B e

32 THE CRIME OF PROMETHEUS

guage which, wearing the mask of Self, proffers him a spur-
ious sacrament of speech, a logic derived from analogues
of ideas—the concept of classes of events. The members of
these classes obtain meaning not from a realm of essence,
but they are conceived as freely bound events being united
into a term through their own inner force. Since the only
definition for such a class is an entailing force of the class
“in itself,” a field relation between members, its concept is
basically dual. There is no center for a class of events to
rest on. Its concept renders evena tautology contradictory.
Thus the paradox rooted in an ego-centered society reappears
in modern logic.

This logic thus has no principle of self-consistency.
Its implicit aim is to yield formulas of necessary entailment of
itself, to achieve its own self-binding through future events.

i It becomes a monologue that ever only tends to approach
self-proof, for it lacks essential terms. It forms the basis
for a wholly natural language that can suck the mass-man
into dogmatic obedience to its tenet that truth always waits
to be produced by his corporate brotherhood. Thus the speech
of the mass-man becomes a collection of individual mono- *
logues conceived as contributing to the infinite monologue of
pure being, the comprehensive summation of all speech
parts at some distant time. The Modern Spirit is engaged
in conditioning men to spiritual silence so that a uniform
technique of inquiry may be perfected for the increase
and consumption of information in a purely technological
universe of discourse, the ultimate monologue of spirit
voided into matter.

Faith in the perfectibility of this inquisitorial mono-
logue forms in the mass its ground for unanimity and opti-
mism in a commonly held future. The mass, in merely being
a consensus of witnesses of events, arrogates to itself, in
the name of this being’s perfect self-proof and in abro-
gation of reason, the ultimate tribunal of verification. Thus
language, like society, grounded in the production of exis-