LAWS OF SUBCONSCIOUS HUMAN NATURE 327
Western history a series of war-and-peace cycles which had started in
A.D. 1494 was in its 45 8th year and its fourth cycle in A.D. 1952; in
Hellenic history a series that had started in 321 B.C. had run through 290
years and three cycles before it had been wound up in 31 B.C.; in Sinic
history, 459 (or 550) years and five cycles had elapsed before a series
that had started in 680 (or 771) B.C. had been wound up in 221 B.C.1
Moreover, each of the first two series was, as we have seen,2 only the
second chapter of an older and longer story. In the history of each of
these civilizations, and of others as well, we can trace these series of war-
and-peace cycles in the relations between parochial sovereign states back
into the afflicted civilization's growth-phase; we can watch the general
wars that the civilization periodically inflicts on itself progressively taking
a greater toll of the war-making society's energies until, sooner or later,
one of these catastrophes precipitates a social breakdown; and from that
epoch-making point we can follow the series of war-and-peace cycles
working itself out to its conclusion through a Time of Troubles whose
standard length we have found empirically to be of the order of approxi-
mately four centuries. A Time of Troubles, however, is no more than
one phase of a far longer process of social disintegration; Times of
Troubles are apt to be followed by universal states, and these, too, seem
to run to a standard length of about four hundred years, which they
sometimes exceed when they encroach upon the ensuing interregnum
that is apt to intervene between the dissolution of a disintegrating civili-
zation and the emergence of a successor affiliated to it. Thus the total
Time-span taken by a series of war-and-peace cycles may vary between
a minimum of 400 years and a maximum of 600, or perhaps even more,
while the total Time-span taken by the disintegration of a civilization
may vary between a minimum of 800 years and a maximum of not much
less than i, i oo. Will a psychological explanation of regularities in human
affairs, which has served us up to this point, avail to account for the uni-
form recurrence of social processes, phase for phase in an identical
sequence and measure for measure on an identical Time-scale, when
these processes uniformly recurring in the histories of divers civiliza-
tions expand over periods which are many times longer, not only than
the individual experience of a single life-time, but also than the cumula-
tive experience of a concatenation of three or four generation cycles?
Considering that, on the level of personal consciousness, the span of
continuous human experience is confined within the limits of a single
life-time, our answer to our question would have been bound to be in the
negative if, in our eyes, the intellectual and volitional surface of the
Psyche had been the whole of the Psyche, as the Hellenic discoverers of
the Intellect were prone to assume that it was.

It is true that even the fathers of Hellenic philosophy were not so
thoroughly blinded by the dazzling light of a newly discovered Reason
as to be altogether without an inkling of an irrational psychic life brewing
below this brightly illuminated surface of the Psyche in the dark deeps of
a subconscious abyss. Aristotle perceived and declared that *the Intellect

1 Sec Tables II and III, on pp. 268-9 aod a73» above.

2 See pp. 282-3, above.