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.

 

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