440 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION

for 'the Dark Night of the Soul' is a darkness that is the herald, not of
Death, but of Dawn.

Thus feelings prove to be as inconclusive as statistics when we in-
terrogate them as witnesses in an inquiry into the prospects of the
Western Civilization; and, now that we have drawn blank in these two
preliminary reconnaissances, it is time to have recourse to our well-tried
empirical method of investigation.