, and so subject to misinterpretation, that if safety were the aim, silence would be proper. But the Jews have never been safe. Let those who are too proud of their past to wish to learn condemn themselves. Unitary thought cannot hesitate to subject the Jewish tradition, where it is relevant, to the same radical scrutiny as it applies here to the European. Indeed the two are inseparable. In its structure, the Jewish tradition is an exaggeration of the European; the orthodox Jew is a more intense European, different only in so far as he has deliberately separated himself from other influences. We are concerned here only with the impress of a given tradition on the individual, and generalization is therefore legitimate. The unitary world can learn not only from the failure of Europe but also from the fate of Jewry.

The debt of Europe and the world to the Jewish people needs no emphasis. Jewry achieved the first stable monotheism, at a time when that represented a unique advance. Indeed the Jew can only be understood as a premature monotheist: all his characteristics follow from that. Akhenaton had shown the world the possibility of faith in one universal God shared by man and nature. In a moment of splendor he revealed that the future may anticipate itself in the vision and will of a single individual. In originality he surpassed Jesus. But his god Aton, being socially premature, fell with him, and when the Hebrews entered Palestine and absorbed the Egyptian and Babylonian culture they set out to create a monotheism which would last, because they would defend it with their whole being against the alien world. Measured by their own absolute standards that was a mistake; universality cannot be defended, for it can admit no enemies and must transcend all divisions. Akhenaton had known this and refused to fight for his God. The time was not ripe for a stable monotheism, but the Jewish people prepared the way. In a decadent world grown brutal they had no choice but to defend their faith by methods which must lead to disaster. There is no monopoly of the spirit. An exclusive God must be a false God.

Early Jewry, seeking what Europe sought later in more favorable circumstances, was bound to develop in more intense form the same characteristics as subsequently marked the European. Revolting from the instinctive excesses of decadent ancient man, the orthodox Jew became the man of deliberation, ever under the eye of God; rejecting the senses and their flattering images, he proclaimed the prior truth of the word; denouncing all other gods, he announced "the Lord is One"; repudiating the ancient hierarchies, since men of the faith are equal before God; converting all his reactions from the alien world around into a stubborn defense of his privileged truth: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God." The unlimited radiance of Akhenaton, transient as all intense beauty, has become the stable defensive discipline of Moses and the prophets.

Fear of God, and of other religions and peoples, fear of the loss of his own religion, and fear of spontaneous vitality, are expressed in the unique institution of a ban on intermarriage fusing continuity of descent with the claim to a unique religious privilege. In the dread isolation of a people separating itself from cross-fertilization, in the intransigent suppression of spontaneity, the orthodox faith repudiated the unity of process and so determined its own doom. In the species as a whole the intellect was developing as part of the organic processes; within the European tradition it grew in the formal separation of static concepts abstracted from process forms; but in the Jewish tradition the separation was aggravated and projected as a social division from the rest of the race.

The Jew has been the conscience of the European, and conscience is negative. His sense of moral superiority was necessary to conceal a division that lay even deeper than the European, just as his aspiration is more intense. From this conflict there was no redemption, not even the illusion of conversion, and he must await the Messiah. Tribulation led him to divorce fact and idea earlier than Plato; since he could have no worldly dominion, he would at least be supreme in the world of the spirit.

The European, as I have described him, is a particular distortion of the universal form of man, which displays certain distinguishing characteristics. The Jew carries these further, as a polarization of European man. Thus the Jew stands beside the European Christian as a sister type, rather than beside any individual European nation or people. This is the historical anomaly: the Jew, having separated himself as a polarized European type, has no home and must fit in somewhere beside Europe. Having achieved continuity in time by an extreme device, he has forfeited stability in space, and is driven from place to place. Only outside Europe and beyond the dominance of its tradition, that is in Asia, can he escape his separation, for there he no longer needs to defend his faith. The Jewish tradition began in the centuries after 1400 B.C. as a response to the situation which also created the European, and the two must collapse together. When the European idea is exhausted, the Jewish books will also lose their inspiration. The common features and mutual polarity of European and Jew will disappear when they transform their traditions and accept new roles within a unitary world. When the European develops a hatred of the Jew he is releasing his dislike of his own tradition against an exaggerated form of it. Widespread anti-Semitism is thus an inevitable accompaniment of either a temporary or a permanent decline of the European tradition. When the Jew finally renounces his tradition it will be a sign that a unitary society is already in sight, for then he need no longer defend his spiritual mission. Integrity supersedes conscience.

To observe what is incomplete in the achievements of the past implies no lack of appreciation. Development means that broader aspects of experience become evident, and failure to take them into account would be a poor tribute to those who, by their own development, created the past which we have inherited. The tendency in man which enabled him to create monotheism now gives him the sanction to recognize that all particular forms of religion are conditioned by their time. We have to overcome two thousand years of European monotheism by the same love of unity as enabled Akhenaton to transcend the two thousand years of Egyptian pagan civilization. The personal god of the European dissociation fades before the unitary principle of an even more splendid emancipation.

The demand for that unitary principle of life and thought is now inescapable. But during the period under consideration it was monotheistic religion, and Christianity above all, which expressed the supreme aspiration in its richest form and allowed Europe to develop. The quality of European endeavor was nourished by the religious component in the make-up of European man. We shall identify the source of that quality in a moment, when we have considered the intellectual and political components of the tradition. But the religious component was primary, being not only the ultimate sanction of the social order but also at once the original inspiration and the expression of the search for harmony. This is true of the past, though in the wider vista which is today opening before man, and which he cannot deny, monotheism has nothing further to offer.

We now turn to the second component of the tradition, the development of universal ideas. It is convenient to treat these components separately, though they are responses to a single situation which differ only in emphasis. As a result of his new self-awareness, man had begun to project into nature different aspects of the processes which he discovered in himself. So far we have considered mainly the ethical monotheism, of which the Jewish tradition provides the clearest example, in which man seeks to overcome an emotional conflict by projecting his need for an integrating emotion in the form of a personal or father-god. God is here the righteous ruler; mankind are his sinful people. In India, the emphasis was not on conflict and sin, but on the unreality of the world. Man here projected his failure to cope with nature in a mystical faith in the higher reality of another world.

But in favored Greece, in an environment where man was relatively well adapted and inherited the fruits of two thousand years of Egyptian and Near Eastern civilization, he was more concerned with the contemplation of the variety of nature, and with the attempt to find order in this variety. The Greek mind sought neither the discipline of a universal father, nor blind escape in a mystical intuition of another world, but the Logos, or universal reason, which inspired the order of nature. The formative tendency in the mental processes of the Greeks led them to seek universal ideas, and these they projected into a transcendental world, more real because conceived to be more permanent than the world of process and appearance.

The Hindu denied the reality of this world in a vague emotional pantheism which was anti-intellectual in tendency; Plato, and his followers, respected the concrete detail of this world, and sought only the higher reality of an intellectual clarity which would interpret and master it. This Platonic doctrine expressed the tendency of thought to establish clear, static ideas even at the cost of their separation from and neglect of the universality of process. This tendency is seen both in Greek philosophic speculation and in Greek mathematics. The Pythagorean numbers and the Platonic ideas together constituted an important factor facilitating the development of the European tradition together with its accompanying dissociation.

But we are mainly concerned with a broader tendency which emphasized the importance of conscious thought, and isolated it as an order of reality sui generis. I shall call this doctrine rationalism. By this term I mean the view that experience is to be interpreted and behavior organized by the deliberate use of the conscious and autonomous faculty of reason. Rationalism seeks the clarity of static ideas as the basis both of knowledge and of the deliberate control of behavior. It assumes that reasoned analysis of fact is the true basis of knowledge, and that an adequate critique of reason can be supplied by the subjective or introspective application of reason itself. Rational, conscious thought necessarily leads to truth -- so it is assumed. Rationalism has a subjective bias; it is interested in the mastery of nature by conscious thought. This subjectivism is common to Christianity and rationalism and expresses an important feature of the situation at the time of their development: the social tradition was ready for an integrating principle, but man could then only conceive an organizing power in the two forms known to him in his own experience, a Supreme person or a supreme idea. Rationalism also has a static bias, for in seeking clarity it abstracts permanent elements from the general process.

During the period when monotheism and rationalism represented the two main methods whereby consciousness supplemented the traditional organization of thought and life, it was natural that the differences between them were emphasized rather than their underlying similarity. We are accustomed to thinking of rationalism as meaning the explanation in terms of reason of what has previously been regarded as supernatural. But this interpretation is inadequate.

Now that both methods are being outgrown, we are in a position to look back and to identify the common features which were less evident in earlier times. Faced by the increasing differentiation of thought and the conflict between spontaneity and deliberation, the rationalist and the monotheist both tended to distrust instinctive impulses and sought to rely on repressive moral ideals to guide and control behavior. Both attitudes moreover express a dislike of the implications of process, and a fear of the transience of the individual life. The Christian seeks the solace of ultimate harmony in a life after death; the rationalist tends to neglect the real world and takes refuge in a harmonious and permanent system of thought. Again, both attitudes reflect the dualism of the self-awareness in which spirit is separated from nature: ideas exist in a world of their own, independent both of the external world and of the organic processes in the thinker, and the soul is distinguished from nature and from the transient physical frame of man both by its permanence and by its partaking in the harmony of the divine nature. This isomorphism, or identity of structure, is inevitable, since both methods developed in response to the same human situation. Indeed it is misleading to regard the two methods as distinct; some communities gave their thought a religious, and others a rational emphasis, and sometimes, as in the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, the distinction is lost in a complex system of religious rationalism.

The development of monotheism and of rationalism is thus an expression and reinforcement of the divorce in thought, and therefore also in the organization of behavior, between the background of instinct, impulse, and universal process, and the ideal forms of religion and intellect, between Dionysian vitality and Apollonian measure. This divorce and the resulting conflict was the source of tragedy not only in Greek drama, but also in the life of the European. We have already seen that its ultimate origin lay in a duality of the central nervous system, which had served animal species well until in man the achievement of a symbolic or rational control of behavior had at first to be paid for by a dualism that passed out of the control of the organic balance. The conceptual organization of behavior implies that standards of behavior must be established, and at that stage a standard had to be clear and definite, and therefore universal and unchanging. The ideals of monotheistic religion and of rationalism were therefore necessarily static and antagonistic to the developing forms of all processes, and in particular of human vitality.

