limited
extent. Civilization is not an example of perpetual motion. Rather it is
a social life cycle, with a beginning and an end, and a peck of
troublesome contradictions and conflicts in between.

Civilization is an integrative process. During the course of its
competitive survival struggle, potential building units of an expanding
civilization are tested out and included or rejected in much the same
way that a stone-mason checks and tests the individual stones of which
his wall is being built. The analogy is not entirely accurate. A wall
becomes a completed part of a total structure. A civilization is a
process of existence from conception and birth to dissolution and death.
At any point in the process there is a delicate balance between
integration and disintegration. As a matter of fact, both integration
and disintegration exist and act, constantly, side by side. If the
integrative forces are in the ascendant, form is built and function is
accelerated. If the disintegrative forces are dominant, form breaks down
and function stagnates.

This shifting balance and/or imbalance with its resulting build-up
and/or break-down exists geographically, biologically, sociologically.
It can perhaps be best described as successive change. It cannot be
referred to as evolution except in its integrative aspect.
Disintegratively it becomes devolution.

Civilization is a result of sociological build-up at a certain cultural
level. It has not been universal in all human societies, but
exceptional, both in time and in geographical space.

What has caused the pattern of civilization to appear, disappear and
reappear again and again during the period of written history?

There have been many answers. The most general answer is divine
intervention by beings above and beyond mankind. Whether such
intervention has taken place or is taking place, human beings are unable
to say with finality, but several thousand years of recorded history,
plus our own daily experience provides convincing proof that the
political, economic, ideological and sociological constructs which have
appeared and disappeared in the course of social history are, at least
in large part, the products of human brains and human hands. They are
man-made.

The social pattern of civilization, like other social patterns which
preceded civilization and which continue to exist side by side with
civilized communities, is the result of human ingenuity and human
energy, of