UNPRECEDENTED WESTERN EXPERIENCES 467
mand had been multiplied by the subsequent harnessing of mineral oil
to drive an internal combustion engine, and by the discovery of a *know-
how' for converting Man's older servant water-power into electricity.
The consequent possibility of producing cheaply an abundance of arti-
ficial light and heat had enabled Man to make himself at home within the
Arctic Circle,1 while the progress of Tropical Medicine and the discovery
of a technique for air-conditioning had enabled the children of tem-
perate latitudes to exploit the wealth and enjoy the amenities of the
Tropics -without any longer incurring a prohibitive risk of finding a
grave there. After the invention of the steamship, the railway train, and
the motor-car had 'annihilated distance* for travellers on the land and
water surface of the planet, the invention of the submarine and the aero-
plane had given Man's habitat a third dimension in both depth and
height. The telegraph, telephone, gramophone, radio, television, and
radar had 'annihilated distance* in a fourth dimension by enabling
human beings to communicate with one another instantaneously round
the whole circumference of the globe without having to meet one an-
other in the flesh. And, finally, since the last days of a Second World
War, the unprecedentedly fast and fertile technological progress of the
Western World in the course of the preceding six generations had been
crowned by a feat that had made even the intellectually and morally
blindest men and women in the living generation suddenly aware of the
fateful significance of all technological progress, not only in the Western
World since the outbreak of a Late Modern Western Industrial Revolu-
tion, but in the World at large since the dawn of a Late Palaeolithic Age.
The discovery of a 'know-how* for tapping the titanic force of atomic
energy and applying this to the destruction of human lives and works had
brought home to the imagination of Mankind in the mass some inkling
of a tragic lesion in the affairs of men which more than one Western man
of science had already diagnosed and reported.2 A geometrically pro-
gressing Technology had now armed a perpetually reborn Original Sin
with a weapon potent enough to enable a sinful Mankind to annihilate
itself. 'The wages of Sin is Death.'3 The fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
had set these dread words ringing again in ears that, through a long
familiarity with their sound, had long since grown deaf to their meaning.
In A.D. 1952, seven years after the detonation of an explosion that had
been heard round the World, it was evident that an unprecedented
human situation had now been created by the unprecedented potency to
which Mankind's progressively accumulating surplus of material power
had been raised, with an unparalleled rapidity, by the technological
prowess of the Western Civilization in the latest chapter of its history.
Man's acquisition of this degree of command over non-human forces
had made it impossible for him any longer to evade the challenge of two

1 The sudden provision of an abundance o€ cheap lighting in Northern Norway
during the -winter months of perpetual night through the generation of electricity out of
the abundance of a previously unutilized local water-power was said to have been followed
by a proportionately steep fall in the local rate of death by suicide.

* See, for example, the passage from Sir Alfred Ewing's address, on the sist August,
1032, to the British Association for the Advancement of Science that has been quoted
in III. in. ail-la. * Rom. vi, z3.