This fundamental antithesis of form is of great importance; it pervades the thought and behavior of every European and every western man, in so far as he has been influenced by the European tradition. In unitary thought a formal difference is neither abstract nor unimportant; formal correspondences and antitheses are the significant factors through which alone the processes of nature and of man can be understood. The only truth is to be found in form; the apparent content and spurious substance that constitute the body of language are merely late types of magical incantation.

For example, we shall not be misled by the Christian who seeks to conceal his own lack of faith and to follow contemporary trends by asserting that Christianity can transcend the division of spirit and matter. Christianity can be re-interpreted without limit, and names may not matter, but so long as emphasis is placed on a personal god as the guarantor of the survival of individual personality, a static idea, in the formal sense of a timeless one, is made dominant, and everything else is secondary. Even those forms of Christianity which recognize the tragic character of life still pay their due to the general cry for comfort and rob experience of its validity by promising consolation elsewhere. If death is robbed of its sting, life is patched up with a silver lining. Illusion may still be necessary to make life tolerable, but this particular superstition loses its appeal for those who have recognized that spirit and flesh have no meaning except as aspects of the process here and now which makes each of us what we are. Indeed if this analysis is right the enthusiasm which is indispensable to every great adventure can now only be created by the objective discovery and personal recovery of unity in process, and this is prevented where static ideals are given a dominant status.

This antithesis between the static conceptions of monotheism and rationalism and the process character of nature as a whole must be interpreted not merely as a dualism in man's thought, but as a contrast of two alien types of form which lies deeper than conscious thought. There is a close correlation between rationalism and self-consciousness, which reveals their common root deep in the structure of mental processes. Rationalism implies that man is aware of his ideas as separate from the external world, and to be aware of this separateness man must also be aware of himself. Self-awareness is thus implied by rationalism. In establishing general ideas man uses a part of his own thought for the interpretation of the world. The processes which drew man's attention inward thus produced two simultaneous results: first, the integration of the continuity of personal experience in the conception of the self; and second, the integration of the verbal symbols of language in the conception of universal ideas. Self-awareness, rationalism, and monotheism were thus intimately related expressions of the state of the social tradition during the early development of European man.

The antithesis between the static conceptions of self-conscious rationalism and the process forms of nature had further consequences. The images of the imagination were separated from those of the senses, the tendencies and desires of the conscious subject were regarded as independent of the tendencies of other natural processes, and the subjective will appeared to stand in sharp contrast to the general course of nature. This division led to the conception of the autonomous and responsible moral will as "free" of the "necessity" which appeared to govern natural processes. In what follows I shall use the term "morality" to express the attempt of the conscious will to control behavior to conform with social standards in ignorance of the conditions of proper organic integration. During the metamorphosis from ancient to European man, self-awareness, rationalism, monotheism, and morality all developed in parallel as expressions of the influence of a new form of social tradition on the organization of the individual. In less marked forms these features were also present in previous societies, and elsewhere in the world, but in Europe they acquired a peculiar emphasis. Europe forced the new mode of life till it produced a definite dissociation, for self-awareness did not then bring with it an adequate understanding of the self; religion could not offer a complete integration; the rational intellect knew nothing of its own origins, limitations, or mode of operation; and morality necessarily failed to realize its aim.

This was the general tendency of the new tradition. If we select any particular period in European history, or any individual whose life we may believe we can reconstruct, we may find that the impress of the European tradition was less important than the influence of special tendencies and local situations. Moreover the underlying instinctive and habitual patterns of primitive and ancient life continued to determine the general forms of life upon which this European organization was gradually imposed. The institutions of marriage and the family, the rituals of religion and craft, the alternation of peace and war, and the preoccupation with the struggle for survival -- all tended to preserve a balance and to protect the individual from taking the European tradition too seriously.

Nevertheless the dissociation eventually affected all to some degree, and some to a disastrous degree. Individuals and communities that were deeply affected by the European ideals showed the result in instability, oscillation between asceticism and excess, conflict, neurosis, or insanity. European genius and insanity have been often associated; the temperament which gave a whole-natured response to the implications of the tradition often paid the full price. Some latent organic weakness, not being protected by whole-natured function, was aggravated by the dualistic tradition until the organic self-regulation was frustrated and the dualism achieved its logical fulfillment in schizophrenia. The supreme exception checks the rule: Goethe rejected the European dualism in all its forms and escaped its distortions. This is not a moral or aesthetic valuation, but a statement and interpretation of fact. On the other hand those who attempted to give the most radical expression to the religious, emotional, and intellectual idealism of the European tradition announced not only their own impending breakdown, but also the ultimate collapse of Europe.

We have so far been able to neglect the political component in the tradition. The political and social organization of any community tends to display its special characteristics less sharply than do its religion or its ideas. The polity of a community is at any moment a compromise between habits inherited from the past and new methods which have still to develop their full influence. For this reason we find the European dissociation and its various aspects much less clearly expressed in its political than in its religious and intellectual forms. Nevertheless the same essential features are present. Europe absorbed from Rome the conception of society as the conscious integration of individual wills within a social order. It is as if in Rome the new subjectivity had emphasized the subject's awareness, not of his emotion or his thoughts, but of his will to action. Therefore in place of the one god or the universal idea, Rome was chiefly concerned with the co-ordination of individual action within a consciously developed political system. The Roman mind, becoming aware of tradition, transformed it into law and established the conception of a political community in which every full citizen shared in law-making and enjoyed equal justice.

Since Roman political methods blended with the Christian-rationalist system to form a single tradition we must expect to find that they have a similar structure. But Rome met each aspect of the new situation in its own characteristic manner: the increasing differentiation of society by a conscious organization of its activities; the growing conflict between spontaneity and deliberation by a realistic adaptation to the requirements of the social order rather than by a moral decision; the sense of the separation of man from nature by the recognition of the power of the human will to mold nature; and the realization of the transience of the individual by emphasizing the continuity of the family and of the political community. In common with Greece and Palestine and in contrast to the ancient civilizations, Rome stressed the deliberate control of aspects of social life previously dominated by habits and traditions which had not been the subject of conscious attention. But unlike the other two components, the Roman polity, being based on a practical compromise between the instinctive tendencies of the individual and the social circumstances of the time, tended to lessen the conflict between spontaneity and deliberation.

Roman traditions, law, and ethics lacked the absolute character of Christianity and rationalism, and drew their sanction not from any strictly religious source, but from a principle of continuity. Like the British people much later, the Romans lacked every fanaticism except the passion for continuity; for them a slowly developing tradition expressed natural human law. Neither the Greek nor the Christian communities had this practical quality which enabled Rome and the societies developing from it to preserve much of their traditions through the disintegration of the ancient world. Rome provided the realistic continuity which, though in some respects antagonistic to the contemporary intellectual, artistic, and religious movements, nevertheless provided the soil in which they could be preserved as part of a cumulative tradition. In the same way the temperament of the English-speaking peoples may enable them to provide the link between the dissipated European culture and a re-organized world community. Just because the Romans and the English-speaking peoples do not take thought seriously, they are able to act as its carrier without themselves succumbing to its weaknesses.

We have now completed the analysis of the transformation which produced European man. Emphasis has been laid on those elements which formed the distinguishing characteristics of Europe up to 1600. It has not been necessary to consider the peoples who inhabited Europe in earlier times, nor shall we discuss the movements which during this period determined the main pattern of European history: the barbarian invasions, the growth of feudalism, the medieval church, the communes, the crusades, the gradual appearance of the government and the people, the Renaissance, and the Reformation. Important as these developments were, their consequences remained within the general form of the European tradition as I have described it. The fundamental conception of a Christian church, the standards to be aimed at in thought, and the general idea of a political society remained essentially unchanged. The history of Europe consists in the interplay of these principles within the changing historical and technical conditions of the different centuries.

The possibility of this interplay arises from the fact that in European, in contrast to ancient civilization, the unity of society was differentiated into a number of specialized institutions and groups: the monarchy, the aristocracy, the church, the government, the people, the academies and professions. This differentiation was the main source of the rich variety of Europe and the guarantee of some degree of liberty and continued development. The ancient civilizations had a more simple and relatively static unity; European civilization displayed a differentiated unity which, as we shall see, contained the stimulus and opportunity for the progressive maturing of the potentialities of the stock. It has long been realized that the co-existence in Europe of theocracy, monarchy, autocracy, democracy, and of varied creeds and outlooks prevented the tyranny of any one system and promoted fertile interchange. European civilization owes its supremacy to the fact that it was diversified rather than exclusive. This feature was present at the start, and has dominated its history until the twentieth century.

We have here come close to the permanent truth latent in the European tradition which it has been our aim to discover: the combination of unity with sufficient diversity to ensure the possibility of continued development. Yet this principle is indefinite. What is sufficient diversity? What conditions determine whether the possibility of further development is in fact realized? We have still to discover the essential condition which Europe satisfied during the period of its ascendancy. The criterion for the continued development of the species must be that the community tradition facilitates the development of the individual. This implies that the only permanent social principle must be one facilitating this balanced relation between individual and community. In animal communities the proper relation of the members to the group is of less importance and is adequately maintained by the conservative tendencies of heredity, instinct, and mimicry. But in man a new relation has developed between the individual and the cumulative social tradition, and society has today reached the stage when the proper form of that relation must be explicitly recognized and incorporated as part of the tradition. The proper relation of the individual to the community tradition cannot any longer be maintained without an explicit formulation which is generally accepted and becomes itself an element in the tradition.

At the commencement of the third period, the increasing complexity of life destroyed the ancient unified communities and resulted, on the one hand, in a differentiation of authority between church, state, and academy, and, on the other hand, in the organization of empire, religion, and thought on a potentially universal basis. The species was insufficiently developed, and its knowledge inadequate, for a single universal synthesis of thought and authority. Thus, while universalism was realized in certain respects, this was limited by the partial separation of religion, politics, and thought. Europe was favorably placed to take advantage of this situation, and we can now identify the clue to its success.

