pasture and agriculture, expand into commerce and industry, and luxuriate
with finance; that thought (as Vico [Vico, Giovanni Battista (1668-1744)]
and Compte [Compte, Auguste (1798-1857)] argued) will pass, by and
large, from supernatural to legendary to naturalistic explanations; that new
theories, inventions, discoveries, and errors will agitate the intellectual
currents; that new generations will rebel against the old and pass from
rebellion to conformity and reaction; that experiments in morals will loosen
tradition and frighten its beneficiaries; and that the excitement of
innovation will be forgotten in the unconcern of time. History repeats itself
in the large because human nature changes with geological leisureliness,
and man is equipped to respond in stereotyped ways to frequently occurring
situations and stimuli like hunger, danger, and sex. But in a developed and
complex civilization individuals are more differentiated and unique than in
a primitive society, and many situations contain novel circumstances
requiring modifications of instinctive response; custom recedes, reasoning
spreads; the results are less predictable. There is no certainty that the future
will repeat the past. Every year is an adventure.
Some masterminds have sought to constrain the loose regularities of
history into majestic paradigms. The founder of French socialism, Claude-
Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), divided the past
and the future into an alternation of “organic” and “critical” periods:
The law of human development… reveals two distinct and alternative
states of society: one, the organic, in which all human actions are
classed, foreseen, and regulated by a general theory, and the purpose
of social activity is clearly defined; the other, the critical, in which all
community of thought, all communal action, all coordination have
ceased, and the society is only an agglomeration of separate
individuals in conflict with one another.
Each of these states or conditions has occupied two periods of history.
One organic period preceded that Greek era which we call the age of
philosophy, but which we shall more justly call the age of criticism.
