THE CROP CYCLE AND THE BUSINESS CYCLE 319
ultra-rationalistic account of the psychology of business cycles were
to be an adverse one on the whole, it seemed already certain that there
would be a consensus in favour of looking for a psychological explanation
of some kind, on one plane or other of psychic life, as opposed to a physical
explanation of these fluctuations in the volume and profit of industrial
economic activity in a latter-day Western World.

The Human Spirit's Educational Use of a Physical Generation Cycle as a
Psychological Regulator of Social Change

The Crop-Yield Cycle that had been more or less authoritatively pro-
nounced not to be the generator of the business cycles current in an
industrialized world was a meteorological cycle of a longer wave-length
than the astronomical Year Cycle or Day Cycle; but there was another
physical cycle, with a longer wave-length again, which differed from
both the Crop-Yield Cycle and the Annual Cycle of the Seasons, but
resembled the Day-and-Night Cycle, in exerting its dominion over the
Spirit of Man, not at two removes, through elements in his terrestrial
environment out of which he made his living, but at one remove only,
through a biological law which in this case was a law governing the
physical self-perpetuation of the Human Race. This biological cycle was,
of course, the Generation Cycle of birth, growth, life-work, procreation,
and senescence leading up to a death which left the field clear for the
time-expired individual human being's successors. The wave-length of
this Generation Cycle varied between lower and upper limits of about a
quarter and about a third of a century in response to differences in social
customs and in the average expectation of life in different societies at divers
times and places; and it was indisputable that the periodic breaks in the
continuity of life arising from the recurrent replacement of representa-
tives of one generation by representatives of another at each successive
revolution of the Birth-and-Death Cycle produced a rhythm of their
own in human affairs which made itself felt in the gait of human history.
Have we here encountered a periodic rhythm which, though current in
a biological medium, external to Man's psychic and spiritual nature,
nevertheless held Man's psychic and spiritual nature under its sway and
constrained the Soul to dance to Mortality's tune?

A sinister 'Dance of Death* which seems to mock Man's spiritual
ideals and aspirations by cutting them off brutally with swiftly recurrent
sweeps of an inhuman scythe had been apt to haunt men's imaginations
in unsettled times, as, for example, at the transition from the medieval to
the modern chapter of Western history on the evidence of contemporary
German woodcuts,1 and during a post-Minoan interregnum on the evi-
dence of a passage in the Iliad that has been quoted already in this
Study.2 But Nature had a retort to both a Homeric pathos and a Teutonic
morbidity which had been cast for her into biting verse by a poet-philo-
sopher who had risen above all self-regarding emotional reactions to the
spectacle of the procession of the generations of Man.

1 e.g. the woodcut on fol. cclxiiii of the Nuremberg Chronicle, cited on p. 178, n. 6,
above.

2 Iliad, Book VI, 1L 146-9, quoted in III. iii. 357.