The social principle which made possible the unique achievement of Europe was this: in the European tradition the individual is conceived to be in direct relation to the universals in terms of which individual and social life are organized; every man stands in direct relation to God, to the world of ideas, and to the law and justice of the community. In the centralized ancient societies, the formative tendencies of the individual were stifled under the rigid system which dominated him; the new communities which laid the foundations of Europe threw aside that tyrannical bondage. It was the individual alone with his emotions in the desert, the isolated traveler perplexed by the contrasts of different ways of life, the philosopher contemplating nature and human life, the artist giving permanent expression to his personal experience, who established the new universals, and from their origin these universals retained, at least potentially, their direct significance for every individual brought up within the European tradition. Vested interest builds up its hierarchies to confuse and dominate the many; the great systems of economic, political, religious, and social privilege develop their jargon and rituals to fortify themselves and intimidate the outsider. But the European never wholly forgets that the great symbols of European life are not the monopoly of a privileged group, but were created by individuals like him from their own experience. He only needs to laugh at the vast system of incantations, and he has conquered it, for it has failed to intimidate him. He is free to think, to pray, to interpret justice, for himself. Europe is the name of this priceless inheritance.

The European tradition is unique in the status which is granted to the individual through the assumption that all men are potentially equal, each and all having direct access to God, being endowed with the faculty of thought, and entitled to the appropriate forms of justice. This was an ideal, and was not realized. But that is not the point. The declaration of this equality of opportunity encouraged the individual. This declaration is unmistakable in Greek thought, in Roman law, and most of all in Pauline Christianity: "Glory, honor, and peace to every man that worketh good, to the Jew first, and also to the Gentile: for there is no respect of persons with God." This assurance Europe gave to all its members.

The most important consequence of this element in the tradition was not the raising of the social status of the individual, since it could not prejudice the hierarchy of power which exists in every ordered society, but in its effect on the subjective confidence of the individual in his own abilities. Nothing is more certain than that the human individual cannot stand alone; without example the individual can never learn to stand on his own feet, either literally as child or morally as adult; separated from the community his humanity perishes within him. But the new tradition gave the individual an assurance that was far-reaching in its effects. In earlier communities only the fortunate could view their lives with any feeling of security. The European system gave the individual the hope that he might discover a secure basis for his own life and so escape misery and frustration. The security in question was not primarily economic; scholar and saint did not hesitate to set out on lonely paths, since they were sure of their own way. With the illusion of a loving god, a free mind, and the promise of justice, the individual dared more than he ever could before.

This may appear a strange feat of auto-suggestion! The subjectivity of the tradition had been exploited with powerful effect. It was natural for man to believe that he had direct relation to universals which were projections of aspects of his own experience. He could scarcely help having a personal confidence in those universal ideals which had come into being precisely to satisfy his own need. Yet strangely enough he was able to derive encouragement from these projections of himself. He took courage from them as might a lonely man in a hall of mirrors gain comfort from the company around him, believing that the big battalions were with him. It was as well that the European did not know that the supporting company were mere echoes of himself, or he might mistakenly have concluded that the universals were as frail and transient as he felt himself to be.

But here the analogy fails and we observe that a mistaken interpretation may provide the basis for a modification which can correct it. The growing sense of security had this justification: the universals were not merely expressions of the characteristics of one individual; they were more reliable than the character of any one person could be without them, because they represented part of the accumulated and tested content of the social tradition. The efficacy of the European assurance to the individual arose from the fact that the new universals, though arising from the contributions of individuals to the tradition, had become stabilized as symbols which had proved to be effective in the organization of European life. These universals were the inspiration of European character. Here is the criterion we are seeking. The permanent truth which inspired the European tradition was the principle that every individual has direct access to the dominant elements of the social tradition. (Or shall we say every man, since woman was largely excluded.) The organization of power in any community has the form of a hierarchy which tends to confine the individual to relationships with those who are his neighbors in the social pattern. But if he is to be able to make his personal contribution to the enrichment of the tradition he must also have direct knowledge of universals which can assist him to escape the tyranny of local power and habit and to develop his own characteristic form of life. Here is the ultimate truth which enables Platonism, Christianity, and democracy to aid the development of man.

The fact that Europeans were often unaware that this was the underlying principle of the civilization which they were creating rendered it no less effective. The religious inspiration of the one God and the idealist aspiration towards simple eternal truth could be shared by all in varying manner and degree. The individual sometimes dared to stand alone against tradition and tyranny because of this sense of power within him. This is the permanent gift of Europe to mankind, which no other civilization or continent has equaled. It is this which justifies the respect which all the world has paid to the Europe now past. It is this, too, which justifies the inclusion, within this study of the development of European man, of an anticipation of the reorganized society which may inherit this principle from Europe.

Here we again reach the central theme of this study: Europe held the clue to so extensive a development, and yet it collapsed. Europe incorporated and made real this permanent truth, and yet in failing to maintain it has itself disappeared. In the West the individual has lost his foundation because there are today no universals, recognized within the tradition, of which he has direct unquestioning knowledge. The earlier convictions have disappeared, because the dissociation on which they rested has itself collapsed. The convictions were necessary and stable because they expressed and compensated the dissociation which lay deeper. This means that the history of European man can only be understood as the development and disappearance of his characteristic dissociation. This is a typical procedure in unitary thought; the universal formative process is postulated in order to emphasize and invite explanation of its distortion in particular circumstances.

We have already analyzed the origin and underlying features of the European dissociation, and in the next chapters we shall examine its intensification and final collapse. But before tracing this further historical development it will be useful to examine some of its consequences. The fundamental division is between deliberate activity organized by static concepts and the instinctive and spontaneous life. The dissociation of two components of an organic system results in a common distortion of both. The instinctive life lost its innocence, its proper rhythm being replaced by obsessive desire. On the other hand, rationally controlled deliberate behavior was partly deflected towards ideals which also obsessed the individual with their allure of perfection and disturbed the rhythm of tension and release. This similarity is not accidental. In splitting the organic system in a given manner, the same form of distortion appears in both dissociated components. In this case the periodicity of whole-natured process is transformed into a dual obsession; it matters little whether the aim is union with god or woman, the ecstasy of the pursuit of unity or truth, of power or pleasure -- the sustained intensity and lack of satisfaction proves the European stamp.

The European soul never truly loses itself in God; the mind never finds ultimate truth; power is never secure; pleasure never satisfies. Bewitched by these illusory aims which appear to promise the absolute, man is led away from the proper rhythm of the organic processes to chase an elusive ecstasy. Morbid religiosity, hyperintellectualism, deliberate sensuality, and cold ambition are some of the variants of the dissociated personality's attempt to escape its own division. The oscillations from emotional mysticism to rationalism, and from rationalism to a materialism of power, which mark the history of Europe, do not represent any essential change. They only express the successive oscillations of the search for novel stimulation within the limits set by the basic dissociation. Superficially they may appear as reversals of pole, but the structure of the tradition has not changed, the strenuousness, the absence of natural rhythm, and the sense of inner conflict remain.

In those whose constructive tendencies are thwarted, the disease may turn outward in the intolerance of the repressive moral will. We may call this the projection of the cruelty principle, self-hate turning itself outward upon others. But such terms leave the dualisms unresolved. The actual form of the situation is that a partial tendency (rationally controlled deliberate behavior) has achieved dominance, another component (spontaneous behavior) being thereby simultaneously distorted; this act of self-distortion involves the tendency to strain oneself, which is masochism; and this form, like every other, tends to extend itself, which implies sadism, though it may disguise itself as morality desired for others.

But beneath all these special forms lay the fundamental division between two ways of organizing behavior. Europe experienced this division more intensely than any other continent because it went further in differentiation. Though the roots of this dichotomy lay almost hidden in the organic and mental processes of the individual, Europeans could speak of little else. Their language tells the persisting story of two distorted and incompatible tendencies: heaven and earth, spirit and flesh, Apollonian and Dionysian, super-ego and ego, deliberate and spontaneous. With rare exceptions the procession of European genius maintains the dualistic chant. The best proof that the day of that Europe is over is that we can look back dispassionately at the structure of the turbulent story. The biologist and ethnologist know that there is no one "human nature," and that other civilizations have displaced other types of structure. The dissociation of the typical adult European is a consequence not of any universal human nature, a term that has no meaning, but of the influence of an inadequately organized tradition.

The condition which we have analyzed characterizes the whole of the third period, in the sense that during it the tradition retained this dominant structure. For two thousand years this mode of organization was stable and effective; its influence on the lives of individuals tended to increase as the centuries passed. The results of the transformation which took place around 1000 B.C. matured in European society from A.D. 200 to 600 as the ancient world disappeared and the medieval world took its place. During the subsequent centuries until A.D. 1200, medieval society was relatively stationary and displayed many features of the dualistic state which has been described. But its stability was only temporary. The formative tendency, already evident in the adaptive vitality which had developed the European mind from that of ancient man, remained at work, forming new patterns of behavior and new symmetries in thought. Indeed the European dissociation, though appearing to provide a basis for stability, actually intensified the urge to further development. This paradox is characteristic of a biological adaptation which is incomplete, and while meeting certain requirements leaves others unsatisfied as sources of further modifications which must ultimately upset the apparent stability.

Until about A.D. 1200, the prevalent conception of man was of a passive personality guided by universal authority. The individual had to play his role as a passive component in a stable and static natural order. Change was regarded as irrational, the early Greek philosophies of process being forgotten in favor of the fixed categories of Platonism, Christianity, and the feudal order. Even the individual will which had been vigorously displayed in the Roman polity was a will normally reverent towards tradition and operating within its forms. The barbarian invasions brought in a fresh element of vigor, independence, and variety, but did not modify the dominant doctrines of the tradition. The late Middle Ages were more rational, in the sense used here, than the Age of Enlightenment, for the medieval church believed it was in possession of an adequate intellectual system enabling all important questions to be answered by pure reason.

