VARIABILITY OF RATE OF CULTURAL CHANGE 361
those social interregna in which the current of history perceptibly
quickens its pace.1

If we were challenged to find evidence for some general law governing
the tempo of change in the realm of Life, the evidence that has proved
irreconcilable with the hypothesis of invariability might perhaps lend
itself more speciously to an hypothesis of secular acceleration.

In the history of Life on Earth, the Fauna had developed faster than
the Flora; the vertebrates faster than the invertebrates; the mammals
faster than the reptiles; Man through the transmission of a social heri-
tage by means of education faster than the non-human animals through
the transmission of a racial heritage by means of physical procreation;*
Upper Palaeolithic Man faster than Lower Palaeolithic Man; and Man
in Process of Civilization faster than a Primitive Man who had lapsed
into a Yin-state in reaction from the Yang-effort of struggling up into
becoming human. In a twentieth-century Westernizing World in which
the pace of Man's intellectual and technological progress had been
speeded up once again, and this time to an unprecedented degree, by
a recent Western Industrial Revolution, it looked as if a crescendo that
had been rising by geometrical progression, in a steeper and steeper
curve, ever since Life's first epiphany, might now be on the point of
culminating, in Human Life, in a pace at which men's racing thoughts
and wills would no longer find themselves able either to coax or to
drive their inseparable subconscious fellow-traveller in the depths of the
Psyche to keep in the running; and the psychic catastrophe which this
threat of psychic discord portended seemed at this stage to be not merely
overtaking the surviving primitive societies and surviving non-Western
civilizations that were being uprooted by the Western bulldozer's
titanic impact; it now also appeared to be impending over the heads of
the demonic Western chauffeurs of a potently mechanized Juggernaut's
car.

'One of the phenomena that bring out, particularly clearly, the relation
between the magnitude and pressure of the network of interdependence
[linking together individual human beings in the Modern Western World]
on the one hand and the psychic state of the individual on the other hand
is what we call "the tempo" of our age. This [term] "tempo" is in reality
nothing but an expression for indicating the multiplicity of the chains of
the social network that find a node in every single social function and the
pressure of the competition, emanating from this far-flung and densely
populated net, that puts its "drive" into every single transaction/3

We need not commit ourselves to the theory of a secular tendency
towards acceleration in the march of Life which might seem at first sight

1 See I. L 43—44,

2 See pp. 319-26, above. Julian Huxley points out that, in the jump from evolution
on the inorganic level to Life, as well as in the subsequent jump from the transmission
of a heritage by procreation to its transmission by education, *the evolutionary process*
had to pay for being 'much accelerated in time' by being 'immensely restricted in extent
(Huxley, J.: Evolutionary EtJnes, the Romanes Lecture, 1943, reprinted in Huxley,
T. H, and J.: Evolution and EM.cs, i8g3-X943 (London 1947, Pilot Piess), pp. 120-1

*** Mas", N.: Uber den Process der ZiviKsatson, vol. ii: Wandlungen der GeselUchttft:
Entioittf ant finer Theorie der ZiinUsation (Basel 1939, Haus zum Falken), p. 337.