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30 THE CRIME OF PROMETHEUS

of parts. It finds no point of rest or return, no memory base,
in this “internal unity.” The individual ego, when cut off
from its true center in Self, needs must fall from its essence.
In its unceasing moral and intellectual deviation from its
center it losesits ground in rational society. It forms a field for
motion. It is therein that man falls infinitely downward toward
material existence. Losing his ““definition”” he decreases steadi-
ly in stature and becomes a man of the mass. He wills to for-
get who he is. Without purpose, he puts his faith in future
happiness, yet he is not capable of a future. He is fit only to
reccive rules that will enable him to function in the limits
igiven by his environment. Happiness is laid out for him in
many gravelled paths but he no longer owns any fate. He
lacks power for good or ill. He is savagely innocent. Author-
ity and responsibility become diffusely scattered through
the entire mass organization and therefore exist only ficti-
tiously, in the guise of a universal mass tyranny, which
enjoins that the individual, cut off from his true center, is
perforce obliged to be free.

Left alone with his freedom, the individual knows the
misery of his abandonment. He discovers himself tricked,
freighted with matter, and begins to abominate himself
as a freak and buffoon ofthe Modern Spirit. Heis the prod-
uct of ancient betrayal. The paths leading therefrom to
universal suicide are various, inevitable, and even weil-
ordered. :

Men thus isolated and ego-directed become increasingly
conditioned by their field of motion to expend themselves
within natural limits, like plants or animals, to exfoliate,
as if produced by some infinite hypothetical syllogism of
pure being, into appearances. They are increasingly compel-
led to become things. These individual units cannot form a
society; they can only be fused into a mass.

Thus the human community becomes spiritually empty
as its social organization increases in complexity. The mass
coheres through atomization. Its language, reduced to a