The collapse of the medieval world cannot be ascribed to any one factor. The adaptive vitality of the species inevitably produced new differentiations to supplement its dissociated and underdeveloped state. This is seen in the gradual development of improved practical techniques of production and construction, in the interaction of cultures, the speculations of philosophers, and all the arts of peace and war. An uncertain current of thought and experiment persisted through the centuries of the Roman Empire, of the spread of Christianity and Islam, and of the Crusades. The tendency towards the greater differentiation of thought and action was in evidence throughout this period but produced little cumulative result compared with what followed later.

Yet the process was at work and about 1300 the veil which religion and scholasticism had imposed between the mind and nature began to fade. Dissociated man had put God as a bridge between himself and nature; but neither scholasticism nor his own knowledge of God could answer the new questions which occurred to him as he observed nature. Religion could not prevent him using his own eyes, though its tendency was to obstruct unprejudiced interpretation. Now, slowly, as he looked around, man's awareness of himself began to change. No longer satisfied to regard himself as a passive recipient of divine favor and doctrine, he began to discover that he could experience things in a manner personal to himself. This transformation, which was most marked in specially placed individuals but rapidly spread to others, was in some respects similar to the previous development of self-awareness of the opening of the third period, and thus was appropriately followed by the renaissance of classical culture. But in other ways it was sharply distinguished from the earlier transformation whose background was poverty and fear. At the end of the twelfth century, the individual was becoming aware of his own positive faculties, and the background was now pride rather than fear. What had for many centuries been the experience only of rare individuals, now became representative in the sense that it was shared by all the leading figures of the time. The urgent desire to explore, to investigate, to allow new forms of awareness and of thought to develop in oneself, was expressed in a novel form of personal initiative. Marco Polo, Roger Bacon, Petrarch, Columbus, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci express the new type of active personality. The European genius found itself.

These names introduce a new stage in the history of Europe, which for convenience we shall call the humanistic phase. Humanism, in the sense in which it dominates the development of Europe from A.D. 1300 to 1800, is a special form of rationalism based on the view that man, as conscious subject, is supreme; his will free, his reason autonomous, his allegiance due only to his own ideals. This attitude is a natural expression of the subjective European tradition. If the humanist view had been valid, it might have provided the basis of a stable society; if the subject had in fact had direct knowledge of a personal god, humanism would not have come into conflict with Christianity. But it was based less on the Christian component of the tradition than on rationalism, and so rational humanism became the expression of the new pride of the individual, and for five centuries gained increasing influence.

The pageant of European humanism is the richest and most complex spectacle of history. It lacks the grand simplicity of the antique world, but for variety and scope of new development it is unique. Yet it was not, as many thought, a steady path of human progress. Just as the ancient world, in spite of its relatively static character, generated a movement which gave the leadership of the species to a new kind of man, so the European system with its inner dissociation intensified the process which later exposed its own inadequacy. But this exposure came about by a long deviation. The tension in the European drove him out from the medieval world on a voyage of discovery. In this adventure he was guided and intoxicated by the discovery of a method of discovery. This frenzy led him to neglect himself as subject, but the new method enabled him to explore the mechanism of nature and so to rediscover himself as object. A deep consistency marks the centuries from 1600 until today. We cannot say that all that has happened has been necessary, because that word, except in special contexts, has no meaning in unitary thought. But we can see that the main tendencies of this period are consistent with the assumption of a progressive transformation of the European tradition into a reorganized unitary form.

The obscurity of the present situation and the difficulty of identifying the continuity which underlies these centuries is due to the fact that the principle which dominated this last period, the new method of discovery, is of a form alien to that of the ultimate reorganization. Not only the positive achievements of this final period, but also its limitations and apparent confusion derive from the characteristics of this method. Yet the deeper continuity of development through which this period must be interpreted is in sharp contrast to its dominant science. The general tendency of the period is towards the recognition of the unitary process, but its science is quantitative.




VI

Europe after 1600

We now enter the fourth period, the period of western man. This covers the last three and a half centuries and represents a transitional stage between the European tradition and a reorganized tradition whose appearance will bring it to a close. It is the age of quantitative technique. The continued differentiation of knowledge and of social organization renders the universal ideals ineffective, and leaves man without adequate organizing convictions. The individual enjoys neither pagan innocence nor naive religious faith. Religion no longer suffices to stabilize the inner dissociation and the individual develops intense personal ambitions. The old order is no longer accepted, personality becomes active, and the individual sets out to explore and dominate nature. In the age of magic, man sought to control nature through ritual; in the age of monotheism he could dispense with this control by relying on the mediation of a personal god; in the age of quantity, man exerts his own will and seeks to control nature himself.

During these centuries Europe still led the race, from its surplus vitality scattering pioneers to the new lands of the West. The inheritors of the tradition, confident of the future, multiplied more rapidly than any human sub-species ever had before, until in the old and the new lands they formed one third of mankind. But their influence far surpassed their numbers. The active personality of western man, expressing itself through the new techniques, ensured his dominance over all other peoples, and every major development during this period sprang from the European tradition. This is particularly evident towards its close. Washington and Lincoln were Europeans in this sense; Japan set out to copy western technique; Lenin followed Marx, and Stalin is the expression of western purposefulness in an Asiatic setting; Gandhi, though repudiating western force, calls his life an experiment with truth; Chiang Kai-shek, in seeking to preserve his country from the methods of its neighbors, relies on the guidance of a Wesleyan conscience. The world is united in its struggle to assimilate what it has inherited from Europe.

This period has not yet been molded into a clear pattern by the perspective of time. Yet the task of interpretation is easier today than it was even thirty years ago. Since 1914 Europe has become increasingly aware of the processes of change. The crisis which was foreseen during the last century by a few lonely thinkers has now scarred every continent. A double world-war has spent its passion upon the old traditions. Throughout the main land-bloc of the European continent there has been a break with the past which cannot he reversed, and continuity is only preserved in a few outposts. If many still regret the old order, that is because they lack ideas appropriate to the time. But the special prejudices which marked this period have been lost, and for that reason we can now look back with greater comprehension on its achievements and its failures.

The life of Europe during these centuries was so rich that no one mind can embrace its detailed variety. The recorded story of the lives of individual Europeans is the inexhaustible monument to the period. But the records offer only sample case-histories from the whole. No one can ever know the scope and intensity of all the individual lives that made up the pattern of this late Europe. Never before had so many individuals developed to such a degree a personal quality in their lives; never had society owed so much to so many.

This flowering of European humanism was superb, and it was entirely new. The magnificence of humanism is not lessened because these centuries failed to realize its ideals. As man develops, his capacity to experience joy and suffering both increase; the sense of frustration and of aspiration are responses to one situation, and must therefore grow in parallel. The waste of individual endeavor in this Europe was beyond measure; the normal lot was poverty, disease, and distortion. Yet though the tyranny of circumstance thwarted most individual lives, greater numbers of men and women than ever before received and accepted the assurance of the tradition that there was more to life than frustration. It was a time in the main, of economic advance, of expansion, and hope. Until late in the nineteenth century most found encouragement in their expectation of material and moral progress, and rejoiced in large families. They accepted this encouragement because it assisted them to develop, even when these hopes remained unfulfilled. So within the varied political systems of Europe and the West there developed a vast community of individuals, each seeking to be himself, and also, in so far as he himself was not distorted, to assist others to be themselves. In the final balance of development and frustration the result was a biological and human credit: Europe was in fact developing along the course set by its inheritance and its environment.

This inheritance lacked an adequate principle of integration, yet the course taken by Europe was proper to it and was leading towards a transformation that would ultimately repair the temporary maladjustment. It was not surprising, therefore, that there grew up in this late Europe, headed though it was for disasters that would undermine its own ideals, the sense that behind the sordid frustration of man by man, behind the misery of poverty and disease, there was not far away the opportunity of a rich and free life. Hope was indeed justified, but, since the forms of the future can never be known until they have been formed in individual minds, not the hope that most experienced. Continuing moral progress is a European illusion, doubly irrelevant to the transformation whose approach was beginning to be felt. The processes of history are rhythmic, not steady, and their transformations express the formative vitality of the species and cannot be ascribed to moral ideals any more than to animal instinct.

This misinterpretation of the trend of European and western civilization expressed a human, and not merely a humanist failing. If an individual wants anything badly enough, life usually brings it, but in an unexpected form. The aim may be achieved, but the setting will be different, the subject himself have changed, and the intensity of yearning have given place to the austerity of action. The emotion was a promise of the possibility of a process of development, and this process itself, not its apparent aim, is its justification, for achievement brings with it new tensions and new opportunities. The situation of European and western civilization was similar. The dissociation produced the intensity of idealist faith and of individual endeavor. This faith and this endeavor promised the further development of man, but it could not then be realized that this development would eliminate the sources of such idealism. It was not surprising that liberal Europe, enchanted by its new ideals, expected too much of political democracy, nor that Europe later rejected this treacherous enchantment for what seemed to be the greater realism of class and racial doctrines.

Human communities are too complex for their condition at any moment to be described in terms of a single spirit of the time. At each stage the social system contains elements characteristic of the dominant forms of past, present, and future. Effete remnants co-exist beside dominant forms and forms still in process of development. No interpretation can be adequate which neglects this telescoping of history in each moment of time. Yet the dominant elements, though often far from obvious, are the most important in the sense that they determine the normal processes of the social system. These dominant elements are the elements involved in the organization of power. Though the health of a community, i.e. the existence of an effective social order, depends on the tempering of compulsion within widely accepted traditions and aims, yet the right to interpret and apply these traditions is always distributed in a hierarchy of individuals within the community. This hierarchy is normally determined according to a particular group of functions: family, religious, political, economic, or technical. In the religious age, the religious hierarchy wields power; in the political age, the ruler, nobles, and commoners; in the economic, the hierarchy of wealth. The development of Europe during the last six centuries has consisted in the progressive shifting of the hierarchy of power from one set of functions to another.

The existence of the hierarchy of power has been largely neglected by humanistic thinkers because it does not conform to their ideal of man. But an ordered society can only admit the equality of all men in fields other than those which determine the hierarchy of power at any particular time. The establishment of religious equality was only possible at the Reformation because political power had displaced religious power and the various sections of the community had accepted their places in the new political hierarchy. Similarly political equality could be realized during the nineteenth century in communities where financial and economic elements already effectively determined the hierarchy of power. The overthrowing of an old social system from within is only possible by those who can call to their aid a new principle for the organization of power. Humanitarian socialism failed to achieve power because it offered no alternative to the economic hierarchy, and totalitarian national socialism succeeded, temporarily, because it transferred power to the hierarchy of technicians of total war.

