ANTINOMIANISM OF MODERN HISTORIANS 187
section of the North American province of a Western World;1 but these
anthropologists' dashing reconnaissance into the domain of the civiliza-
tions had been anticipated by two other expeditions organized by latter-
day Western intellectual conquistadores who had never deigned to concern
themselves with the conquest of primitive Caribs and Comanches, but
had concentrated from the start, with the vaulting ambition of a Corte*s
or a Pizarro, on the conquest of the Mexicos and Perus.

The first of these scientific attacks on the life of Man in Process of
Civilization had been made by what, at the time of writing, it had be-
come fashionable to describe as a 'functional' approach. The eruption of
Industrialism out of a social crater in Great Britain in the latter decades
of the eighteenth century of the Christian Era, and the wide-spread
devastation inflicted by the cataclysmic lava-flow, had produced enormi-
ties of material power, social injustice, and spiritual suffering2 that had
caught a horrified Frankenstein's imagination and, in moving his feelings,
had spurred his collective intellect to work on the problem of ascertain-
ing what 'laws of Nature' these might be that had thus suddenly asserted
their tyrannical rule over Late Modern Western affairs. It was true that,
within the century and three-quarters that had elapsed, by the time of
writing, since Adam Smith's publication of The Wealth of Nations in
A.D. 1776, the new Western science of Political Economy had hardly
begun to extend its horizon beyond the spatial limits of the Western
World or the chronological limits of the industrial phase of the Western
Civilization's history; and this was, of course, an almost derisorily small
fragment of the total history, already running to five or six millennia, of
a species of society of which the Western Civilization was merely one of
more than twenty known specimens. The intellectual importance of this
new Modern Western science of human affairs was not, however, to be
measured by the narrowness of the range of the data that it had brought
within its purview so far. In a Late Modern Western World the estab-
lishment of a science of Economics had been an intellectually revolu-
tionary event because, on one plane of social3 activity, within the limits
of one society in one chapter of its history, Political Economy had trans-
lated into an accomplished reality the eighteenth-century Western philo-
sophers' dream of bringing to light the laws governing 'the natural
order'4 in the affairs of Man in Process of Civilization.

Moreover, the 'classical' nineteenth-century Scottish and English
political economists had not been content merely to report the discovery
of 'laws of Nature' in their newly reclaimed polder; they had gone on to
proclaim to an awe-struck British Israel that these commandments
which they had adventurously brought down from the goddess Science's
holy mount were 'iron laws' of an adamantine severity; and this timely
psychological substitute for the terrors of Hell had been swallowed with

i See Lynd, Robert S. and Helen M.: Middletown (New York 1929, Harcourt Brace)
and Middtetown in Transition (New York 1937, Harcourt Brace).

a See IV, iv. 137-93.

3 In the eighteenth-century term 'Political Economy', the -word 'political had been
employed to convey the meaning expressed by the word 'social' in twentieth-century
Western usage.

* See the passages quoted frorn Teggart's work on p. 183, above.