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If we examine the three types of change from the point of view of their internal structure we find an additional profound difference between the third and the first two, one that accounts for the notable difference between the responses they evoke.

The first two types of change occur within the inward and immanent structure of the society.

The first involves a simple shift of interests in the society.

The second involves something deeper, but its characteristic form focuses on a shift in policy for the community, not in the truth on which the community rests.

Thus in both types attention is focused on the community itself, and its phenomenological life.

The third type, however, wrenches attention from the life of action and interests in the community and focuses it on the ground of being on which the community depends for its existence.

Voegelin has analyzed this experience in the case of the stable, healthy community.

There the community, faced with the need to formulate policy on the level of absolute justice, can find the answer to its problem in the absolute truth which it holds as partially experienced.

This, however, cannot be done by a community whose very experience of truth is confused and incoherent: it has no absolute standard, and consequently cannot distinguish the absolute from the contingent.

It has lost its ground of being and floats in a mist of appearances.

Relativism and equality are its characteristic diseases.

Precisely at the moment when it has lost its vision the mind of the community turns out from itself in a search for the ontological standard whereby it can measure itself.

For paradigmatic history `` breaks '' rather than unfolds precisely when the movement is from order to disorder, and not from one order to a new order.

The liberal-conservative split, to define it further, derives from a basic difference concerning the existential status of standard sought and about the spiritual experience that leads to its identification.