This interpretation of the development of society follows directly from the methods of unitary thought, and is more comprehensive than either the idealistic or the materialistic methods of approach. In unitary thought, the unity of every complex system resides in a system of relations of dominance whereby each element facilitates, and to that extent controls, the operations of the elements subordinate to it. This is as true for a group of organisms such as a human community, as it is for any particular organism. The unity of society depends on the existence of a hierarchical order which gives each section its special status and function within the whole, and this order may be effective even when it is not recognized. But now, after two centuries of individualism, it is necessary to recognize it, and those who today deny the existence of this hierarchy in every ordered society reveal their ignorance or prejudice. The asymmetrical relation of dominant to subordinate elements is the source of all order in nature and in society. Only snobs can regard so universal a fact as damaging to the dignity of man, just as only the stupid can fail to recognize that at certain moments in the history of a community, an old system of dominance must be replaced by a new, if the development of society is to continue.

This hierarchical pattern of dominance relations pervades the whole of society and is the source of what is called power. The history of Europe provides no evidence of religious, moral, or political progress, in any absolute sense. But it does reveal the successive shifting of the hierarchy of power so that the individual can exercise, in accordance with his own nature, more and more of his capacities. The sixteenth century saw the hierarchy of power shift from religious to political elements, and in the early nineteenth this was followed by a shift from political to economic elements. A similar sequence may be found in the history of other civilizations, but these earlier rhythms only found their full expression in the development of Europe.

After each of these steps the European individual enjoyed a new realm of liberty in which he could choose his own way of life without threatening the established social order. In this sense the growth of liberty in the history of Europe is an objective fact. But the idealist who interprets this as the progressive realization of subjective freedom goes as far astray, through his neglect both of the organic background of the personal life and of the persisting hierarchy of power, as the materialist who considers that personal incentive and social power are always economic. These two errors arise from the same source, the original European idealism which seeks to compensate an inner dissociation by clinging to an absolute idea, whether it is the economic process leading to the classless society in which conflict is resolved, or the human spirit realizing its freedom. The paradox of freedom, that men will appear to die willingly for what few can endure, does not arise from some perversity in human nature, but expresses the inadequacy of a dualistic language which separates subjective desires from the history and circumstances of the individual. Men desire the opportunity to develop, but they are also gregarious and require to be guided at all but rare moments. Mimicry must predominate for development to be possible. But the positive aspect of one period of the development of Europe lay in the progressive achievement of a certain degree of religious, political, and economic equality, and in the consequent maturing of human faculties.

This preliminary analysis provides the outline within which we can now trace the main social tendencies which marked this period. Our aim is a unitary image of a continuous transformation which, though complex, reveals one dominant form. But this picture must be built up by stages through the consideration in turn of the various component processes which can be identified in the history of these centuries. These component tendencies have no ultimate independence; they are merely aspects of one coherent process. Yet they can be identified for independent study and their different phasing can be noted. One aspect may be already mature at a time when another is only beginning to develop, and the sequence of these overlapping processes corresponds to the pattern of past, present, and future elements which co-exist in the community at every stage.

The earliest of these components is the further development and maturing of the humanistic component of the tradition. The next and the most important, is the development of the quantitative method in scientific theory and practice, in technology and industry, in individual and state capitalism, and in warfare. This process dominates the explicit features of the period but does not alone provide an adequate basis for its interpretation. A later component is the decline of the tradition and the reaction from humanism which, appearing first about 1850, expressed the despair of the subject in the power of the human mind. This may be regarded as the continuation of the first component, but it is not possible to treat the development and the decline of humanism as one complete process in isolation from the other factors which influenced its later stages. Finally, towards the end of the period, we find the development of a new objectivity, in which the subjective emphasis of European humanism gives place to an approach guided by observation and scientific method. We shall find that these component processes can only be fully understood as aspects of a general transformation of the tradition, in which the breakdown of the traditional subjective integration is complemented by the progressive loosening and ultimate disappearance of the European dissociation.

Many of the special features of our time arise from the fact that the dissociation of European man has exhausted its efficacy, and that the earlier unity of primitive and ancient man is in process of restoration in a form which can, in principle, retain and organize all the differentiated development of Europe and the West. The last three and a half centuries display all the complementary processes which must play a part in any such radical reorganization of the tradition. The trend of these centuries has been obscure because contemporary events could not be interpreted as evidences of a progressive re-integration until the European dissociation had broken down sufficiently to permit it to be identified. In this process the anarchic exploitation of the quantitative method played the role of Mephistopheles in loosening traditional structures and so facilitating the growth of the new. The quantitative method was the final and most uncompromising product of dissociated thought; it symbolizes to the point of parody the specializing tendency of the European mind and its lack of integration.

When any organism, in the course of adaptation to new conditions, after a series of random responses to its environment finally develops the first elements of a new tissue or organ that is well adapted to produce an effective response, then the exercise of that new organ steadily reinforces it and its further development proceeds steadily, trial and error being replaced by cumulative improvement. The new tissue or organ grows by use. This process is an example of the self-development of formative processes which was discussed in a previous chapter. The development of a structure which facilitates the dominant tendency of any system is itself facilitated, and the structure grows in parallel with its successful use. The essence of this situation is that the development of useful structures is regularly facilitated, while structures which distort the organism are themselves distorted and tend not to develop further, but to disappear. This self-developing property of the formative process means that ineffective responses are less likely to be repeated, while the repetition of effective responses is facilitated, so that further development becomes systematic, in the sense of continuing the operation of a method which has proved its efficacy.

This property is exemplified in the discovery of the quantitative method. The main trend of human development is in the direction of the increasing differentiation of thought and behavior, and of the resulting heightened dominance of man over his environment. This tendency towards further differentiation in thought had been at work for countless centuries before the opening of the fourth period, and had been intensified by the inner dissociation and active personality of the European. Yet no special kind of thought had achieved particularly effective results, except in so far as static concepts had, by a process of trial and error, gradually become clearer and more specialized. The development of thought is a process of adaptation to the environment, in which the structure of thought is developed so as to conform better to the structure of the environment, thus giving man control over it. This process of adaptation had proceeded more or less at random until 1600. Prior to the time of Kepler and Galileo the only developed systems of thought had been religious or philosophic organizations of subjective experience, while such objective observations of nature as had been collected had remained relatively unorganized. Medieval rationalism was subjective; there was as yet no rational philosophy of nature of comparable complexity or precision. For two thousand years man had been observing, comparing, and seeking to classify his observations, but as yet there was no system of thought concerning nature which provided any method which might be systematically used for facilitating the process of discovery and for the further improvement of thought. Discovery was still a matter of sudden aper�u; the process of research guided by a continuingly successful method had not yet begun.

We have here reached a moment of great significance. About 1600 Kepler and Galileo simultaneously and independently formulated the principle that the laws of nature are to be discovered by measurement, and applied this principle in their own work. Where Aristotle had classified, Kepler and Galileo sought to measure. This bald statement defines an event, but conceals its significance. There is no better way to bring out its implications than to describe it from the several points of view. The discovery of the quantitative method is an important moment in the history of the species because it involved a new adjustment at many different levels in the hierarchy of the human system. We will start at the most general and pass to the more specific descriptions of this event.

The unitary thinker recognizes in this discovery the establishment by the formative process in man of a new class of symbolic structures (quantitative concepts) capable of progressively facilitating the conforming of thought to the rest of nature. The biologist interprets the discovery in his somewhat narrower terms: the adaptive vitality of the species established a method of facilitating the progressive improvement of specialized responses and hence the extension of man's dominance over his environment. When we pass from objective to subjective descriptions, the all-important characteristic which we have hitherto described as progressive (in the sense of cumulative) is more easily recognized under the term systematic -- but it remains the same characteristic. The social historian notes that the truth-seeking tendency in man led him about 1600 to the discovery of the first systematic method for improving the collection and organization of facts.

Kepler's biographer might accept all these interpretations, but his own formulation is the richest of all, for in unitary thought the most specific has the greatest content. Kepler exemplified all these general processes in the special pattern of his individual temperament. Though Galileo may have made a greater contribution to scientific method, Kepler provides the better example for our present purpose. Kepler's desire to reveal a single divine harmony within the processes of nature led his Pythagorean temperament to the discovery of the numerical laws of planetary motion; these were to him one example of the universal expression of the divine in the quantitative order of nature.

All the facets of this unique moment have a peculiar fascination for the twentieth century mind. It might be thought that this is due to the fact that we can now appreciate the moment when the principle which has created our age first received explicit formulation. But the importance of 1600 for contemporary man lies deeper than that. If the unitary interpretation is valid, that moment will soon be repeated, but in a new manner. We are fascinated with the significance of that first discovery because we already suspect that a second such discovery, complementary to but transcending the first, is now due. What the species has achieved once it can repeat in a more comprehensive form. We look back on Galileo and Kepler and see that the failure of the modern world arises from the limitations of their thought, as its hope lies in the fact that such positive discovery is possible.

Discovery is the essence of social development and a method of discovery its only possible guarantee. This fact is so far-reaching that it requires a distinguishing epithet. The word "heuristic," from the Greek "heurisko," to find, will be used to mean "promoting discovery." 1600 is the date of the first general heuristic principle, the principle that quantity is the clue to the structure of nature; in the next chapter I shall bring evidence that its scope is nearly exhausted. The special importance of Galileo and Kepler for this study is that the second heuristic method must salute and challenge the first.

