The climax of civilisation / by Correa Moylan Walsh.

  • Correa Moylan Walsh
Date:
1917
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The climax of civilisation / by Correa Moylan Walsh. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    58/170 (page 44)
    COMPARISON OF CYCLES THE typical cycles are necessarily written in an absolute form, from which actual cycles depart in greater or less de- gree. The subsequent cycles always retain something from the last period of the preceding, and therefore start from a higher level, which. continues to be maintained all through. For example, in the typical scheme it could be said that the first period is one of status, which changes in the later periods to one of contract. In actuality there is nothing so absolute as this. In the classic civilisations the stage of contract reached was not so advanced as in ours, while on the other hand its stage of status was more complete than the corres- ponding stage at the beginning of our cycle. There is a difference also in the comparative duration of the successive periods. The earliest civilisations we know of, in Egypt and Mesopotamia, came to the last condition of despotism so quickly, and it continued so long, that it seems to occupy the whole of their history, though this may be due to the obscurity in which their origin is shrouded. In the later and better known civilisations of Greece and Rome the last period has been much shorter, except in the almost negligible Byzantine empire; and the preceding periods of the rule of priests and warriors under kings and in aristocracies, and of the rich in a republican form (the form of a commonwealth), were much longer. In those early and oriental civilisations the transitions from the primitive kings to the final despots seems to have been immediate, or through so short an inter- vening period of republicanism that this has dropped out of the record. More probably, the kings, who were primarily the chiefs among the aristocracy, by pandering to the people became the people’s representatives and, subduing the aris- tocrats, came to be looked up to by all as masters. In the Greco-Roman civilisation not only the stages of kingship and