278 THE RHYTHM OF MOTION. 



telegraph from hour to hour. The whole outline would 

 show a complication like that of a vast ocean-swell, on whose 

 surface there rise large billows, which themselves bear 

 waves of moderate size, covered by wavelets, that are rough- 

 ened by a minute ripple. Similar diagramatic representa- 

 tions of births, marriages, and deaths, of disease, of crime, 

 of pauperism, exhibit involved conflicts of rhythmical mo- 

 tions throughout society under these several aspects. 



There are like characteristics in social changes of a more 

 complex kind. Both in England and among continental 

 nations, the action and reaction of political progress have 

 come to be generally recognized. Religion, besides its occa- 

 sional revivals of smaller magnitude, has its long periods of 

 exaltation and depression — generations of belief and self- 

 mortification, following generations of indifference and lax- 

 ity. There are poetical epochs, and epochs in which the 

 sense of the beautiful seems almost dormant. Philosophy, 

 after having been awhile predominant, lapses for a long 

 season into neglect; and then again slowly revives. Each 

 science has its eras of deductive reasoning, and its eras when 

 attention is chiefly directed to collecting and colligating 

 facts. And how in such minor but more obtrusive phenom- 

 ena as those of fashion, there are ever going on oscillations 

 from one extreme to the other, is a trite observation. 



As may be foreseen, social rhythms well illustrate the 

 irregularity that results from combination of many causes. 

 Where the variations are those of one simple element in na- 

 tional life, as the supply of a particular commodity, we do 

 indeed witness a return, after many involved movements, to 

 a previous condition — the price may become what it was be- 

 fore: implying a like relative abundance. But where the 

 action is one into which many factors enter, there is never 

 a recurrence of exactly the same state. A political reaction 

 never brings round just the old form of things. The 

 rationalism of the present day differs widely from the 

 rationalism of the last century. And though fashion from 