Kepler's personality and thought will be considered later in greater detail; here I only give the discovery its historical setting. Certain conditions were necessary before the quantitative method could be established. The main external condition was the availability of a sufficient body of appropriate facts. This was satisfied; the development of technology had made possible observations such as Tycho Brahe's of the planetary motions. The main personal condition was the combination of a sufficiently active independent personality with the special personal tendencies which would facilitate the discovery of general laws. By the sixteenth century the medieval veil between man and nature had fallen: the individual was setting out to express himself through all his faculties. Thus both these conditions were satisfied towards the end of that century and awaiting the appearance of a suitably placed individual with the tendencies which might lead to general discoveries. These are the tendency to retain a true record of environmental stimuli and the tendency to form one comprehensive pattern from this record. These two tendencies express components of the biological constitution of man; they are better known as the love of truth and of unity. Kepler displayed these two passions in high degree. All the conditions were satisfied -- and the first heuristic method was discovered. The same process took place simultaneously in Galileo, though in him it received a different emphasis.

Kepler and Galileo not only successfully applied in their own researches the principle that the laws of nature are to be discovered by measurement, but also gave clear expression to it. The process of measurement was the one objectively reliable approach to the structure of nature and the numbers so obtained were the key to the order of nature. After 1600 mankind was thus in possession of a systematic method of research into those aspects of nature which were accessible to measurement. By measuring with steadily increasing accuracy and sifting out the quantitative laws which covered the measurements, man could progressively improve not only the scope of his knowledge of detailed facts but also its organization under simple rules. The new heuristic method guaranteed the progressive adaptation of mental processes, i.e. their increasing conformity to the structure of nature, so long as measurements could be made more accurate or new fields still remained where the method could be applied. What had happened was not the discovery of a law, or of a set of laws, but of a method for progressive discovery, an assurance of man's increasing dominance over the quantitative aspects of his environment.

The centuries since 1600 may well be regarded as the age of quantity. Never before had such a technique been available; it was not surprising that European man was fascinated by it and that his thought and behavior were increasingly dominated by quantity. Number and quantity had been used ever since the ancient civilizations; the balance had been the Egyptian symbol of justice and a feather the symbol of truth; but now it appeared certain that quantity provided the sole clue to the understanding and control of nature. The result may be described equally in objective and subjective language: the further development of this successful adaptation was facilitated and accelerated, and increasingly monopolized the adaptive vitality of the community; man was fascinated by the exercise of this new tool, and the obsession blinded him to other aspects of his situation.

The story of the exploitation of the new method is well known. In exact science Galileo's first principles of mechanics have led to twentieth century quantum mechanics, which permits the inclusion within one moderately well-ordered system of all the aspects of nature which can be covered by current quantitative methods. In applied science the mechanical revolution has led to the present phase of total technology, in which the practical application of number is exploited to its limits. The mechanical led to the industrial revolution, and so to the extension of private and state capitalism, the raising of the standards and the length of life, the rapid increase in European population, the extended influence of the masses, and to totalitarian methods in peace and war.

All these developments, and many others of the period, mirror the characteristics of the quantitative method in its primitive, radical form. The symbols of number and quantity are appropriate to the enumeration, analysis, standardization, and accumulation of magnitude, and they tend to neglect order, development, structure, and quality. The centimeter, the second, the gram, the horsepower, the vote, the �, the Limited Company -- these quantity or number symbols were effective instruments precisely because they encouraged man to go ahead without considering the methods by which they were obtained or the results they would produce. This is the main characteristic of the fourth period: increasing obsession with number, and repudiation of those who pointed out that such numbers were symbols representing particular human operations from which alone they derived their meaning.

Today we can look back dispassionately at both the constructive and the anarchic aspects of the quantitative principle. On the one hand we have to record a vast body of achievement: differentiation of knowledge, increase in security and health, the approach of plenty, the continued development of society. Moreover, beneath these well-known achievements lies the establishment of a new type of socially recognized authority. Hitherto all forms of social authority had been static, in that each represented a stabilization of accepted doctrines, and new forms of authority could only become effective after an open struggle with orthodoxy. But the discovery of the first heuristic principle resulted in the development of a corresponding social institution: an authority, the orthodoxy of quantitative science, which was not only capable of steadily developing its doctrines, but was formed for this express purpose. This was novel: an orthodoxy which could modify its pronouncements not merely without loss but with increase of its prestige.

This differentiation within the system of social authority of a self-developing orthodoxy of science was a characteristically European institution. Yet any cultural institution which was intrinsically progressive challenged the static forms of authority. Two types of authority presenting so fundamental a contrast to one another could not permanently co-exist. The result was that static or passive governments tended to disappear; only active governments could understand and use the new techniques to the full. The application of quantitative science thus reached its climax in totalitarian state action, whether occupied in developing and defending the collective community, as in Russia, or in aggression, as in Germany.

Beside the positive results of quantitative technique we can trace in these centuries the consequences of its limitations: its neglect of other aspects of nature, and its anarchic tendency. Because it was the only known heuristic method, the quantity principle was believed to be the only possible method. Because nature had given her sanction to the method, the structure of nature was thought to be wholly quantitative. Aspects which were inaccessible to measurement were treated as beyond the scope of positive science. The consequent damage went far beyond the academies and workshops. All thought and action suffered from the general belief that the quantitative aspect was the determining factor in every phenomenon. The quantity principle was not an isolated thought-form in professional brains; it was the instrument through which social power was actually developed.

There is here a paradox. The first great systematic method for achieving the progressive differentiation of thought was essentially anarchic. Thought and society disintegrated under its influence. Quantity, for all its efficacy as an instrument of research, contains no general principle of form, of order, or of organization. All magnitudes have equal status before the laws of elementary arithmetic, whose operators recognize no distinction between one value and another. Similarly in its social application the quantity concept sets no limit to the pursuit of wealth, the manipulation of the symbols of the markets, or the desire for expansion in any field. Elementary quantity symbols fail to relate magnitudes to the actual or potential order in any system. The explanation of the paradox that a method could be at once so constructive and destructive is that it was a method for the differentiation of thought, i.e. for specialization and analysis, not for integration or organization. It could thus only be effective temporarily, within the general order of the earlier tradition. The further it invaded the tradition, the less effective became the organizing principles of the previous period. The quantitative method set in motion countless anarchic processes of expansion which, like the processes of a virulent cancer, bore no relation to the general order.

For a moment let us forget the historical structure of these centuries and view the period in its biological perspective. The period opened with the development of a new organ, or more accurately of a new method of developing thought and behavior, the principle of quantity. This set in motion an accelerating process of the differentiation of quantitative concepts and of specialized modes of behavior which were found effective in dominating the environment. The attention of the community was increasingly drawn to this new technique of developing characteristic human forms, but as this continued, the technique used in this process of differentiation began itself to dominate the process. Thus gradually the method escaped the control of the human organizing process and became autonomous. The method ceased to be a technique for developing biologically effective forms of differentiation and became the instrument of every anarchic or perverted human tendency. The general tendency for civilizations to pass through a phase which over-emphasized the economic and technical aspects of social life had often been displayed before; this time the emphasis on quantity was of a different order because the method was now being systematically exploited as a method of progressive discovery.

It may appear strange that a community of organisms can pass into an unstable state of accelerating change leading towards disaster without some regulating or compensating process being brought into play. In the animal body fever is the sign of the operation of the regulating processes set in motion to overcome certain forms of unbalance. But society lacks any such normal condition of balance to which it always tends to return; it is, for the time being, at any rate, launched on a path of continuing development. Social fever must lead to a new balance, if any, since the old equilibrium cannot be restored. The accelerating rush might have been fatal and the new organ permanently incapable of adaptation to the human system as a component of a general human order. The mad pursuit of quantity might have remained autocatalytic, hypnotic, and lethal.

Some voices were raised in protest. A few thinkers asserted that quantity was not the only avenue to reliable truth; here and there a religious or philosophic thinker warned Europe of the dangers of the road from mechanical science through mechanical industry to the mechanization of human life. But their voices lacked authority, because they lacked certainty of their own rightness. It was not possible to assert with conviction that the achievements of science must be repudiated; only perverted minds could reject the possibility of overcoming poverty and disease. The time had not yet come to subdue the new method, for man was not yet biologically ripe for the readjustment which would then be necessary.

But what was the effect in the meantime of the quantitative method on the basis of the European tradition, and in particular on the development of the humanistic phase? The first influence of the new method on the structure of European thought was to intensify its dualisms, and in his thought to separate man even further from nature. To a divinely drunk spirit such as Kepler, number and the human soul were twin manifestations of the perfection of the Creator. But Europe could not sustain his ecstasy. God was the personification of man's need for a principle of order or organization, number an instrument of analysis, and this contrast led to the separation of the two forms of search: for subjective harmony in God, and for objective harmony in measured number. Kepler's rare synthesis fell apart, and European thought split into two independent realms. In the one there were all the vague, but emotionally powerful, subjective conceptions that expressed man's dissociated being: good and evil, heaven and hell, love and hate, God and man; in the other, across a metaphysical abyss, there grew up the equally powerful world of quantity: energy and inertia, gravitation and electricity, physical forces and statistical laws -- all concepts of number or quantity, tending to become increasingly precise and ever further distant from the subjective realm. After Kepler no direct connection could exist between these worlds; physical quantity and the divine soul of man cannot simultaneously be regarded as absolute.

The effect of the discovery of the principle of quantity, through its influence on thought and practice, was thus at first to reinforce the European tradition in its separation of the subject from external nature. Nature became a closed system under quantitative law, the human mind or soul an independent principle known without the aid of the senses. Descartes left no doubt about it: matter was extended substance; mind, thinking substance; and this dualism represented the unfathomable act of God. If the human realm of instinct, will, and thought was ever to become one with the realm of extension and quantity it could only be after another discovery transcending that of 1600. The divorce of mechanical power and emotional power can only be overcome by a new overriding principle which reveals that they both derive from a single source.

The intensification of the European dualism of subject and nature by the quantitative method was no arbitrary influence coming from outside the tradition. It was merely one step, though an important one, in the working out of the tendencies inherent in the tradition. As we have already seen, the search for precise static ideas reached its final and most radical expression in the concept of physical quantity. Here at last the analytical intellect, demanding static precision at any cost, even at the price of its own blindness to the cost, gloried in its triumph over nature. There is in this respect no break from Pythagoras and Plato to Descartes, Newton, and the nineteenth century. The tradition is working out the consequences of its original impetus.

