206 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

establishment of the facts, or else so great that the only practicable way
of coping with the data is the method, not of Science, but of Fiction.
Western historians might perhaps be forgiven for having failed to find
any rhyme or reason in fifteen decisive battles, twelve imams, seven sages,
four Georges, three ages,1 and other casts in which the dramatis per-
sonae had been brought on to the stage in these exiguous numbers;2 but,
in contrast to the quantity of data yielded by public events, the quantity
yielded by ordinary affairs of private people was of just that intermediate
order of magnitude that permits 'laws of Nature' governing data to
reveal themselves to the human eye. The number of annual harvests, for
example, that had been reaped by Man in Process of Civilization between
the date of the invention of Agriculture and the time of writing, mid-
way through the twentieth century of the Christian Era, was probably
something between 6,000 and 12,000. The number of 'middletowns'
that had come and gone from the floruit of Heliopolis and Ur and
Harappa to tiitflondt of Chicago and Magnitogorsk and Shanghai must
have run, all told, into some scores of thousands. The economists and
sociologists had been showing what could be done with data presenting
themselves in these quantities. Why was it that the historians were not
taking the same advantage of the same opportunity ?

The historians seem to have missed this opportunity by falling into a
snare and a delusion. The snare was an obsession with their own pro-
fessional technique;3 the delusion was a mistaken impression that the
panorama of History was incomprehensibly complex.

'For students of modern history it was an important moment when the
young German historian Ranke, looking at the Age of the Renaissance,
took various authors of that period, who had written the chronicles of
their own times, and by various forms of detective-work undermined
their credibility. The novelty of his technique was perhaps exaggerated in
the nineteenth-century,* but it established the fact that you were foolish

1 A critique of the Late Modern Western historians' conventional pcriodizatkm of the
history of Man in. Process of Civilization into an 'ancient', a 'medieval', and a 'modern*
age -will be found in I. i. 168-71.

2 It -was noteworthy, however, that, of the five numbers here cited, the last two only
would be decidedly too small to reveal underlying regularities and uniformities by giving
the play of Chance on the surface a sufficient scope for it to neutralise itself.

*The number usually need not be at all large far the chances to average out. With the
typical example of spinning a coin, even a quite small number like ten will almost count
as a large number in the sense that, if the coin is spun ten times, the number of heads
will rarely be more than two away from five, which is the average number of heads. In
most matters concerned with probability, three or four count as small numbers, ten as
a fairly large number, and a hundred as a very large number' (Darwin, C, G.; The Afa#t
Million Years (London 1953, Hart-Davis), p. yo).

By the time when this authoritative pronouncement by one of the most eminent
mathematical physicists of the present writer's generation was published, the writer had
been spending some twenty-five years of his working life on mental operations with
twenty-one specimens of the species 'civilizations' without having any assurance that
this number was, in truth, large enough for his requirements, He was proportionately
elated when he came to this passage in Sir Charles Darwin's book.

3 See I. i. 1-8,

* Ranke had certainly been anticipated by a school of Chinese philologists and textual
critics in the Far Eastern World in the age of the Manchu imperial regime (aee pp. 58-39,
above) and by( a school of Greek documentarians in an Aristotelian and post-Aristotelian
age or Hellenic history. If Ranke and his disciples had taken to heart the two historical
facts that Aristotle had organized the manufacture of a digest of the constitutions of
158 parochial states, and that Craterus had assembled a corpus of Athenian official