The fate of organic aggregates is sealed from the very start of
their career. Organic societies, if left to themselves, may become
stationary, or static, as it is sometimes termed, stagnating for cen-
turies, like Egypt, India, China, and Byzantium, until destroyed by
the onset of a young, vigorous society in which the structural elements
have not yet gone far in their development, the living individual ele-
ments having still retained their social vitality and independent upper,
personal consciousness, so that the social self has not yet sunk into the
decadent, massive, subconscious with its characteristic abnormal sug-
gestibility, and its hypnotic trance state. This young aggressive aggre-
gate, once it has taken the course of organic, social development is,
in its turn doomed to a similar fate. The ancient Babylonian and Hit-
tite empires were destroyed by the Assyrian, the Assyrian and Egyp-
tian empires by the Persian, the vast Persian empire by the Mace-
donian. After undergoing a process of segmentation the Macedonian
empire succumbed to the iron grip of the Roman imperial rule. The
Roman empire in its turn underwent a process of segmentation, into
the western and eastern portion. The western portion fell a prey to
the Germanic barbarians, while the eastern, the Byzantine empire,
remained for centuries in a state of ossification, until destroyed by
the onslaught of the Turks.
Boris Sidis 47



In modern times we witnessed the fall of the Chinese empire at
the hands of the Japanese, the great crash of the mighty Russian and
structurally well organized German empire, along with Austro-Hun-
garian and Turkish empires, all falling together into heaps of ruins
in the great hurricane of the world war.