What is less obvious is that the tradition also set in motion contrary processes which ultimately led to its own decay. In unitary thought the modes appropriate to one stage of development always lead to their own supersession, since when they have played their part and one period is mature, another period opens in which other modes become appropriate. Thus in any developmental process temporary forms always work so as to bring about their own decay, though it is not always possible to distinguish in advance what is passing and what permanent in any contemporary process.

We have seen that the conception of God stimulated the changes which led to its being challenged. Similarly humanism facilitated the realization that the individual is not self-sufficient. This does not mean that centuries of humanism sapped the strength of the individual, though it may seem so, but that they developed the individual to the point of recognizing limitations of personality which had always existed but had previously been neglected. This dialectic of transformation has many subtle aspects. Man was fascinated by quantity, but quantity was not directly related to the organizing factors in the individual. Hence the mechanical age, though it demonstrated the power of the human mind as never before, nevertheless brought about a decline of belief in human nature. The exploitation of quantity did not destroy the earlier tradition by direct attack, but it altered the social environment and the balance in the activities of the individual so as to render the tradition effete.

But this only became evident late in the period. The discovery of the first heuristic principle was followed in the seventeenth century by the flowering of humanism in a great array of individual genius. Galileo, Kepler, Rembrandt, Spinoza, Newton, and Voltaire symbolize the advancing maturity of humanism: the individual as active subject rejoicing in the new vision. The individual challenges authority, and empiricism challenges medieval rationalism. If we compare these names with some of those at the opening of the humanistic phase, Marco Polo, Roger Bacon, Petrarch, Columbus, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, we see that there has been a change in the dominant quality: richness has become precision, and adventure has become less whole-natured and more intellectual, Rembrandt presenting a contrast to the main tendency. By the eighteenth century this movement has passed from the phase of individual inspiration to the theory of intellectual idealism and the mass philosophies of liberalism and nationalism. But during these centuries technique was still primitive, and it was not until the opening of the nineteenth century that it began to prejudice the effectiveness of the European tradition as the basis of community life.

The development of industrialism introduced a new element into the processes of society. All the aspects of industrialism were direct expressions of the quantitative method. As a research technique the method stimulated mechanical discovery; as a method for facilitating man's dominance over nature the method made possible the raising of the standard of life; as the channel of a multiplying and expansive tendency out of the control of the organizing processes of the human personality the method offered an unrestricted opportunity for personal greed, ambition, and aggression. In earlier civilizations the desire for profit and power had never been inflamed by the connivance of a systematic method of expansion.

By the middle of the century this process was gaining momentum, and steadily sapping the vitality of Europe's traditional institutions. Hitherto the instinctive tendencies had been molded into the pattern of European social life by a great system of traditions and ideals, religious, rational, and patriotic, but now society was being transformed by an incentive that bore no relation to the social order. The fierce lust to multiply and expand, whether in power, wealth, territory, or family, knew no restraint. The European dissociation of spontaneity and deliberation remained, but the new technical principles which were beginning to dominate behavior, unlike the great ideals of Europe's past, played no part in maintaining the organization of society. Europe had silently deserted the ideals which had maintained its dissociated state. During the nineteenth century only a few isolated thinkers realized that this must eventually result in an outbreak of the dissociated, and therefore distorted, instinctive tendencies. Europe and the West were on the way to an unholy marriage of distorted instinct and mechanical technique.

It is no figure of speech to regard the quantity method as having got out of control. The organizing processes of a healthy organism ensure that its behavior is such as to facilitate its own development. The fact that man has been able to civilize himself shows that some such self-regulating development has in the main dominated the history of the species. Local civilizations have displayed cycles imposed on this general trend, but so far neither the species as a whole, nor any important sub-group, has ever shown any persisting tendency to develop along a path which threatened its health as gravely as the world is threatened today through the spread of western techniques. There has been no cumulative masochistic tendency leading to failure to survive, no universal suicide, no mad development of behavior patterns unrelated to organic needs.

The main forms of human behavior can be regarded as expressing developments of tendencies which form part of man's instinctive and animal nature, and bear some relation to the primitive animal harmony and balance. The European dissociation was a radical departure from the animal harmony, but it provided a system of partial control. Even war has been limited by unwritten conventions which saved the fabric of community life. The discovery of a heuristic method set going for the first time in history a cumulative process which absorbed the vital energies of man and yet was not subject to any central co-ordinating control. It was as though in the hierarchy of the human system tendencies and energies flowed into the development of the new technique and in doing so escaped the dominance of the central organizing processes, just as at a lower level the proliferating cells of cancerous tissue may escape the dominance of the formative processes which mold and maintain the individual organs.

During the nineteenth century the new technique was definitely out of control; it was producing results which no one had desired or planned and yet were not expressions of instinctive or traditional tendencies. No one willed the social consequences of the industrial revolution. They were as far-reaching as some vast climatic or planetary disaster, yet they were the consequence not of arbitrary circumstance but of human action. The activities of countless individuals were producing results which apparently could not be controlled by any individual or group. A relentless transformation was proceeding of its own accord far beyond the range of deliberate intention, for man was not aware that he was intoxicated by quantity. The essential feature of laissez faire was the assumption that the automatic operation of the quantity symbols, through the actions of individuals organizing their behavior by means of them, would lead to the satisfaction of human needs. Thus, in a time of general expansion, the new resources of manpower, horsepower, and money power were dominated by private manipulation of the quantity symbols.

This is no allegory but a situation characteristic of the organization of behavior in organic communities using verbal and algebraic symbols, that is, in every human community at the appropriate stage. A man could sit at a desk in a perverted condition of sustained ecstasy, dream of numerical manipulations, and finally write a check or a cable. Driven by his lust for expansion, by the relentless passion for quantity which is more general than power, or wealth, or sex, and gives man the illusion of possessing all of these; without the catharsis of rhythmic relaxation or satisfying achievement, and therefore perpetually lusting for more; haunted by his own frustrated life and blind to the lives distorted by his money apparatus, he commanded the lives of countless men and women. Another nought on an order and the world-wide machinery of credit operated without scrutiny of purpose or result, and thousands more were able to live or compelled to die, to work more or less, to experience once again the instability of their employment. Every check written in this blind passion was a forgery of right, every company registered a conspiracy of theft, every dividend declared the further reproduction of greed.

The world has had opportunity of late to learn that strange allies collect when great issues are at stake. When ignorance and privilege struggle against vision and development, then all the vested interests are found together, however incompatible may seem their overt aims. That is obvious enough in the political field. But when the issue is that of abstract thought, systematic, static, and divorced from life, against the unitary organization of thought as one of the processes that make up the human community, the alliances are stranger still and largely unaware of their mutual co-operation.

The great capitalists and industrialists of the nineteenth century, in so far as they pursued the technique of expansion without scruple, were supported by the mathematical physicists who neglected the asymmetry of process and acclaimed elementary numbers as the sole key to the structure of nature. While science maintained the separation of abstract number from real process, it was scarcely surprising that vested interest would also succeed in maintaining the bluff that the esoteric truths of finance must operate without consideration of the concrete processes of social life. These deeper correlations are unmistakable if approached at their own level, and in the next chapter we shall see that the two partners of this particular alliance gave up the game at the same moment, as is appropriate, since their activities expressed a common prejudice. Yet it is misleading to ascribe any degree of conscious intent to such innocent instruments of the historical process; the capitalist and the quantitative scientist were working out the final consequences of tendencies that had begun with Plato and Archimedes, borne fruit in Kepler and Galileo, and were reaching their culmination in Carnegie, Ford, and Zaharoff, and -- as we shall see -- in Heisenberg. Yes, it would be unfair, and perhaps libelous, to accuse recent leaders of the West of a mature consciousness of their own historical significance.

The reckless development of industrialism did not go without challenge. The decay of humanism and the nihilism of the new outlook were evident to many throughout the nineteenth century. Behind the trumpeting of progress, which became more strident as the doom of European civilization approached and reassurance was needed, many warning voices were raised. Some were even listened to with tolerance as a pleasantly astringent contrast to the general optimism.

For each of the few who can be cited here, there must have been many other contemporaries who were losing the humanistic faith in the efficacy of rational idealism and in the power of the enlightened mind to control human fate. Schopenhauer, Marx, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and many others understood much of what was in store for Europe and the West. Uncontrolled industrialism and an excess of analytical thought were leading man to disaster; redemption might come from the renunciation of the will to power, from the inevitable pressure of the economic needs of the people, from a universal religious vision, or from aristocratic leadership, but not, according to these, through the free operation of the individual mind. Rational thought was a mere iridescence on the surging of the will to power, the historical-economic process, the divine purpose, or the vital impulse of man. These thinkers were at one in their repudiation of the assumptions of subjective humanism; the aims of humanism might be harmless enough, though that was itself doubtful, but man was clearly impotent to realize them. More comprehensive processes than those of the conscious mind control human destiny.

Such was the development of the quantity technique and its effect on the progress and decline of humanism. Throughout these aspects of the general transformation there can be traced one main positive component: the continuing achievements of theoretical and applied science in extending knowledge and gradually liberating man from poverty and disease. But this process of the differentiation of knowledge and behavior was uncontrolled and unstable, and if it had been the only constructive tendency which marked these centuries, the disorganization and despair would have been greater than they were.

Through the whole of this period another tendency was at work which, because later in development than these others, is of even greater importance for the interpretation of the twentieth century. We saw that as medievalism faded and humanism took root, the inhibitions which obscured man's view of nature began to fade. Man, as subject, looked out on nature with less prejudiced vision. To Kepler it was enough that God linked man and nature; to Bruno, his contemporary, it was not. For him, as for many thinkers, from Aristotle and Lucretius to Darwin, Marx, and Freud, the integrity of thought required that man must be understood as a part of nature.

