We have already seen the way the phenomenon of a transition generates a divide, that is, the point at which its operation stops and a new period comes into existence expressing the results of the transformation. Since our model is only approximate we could hardly hope to detect this elusive moment, and yet it is clear from the facts given to us that history actually reflects this principle derived from abstract reasoning. The clearest example is the modern divide, but once we know what to look for we can begin to see during the Axial period. For example, the period just before the Exile, ca. -600 is a roughly indicated division point. The Judaic transition is remarkable in that it expresses the religious history of an area of Canaan, with respect to two kingdoms, Israel and Judah, and this becomes the history of their disappearance. The final fall of Judah  unwittingly precipitates this strange 'universalization beyond kingdoms' of a new tradition soon codified in the Old Testament. We should note that the Exile period creates a poorly documented blending effect with the also emerging Zoroastrian tradition. We see that just before the divide this text begins to take its final form, with additional redactions appearing to complete the material. But the era of the Prophets has already passed, and the perception of an interval of history in which something extraordinary happened begins to gel and become a new religious core. This rough division point of the decades to a half-century before and after -600, then, it is hard to be fully precise, clearly shows this divide phenomenon. A similar point is visible in India, and just barely in China. Note that the Indic transition is really about a period reminiscent of the Greek Archaic, one in which a spectrum of sages and philosophers appears, the Upanishadic era with its magnificent flowering of the yogic world. Just as with 'Israel/Judah' it is after the divide once again that a crystallization takes place, and we see the formation of Buddhism, a clear rendition of the essence of this yogic tradition, but in a remarkable, potentially universal form beyond the specifics of the 'Hindu' legacy from which it springs. It is significant that in China the figure of Lao Tse is ambiguously placed around -600, or else somewhat later, although the codification of the teaching this perhaps mythical figure represents is just a bit later. 

In the case of Greece we see something uniquely different, yet directly related to this divide phenomenon. The Greek transition proper sets up a field rich in potential which then commences on a more autonomous realization of freedom, and it is this that we see is the source of Greek democracy, which appears during the first period after the divide period, clearly indicated by the transitional figure of Solon around -600. This clustering of the freedom effect, seen with first in relation to system action, then as free action, is one of the most mysterious clues to the whole eonic sequence and as we jump to the modern transition we see almost the same phenomenon occurring once again with this clustering of democratic emergence just around the divide, which we take as being around 1800. It is a remarkable thing to discover that this effect is not coincidental and expresses the nature of freedom, constrained and unconstrained, that must accompany the passage from eonic evolution to free action taken beyond the divide. 

The modern transition is a complex and multidimensional interval, with a host of emergent effects, but it is the conclusion to this interval that surpasses wonder in the plenitude of its innovations all clustered in the period of the Enlightenment, the French and American Revolutions, the Industrial take-off, another Revolution, the Romantic counterpoint to the Enlightenment, and the emergence of modern liberalism and democracy. We can see that this closely packed interval sets the foundations for modernity as we know it, and it is also remarkable that it gives birth to the idea of evolution which will become one of the basic mainline conceptions of the new era. We have already indicated, through a comparison of Lamarck and Darwin, that this idea swiftly becomes grafted onto the already late, post-divide appearance of positivism, and loses its clear association with progress and universal history with which it is born, and born not only in biology, but in the philosophy of history, which once again flowers in most eerie fashion in the decade before 1800. We have come full circle, to see that our keynote for the eonic model, an idea for a universal history, virtually christens our divide, and appears with an expression of the major chord of the divide music, the idea of freedom, whose expression in each of the areas of the modern transition is a chorus of realizations. One of these is clearly visible in the background to Kant's remarkable divide appearance, the brief explosion of German classical philosophy with its rapid fire flowering into the nineteenth century in such figures as Hegel, Marx, and Schopenhauer at the tail end of the transition. 

The emergence of the classic philosophies of freedom in this period is therefore the new keynote for a new age, and later we will see how, via the antinomies of Kant, this contains not only the basis for a new political order, but the clue to the past and future of religion itself, as this enters into the domain of a secular age. 

