CHAPTER 4

The Wheel of History
yJLL NON-INSPIRATIONAL OR NON-INTUITIVE ATTEMPTS -/jL to look into the future are necessarily based on experience, i.e. on the past, and on the assumption that like causes will have like effects.
However, there are large spheres of human endeavour in which such simple empirical predictions are impossible or ex- tremely difficult to make. Thus most historians would agree that past historical events cannot simply be projected into the histor- ical future, i.e. that there is no such thing as the "lesson of history". Laymen, on the other hand, have never been content to consider the past as of no more than "historical" interest, and have tried instead to predict the future, on the questionable assumption that history repeats itself. Those who believe that they can, in fact, make historical predictions from past events, can, by and large, be divided into two groups: those who look upon history as a chain of cyclic events, and those who consider it to be linear, i.e. without beginning or end. Still, even the second group recognises periodic similarities in the appearance of certain segments of the line so that, when all is said and done, the two groups are not quite as radically opposed to each other as might be supposed. The only real difference is that the former look upon cycles as objective phenomena, and the latter as a mere working hypothesis — one of many possible approaches to history.
The conception that world history proceeds by cycles is one of the oldest and most persistent human beliefs. The greatest philosophers and the greatest dunces have always shared a common faith that what happened must; inevitably happen again, even though there is not a shred of evidence to support this contention. In fact it is no more rational than the astrological belief that man's fate is determined by the revolutions of the planets.
According to Brahmism, for instance, the individual periods of a given historical cycle make up the calendar of the gods. In the same way that the "human" year was thought to consist of
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