But since sensory information is the only information, only the facts are demonstrably true, and we will have to use another measure for other kinds of statements.  Since we cannot establish truth,we will establish validity,but we must not forget that validity as a measure is only a means, a crutch we are using because truth, the end, is beyond our reach.  Statements of fact have an unconditional validity.  "In every recorded test, water has boiled at one hundred degrees centigrade" is a statement of fact.  "Water boils at one hundred degrees centigrade" is an interpretation which assumes, beyond the facts, a reality consistent across time.  The assumption makes possible the statements of science, which we accept in practice as unconditionally valid because they are directly verifiable.  Statements which are not directly verifiable we must test indirectly, as they have factual consequences (if they have none, they are useless), and ascribe to them a conditional validity depending on the immediacy of the consequences.  Statements may have verifiable consequences in several ways.

A leopard learns to hunt antelope by trial and error.  Instinct gives him a method, but vaguely; he must perfect a technique.  Each attempt is a learning experience, filed as uncountable sense impressions under "antelope," and as the leopard's "antelope" comes to resemble a real antelope more closely, the leopard is less often hungry.  The leopard builds an antelope block by block with sense impressions.  The structure is an empirical concept, a group of sense impressions unified by their common origin in material reality.  Much human learning is identical; it is the building of empirical concepts, triggered by objects and events-- trees trigger "tree" and sunsets trigger "sunset."  As we learn, more objects and events trigger concepts, and experience refines them.  The concept "tree" is not accessible to the senses; it is not directly verifiable, but all of its immediate consequences are.  We can give statements using empirical concepts the highest conditional validity.

When we have gathered the facts that empirical concepts lead us to, patterns appear that empirical concepts cannot explain, and we must search for hypotheses which can explain them.  These hypotheses will be concepts without empirical content, so they will have no immediate factual consequences.  They can have more remote consequences in two ways:  they can correlate unrelated facts by putting them into a rational scheme, and they can predict the existence of undiscovered facts.

A detective playing with clues seeks a solution which will explain them and point to new evidence.  When we are attempting to draw conclusions about the nature of reality, we face not a scarcity but an overabundance of pertinent facts, and our problem is greater . Broad, definite statements about reality can be tested at many points, and a hypotheses which can withstand the scrutiny that modern science is capable of must fit the facts extremely well.  Outside of science we can never test statements with precision and the search for truth is less orderly, but from detective to theoretical physicist and everywhere else, the same principle holds : that theory is nearest truth which explains the most facts most plausibly.

A theory which claims generality over any body of knowledge (or over reality itself) must put all of the facts within that body of knowledge into three categories:

assumptions--when we assume spatiality we confess that we do not understand it, that we have no experience of it; we assume it because it makes sense experience intelligible;

implications--facts the assumptions explain;

coincidence--facts within the bounds of the assumptions (and all of them must be; no amount of correspondence to reality can prove a theory, but a single contradictory fact destroys it) but unexplained by them.

Mechanism assumes materialreality, which can be defined most simply as objects changing regularly. Objects require a spatialuniverse, change requires a temporal universe, and regular change requires a causaluniverse, so four assumptions underly the mechanistic conception of reality: spatiality, temporality, causality, and (the universe would be empty unless we assume beyond them) materiality.

The assumptions are independent, and do not interact, so they have no implications, but if we combine them they produce a process which we are ideally suited to observe.  All observations of the Process will be specifically within the bounds of the assumptions--logicalimplications but not inevitableimplications.  Each assumption limits and defines the Process; any factual evidence of a reality beyond the spatial, the temporal, the causal or the material would destroy the theory, but there is none, and there are within the bounds infinitely various phenomena, endless opportunities for observation.

Science, the sum of these observations, has progressed phenomenally, has alone moved measurably closer to truth, has made possible the technology that has changed and perhaps enriched our lives.  The sheer bulk of its achievement makes science tower over the rest of knowledge, and mechanism has this bulk behind it.

Mechanism limits knowledge to science.  With only causality driving it, the Process is statistical:  reality is building, event by event; the present is the growing tip of an evolutionary thrust.  We are as far as there is until we go farther, so if we control the present we can determine the future.

A metaphysical concept would be an additional assumption about reality, so all concepts that are not purely physical are produced by physical forces; the mechanist can say nothing about history, risings and fallings, crusades and migrations, says nothing about literature, morality, psychology, sociology, denies that they are significant except as they give us insight into the deterministic, evolutionary Process.  Mechanism is valueless: all judgements are relative, all conflict dialectic, no reality necessary.  There's no good taste (thing, men) or bad taste, just your taste and my taste.  Mechanism is only science and coincidence.

We will assume God, holyand omnipotent.

We will secondly assume Satan, evil,and as a creature not merely less powerful, but impotent.

