393 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

presentation of each successive challenge, there can be no assurance
that the spinner will not fail, this time, to add another fathom's length
to his life-line; for in each act Man is free to choose Death instead of
Life; and, each time, his momentous choice depends on the uncertain
issue of a spiritual struggle within his soul between an aspiration towards
Grace and a gravitation towards Original Sin.

The severity of this perpetually recurring struggle is indicated by our
finding that, out of twenty-two known civilizations,1 there was only one
that could not be certified to be either dead or in disintegration by the
twentieth century of the Christian Era. It is true that these figures did
not warrant any inferential estimate of a civilization's normal expecta-
tion of life, because this species of Society was at this date still so young,
and the number of its representatives was still so few, that any attempt
at a generalization must be subject to a stultifyingly wide margin of error.
Yet, even if the statistics gave no legitimate ground for pessimism, it
might be augured that each additional round might be likely to make the
game more perilous, since a sinful Human Nature was apt to be tempted
by every successful response to a challenge into succumbing either to
the active sin of hybris or to the hardly less ruinous passive sin of resting
on its oars.2 If 'the greater the success, the greater the temptation' were
in truth one of the laws to which the Human Psyche was subject, then
it would seem to follow that an equilibrium which had to be unstable if
it was to be a vehicle for the growth-process must be prone to become
ever more precarious with each successive victory of Life over Death.

This besetting danger, which was the price of freedom, was advertised
in the spectacle of disintegrating, petrified,3 arrested,4 and abortive5
civilizations, and was illustrated in the history, not only of human
societies, but of terrestrial life itself. Every species of living creature is
an earnest of growth, inasmuch as it is the fruit of some past creative
mutation of an antecedent species and might become in its turn the seed
of some further creative mutation into yet another species; yet at the
same time every living species 'is a halt', and it is this 'by definition',
since it 'is essentially a created thing5.6

The tragic breakdown of the Hellenic Civilization in the flower of its
growth was sensitively forecast in the premonitory arrest of the growth of
the Attic art of the tragic drama in a generation that lived to see the
Atheno-Peloponnesian War.

'Tragedy—as also Comedy—was at first mere improvisation. . . .
Tragedy advanced by slow degrees; each new element that showed itself
was in turn developed. Having passed through many changes it found its
natural form, and there it stopped (e-jrava-aro, eirel eo^c 717 vavrijs <f>vcnv).'7

The changes through which the Athenian tragic drama had passed

1 On a count in which a Medieval Western City-state cosmos is given the status of a
civilization distinct from the mmn body of the Western Society.

2 See IV. iv. 245-61. a See VI. vii. 4-6 and 47-52.

* See III. iii. i-jn. a See II. ii. 322-60 and 388-91.

6 Bergson, H.: Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion (Paris 1932, Alcan),
P. 251, quoted in III. iii. 235.

7 Aristotle: Poetics, chap, iv, § 12 (I449A), translated by Butcher, S. H.: Aristotle's
Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, 3rd ed. (London 1902, Macmillan), pp. 18-19.