ThePast fifty years have shown a marked tendency toward the suppression of any consideration of the mysterious as a part of history. R. G. Collingwood's categorical remark that “the blind forces and activities in us” are not parts of the historical process merely reflected, in a particularly distinguished quarter, an assumption that has since gained widespread support. In social studies this trend has favored the accumulation of extensive data of the kind, for example, that lies behind the growth-of-learning S-curve postulated by industrial psychologists who have made detailed studies of “cycles” in a wide variety of industries. Such accumulations of solid quantities of data that lend themselves to statistical interpretation are reassuring, and it would be foolish to disparage either the method or its results. But it is important, and especially appropriate in studying a complex topic like the morality of a culture, to recognize that if one examines closely even those more limited social patterns that lend themselves to statistical analysis, there often seems to be, as Walter Bagehot argued a hundred years ago, a point somewhere along the line of development where the individual, or a creative minority, emerges as the real source of the breakthrough which establishes the pattern.