We will assume finally that evil originates with Satan's contention, the primary challenge to a God both holy and omnipotent, that creatures do not worship God because He is good (God's holiness is a solitary virtue; it does not stand in relation to anything else, does not gain any of its meaning in contrast to another concept; in relation to evil it expresses itself as goodness)but because He is powerful.  This is a fundamental attack on the givenness of the good:  if the good is protected by infinite power and accompanied by unlimited comfort, security, and assurance, we can only say that it is all there is--we cannot know that it is better than anything else.

God can destroy Satan, but the destruction would be fully an exercise of His power.  Once uttered, the challenge is stamped on consciousnesses, and the mere extermination of Satan would stand as proof that it had been valid.  God can also destroy the memory, but only by interfering with the consciousnesses of His creatures, destroying them as consciousnesses and eliminating any possibility of actual communion.  Creatures would not worship God for His goodness, once it had invoked power.  If Satan is to be not destroyed but defeated, and if the good is to be justified, the good must be the just agent of the defeat:  there must be a test of good versus evil.

Creatures to whom God is separated from power must choose between goodness and security.  The God who is the focus of the choice must be both holy and omnipotent; if neither His goodness nor His power is to be in doubt, His existence must be.  The choice will not be between acceptance and rejection of a visible, but belief and disbelief in an invisible God.

The arena for the choice will be a reality in which there is no evidence of God's existence, a reality which will pose a choice between two apparently valid but fundamentally contradictory interpretations, that it is all of reality, or contingent on another reality. There cannot always have been life: reality must be initially material (as objects, so reality must be spatial). Choice implies change; a choice made is an event, considered before and acted upon after: reality must be temporal.  If the creatures are to choose, they must be able to see and consider the choice, and they must be able to make a choice:  choice implies both rationalityand freedom. A reality which allows rational interpretation, and especially two interpretations in radical opposition, must be causal. Reality will be an infinitely elaborate mirage with two complementary phases:  the apprehending consciousnesses and the reality apprehended.  The apprehension must be spatial, temporal, material, and causal, and there can be no evidence of a reality outside this framework.  Everything must happen naturally; every event must seem caused.

Satan contends that creatures serve power rather than goodness, that denied security they would seek security and deny God.  This will be the choice for evil. Those who would choose the good must denounce power, reject security, and serve God.  They must serve neither out of fear of God's might nor hope of reward, but willfully and wholeheartedly.  Their service must be unrewarded by comfort, security, or assurance; it can be of no material benefit to be virtuous.

If we assume an omnipotent good and call it the Light, and if we assume an impotent evil, and call it the Darkness, Light is the natural state, and the Darkness an imposition on it: they are Darkness surrounded by Light.  If creatures are to choose between the Light and the Darkness, they cannot see that the Light is omnipotent and benevolent, but if they are to choose the Light, they must know that it is, so they must not see the Light.  The choice must have some other basis.  Let it be possible to believe that darkness is the natural state, that light is an imposition on the darkness.

Creatures who see that the light gives them life, who see nothing beyond the light but darkness and fear the darkness (and especially the final darkness), will value above all the security of the light, and will in every endeavor seek to extend it.  Affirmation of the Light will not be a denial of the light, but an assertion that it is not the only light, that there is a Light beyond the darkness, out of sight.  The darkness will not be threatening and the security of the light not reassuring but tedious.  There will be no other choice; to deny the Light is to choose the Darkness.  We merely assume, then, Darkness surrounded by Light, and between them light surrounded by darkness.

Just as the leopard's well-being depends on the accuracy of his antelope, the more man's picture of the world has resembled the real world, the more skillfully he has influenced its processes.  Physics, because it is there that statements can be most easily tested against reality, has more than any other field succeeded in completing its part of the picture, and its history can teach us much about the nature of the process.

Until the end of the nineteenth century the development of physics was a single triumphant advance.  After Galileo and Newton discovered the scientific method and mechanics, physicists spent the next centuries methodically applying mechanics to such diverse areas with such phenomenal success that in the middle of the nineteenth century they were sure they would know everything by the middle of next week.  Ultimate reality was unchangeable particles and simple forces, and as soon as all phenomena could be reduced to these elements physics would have completed its task and man's destiny would be limited only by his technology.  Newton's universe was an infinite machine, geometric space dotted with matter and pulsing with energy, an extension of sense experience.  But scientists began finding phenomena that would not fit into the mechanical framework, and then Albert Einstein shattered the entire program; the universe turned out to be neither mechanical nor sensible.  In destroying the mechanical universe, relativity destroys the world of our sense experience, and replaces it with a set of assumptions which, though they satisfy breathtakingly the scientist's desire for simplicity and generality, are a hideously mathematical dead end for our need for understanding.

