First Principles · Herbert Spencer
CHAPTER XI. THE RHYTHM OF MOTION.
There are the recurring bars, in each of which there is a primary and a secondary beat. There is the alternate increase and decrease of muscular strain, implied by the ascents and descents to the higher and lower notes—ascents and descents composed of smaller waves, breaking the rises and falls of the larger ones, in a mode peculiar to each melody. And then we have, further, the alternation of _piano_ and _forte_ passages. That these several kinds of rhythm, characterizing æsthetic expression, are not, in the common sense of the word, artificial, but are intenser forms of an undulatory movement habitually generated by feeling in its bodily discharge, is shown by the fact that they are all traceable in ordinary speech; which in every sentence has its primary and secondary emphases, and its cadence containing a chief rise and fall complicated with subordinate rises and falls; and which is accompanied by a more or less oscillatory action of the limbs when the emotion is great. Still longer undulations may be observed by every one, in himself and in others, on occasions of extreme pleasure or extreme pain. Note, in the first place, that pain having its origin in bodily disorder, is nearly always perceptibly rhythmical.
During hours in which it never actually ceases, it has its variations of intensity—fits or paroxysms; and then after these hours of suffering there usually come hours of comparative ease. Moral pain has the like smaller and larger waves. One possessed by intense grief does not utter continuous moans, or shed tears with an equable rapidity; but these signs of passion come in recurring bursts. Then after a time during which such stronger and weaker waves of emotion alternate, there comes a calm—a time of comparative deadness; to which again succeeds another interval, when dull sorrow rises afresh into acute anguish, with its series of paroxysms. Similarly in great delight, especially as manifested by children who have its display less under control, there are visible variations in the intensity of feeling shown—fits of laughter and dancing about, separated by pauses in which smiles, and other slight manifestations of pleasure, suffice to discharge the lessened excitement. Nor are there wanting evidences of mental undulations greater in length than any of these—undulations which take weeks, or months, or years, to complete themselves. We continually hear of moods which recur at intervals. Very many persons have their epochs of vivacity and depression. There are periods of industry following periods of idleness; and times at which particular subjects or tastes are cultivated with zeal, alternating with times at which they are neglected. Respecting which slow oscillations, the only qualification to be made is, that being affected by numerous influences, they are comparatively irregular.
Passing from external to internal changes, we meet with this backward and forward movement under many forms. In the currents of commerce it is especially conspicuous. Exchange during early times is almost wholly carried on at fairs, held at long intervals in the chief centres of population. The flux and reflux of people and commodities which each of these exhibits, becomes more frequent as national development leads to greater social activity. The more rapid rhythm of weekly markets begins to supersede the slow rhythm of fairs. And eventually the process of exchange becomes at certain places so active, as to bring about daily meetings of buyers and sellers—a daily wave of accumulation and distribution of cotton, or corn, or capital. If from exchange we turn to production and consumption, we see undulations, much longer indeed in their periods, but almost equally obvious. Supply and demand are never completely adapted to each other; but each of them from time to time in excess, leads presently to an excess of the other. Farmers who have one season produced wheat very abundantly, are disgusted with the consequent low price; and next season, sowing a much smaller quantity, bring to market a deficient crop; whence follows a converse effect. Consumption undergoes parallel undulations that need not be specified.
The balancing of supplies between different districts, too, entails analogous oscillations. A place at which some necessary of life is scarce, becomes a place to which currents of it are set up from other places where it is relatively abundant; and these currents from all sides lead to a wave of accumulation where they meet—a glut: whence follows a recoil—a partial return of the currents. But the undulatory character of these actions is perhaps best seen in the rises and falls of prices. These, given in numerical measures which may be tabulated and reduced to diagrams, show us in the clearest manner how commercial movements are compounded of oscillations of various magnitudes. The price of consols or the price of wheat, as thus represented, is seen to undergo vast ascents and descents whose highest and lowest points are reached only in the course of years. These largest waves of variation are broken by others extending over periods of perhaps many months. On these again come others having a week or two’s duration. And were the changes marked in greater detail, we should have the smaller undulations that take place each day, and the still smaller ones which brokers 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 roughened by a minute ripple. Similar diagrammatic representations of births, marriages, and deaths, of disease, of crime, of pauperism, exhibit involved conflicts of rhythmical motions 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 occasional revivals of smaller magnitude, has its long periods of exaltation and depression—generations of belief and self-mortification, following generations of indifference and laxity. 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 phenomena 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 national 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 before: 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 time to time revives extinct types of dress, these always re-appear with decided modifications.
The opposing tension into which the expended momentum has been transformed, then generates a second recoil; and so on continually—the vibration eventually ceasing only because at each movement a certain amount of force goes in creating atmospheric and etherial undulations. Now it needs but to contemplate this repeated action and reaction, to see that it is, like every action and reaction, a consequence of the persistence of force. The force exerted by the finger in bending the prong cannot disappear. Under what form then does it exist? It exists under the form of that cohesive tension which it has generated among the particles. This cohesive tension cannot cease without an equivalent result. What is its equivalent result? The momentum generated in the prong while being carried back to its position of rest. This momentum too—what becomes of it? It must either continue as momentum, or produce some correlative force of equal amount. It cannot continue as momentum, since change of place is resisted by the cohesion of the parts; and thus it gradually disappears by being transformed into tension among these parts. This is re-transformed into the equivalent momentum; and so on continuously. If instead of motion that is directly antagonized by the cohesion of matter, we consider motion through space, the same truth presents itself under another form.
Though here no opposing force seems at work, and therefore no cause of rhythm is apparent, yet its own accumulated momentum must eventually carry the moving body beyond the body attracting it; and so must become a force at variance with that which generated it. From this conflict, rhythm necessarily results as in the foregoing case. The force embodied as momentum in a given direction, cannot be destroyed; and if it eventually disappears, it re-appears in the reaction on the retarding body; which begins afresh to draw the now arrested mass back from its aphelion. The only conditions under which there could be absence of rhythm—the only conditions, that is, under which there could be a continuous motion through space in the same straight line for ever, would be the existence of an infinity void of everything but the moving body. And neither of these conditions can be represented in thought. Infinity is inconceivable; and so also is a motion which never had a commencement in some pre-existing source of power. Thus, then, rhythm is a necessary characteristic of all motion. Given the coexistence everywhere of antagonist forces—a postulate which, as we have seen, is necessitated by the form of our experience—and rhythm is an inevitable corollary from the persistence of force. Hence, throughout that re-arrangement of parts which constitutes Evolution, we must nowhere expect to see the change from one position of things to another, effected by continuous movement in the same direction. Be it in that kind of Evolution which the inorganic creation presents, or in that presented by the organic creation, we shall everywhere find a periodicity of action and reaction—a backward and forward motion, of which progress is a differential result. ----- Footnote 15: After having for some years supposed myself alone in the belief that all motion is rhythmical, I discovered that my friend Professor Tyndall also held this doctrine.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.