Our short tour of the eonic effect is complete and we have discovered a truly spectacular, but subtle structure behind world history. That the result should reveal, not laws of history, but a play on the determinations of free action as self-consciousness, as if a dynamic of oscillations of degrees of freedom, is an altogether elegant solution given to us by nature to the search for a science of history. In a descant on a Kantian theme we confront a contradiction: there must a science of history, and, there cannot be such a science. Deftly, in a prodigious display of global action, nature resolves the paradox in the evidence we have found for the eonic sequence. And in the process we have found the close connection of this to the enigma of evolution. It is strange, at first, to consider that history and evolution could show a connection. Indeed, we have gone further to consider that evolution reaches into our present, and future, and yet, armed with our new type of model, this consideration allows us to carefully buffer our assertions about evolution from those about the free activity that constitutes the real core of the historical chronicle. We are left with a new answer to the question of the meaning of evolution. The persistence of Darwinian thinking lies in the impossibility of imagining how evolution could really occur. But the eonic effect shows us just how easy it is to miss the process, miss it altogether, without even suspecting how the seemingly impossible is accomplished in short bursts of directed action, able to leapfrog and play hopscotch on the surface of planet.

The biologist Dobzhansky made the well-known statement that nothing makes sense except in the light of evolution. The problem with that was that nothing quite made sense in terms of natural selection, and now we see why. We can extend this statement to the assertion that nothing in history makes sense except in the light of ‘eonic evolution’, in the evidence of the eonic effect. And this statement forces us to revisit the question of the descent of man with a strong suspicion we have found the missing clue to how the earlier emergence of man might have taken place. If we find discrepancies of periodization suggesting changes of direction, with creative flowerings in the most complex aspects of culture, from art to religion, then we can legitimately suspect that some earlier process resembling the eonic effect is at work, able to drive species level changes in ten thousand intervals. More we cannot safely conclude, save to enforce a similar caution on the presumptions of Darwinists, now seen to hold a very weak hand in their speculations turned dogma.

Whatever the limits of our description, a task to whose further elaboration we should promptly adjourn, for we are at the beginning and not the end of our subject, the pattern we have discovered shows the highest degree of coherence, and this independently of the ‘facts of the case’, the immense subhistories, we have deliberately stylized, of each sector our global pattern.  We can proceed to initiate an expansion of our outline into an historical chronicle, mindful that our approach, while making no claim to be beyond ideological assumptions, can nonetheless catalog all that can be imagined. The result is not a 'theory' of evolution, for it is probably true to say that we never see the dynamic directly, but an 'evolutionary map' whose correct use lies in the lineage of our own 'action scripts' arising in the diffusion field of the transitions in our immediate past. To the presumed objectivity of the scientist observing evolution, our model gobbles up the ‘action sequence of the Scientific Revolution’ and makes it an eonic emergent in the very evolution in question. Bringing evolution into the present in this fashion shows at once the clumsy generation of Social Darwinist ideology to which current Darwinism is condemned without relief. This 'evolution' is to be distinguished by what represents it, the 'self-evolution' as free action that we have designated as 'history' in the braiding of these double aspects of one eonic sequence. This is a perfectly valid, and non-genetic, definition of the term 'evolution'. The further advantage of this approach is that 'free action' is quarantined from 'theory interacting with the present of action', with its concomittant Oedipus Effects. Thus, even as we have brought evolution into the present we have placed it out or range, for our proper business is not ‘evolution’ but to fulfill the emergent processes that are amplifications of our prior stream history.

We tend to displace 'evolution' into the distant past, but our analysis brings it into the present and future, even as it separates this from the particulars of realization that constitute our distinction of 'system action' and 'free action'. It is important to note this fact, since we are proceeding through a thicket of ideological questions whose mediation requires correct use of our eonic model. But the account is buffered from even the author's ideological viewpoint by the way each interpretation is forced to speak the language of the 'eonic emergents' of the modern (or other) transitions and these constitute complex zoom targets that enforce a discipline of multiple perspectives. By invoking a 'transition', we avoid the treacherous description of an unseen dynamic and indirectly summon up a 'dialectic' of, e.g. all the interpretations of the Scientific Revolution, seventeenth century sources of liberalism, or the various Enlightenments, French, English, German, etc,... Any one dimensional line of interpretation will immediately produce a tangential 'modernist realization', all to the good, but almost always short of the comprehensive shotgun spectrum by which the eonic sequence establishes its progression beyond reversal against antiquity. In this sense our modern transition truly produces a New Age. 

There is an irony to eonic history, and its modern transition: it starts 'debriefing' its great ancestor, the universal history of the Old Testament. The first order of business is rapid religious change, the Protestant Reformation, and one of its side effects is the rapid emergence of Biblical Criticism. But as we have seen our eonic analysis by stripping the Old Testament of its mythological props leaves in place a distinctively new perspective on what constitutes its core thematic, and we can, to the consternation of religious traditionalists, produce a superior secular upgrade to what is manifestly the Bible's primitive yet beguiling 'eonic history'. This great text might finally come into its own as a secular document. Suddenly the account of divine revelation has turned into an eloquent testimony to man's evolution, and more directly the 'eonic evolution of religion', a complex subject we have not fully unraveled. Our account gives a powerful place to the history described in the Old Testament, but the nature of our model produces something different, and shows us the two levels on which to take this history. The mythological rendering of what we see is 'eonic history' constitutes the aspect of 'free action' giving expression to the system action of the eonic sequence, which must be in part reconstructed via archaeology, and cross comparison with the synchronous transitions, such as the Axial Greek, that it resembles. 