Yet, under the only conditions we will ever experience, Einstein's universe reduces to Newton's, becomes our orderly world, as if the universe were created to appear mechanical.  Physics cannot explain the fact that two contradictory sets of assumptions explain precisely a fantastic range of phenomena.  Only under extreme conditions, in fact, do the systems predict different behavior, and as the conditions become more extreme they diverge radically.  When they do, Einstein's theory is accurate, Newton's contrary to fact, so we must dismiss classical physics as a good try, a geometric astrology, though its laws are so accurate and so simple that they are still used instead of Einstein's to measure the stars.

The relationship between mechanics and relativity is precisely the relationship between mechanism and theism.  Mechanism, though it finds precise verification in experience, has no connection with reality.  Theism, its assumptions diametrically opposed to those of mechanism, predicts identical behavior under normal conditions.  In extreme conditions mechanism and theism diverge, predict contradictory behavior and dictate antagonistic action.  Only behavior in crisis conditions is useful in judging between the two interpretations of reality, and there there is no question which is accurate.

Since mechanism and theism are previous to experience, we approach every endeavor with them, and there is, common to all, a pattern of purpose and counterpurpose.  Each of our three intellectual processes (thinking, learning, communicating) exhibits the pattern.

The two modes of inference (thinking in thoughts which follow logically from one another) are induction and deduction.  Induction attempts to reach unrestricted generalizations from particular facts.  We build a world as the leopard builds an antelope, block by block with sense impressions.  The more accurately we describe the facts and the more precisely we order them, the larger a structure of knowledge we can build before it becomes imprecise.  The most significant activity in the search for knowledge is observation, the gathering of facts, the recording of sense impressions.

It is impossible to simply gather facts; potential sense impressions that we do not have concepts for pass over us in a great formless wave.  We receive only those we are prepared to receive.  The empirical data necessary to prove that the earth is round was available to fifteenth century Europeans, but until the concept "the earth is round" appeared they could not know that the information was significant, and could not pick it out from the mass of irrelevant information.  Until Galileo identified air pressure and isolated it in his forty-foot barometer, we had no idea there was such a phenomenon.  We had not measured an easily measurable process because we did not know it existed.  Now we measure it constantly and are in better control of the situation.  The source of the advantage is not the observation, but the concept.  You don't know what to look for until you know what to look for.  We approach the world not inductively but deductively, with concepts seeking verification.  Valid concepts, of course, are structures of facts--concepts not verified by observation are useless--but without concepts there can be no observation.  We are building a world with sense impressions, not upward, from facts to generalizations, but downward, from concepts to facts.  Induction and deduction are related as mechanics and relativity are related. Deduction includes observation (reduces to observation under normal conditions), but induction in no way implies deduction.
 

Mechanism applied to learning theory yields behaviorism.  The behaviorists, having modified their original stimulus-response model to include the environment reinforcing the organism as well as providing the original stimulation, are contending more adamantly than ever that we are products of our environment, which in turn can be controlled.  Since learning is "learning experiences" building a structure of knowledge, teaching should package learning experiences, because the more skillfully we can choose, produce, and order learning experiences, the larger a structure of knowledge we can build in our pupils.  Behavioral objectives have become accepted procedure at every level of education:  identify the organism; identify the desired response; identify the attempted stimulus; identify the test of effectiveness.  Learning is programmed and mechanical, in measurable quantities.

The behaviorist definition describes most learning, but it excludes the most important learning, and it is in limiting learning to this pattern that the behaviorists err.  If a physics teacher wants to teach gravity, he can construct an experiment that will demonstrate the principles.  If he does it well, and if his students are attentive, he will have created a learning experience.  But Isaac Newton, who had that learning experience, did not use the experiment.  He may have experimented later to test the theory, but his discovery was like nearly all scientific discoveries, and the principle had been discovered before the experiment proved it valid.  Newton's discovery was typical, and it was instantaneous.  Between the time the principle was unknown and the time that it was known, the environment did not provide any stimulus, or at least no stimulus that a scientist could arrange or foresee. Discoveries (scientific and otherwise) are leaped to, and since most bodies of thought follow inevitably from first principles, there is at the forefront of knowledge a learning that the behaviorists cannot explain.  Experiments test theories; they do not produce them.  Principles organize information; the organization of information rarely produces principles.  The behaviorists may allow for happy accidents, but behavioral objectives strive to eliminate all accidents.

The theistic definition of learning includes the mechanistic:  learning under normal conditions is mechanical.  But behaviorism denies that there is any other kind of learning, and it is precisely the learning beyond the mechanical which is significant.
 

There are also two ways of using language:  descriptively and creatively. Descriptive language uses words as building blocks to build a structure of meaning.  Each word acts as the symbol of a single concept (the concepts may be as complex as "relativity" or as ambiguous as "peace," but the relationship between the word and the concept it stands for is a direct one), the words are ordered into paragraphs, the paragraphs into larger structures.  The more accurately we define our words and the more precisely we order them, the larger the structure can become before they become ambiguous.

