an excessive value upon placidity of existence. They refused to face the necessities for social reform imposed by the new industrial system, and they are now refusing to face the necessities for intellectual reform imposed by the new knowledge. The middle class pessimism over the future of the world comes from a confusion between civilization and security. In the immediate future there will be less security than in the immediate past, less stability. It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been the unstable ages.'

998

We come, then, to an inevitable conclusion: in the realm of ideas standardization means death. Society cannot afford to stamp out variations from type; they are the biological steps by which the race advances. It is by the uniqueness, the differentiation, of a St. Francis, a Goethe, or a Darwin that we have any civilization at all. No society can be healthy which does not contain strong ingredients of non-conformity. No mass opinion has any claim to validity which is not continually challenged by the critical judgment of the individual.

In 1813 eighteen workmen died on the gallows at York, England, on the charge of destroying machinery. They had resented the coming of the new civilization, they had feared the extension of its power, and they had struck out blindly to destroy it. It was a pathetic, foolish act. It was like trying to stop a glacier with a firecracker. Remorselessly and irresistibly the machine age has ploughed its way across the life of man. To-day we are in the complete grip of its gigantic force. Some of its consequences we know to be appalling; some we know to be good. In the midst of the revolution we can scarcely tell the good from the bad, so great is the upheaval. But this we know: that if as an incident of the machine process the opinion of the individual becomes more hampered in expression, and diversity and spontaneity are checked, then there are no compensatory advantages that can outweigh the disaster. Then, indeed, are we headed for spiritual bankruptcy. The things that make life worth preserving are not created by mechanism, nor are they born of organization, however efficient. They come only from the freedom of the human soul.

Chapter IV

THE MACHINE AND LEISURE

"What would you gain, ye seekers,

with your striving,

Or what vast Babel raise you on

your shoulders?

You multiply distresses, and your

children

Surely will curse you."

-SANTAYANA.

WHERE is our machine civilization headed? It has sprung so suddenly upon us and its pace is so swift that we are benumbed in our attempts to plot its course. We know how it started, but where will it end? And what is it doing to us? And what will its ultimate effects be upon the human race crowded together on a planet that is suddenly much too small?

We can only guess at the answers. Destiny is

94

running the film through the projector much too fast, and the picture is streaked and blurred. How the story is developing and whether it bodes good or ill for humanity we do not really know. One observer, Count Hermann Keyserling, sees everywhere the emergence of the "chauffeur type”— "primitive man made technical"-hypnotized by machinery, disavowing the old cultures, finding spiritual satisfactions in the new sense of physical power. Because what is technical is easily grasped by people in all stages of development, he concludes that we are now entering upon a "mass age," chauffeurs ruled by chauffeurs, a dominance by mere numbers worshipping mechanistic gods, an interregnum between the old culture that is dying and the new culture that is yet to be born. But Keyserling refuses to believe that the dominance of mechanism is more than temporary. "The technical can hardly continue to hold captive the imagination of mankind," he says. "The element of surprise is gone and will never return, not even if it should be proved possible to bring the moon down to the earth; for fundamentally every future possibility is already predicted only that which distinguishes can possibly be a goal for the ambitions. Once the technical has

and

become, as it inevitably must, a matter of course then all of its achievements will have become the tacitly accepted foundation of a subsequent state of things.' Then and then only will a new culture arise, centuries hence, perhaps, when the products of the physical sciences have completely broken down the barriers of race, nation, and creed-a universal culture dominated by the new type, the "world-man." In the meantime, however, for ourselves and our children, we seem to be doomed to wander "between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born."

But however discouraging the immediate outlook, Keyserling and his general school of thought are emphatic in believing that nothing is to be gained by trying to escape from mechanism or revolting against its control. The trail to the new culture lies through mechanism. By no other route can that objective be reached. "Those who preach the doctrine of 'back from the technical' are nothing else than bad romanticists," says Keyserling, and from laboratories and factories the world over comes a complacent "amen." Indeed, the apologia for the modern business and economic system is based on the assumption that somewhere at the end of the trail, and even en