296	LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY
economic and social conditions—a system of free competition for earning
profits reckoned in terms of money—in which the series of Late Modern
and post-Modenx Western 'business cycles' had taken its rise. In the
same connexion we may remind ourselves of our finding1 that, when and
where a conflict between a disintegrating civilization and bands of recal-
citrant barbarians beyond its pale had passed over from a war of move-
ment into a stationary warfare along the times of a universal state, the
passage of Time had been apt to militate against the professional de-
fenders of the Kmes to the advantage of its barbarian assailants, until in
the end the sagging dam had burst and the gradually accumulated flood
waters of Barbarism had descended in a sudden devastating spate on the
domain of a society whose defence had become at last an intolerably
heavy tax on its resources. We may further remind ourselves of our ob-
servation2 of a tendency for the native bent of a civilization to reassert
itself, sooner or later, against the deflecting effect of the renaissance of
some incongruous element artificially resuscitated from the ossuary of a
dead antecedent culture.
The foregoing observations are all illustrations of our more general
finding3 that cyclical movements in human history, like the physical
revolutions of a cart-wheel, have a way of forwarding, through their own
monotonously repetitive circular motion, another movement with a
longer rhythm which, by contrast, can be seen to be a cumulative pro-
gress in one direction, even if we cannot be equally sure that this course
has ever been set for it deliberately in execution of a plan. In each of the
historical instances in which we have detected one of these finite series
of cycles generated by a struggle between two tendencies of unequal
strength, the stronger tendency of the two has been apt to bring the
series to a close by eventually winning a decisive victory over its weaker
opponent; but, of course, this denouement tells us no more about the
winning tendency than that, in this particular episode, it has proved
stronger than its opponent to a degree that has eventually availed to put
an end to the unequal struggle. There is no warrant for interpreting
these victories of one tendency over another de facto Historiae as victories
dejure Naturae. Empirically observed matters of fact are not necessarily
the outcomes of an inexorable fate; the onusprobandi here lies with the
detenninist, not with the agnostic. The unwarranted assumption that the
historical denouement whose historical occurrence has been recorded in
retrospect must therefore have been predestined to occur, in the teeth of
all possible variations in previous acts of the play, has been propounded
as a jeu d* esprit in Lewis Carroll's fable of 'the time-machine* ;4 but
the English mathematician C. L. Dodgson left it to his German confrere
Oswald Spengler to crystallize this airy conceit into the ponderous dog-
ma under which a man of genius has perversely buried the brilliant
findings of his intuitive insight. This undocumented Determinism is the
bane of many passages of Spengler's work besides the one—already
quoted in this study5—in which the Western culture's reassertion of its
i In VIII. viii. 16-44.	2 On pp. 62-73, above.
3 In IV. iv. 34-37.	4 See V. vi. 214-15.
3 Spengler, O.: Der Untergang des Abendlandes, vol. i (Munich 1920, Beck), p. 321,
quoted on pp. 65-66, above.