There are natural limits on the size of the structures, because we do not learn words from a dictionary.  What we think when we hear the word "red" is an average of all the reds we have seen, and none of us have seen the same group of reds.  With many words we are most of us on common ground, but as we get away from a common, concrete vocabulary, the size of our differences increases and the accuracy of our communication lessens.  Nevertheless, it is possible to say almost anything descriptively, except that it takes time, it gets tedious, and the few things you can't say are the few things you want to.

If words evoke experiences, some evoke strong experiences, and it should be possible to use words evocatively rather than descriptively.  It should also be possible to use the relationships between words and their referents to build structures of more than one dimension.  A high school girl with a crush on John, who has finally responded, can tell a friend the next day by saying, "John called me last night."  The sentence contains four blocks, all replaceable: someone else called her last night; John took her out last night; John called someone else last night; John called her some other night. But if she's fairly imaginative, and doesn't want to say "John called me last night," and has told her friend that John reminds her of Paul Newman, she can say, "Paul Newman called me last night." She has taken no more time to get her message across, and on one level it is the same message.  But she has added something--she has changed the relationship between what she said and what she meant.  Her friend still thinks "John," but she also thinks a great deal more, and that extra thinking is almost instantaneous, almost outside of time.

Most literary devices are more subtle, of course, but they fit the pattern.  They assume a common experience (intellectual or emotional, a common knowledge or a human condition) and by calling segments of it to mind with single words or series of words, they add an emotive, affective dimension to communication (a fault in descriptive language).  By building multi-leveled structures of meaning they add a depth and a concentration to language, and when they work most quickly they produce leaps, instantaneous flashes of insight.

Mechanistically, there is no common experience, only an objective world which we experience variously but should attempt to describe as identically as possible.  The accuracy of language can only be measured by its faithfulness in representing the objective world.  Literature is not a heightening (to what?) of experience, but a mere extension of experience.  Creative language builds on the one-dimensional symbolism of descriptive language, but descriptive language in no way implies that creative language is possible.

In the relationship between concepts and facts, mechanism gives priority to facts; the scientific method is inductive.  The truth is not only otherwise, but opposite.  There have been two periods of rapid growth in physics, one each sparked by Newton and Einstein.  Their systems of concepts made the observations possible, and all observations made within the systems, however much later, were implied by the original concepts.  [Once you know what to look for, you see it.]  Concept precedes observation, and concept implies observation.

Progress is the discovery of concepts, and there is no method to discovery, but there is a stance conducive to it.  Inquiry should not abandon scholarship, but should refuse to insist on it, and attempt to know as much as possible without holding onto any knowledge so tightly that new information must fit into a pattern to be accepted.  Every judgement should be suspended, each new fact given a chance to alter the structure.  You cannot plan a leap, but let things float, free them to move around, maintain a constant readiness to leap.

Mechanism counsels an approach precisely opposite.  Classical physics assumed a coordinate system, a rigid three-dimensional space in which it is possible to refer to any point with three numbers: with a number for latitude, a number for longitude, and a number for altitude we can refer to any point near the earth.  Relativity is partially the discovery that the coordinate system does not exist.  There is no rigid space, and it is impossible except under limited conditions to refer to points with accuracy.

Mechanism is an attempt in every endeavor to impose a coordinate system on the wild.  In the nineteenth century, newly acquired territories were of no more use to the United States after they had been surveyed than before . They became truly valuable when the settlers built roads and towns and established mail routes and trading networks, turning the theoretical coordinate system into a tangible reality.  Mechanism's attempt to impose a coordinate system is an effort to establish control, driven by a need for certainty.

Goodness implies justice, virtue, and kindness.  Expressing these values in action is extremely difficult, since situations are never simple and values are imprecise, so societies set up guidelines to objectify them:  law preserves justice, morality facilitates virtue, and courtesy furthers kindness.  The more precisely we fashion and precisely follow the guidelines, the closer we will come to goodness.

Virtue naturally expresses itself in moral acts, but it is not an object of experience and cannot be analyzed.  When mechanism objectifies virtue the content of the guidelines will not be virtue but moral acts, not virtue but the appearance of virtue, and the appearance of virtue can be fulfilled just as easily out of a desire for order as a desire for goodness.  People enjoy the certainty of rules, and either forget or ignore the fact that the guidelines cannot cover every situation, that they are only means to higher ends.  When the rules come to be insisted on as ends in themselves, they undermine the values they were instituted to protect:  "law and order" obstructs justice, etiquette kills kindness, and moralism poisons virtue.  Mechanism reduces endeavor to method, and obligation replaces impulse.  It has erected a structure of obligation for giving--birthdays, anniversaries, and a fifteen per cent tip--but you cannot give generously within a structure of obligation:  generosity will be indistinguishable from obligation.  You cannot be kind if you are courteous.  We cannot build to generosity (or justice or virtue or kindness), cannot fake it.  When we try to do it deliberately, we destroy it.

