28 THE CRIMEOF PROMETHEUS

who appear on the scene, guiding them thus back on the
right path. The audience remains, for all its feeling of shared
guilt, radically innocent, irresponsible, and safe from the
drama, capable of engorging all possible evil though its
-abysmal understanding. All its pleasure is in just in “*knowing,”’
and its moral elevation is attained through a tacit belief
‘that it can purify the scene by receiving the confessions of
‘the actors.

Yet, what indeed does this knowing, this common eye,
tequire of the actors on its stage? To whom is their lan-
guage addressed, what spirit invoked? What quality of mind
enlightens the scene? How could that higher man withstand
its glare?

The eye, image of reason and maker of reason’s images, 1s
kept chaste by reason, which 1s the spiritual palate for god-es-
sence. The evil eye of the Modern Spirit, however, has turned
reason aside from its rightful object and has evoked an image
unequaled in monstrosity by any of old fable. On the analogy
of reason, he has postulated a universal being, as god,
state, idea, as the fictitious father of the brotherhood of man
and as the son-spouse of Maya. Whereas by Prometheus’ sac-
rifice the father-god was cheated of his sons, the Modern
Spirit offers men a spurious father in the concept of a  be-
ing who incarnates their brotherhood and whose will is to
possess, comprehend, and create and become manifest through
matter. This is pure egotism conceived as deity. Itis an anal-
ogous rational goal used to convince men of their ““rationality”
and 1t 1s a surrogate god used to obliterate in men all memory
of the sacred Classictsm of their past. It is now ripening
to fulness under the eye and genius of our Modern Spirit,
that ghoul of retribution lurking in Prometheus’ crime. This
Nemesis is but an emasculated shadow of the mighty crim-
inal, yet his feeble strength is equal to his task of seeing
to 1ts conclusion the Promethean cycle, since he encounters
scarcely any resistance the world over.

Whereas Greek science disdained as its proper pursuit

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