Discrete Freedom Sequence  We should reiterate our remarks about the discrete freedom sequence, in the context of the Great Divide.Our eonic sequence shows, empirically, a succession of transitions. Suddenly we notice that inside this sequence we have a counterpoint sequence visible in the double eonic emergence of democracy. This can hardly be chance. Not only that we can see that in both cases our discrete freedom sequence initializes at the point of the divide, ca. -600, the time of Solon, and ca. 1800, the time of the American and French Revolutions. There is a beautiful logic to this: the evolution of freedom is not purely spontaneous, it is part of the generation of eonic evolution. But since freedom must be free of such generation, our system performs a beautiful, eerie, and dangerous trick: it generates ‘freedom’ as ‘system action’ during the transition, but towards the end, near the divide. As the system crosses the divide it switches from ‘system action’ to ‘free action’, ready or not, the roller coaster reaches the top and the ride starts.

One of the strongest tenets of proponents of Darwinian evolution is the denial of any form of evolutionary progress. But we can see clearly that the regime of theoretical natural selection has misled the analysis completely. Looking at the eonic sequence we can see that we would not have a difficult time putting the idea on a proper foundation.  We can also highlight the difficulties that arise from the idea. But it is obvious that within the scope of the eonic sequence, which may or may not tell us anything about earlier evolution, there is a clear expression of progress in history. At the bare minimum, we are able to see that there is a definite series of progression, and these are clearly timed by the eonic sequence. Darwinism blinds us to the fact that almost any form of evolution is going to show a progressive aspect, and this will be associated with any inherent depiction of development. The question of progress in biological evolution is, as we can now suspect, muddled by the overlay of different processes, and the difficulty of seeing processes closeup.

We can suggest what we suspect, but we can’t close the case with any ease. But the point is that a great of biological evolution is indeed relatively random or contingent. Here the suggestion of our eonic model is clear: any attempt to find directionality is going end up in speculations about teleology. We have completed our analysis of the eonic effect without such speculations because we had an evolutionary map allowing us to see directionality in the past, without extending this analysis to any teleological conclusion. Even our frequency hypothesis was left up in the air as our data falls out of range.  But in the case of biological evolution we are unable to close in on the specifics of ‘changes of direction’, if any, that might be present in the record we get from deep time. But all at once, confined to the short run of the eonic sequence, we clearly see the progressive aspect of a developmental sequence, mixed with the far larger intervals of the mideonic periods, where the evidence of progress is mixed with obvious cases of retrograde decline. This combination of short-term progression and mideonic sluggishness ought to warn us of the dangers of jumping to conclusion about evolutionary progress in the emergence of biological life.

We should be clear of the limits of our own approach to this question. Where does the idea of progress come from? It is another child of the eonic sequence, an eonic emergent! The literature of the idea of progress is very extensive, with suggestions about the birth of the idea in the Old Testament history, or else the thinking of Zarathustra, with statements that the Greeks had no idea of progress, or else statements that idea did indeed appear among the Greeks. Clearly the idea is gestating in the course of world history. But it is most ironically the appearance of the idea in the modern transition in the debate over the Ancients and the Moderns that it is born in its sturdy secular form. This debate arose as the achievements of modernity began to dispel the perennial sense of looking backward at the creative heights of antiquity. The sudden sense of surpassing this legacy gave birth to the idea of the progressive aspect of history, still without the clarity given by seeing its relationship to the eonic effect, where ‘eonic progression’ is not continuous but intermittent. The inability to account for this mideonic aspect of the potential of progress has continually thrown the idea into confusion. But we can see that at a bare minimum the eonic sequence sets a pace of overall progression, now for the first time visible in the larger picture of world history that archaeology has given us.

Notice how the fate of the idea of progress follows the contours of the modern transition. The idea is born, or reborn, in the core of the transition, turns into a philosophy of history, then suffers from ideological confusion in the wake of the transition, then suffers postmodern reversal in the sudden rejections of the idea. The match is exact, for the simple reason we can see that once the transition completes the nature of the future becomes an unknown once again. We cannot with total confidence say that the short term future and its longer range will coincide. Furthermore, as the modern system crystallizes the idea of progress turns from a revolutionary to an ideologically stabilizing idea. It can degenerate into propaganda, or become confused with the defense of an economic order.

It becomes obvious that while can clarify the evidence of progress in world history, we are nonetheless extracting an ‘eonic emergent’ to describe the whole system of history in a presumption of meta-knowledge. Thus the idea will retain its controversial dialectical character. But the point is clear in broad strokes: we can account for the evidence history shows, that of an immense progression from simple beginnings to a greater complexity in a fashion that is obviously evolution. Our model does more, because it distinguishes system action and the free action of the mideonic intervals. The driving motion of the eonic system must be matched by the resulting mideonic free action able to fulfill the potential established without retrogression, a task not always visible in the history we have!

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