Honest, righteous, compassionate men cannot help but notice, and cannot help but rebel, but if they wish to be judged (by any standards) as rebels rather than criminals, they must not merely rebel.  If you do not live by the code you must be all the more virtuous.  Abandoning the guidelines must be an acceptance of new responsibility rather than an escape from old obligations.  In other words, if you throw away the rulebook you must claim that you can, as most people cannot, instinctively see the good in any situation, that you can somehow leap to honesty, virtue, compassion.  You must assume a unity you would kill by trying to reach it deliberately, must not only tolerate but welcome and seek uncertainty.  It is this assumption and this stance that are conducive to discovery, and it is these that are necessary for artistic creation.  The most important talent is that of the director, for selection, discrimination to see the significant among the insignificant, a sense of affinity.

The unity we must assume, and which gives reality an affinity we cannot dissect, is the good, and we must assume it because experience cannot in any empirically verifiable way reflect it.  The universe was created to make mechanism a viable choice, so the evidence of sense experience is neither more nor less than necessary to support it.  Theism, on the other hand, involves belief without evidence, and if experience cannot reveal the good it cannot reveal the content of the good.  The good is the reaction of God's holiness to evil, so establishing it as a choice will require a revelation of the holy.  The revelation must be limited, in some ways for obvious reasons (a revelation of God's nature will require, for instance, miracles as evidence of His omnipotence, temporal rewards and punishments as evidence of his benevolence and justice, and direct, verbal revelations of the nature of the holy, none of which can be general without destroying the experiment) and in others for reasons we can only guess at after the fact, by examining the form the revelation took.

God has made two covenants with man, the first limited to His chosen people, Israel, the second universal.  The final covenant was inevitable, implicit in creation, but it had to be sealed in a single moment, and sealed only once, so it was vital that the moment be chosen w ell.  It had to come when men were finally ready, finally able to understand. The first covenant, God's long and tumultuous relationship with His people, was a preparation for that moment.  The gradual, painstaking revelation to Israel was a background for the ultimate revelation.

The covenant with Israel was "mechanistic."  Its two demands were penitence and righteousness, and it erected structures of obligation in which they could be achieved deliberately.  Inevitably, the law often became merely obligation and the sacrifices merely ritual, and God sent a series of prophets, most of whom were rejected and eventually killed, to remind His people of the need for genuine repentance and righteousness.

And then He sent the Christ to complete the revelation at the climax of history.  Sinless, he died as a sacrifice, making further sacrifices unnecessary.  But sacrifices are offered by the righteous as a symbol of penitence; He was not killed as a sacrifice.  He was rejected and killed as a prophet.  The obligations of the first covenant were the law and the sacrifices; His martyrdom was brought about by lawyers and priests.  His message was not that the law was unnecessary, but that it was insufficient, that righteous acts must be the fruit of righteousness, works an expression of faith, but that righteousness cannot be defined in terms of righteous acts; an emphasis on the letter of the law kills the spirit.  Christ does not release us from the law's restrictions; He demands that we step outside its security.

Before Christ began His ministry, He went into the wilderness and fasted, and afterward was tempted by Satan, tempted and reminded of the terms of the agreement.  He must not win men's allegiance by offering them bread for comfort or government for security or miracles for assurance, must not only not offer them but show Himself capable of giving them and then refuse.  He did not turn stones to bread but He fed five thousand with five loaves and two fishes, and then offered the Bread of Life.  He did not jump from the temple, but He healed the sick and raised the dead, and then refused the Pharisees a sign.  He did not set up a government, but He rode into festive Jerusalem and set the city abuzz with anticipation of the kingdom of God.  When His kingdom turned out to be not an earthly kingdom, He was crucified.  And won followers who would, by refusing to be enticed by comfort, security, or assurance, conquer the kingdom that Satan had offered Him.

Christianity entered western history at its high point:  Babel was almost to heaven.  Mechanistically, civilization is domestication, a process of turning environmental variables into societal constants.  A society is functioning when it is refining its thermostat, extending its coordinate system, taming the wild and freeing its citizens from uncertainty.  Certainty always brings control; security is always bought with freedom.

A society must be managed, and the institutions created to manage it become authoritarian.  Any institution becomes easier to administer if those likely to focus the opposition are eliminated, so success in a mechanistic, hierarchical society does not depend on virtue or intelligence or any other measure of worth, but primarily on subservience.  (Satan contends that creatures serve power rather than goodness; his servants are loyal to power, irrespective of goodness: they are subservient.) Systems select for subservience, and only secondly for talent, and inevitably reject the most talented (superiority in any area, as in discovery or artistic creation, is accompanied by a bent for wildness and freedom and a rejection of authority--of the old theory or the old guard), who will not surrender.