This demand had little influence on the general tradition of European thought until the active personality of the humanist period began to draw the obvious conclusions from the many similarities between men and animals. The discovery of "universal laws of nature" gave prestige to the conception of one all-embracing natural order, the religious inhibitions grew still weaker, and an objective conception of man as part of the animal kingdom began to develop, and even his thought to be regarded as a process in conformity with the general order of nature. In Bruno, Spinoza, and Goethe we see this attitude developing through the forms appropriate to the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, or rather, to the genius of those centuries, which in this respect was many generations ahead of its time. Each of these men repudiated the European dualism, Bruno in a confused search for unity, Spinoza in a systematic demonstration of a kind more appropriate to static geometry than to his theme of God, nature, and man, and Goethe in an attitude to life expressed in poetry and philosophic aper�u. In Goethe the dualism of the thinking and feeling subject confronted by objective nature is finally rejected and a conscious attempt is made to fuse subjective experience with objective knowledge of man in intuitive formulations which are at once personal and biological.

One of the most profound, and for us certainly one of the most important consequences of quantitative science, because not yet exhausted, was the stimulus which it gave to this tendency to view man and society objectively. In the long run this stimulus outweighed the intensification of the European dualism. The fact that the science of quantity could not provide symbols or concepts appropriate to biological and human organization did not lessen this stimulus to objectivity, but it had the result that the objective picture of man which could be developed at the time lacked any principle of integration or form. Man was therefore regarded as a "machine," a term which begged all the crucial questions. A machine was a thing constructed of component parts, each part being a static independent entity, and the relations between the parts being those of changing spatial arrangement rather than the record of a common history. This conception of man as machine drew attention away from the organizing aspects of personality which are known subjectively, and this encouraged the decline of confidence in the powers of the subjective mind. The trend towards objectivity thus reinforced the decline of subjective humanism, and the state of science at the time was such that it could provide no adequate substitute.

Language is too restricted in its degrees of freedom to describe at one stroke this many-faceted transformation, for it must proceed in one dimension from word to word and from sentence to sentence, and thus cannot present simultaneously all the aspects of such a process. The historical process is a unitary transformation, a complex form steadily transforming itself, and is too rich for the thread of language to portray in a single sequence. Hence the need to retrace the centuries and follow through in turn the development of each component of the story. Orchestral music might portray the process in one movement: the bass instruments maintaining the slowly modulating rhythm of the genesis, development, and final disappearance of the dissociation, while the others trace the varied discords and harmonies of the changing human habits in which this fundamental rhythm is displayed. Even the musical image would involve too great a condensation, but it is relevant, since music is concerned with the non-verbal expression of this very architecture of the soul.

A better presentation of the transformation of Europe is given by the record of its art, through which the representatives of past times can speak directly to the receptive mind. But here we are reduced to words, and the attempt to express the changing structure of European man in conceptual form would imply a failure to recognize the diversity and complexity of the process, if it were attempted by any other method than unitary thought. Unitary concepts carry with them the implication that they can never achieve more than a partial conformity to the historical process of which they are themselves part. Late European or western man can understand something of his own history, precisely because that history has made him what he is and brought him to the verge of unitary thought.

Beneath the lovely cadences and threatening discords of humanism in decay there persists this major theme: through the discovery of the objective order of nature, the subject is losing his conviction of the autonomy of his own mind. This surrender of the conscious essence of all that had made Europe great is at the same time the prelude to the re-integration of the dissociated western soul. The separation of subject and object conditioned both the achievements and the limitations of the European tradition. The blended triumph and misery of the last century arise from the fact that those achievements and limitations must come to an end together. Subject and object can only be transcended in a single approach after the decay of the subjective ideals that inspired the old tradition. The objective order is more extensive than the individual subject; to achieve their fusion the subject must first accept the fact that his method of thought has rested on an illusion, the separation and autonomy of his own mental processes.

This step requires the courage that can discard what appears as beautiful and good, trusting that some truth will arise to give new conviction to the anxious soul. Has all the dreaming of Europe ended in this nightmare of recurrent total war? Failure and despair are the commonplaces of the individual life; as individuals we are all always in the grip of circumstance. But the despair of a tradition is graver than personal despair when it seems to herald the collapse of the only convictions that men can accept.

Yet thought, which has led us to this point, can also lead us on -- on one condition. To overcome a conflict which derives from the very origins of Europe, thought must be uncompromising in its demand for a single comprehensive method. This implies humility in the subject. If the facts have not already demonstrated the invalidity of the assumptions of humanism, then the need for a unitary method must now displace those assumptions. Once this is accepted, the scene is transformed, and a new world is at our feet. In renouncing a dream-illusion, man's imagined feet of clay are rediscovered as the tissues, organs, and tendencies which make him all that he is. We find that what we have surrendered is not the source of human dignity, but only what Europe mistook for its source.

The humiliation suffered by European man in the first half of the twentieth century -- which we shall consider in the next chapter -- expresses the final loss of the sense of the autonomy of the subject. Through all the fluctuations of European thought, the emphasis had been on man as subject, with the objective world as his field of operation. In the subject-object antithesis, the subject had been dominant and the object subordinate. Therefore in the continuous transformation which is leading towards the replacement of this antithesis by a unitary form, the first step was the transfer of emphasis from subject to object, the objective approach being the more comprehensive and reliable. The objective study of nature developed the mind further than could introspective idealism, and in the process of this development the emphasis inevitably swung over. Instead of subject being dominant to object, the object now dominated the subject, though in the new picture of objective nature there was no element corresponding to the constructive mental processes of the subject.

The formative mind was humiliated by the frustration which resulted from this loss of status. Though this was only a temporary phase of a process leading to a unitary form in which the dualism would be overcome, that fact was not recognized at the time and the individual was paralyzed by despair.

This glimpse ahead is necessary to allow us now to look back and see how the main processes of the nineteenth century contributed to the preparation of this final collapse of subjective confidence. I am not suggesting that the events of the last century are to be explained as contributing to a given end. In unitary thought the teleological method is as superfluous as that of material causality. Purpose and mechanical necessity are question-begging conceptions, necessary only so long as the mind has failed to identify the continuity which underlies this dualistic appearance. The continuity of the development of process is all that is necessary to organize thought. The requirements of an interpretation of history are satisfied in the case under consideration if it is shown that processes which were generated at the origin of Europe in the millennium before Christ and acquired a special form after 1600, display a continuity of development through the challenges of the nineteenth century, the despair of the early twentieth, to the unitary form which we have still to examine. The role of the nineteenth century in this continuity was the challenge to subjective idealism resulting from the anarchic exploitation of the quantitative method and the ascendancy of an objective picture of man which held no place for the formative tendencies of the individual mind. If one looks deep into society, or more accurately, concentrates attention on the most general tendencies of social thought and behavior through this fourth period, then it becomes evident that the "reaction from reason" which began in the nineteenth century was not a reaction back towards a primitive lack of differentiation but the first stage of a healthy readjustment.

Bruno, Spinoza, and Goethe had anticipated the main task of the hundred years after 1850: the replacement of the subjective conception of man by a balanced view in which man and his mind are regarded as elements in a single order of nature. Since losing his naive pagan innocence, man had developed a distorted picture of himself; the opportunity had now come to restore the innocence, not of ignorance, but of an integrity supported by objective knowledge concerning man.

This implies a form of self-knowledge far surpassing the treacherous introspective intuitions of dissociated European man. The power which such scientific self-knowledge can bring to man in his molding of his own destiny transcends that of every element in human culture prior to it. To unitary man in possession of this power, the struggles of the frustrated and dissociated European will seem as blind as the animistic superstitions of the pagan primitive did to the European. This does not imply the discovery of a new magic open to arbitrary use by distorted individuals, nor the domination of man by an alien science, but a historical development, sane and stable and realistic: the further self-development of the organic processes in man by the discovery of a new instrument of facilitation. This instrument is the second heuristic principle, which enables man to re-integrate and develop what analytical thought has separated.

The power of such scientific self-knowledge is so great that even limited and distorted components of such knowledge have been sufficient to destroy old civilizations and create new ones, and to inspire comparable revolutions in the human mind. Karl Marx saw to the very roots of the dialectical situation in which man was placed in the nineteenth cehtury. His thought was narrow, his theories limited and of temporary validity, and his conclusions often wrong. But the form which he gave his thought, his method of thinking about man, went to the heart of the human situation at the time. The vigor of Marxism sprang from the fact that it tapped this new source of power. From one point of view, Marx and Engels were fully conscious of this fact. They knew that if men could recognize the nature of the historical process and accept their own role in it, they could escape the futile struggles of subjective idealism, and recover conviction, integrity, and courage, in the process of transforming the world. This is the universal truth which they recognized nearly a century back, but has still to be fully absorbed into the general tradition. The historical process was to them an economic class struggle and it was for the workers to serve as the willing agents of history, and to redouble their power by becoming aware of their historical role. Here the interpretation given to the situation was too narrow. A new integrity of action replaced the frustration of subjective idealism, but at the cost of a loss of individual judgment. The individual, in identifying his will with the economic interests of a particular class, had forfeited his own right to think.

Much of the history of the last hundred years arises from this dual situation: Marxism obtained its inspiration and power from the new source, scientific self-knowledge, but its achievements were conditioned by the restricted degree of self-knowledge which it brought to man. Just as the Jewish religion had been established as a premature and therefore narrow monotheism, so Marxism was a premature and limited form of unitary process thought. The tradition was not then ripe for a comprehensive unitary reorganization. By emphasizing the economic interest of the masses, Marxism heightened the frustration of those individuals who could not lose themselves in collective action on a partisan issue. By over-emphasizing the role of the economic productive factors in the historical process, it tended to impoverish the personal life already established in Europe. The same restrictions led to the rapid obsolescence of its interpretation of society and the consequent failure of revolutionary socialism throughout the world.

The single exception was in Russia where the individual had for long been ready to lose himself without reserve in the collective, and economic forces were still in the ascendant. Success in Russia, and lack of success abroad led to the final limitation of Marxism: the renunciation of the international revolution in favor of the development of socialism in its single home. Thus communism, viewed from a universal standpoint, suffers from multiple restrictions which, though necessary to its achievement and example to the world, quickly robbed it of its original power. In their practical realism Lenin and Stalin have been more Marxist than the greater part of Marx's own writings: they have seen and overcome the limitations of the Marxist view, and have retained and applied in the separate development of the Russian community the universal truth which lay at the root of dialectical materialism. In this they follow the example of the greatest political leaders who have recognized and identified themselves with the historical necessity of their community.