WE have now completed our investigation of the process through which civilizations grow and, in the several instances which we have examined, the process seems to be one and the same. Growth is achieved when an individual or a minority or a whole society replies to a challenge by a response which not only answers that challenge but also exposes the respondent to a fresh challenge which demands a further response on his part. But although the process of growth may be uniform the experience of the various parties that undergo the challenge is not the same. The variety of experience in confronting a single series of common challenges is manifest when we compare the experiences of the several different communities into which any single society is articulated. Some succumb, while others strike out a successful response through a creative movement of Withdrawal-and-Return, while others neither succumb nor succeed but manage to survive until the member which has succeeded shows them the new pathway, along which they follow tamely in the footsteps of the pioneers. Each successive challenge thus produces differentiation within the society, and the longer the series of challenges the more sharply pronounced will this differentiation become. Moreover, if the process of growth thus gives rise to differentiation within a single growing society where the challenges are the same for all, then, a fortiori, the same process must differentiate one growing society from another where the challenges themselves differ in character.
A conspicuous illustration presents itself in the domain of art, for it is generally recognized that every civilization creates an artistic style of its own; and if we are attempting to ascertain the limits of any particular civilization in space or time we find that the aesthetic test is the surest as well as the subtlest. For example, a survey of the artistic styles that have prevailed in Egypt brings out the fact that the art of the Pre-Dynastic Age is not yet characteristically Egyptiac, whereas the Coptic art has discarded the characteristically Egyptiac traits; and on this evidence we can establish the time-span of the Egyptiac Civilization. By the same test we can establish the dates at which the Hellenic Civilization emerged from beneath the crust of the Minoan Society, and at which it disintegrated to make way for the Orthodox Christian Society. Again, the style of the Minoan artefacts enables us to delimit the extension in space of the Minoan Civilization in the various stages of its history.
If, then, it is accepted that every civilization has a style of its own in the domain of art, we have to inquire whether the qualitative uniqueness which is the essence of style can appear in this one domain without pervading all the parts and organs and institutions and activities of each separate civilization. Without entering on any ambitious inquiries in this direction we can assert this well-recognized fact that different civilizations lay differing degrees of emphasis on particular lines of activity. The Hellenic Civilization, for example, displays a manifest tendency towards a predominantly aesthetic outlook on life as a whole, illustrated by the fact that the Greek adjective KOAOJ, which properly denotes what is aesthetically beautiful, is employed indiscriminately to stand, in addition, for what is morally good. On the other hand, the Indie Civilization, as well as the affiliated Hindu Civilization, displays an equally manifest tendency towards an outlook that is predominantly religious.
When we come to our own Western Civilization we find no difficulty in detecting our own bent or bias. It is, of course, a penchant towards machinery: a concentration of interest and effort and ability upon applying the discoveries of natural science to material purposes through the ingenious construction of material and social clockwork—material engines such as motor-cars, wrist-watches and bombs, and social engines such as parliamentary constitutions, state systems of insurance and military mobilization time-tables. And this has been our penchant longer than we commonly suppose. Western man was regarded as disgustingly materialistic by the cultivated elite of other civilizations long before the so-called ‘Machine Age’. Anna Comnena, the Byzantine princess turned historian, sees our eleventh-century forebears in just this light, as appears in the mixture of horror with contempt which is her reaction to the mechanical ingenuity of the Crusaders’ cross-bow, a Western novelty of her day which—with the characteristic precocity of lethal inventions—preceded by several centuries the invention of clockwork, which was medieval Western man’s chef-d’oeuvre in the application of his mechanical bent to the less fascinating arts of peace.
Some recent Western writers, more particularly Spengler, have pursued this subject of the ‘characters’ of the different civilizations to a point at which sober diagnosis passes over into arbitrary fantasy. We have perhaps said enough to establish the fact that differentiation of some kind does take place, and we should be in danger of losing our sense of proportion if we lost sight of the equally certain and more significant fact that the variety manifested in human life and institutions is a superficial phenomenon which masks an underlying unity without impairing it.
We have compared our civilizations to rock-climbers, and on the showing of this simile the several climbers, though they are certainly separate individuals, are all engaged on an identical enterprise. They are all attempting to scale the face of the same cliff from the same starting-point on a ledge below towards the same goal on a ledge above. The underlying unity is apparent here; and it appears again if we vary our simile and think of the growths of civilizations in terms of the Parable of the Sower. The seeds sown are separate seeds, and each seed has its own destiny. Yet the seeds are all of one kind; and they are all sown by one Sower in the hope of obtaining one harvest.