The process is evident in many areas: every movement (historical, religious, scientific, artistic) begins as a rebellion against authority, but movements begun in impulse are perpetuated deliberately, and rapidly build downward to a bureaucracy of mediocrity.  The brightness and hope that are characteristic of the beginning of any period fade rapidly as creation becomes form and form becomes authority, executed methodically.  But the most significant consequences are political, in those institutions which manage society, and do it either well or poorly.  In response to a crisis or a challenge, authoritarian institutions become more rigidly authoritarian and then incompetent and corrupt.  As they select more specifically for subservience, they bring to power men blind to the real forces shaping any situation.  In a crisis, when effective management is critical but when mechanism predicts and dictates behavior out of touch with reality, they will bungle at every step.  Power is a pact with Satan; because it turns every relationship into one of dominance and submission, it leads to malevolent intentions and malicious acts.  You cannot demand--or, finally, give--subservience for a good end.  It is inherently evil, and once accepted, it corrupts.

The direction of mechanism was most vividly exemplified in the last phase of ancient western history, when the light, the hope, the liberalism of Greece gave way not incidentally but inevitably to the darkness, the power, the conservatism of Rome.  They are the poles of mechanism, and power just as certainly becomes corrupt.  Mechanism is the recurring illusion that there is an honorable human alternative; no matter how hopefully it begins, every attempt triggers the inevitable sequence:  light turns dark, and dark turns Dark.

The first several western empires, when they weakened, fell prey to younger, expanding empires, but though they were destroyed themselves, they elaborated mechanism, intellectually and technologically, so that each empire had a head start on the one before it and could go nearer heaven before it faltered and was overthrown.  Rome, finally, fulfilled the dream and achieved a universal empire.  She ruled the world, and there was no one to challenge her when she weakened, so she simply declined and fell.  Christianity challenged her at the height of her power, before the collapse began.  Never before (or for many centuries after) had travel to so many places been so easy, and the new religion spread like wildfire.  When the collapse came, it came in Christian terms, and when it was complete, a Christian civilization sprang from the ruins.

In the Revelation,John prophesies a period of a thousand years when Christ and his saints will rule the earth.  He says nothing about what the millennium will be like, but says that Satan will be in chains so that he can "seduce the nations no more" until the end of the thousand years, when he will be released to resume his seduction.

Satan's temptation is mechanism, the growth of which, since it is a logical interpretation of the world rather than an inevitable one (the Eastern civilizations never discovered it, though in various ways they have all succumbed to it once confronted with it), depends on Satan's continuing seduction.  If men were left to their own devices, they would develop neither mechanism nor theism, merely mysticism.

When Christ was crucified He conquered Satan and came back to announce His triumph, but the victory was spiritual, eternal, and contingent on the physical, temporal battle, which had still to be fought and could only be won by accepting Christ's triumph and in simple faith proclaiming it.  Satan had been chained and would not "seduce the nations" for a thousand years.  Evil had not been taken out of the world, and even mechanism had not been removed; it was the basis of Roman culture, and self-perpetuating.  But if Christianity could defeat mechanism, Satan could not reintroduce it.

As the state of the empire became more critical mechanism lost contact with reality and theism became more apparent.  If it had not been for Christianity, Rome would have collapsed anyway; the world would have descended into chaos, civilization would have disappeared, and Satan would have been victorious.  But here, as at every crucial point, good triumphed, and only mechanism disappeared. Babel could not fall silently or painlessly, and the world went dark for a while.  Communication, travel, education became impossible, so we have few records of the period, but when the light was gradually restored the church was a vibrant, full-grown institution, and must have been glorious during the tribulation.

We cannot evaluate a world with mechanism removed.  Many of our central concerns grow out of a mechanistic point of view, and if we examine the Middle Ages mechanistically they will of course seem backward and naive, especially in relation to the modern world, and even in relation to Rome and the Renaissance, which bracket them on either side.  But if we can rid ourselves of our preconceptions we can perhaps see them for what they were: the nearest men have come to heaven on earth, got by faith, not built to, a unified, awesomely beautiful world.

We also misjudge the Middle Ages because the traditional dates are misleading.  When Satan was released around the year 1000, he made mechanism again available.  Theism needs mechanism for focus, for definition (as the good needs evil for definition, being a response to evil).  Its immediate effect on theism, which had for a time lacked it, was to define theism; mechanism born here, too, was light, but then the church after no noticeable alteration sought authority and power and became inquisitional and then weakly inquisitional.  Entering a world in which the church was the dominant institution, Satan naturally infiltrated it and petrified it, turning it toward comfort, security, and assurance, dogmatizing its beliefs and ritualizing its forms.  This did not happen quickly, and it did not happen simultaneously all over Europe.  It followed Christianity a millennium earlier, so that there is between the two processes a counterpoint: the defeat of Satan in the first century and his release in the eleventh; the flowering of the church in the second century and the second flowering in the twelfth; the Roman inquisition in the third century and the Roman Catholic in the thirteenth; the death of civilization in the fifth century and its rebirth in the fifteenth.  There was no period of a thousand years that we can call the millennium, and no period at all that was "millennial," but for a thousand years Satan was chained and mechanism was not available, and for those thousand years Christ, through His saints, ruled the earth.

