THE CRIME OF PROMETHEUS 33

tent things, becomes fragmented. The mass-man serves
merely as machinery for channeling information into a
common sink. Since the “thingness’’ of a thing is best com-
municated by shared sensations of witnesses, language
becomes intensified as sense-signs attaching to events. Its
communicants become sensitives instead of thinkers. They
are turned, by their nature-logic, toward matter as sympa-
thetic witnessss of its manifold appearance. They are used
as a choral medium through which is conducted the aberrated
duet of universal being with matter, the resonance
of its monologue. Their thought, turned aside from reason,
is made into a self-binding machinery for going through
matter, spiritualizing it into dimension. Since matter can
be penetrated only by taking one part of it after the other,
in units of time, the fashioning of the yardstick time as a
universal measure parallels the sensitizing of thought as
a tool of knowledge. Inasmuch as infinite time is the vehicle
of the universal monologue, the time problem lies at the
heart of modern logic as offering its sole condition of proof.

Rootless time, conditioning the future in producing it,
yet has no direction in the past, and the forward-looking urge
of our uprooted mass-man induces a social amnesia consis-
tent with the aims of an egotistic society that holds all
spiritual pain to be evil heritage from the past. Past history
is thence reconceived as having been but an excrescence, a
sport, a mere direction, tentative and obscure, largely
misdirection, of time’s onward stride, and the time-serving
language of the mass- man, draining his memory of objective
truth, shakes him free from intellectual agony by condition.
ing him as a sensitive conductor of the product-future.
Animal organization is thus being accomplished without
reference to truth, and a technical, denotative language is
being perfected in efficiency even while the principles of its
formation elude definition.

His existential language having rendered him a spirit-
ual mute and his many-voiced enlightenment having blind-