36 THE CRIME OF PROMETHEUS

of language for the indulgence of general bad taste;in claim-
ing that they are regenerated through their own illumina-
tion and that they can give true accounts of themselves, they
desecrate language, they blaspheme, and they give the aud-
ience false communion in the unsavory spectacle of deprav-
ity sympathetically presented.

Habits of sympathy promote a precocious sensitivity
to pleasure and pain and a vast capacity for vicarious feeling.
The bulk of his knowledge about the human state is derived
from this capacity of the mass-man for easy simulation. He is
an insatiable, omniverous spectator of his scene and he ac-
cordingly “knows” joy and suffering by his feeling apprecia-
tion of their outward signs. His lore thus reduces the human
agony to a condition of physical pain and represents joy as
the state of animal bliss. And as he finds only listless, worried
joy in his delights, he likewise finds no purification througn his
pains. His vision of his agony consists in the ennui and bit-
teruess of his disillusionment. He is alone with his body and
uneasy with it. His bad taste nauseates him. His abstention
rom the desired pleasures of savagery emasculates him. Could
he but rid himself of his bad conscience he would prepare
the moral way for an animal society. This is the true desire
born of his exhaustion. He has found his freedom a monstrous,
unthinkable void, and he has learned no language by which
he can conjure on his stage aught but the self-confessing spec-
tre of bad taste. He is anempty vessel and can find
nothing with which to refresh himself, for his Modern Spir-
t is impotent and can but keep guard, unlovingly, amused,
watching the betrayal inherent in universal brotherhood
bloom under his dark sun as the “brothers’’ come to the final,
violent division of their spoils.

Thus man, left to his natural devices, becomes a brute
that has lost its innocence and therefore its hope of godliness.
He is once more the primative Titan man “‘rushing headlong
into death’” for whom Prometheus perpetrated his great crime.
Yet Prometheus lies in chains while his Nemesis presides

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