The Renaissance and the Reformation broke the inquisitional church's strangle hold on life.  With the emergence of churches that once again worshipped God, Christianity could again become passionate, and with the sudden rediscovery of the literature and learning of the ancient world, mechanism could again become brilliant.  With mechanism available, both the passion and the brilliance would fade.  Churches founded in rebellion against an inquisition would themselves become authoritarian; when the low church becomes the high church, it soon ceases to be God's church; it is vulnerable to the inquisitor and his kin.  Secular movements begun in rebellion against the church's dogmatism would themselves become dogmatic, and as inquisitional as the churches they had fought.  But churches, though self-perpetuating, would be resisted and deserted; Christianity would be reborn when churches died.  Secular institutions, political and intellectual, would likewise be resisted when they became authoritarian, and new institutions would be born.  Though each would soon reach its level of incompetence, Babel would continue to be built.

Babel has profited from science, which discovered a mechanical order in the universe and machines to make use of it.  Because of the wonders the machines can perform (and because the Middle Ages had made the Judeo-Christian ethic an inherent part of Western culture), the goal in the second building of Babel has been more universal happiness than universal government, the emphasis less on security than comfort, but in spite of the accent on benevolence, the program ends in complete control.

The position has been stated most clearly only recently, by the behaviorists and the futurists, who are delirious about technological possibilities and expecting a technological disaster.  We have, they say, the means to create a utopia, and if we do not soon create one we will have chosen oblivion.  In order to do so we will have to recognize the concept of freedom as false and increasingly dangerous, and use the rapidly evolving techniques of behavior control to create a programmed paradise.  Freedom is, after all, a myth, flattering but illusory.  It has at times been a useful crutch, but it has become hazardous, because it is man's notion that he is autonomous, and that alone, which is preventing him from embracing the controls which are the key to heaven on earth.  It is only the man who accepts the fact that he is a machine, unable to act until acted upon, and then only acting in order to be acted upon more benevolently in the future, who will be able to build utopia.  It is only by accepting the fact that he is controlled that man will be able to take control, to build a new environment and step into a new world.

The magnitude of the control we are asked to assume and assent to makes the decision we are faced with seem unique, but it is different only in degree from the central decision man has always been faced with.  It is no more central now--it is simply more final.  The behaviorists have stated the position more clearly, but they offer nothing new; we have spent many years on the brink of a science of man.  In the last half of the nineteenth century, in fact, utopia seemed just around the bend--Babel was almost to heaven.  Then, just into the twentieth century, almost without warning, she collapsed again, and everything since has been apocalypse.  If it had not been for America, civilization would by now have disappeared.

Just after the Renaissance turned men's eyes outward (from inward and upward) men began to travel outward, and discovered a new world, which soon became the sight of a radical experiment in government.  Men had always been ruled, usually harshly, and had on the whole seemed content.  But perhaps subjection was tolerated out of habit, because no other way had been tried.  Perhaps men could live both secure and free in a society structured to prevent anyone from taking over, to prevent everyone from asking anyone to take over.

At the convention called to set up the government, the crucial battle was fought over predictable principles.  Jefferson said that men could behave well in a free society.  Hamilton told him that "The people, your people, sir, is a great beast."  Hamilton built a government for his beast and Jefferson demanded a bill of rights for his citizens.  The compromise made, the spirit of the times took over and Jefferson defined the new society.  The experiment was begun; its beginning was one of morning innocence and hope.  Freedom.

Hamilton, of course, won out in the end.  With Eden out the back door and no one to bother us, we set about to tame the wilderness and became not primarily a free people but a successful people, apparently oblivious to the fact that the success we sought and achieved is incompatible with freedom.  As much as any tyrant we became suspicious of eccentricity and slaves to certainty and conformity.  We could have made life exciting, but we made it easy, and moved not toward pleasure, but comfort, and away from adventure.  Most people, of course, have always been willing--anxious--to trade both pain and pleasure for comfort.

And there have always been a few to whom the trade seemed like treason, and for them we were not like other countries.  We started out north-south on the eastern edge of a country that would be east-west, and as we grew it was the ordered east and the wild west.  The frontier was a function of the culture, and the pioneers were our mythology.  Anyone who felt cramped by civilization could go west, leaving the others comfortable and secure in patriotic assurance.  As long as the west was there we could feel free; the pioneers could use their freedom, and the rest could feel virtuous having it.

