378 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

timidating calculation, notwithstanding the evidence indicating that the
tempo of social change was by no means uniform as a matter of fact.
Within the writer's own infinitesimally short experience between the
time when he was drafting his first systematic notes for this Study in
A.D. 1927-9 and the time in A.D. 1950 when he was approaching the
completion of the writing of the text, previously unknown facts had been
brought to light—for example, in the realm of pre-Sinic archaeology and
in the realm, of Sumeric chronology—which were no mere points of
detail but were 'integral* facts throwing fresh light on the whole study of
History. The spectre of ignorance haunted the writer at the close of his
work as insistently as at the beginning; and it was always in his mind that
future students of History, equipped with vastly ampler funds of relevant
knowledge, might smile at his faith in a pittance of knowledge that, by
comparison with what they knew, would look as tiny as a squirrel's
winter store. A faith that had moved him to carry out his own recon-
naissance did not blind him to the possibility—improbable though he
personally felt this to be—that the appearance of freedom in human
affairs might be dissipated one day by a progressive increase in the
candle-power of Science's dry light.

If a haze of Ignorance was thus one of the contingencies that had to
be reckoned with, was it also necessary to allow for the play of Chance ?
The answer to this second question could be given out of hand, without
any question here of having to await the verdict of a still untold tale of
500,000 million years; for the settling of the historian's accounts with
Chance was a matter, not of fact-finding, but of reasoning; and Reason
pronounces that Chance is not an absolute positive concept, but a negative
and therefore necessarily a relative one, and that accordingly to see in
Chance an ultimate explanation of any phenomenon would be as naive
an error as to mistake a sign-post for the goal to which it pointed. Just as
the label 'Heterodoxy* merely indicates the existence of another 'doxy'
labelled 'Orthodoxy',1 and the name 'Neustria' merely indicates the
existence of another country labelled 'Austrasia',* so the labelling of a
phenomenon as an outcome of the play of Chance merely indicates that
this phenomenon does not display the pattern of some particular kind of
order that the thinker happens to have in mind—and perhaps also to
expect, or even desire, to find—at the moment when he indicates its
absence in the case in point by holding Chance responsible for the pro-
duction of the phenomenon that has to be accounted for. To attribute
a child's paternity to Chance is thus merely a form of words for stating
that this child cannot be credited with some other paternity that might
have been expected to be proved; but this negative label does not tell us
what the child's true paternity is; nor can this or any other verbiage act
as a spell to perform the miracle of begetting a child without recourse
to any father at all. The patronymic 'child of Chance* merely informs us
that the foundling is not the child of so-and-so; and this negative finding

1 A theologian with a sense of humour who was asked by a lady at a dinner party to
explain the difference between Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy is said to have answered her;
'Well, Orthodoxy is my doxy and Heterodoxy is your doxy.'

2 See IL ii. 167, n. z.