58 W. G. Langzvorthy Taylor 



The plain fact that a crisis is looked upon as an interruption 

 of progress made it necessary that we should inspect the nature 

 of progress before attempting to understand a crisis. The fur- 

 ther fact that experience so far has been that the interruption to 

 progress called a crisis has not been permanent leads us to inquire 

 whether the crisis may not be assigned a place in the general 

 scheme of economic progress. Remedies for the unpleasant inci- 

 dents of crises will be in order when once we understand their 

 nature. It is safe, however, to predict that the remedies will not 

 consist in a disorganization of business by an attempt to introduce 

 an ideal, — by directly hindering the accumulation of capital by 

 the passing of minimum wage- or price-laws, or by attempting 

 to preserve "competition" by confining business to small industry. 



Economic progress has been here treated as a movement of 

 mankind upward through a series of environments which, in the 

 first instance, are to be regarded provisionally as potentially exist- 

 ing in a rising psychic series, but unoccupied beyond the point to 

 which industrial mankind is actually arrived. Man progresses 

 through an impulse to live a more psychic life, to acquire more 

 psychic standards. As he progresses, however, the conception 

 of environment must change. Starting out with the idea, per- 

 haps, that environment is absolutely or unchangeably material- 

 istic, he must perceive, if he only can take a reasonably long 

 period into account, that the environment is only relatively mate- 

 rialistic, not absolutely nor unchangeably so. The environment 

 assumes more and more the aspect of a conjuncture. And this 

 must be so, since his life is continually becoming more psychic. 

 As he learns to "annihilate time and space," his environment or 

 conjuncture must itself become less material, since otherwise it 

 would not preserve a fairly constant relation with him, and 

 Nature's continuity would be broken. More action, more "anni- 

 hilation of time and space," involve more active cerebration, a 

 more mental life, and hence justify the general characterization 

 of progress as "psychic." 



Moreover, man progresses by a process of feeling his way, by 

 a series of rebuffs administered by the controlling limits of the old 

 environments. The successful experiments, however, become 



58 