The presence of the frontier in our culture brought into focus the relationship of a good man to his society.  Our literature, when it appeared, sporadically, was a frontier literature:  its moral center was far from the center of society, and outlaws were often heroes.  Around 1900 the frontier was pronounced closed, and the pioneers were left with nowhere to go.  Once the west no longer lit the darkening land the society seemed wholly oppressive.  In the 1920's we produced our first major body of literature, wholly cynical about the United States.  The pioneers had become an irritant.

The cynicism of the intellectuals was intensified by our collision with Europe, where Babel had just collapsed and western civilization was almost under.  By an accident of wealth we were able to halt the destruction, but we suffered little, and when we had done it we demanded not gratitude but reverence and went home to paradise, because it is profitable to fight a war on someone else's country.  Demanded reverence and left Europe to rebuild while we got rich.  So we got ours all at once, when our superproducing society stopped producing.  Apocalypse played out before our eyes, and we didn't notice, or noticed and forgot.

Then a maniac almost took over and we found ourselves once again able to save the world on some other countries.  That world war brought the factories alive and stoked them hot so that when it was over, with barely a tremor, they kept on running.  Once again we had done a good deed easily and demanded reverence and stepped into utopia as if we deserved the reward.

Mechanism contends that people do anything to become secure, and points to utopia:  perfect security.  But paradises must be built, and the lucky few states with the resources necessary to build one have had to establish and enforce the equally necessary period of peace.  We had just established the peace and were intent on enforcing it, both nobly but with notably little hardship.  We would find that in establishing the peace we had built a machine that could set up utopia, and that enforcing the peace would be a lucrative way of keeping it running.  Both establishment and enforcement were against manifestly malevolent enemies, so we accepted perfect comfort with blessed assurance and bowed to the organization that made it all possible.

The depression and the war had filled the land with people who had never known security; people deprived of security seek it remarkably wholeheartedly, and having gained it do not willingly endanger it.  In order to be secure, they ask to be controlled.  Having been secure, their children can see control more clearly.  Utopia's children see her with eyes unclouded by a mania for order, and they shudder at her sterility and artificiality, her indifference to human needs and disregard for human dignity.

Given freedom, we made us a master.  Turned loose in Eden, we looked around to get the lay of the land and then hitched up our pants, spit on our hands, grabbed our shovels and started building a machine to run our lives.  Maybe none of us realized it at first and only a few of us caught on before our course was pretty well determined, but as surely as if the founding fathers had poured her footings at Philadelphia, we built the Machine.

When we had tamed and settled the land, the next step was invention.  We couldn't just build her; we had to create most of the working parts as we went along.  We borrowed wherever we could, but if a need arose that could not be met with existing technology, we designed a device to meet the specifications, and as time passed more of the invention was our own. The steam engine, the railroad, the telegraph, the production line, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, television, the computer, the superhighway, big business and big government and dozens of other tools soon became integral parts of the Machine.  Gradually, and then more rapidly, she grew, and at some point became a structure with needs of her own and began to look out for her own welfare. We had waked a giant, a new kind of life, with processes beyond our investigation.

She must grow to remain healthy, and as she grows she must become more efficient, tying her separate structures more and more closely together, becoming more interdependent.  As she becomes more interdependent each mistake has wider consequences, sends shock waves through more and more of the system, and it becomes important that all of her parts operate smoothly. Controls become necessary, on her machinery and on her citizens.  As she becomes strong she ties their welfare more closely to hers; every advance drives them further from self sufficiency. She is soon indispensable and can force them to act as it is good for her, for them to act.  They must accept controls and her value system and become as much as possible like interchangeable parts . She favors submission over inde pendence, sameness over uniqueness, control rather than freedom.  She selects for mechanistic values and not the fittest survive but those best suited to the game.

When we awoke from the fifties and rediscovered the world, the renaissance began the familiar sequence for the last, quickest, purest time.  Hope was in the air and the liberals in charge.  But hootenannies and sit-ins gave way to riots and rockfests as the conservatives took power just as the kids were beginning to move, if not to theism, in that direction, choosing wildness and freedom and placing themselves outside the control of a society based on control and increasingly needing control.  The Machine reacted as quickly as she can react and sent her best men to the front and the people overwhelmingly chose their best man ('eep as A'ab) to lead them through the storm, and the Machine clamped down, froze up, and went Dark.

The Nixon team has managed us for years now; it has selected for subservience and gotten dull thugs, incredibly stupid.  They have brought us through the crisis to the brink of chaos.  We are addicted to affluence, and will be given a cold turkey cure.  We should have learned our lesson the last time, but when it was gone we wanted nothing more than another dose, and dedicated our lives to getting it, and got it, and it will happen again, but this time quickly and thoroughly, though not easily.  The Machine self-destructs, and this time she is the only game in town.

We must leave, of course, but there is no hurry.  Leaving only takes a day or two, and we've got time yet to figure out what's happening and what to do about it.  Brer Fox, he lay low.