THE CRIME OF PROMETHEUS 31

technical apparatus, moves and conditions it in terms
of force and matter. Through its collective base of radic-
ally separate but morally identical particles connected by
inherent force, the mass becomes homogeneous in appearance
and warm with mutual recognition of lonely predicaments
in its common awareness of being trapped. It is quick to
sympathize and to mimic. It fuses through feeling. Yetit
is compassionately indifferent to itself. Lacking common
spiritual bread its members remain fundamentally alien to
each other, though all voice the belief that social union can
be achieved eventually through technological effort, wherein
each may fulfil himself as a unique dimension. As discrete
particles they are homeless and exiled from rational order,
and though the mass morality ordains that a place be made
for each, its house, lacking the pillars of reason to support
authority, is insufficient to shelter a society. It but provides
an open field. It has shrunk to a hive of indefinitely exten-
sible cells, the ultimate containment of free egos regarded
as moral ends. Its full authority is simply “in itself,”’ a connec-
tive function shared and perpetuated by all its members by
virtue of their existence as forces. Governed thus internally,
this surrogate society is an infinitely open system of induction
of members into its collection, but it is formally closed.

With the ground for social order eroded, the basis for
language slips away. Dialogue with the spirit of pure egotism
is an impossibility. One can but tender it one’s own bit of
monologue. So essentially cut off from discourse, the mass-
man is condemned to perpetual aloneness. Lacking spirit-
ual center, he experiences an animal terror at the space he
must traverse in his comprehension of the material universe
and a human terror of the endless time that measures his
solitudinous path. The terrible fact of his existence is that
he is lone, free, and fateless, an ultimate thing-in-itself
moving into void and speaking into abysmal silence. As an
individual he cannot survive. He is without language.

He thus becomes a votary of the Modern Spirit of lan-