218 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

more damaging than Islam, and an adversary more puissant than the
'Osmanli. Communism was more damaging than Islam because it spoke
to the West with the voice of the West's own conscience, and the Soviet
Power was more puissant than the Ottoman because it made war on the
West with Western material and spiritual weapons. These harrowing
and terrifying new Western experiences had demonstrated unanswer-
ably that a century of low tension which had opened for the Western
Society with an Ottoman 'cease fire' under the walls of Vienna in A.D.
1683, and had closed for it in A.D. 1775 with the firing, at Concord,
Massachusetts, of 'the shot heard round the World',1 had, after all, been
nothing more than a deceptive lull; and, after the successive warnings
served on Western Man by History in A.D. 1775,1792,1914,1917,1933,
and 1939, the rake had come to a point in his progress at which his cars
ought to have been open to Menandrian saws that certain of his own
poets had been saying.2 Volney's 'La source de ses calamities... reside
dans 1'homme meme' had anticipated Meredith's 'We arc betrayed by
what is false within';3 and in these sentences a Late Modern Western
Antinomianism had written its own self-indictment.

The moral question whether these experiences and admonitions would
move Western Man to repent of his hybris was one that could be
answered by nobody except the tragic hero himself; but, on the intellec-
tual point at issue between latter-day Western historians and latter-day
Western scientists, it seemed reasonable, in the circumstances of A.D.
1953, to ask the historians to meet the scientists to the extent of admitting
that it might, after all, at least be an open question whether 'laws of
Nature' were or were not to be found governing the affairs of Man in
Process of Civilization, Indeed, the openness of the question was actually
so patent, the need to look into it so pressing, and the aphasia afflicting
the historians so invincible, that it seemed warrantable at this point for a
student of History to make the requisite declaration on the historians'
behalf.

If we do thus take the liberty taken by godparents in the ministration
of the Christian Church's rite of baptism by declaring open for discus-
sion the question whether 'laws of Nature' have any currency in the
domain of History, we immediately find a string of supplementary
questions unrolling itself.

What (if any) instances of laws of Nature* governing the affairs of
Man in Process of Civilization are brought to light in fact by an em-
pirical survey of the data? If 'laws of Nature' operative in the realm of
History do emerge from our study, what are the possible explanations of
their currency? Do such 'laws of Nature' governing human affairs turn
out, when we understand them, to be inexorable ? Or can their incidence
on Human Life be brought under human control at least in some mea-
sure? Are there any tracts in the realm of History in which human affairs
appear, on the evidence of the data, to be, not amenable to 'laws of
Nature', but recalcitrant to them ? And, if this, too, is one of the findings

1 Emerson, R. "W,, in his quatrain inscribed on the spot where the first shot was fired
m the American Revolutionary War. The historical significance of this war has been
discussed in IV. iv. 165.

»Actsxviua8. 3 See IV, iv. uo.