374 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

1440 had run through a first retardation into a second acceleration and

thence into a second retardation in the course of some five centuries.

This glance at the history of the Western shipwright's art concludes
our survey of evidences of variability in the rate of social change; and
these evidences—which have presented themselves in divers phases of
the histories of a number of different civilizations—are so many indica-
tions that a recalcitrance to laws of Nature is no less characteristic of
Human Nature than an amenability to them. Indeed, if we now look
again at the pattern of the disintegration-process, in which we have
found our classic example of regularity, we shall see that a varying rate
of change is one of this regular process's uniformly recurring features.
There is a particularly sudden and extreme change of tempo at the
transition from a Time of Troubles to a universal state; for the second
paroxysm of a Time of Troubles, which is precipitated by the first
relapse and is pulled up short by the second rally, is the most feverishly
fast-moving episode in the story, whereas there is no episode in it so
slow-moving as the first spell of oecumenical peace which supervenes.
This rebellious variability in the rate of change is not, however, the only
irregularity in the gait of History which suggests that, after all, Man may
not be completely subject to Nature's orders.

(£) THE DIVERSITY OF CORRESPONDING EPISODES IN THE
HISTORIES OF DIFFERENT CIVILIZATIONS

i. A Diversity in the Duration of the Growth-Phases of Civilizations

Evidences of human recalcitrance to laws of Nature multiply when
we place the records of the life-histories of civilizations side by side and
take a synoptic view of them. Two breaches of uniformity that stand out
conspicuously are a quantitative diversity in the duration of the growth-
phases of those civilizations whose growth-spans we are able to measure,
and a no less striking qualitative diversity in the relations of Religion to
the rises and falls of civilizations in different generations.1

The diversity in the length of measurable growth-spans is extreme,
as can be seen by anyone who runs his eye down Table V at the end of
the present volume.

In compiling this table we have had to leave out of account the seven
civilizations of the first generation (the Egyptiac, Sumeric, Minoan,
Indus Culture, Shang Culture, Andean, and Mayan), since each of
these arose out of the mutation of some primitive society2 at a stage of
social development earlier than the invention of techniques for keeping
records; and, though we may know, or guess, the nature of the challenges
from Physical Nature by which these mutations were evolved,3 we have
no means of even approximately estimating the dates at which they
occurred. In the history of the Egyptiac Civilization, for example, the
evidence, as it stood in A.D. 1952, did not suffice to indicate whether the
age of *the Old Kingdom' was to be equated with the growth-phase of
the Egyptiac Society, or whether an investigator was to see here a uni-

i See Table IV: Primitive Societies, Civilizations, Higher Religions, in vol. vii, ad fin.
* See II. i. 188. 3 See II. i. 302-30,