Our prime objective was to demonstrate a non-random pattern, and this we have achieved. Its correct interpretation is second task. A broad general interpretation is relatively easy. A comprehensive description is a considerable undertaking. And through all of this we have produced a powerful challenge to standard accounts of the descent of man, albeit as an empirical pattern, and a theory of the evidence for that. We never 'see' evolution, we only see a coherent phenomenon taken together over millennia, expressed through human activity, and we only interact with and execute the 'action scripts' and eonic emergents that emerge from the transitions in the eonic sequence. The result can only be called 'evolution', and this is counterpointed by its emergent embedded history rising to overtake the eonic sequence itself. 

And we can see that the rise of modernity is the most recent expression of this evolutionary dynamic, giving birth to a New Age of history. We use this phrase because a great deal of religious opposition to modernity wishes to leapfrog modernity in a restoration of premodern forms and institutions. That is a misunderstanding of history, and can only result in confusion. Seen in the context of world history as a whole modern transition is more than just a process of secularization or techno-economic development, and becomes a pluralistic domain in which the forms of antiquity have their place, albeit subject to the mediation of modernist perspectives. It represents a major new stage in the 'eonic' evolution of civilization, moving swiftly from its localized transition to general globalization, and goes some way to account for our conviction that we are defending 'modernity' against the past. Such thinking has suddenly undergone dialectical reversals in a postmodern period, but the logic of our model, and data, is sound, and deftly moves to incorporate its own 'post-transitional' if not 'postmodern' reflections on the qualitative results of the modern period taken as the realization of its agents. 

A kind of disillusioned protest against modernity arises from, for example, the catastrophe of the First World War or the hideous descent into barbarism seen in the Holocaust. But we can see from the nature of our analysis that none of this can be laid at the doorstep of our way of defining 'modernity' (a term we could dispense with) in terms of the eonic sequence, whose action was complete well before these events. To the degree that the historical directionality expressed by our eonic series lays any claim on the future, it was only the 'future' potential relative to that which came before, the medieval world, and the legacies of the 'Axial Age'. The eonic sequence shuts down in the early nineteenth century, and the outcome after that could represent decline, deviation, or a failure to realize the true potential established. Our model says nothing further. You don't get a prize for thinking about the notes of an opera. Performance is all. This implies that we have no absolute claim on our own definitions of modernity apart from the quality of their expression, since these might only be partial scripts drawn from a greater totality of effect that might elude our more partial expressions that 'fly off on a tangent'. We have already suggested that the idea of evolution suffered this fate in the emergence of Darwinism. The unexpected attempt to redefine man in terms of reductionist positivism is thus under suspicion as one of the first 'dumbing down' processes of the New Age, and would have proven surprising to the 'eonic greats' such as Descartes, Spinoza, Newton, or Kant. The latter in fact cogently foresaw precisely this danger and thought through a response to such a possibility. 

The compelling nature of the eonic pattern constitutes its own justification against those, especially apocalyptic reactionaries who denounce modernity as secularized irreligion, who wish to undo modern freedoms in the perpetuation of the outcomes of the Axial Age. This does not mean that the result is a proven theorem of some science of history, nor will it prove especially useful for historicist propagandists promoting the idea of Western Civilization, since we see that the 'European' character of the modern transition is incidental, being bound up in a greater system of evolution. But we can see by empirical demonstration that modernity has better claim to the future of man than the imperialisms of religious adventurers whose ideologies of supernatural legitimation are, we can see, distorted descendants by misinterpretation of the Axial period itself.  

Our result should be taken as an advisory against those who have some apocalyptic hope that the destruction of the modern will initiate a New Age. Nature has completed its own New Age-ing in a corner of Eurasia, completing its business in short order, leaving a totally misleading impression that the result, a stage toward globalization, has something to do with Europe. Proceed as an anti-modern reactionary at your own risk. The eonic model merely warns you of the chaos that will create. The conclusion of the Axial Age gives ample warning of the real difficulty, especially with respect to the Greek transition. All of its major advances disappeared, and the whole system just when into a kind of medieval shutdown. That situation is complex, and not our own, but the rise of the modern was in many ways a recovery operation for the Greek advance, and we should be wary of those who wish once again to destroy this faltering theme-line in the evolution of civilization.  

We have touched on the philosophy of history, a subject often challenged on the grounds of its ideological exploitation of some idea of Big History. But matched to such philosophy is a very specific type of systems model that will remind us to see the limits of our theoretical capacities and return us swiftly to the historical study of actual situations. The complaint of Karl Popper, for example, is that the attempts to predict the future with historical theories suffer a series of paradoxes, indeed, outright contradictions. But we have constructed our model to forestall just this difficulty. We have made two beautifully without any claims of historical inevitability. Statements of dynamics apply only to the past, and as we reach the present our model switches off leaving free acitivity in its wake. 

Thus we have distinguished two things, the modern transition, and the New Age of modernity, so to speak, that begins after the divide generated by that transition. Note the way that historical dynamism, which we call 'eonic determination', applies only to transitions, and that there is an alternation in the wake of that dynamic into the secondary process we call 'free action'. The slight fall-off in creative innovation (cultural, not technological) after the Great Divide confirms the prediction of this model. There are two aspects or processes to this dynamism. The thrust of the transition, which peaks at the close of the eighteenth century, and the take-off of the overall system set in motion.