TECHNOLOGY, CLASS-CONFLICT, EMPLOYMENT 629
far more urgent task of re-conquering an inner spiritual world that had
slipped out of his control while he had been engrossed in his unduly pro-
longed child's-play with clockwork; for this spiritual world was the field
in which lay buried his pearl of great price1—his master tool consisting of
his Self; and 'what shall a man give in exchange for his soul ?'2 A Western
Man who had all but gained the whole World could not recapture his
lost self till he had made his peace with his fellow men and women, with
his Subconscious Human Nature, and with his God; and he must first
turn again to worship a Latens Deltas3 if he was to have any hope of
achieving an eventual reconciliation with his fellows and with himself.
He must reorient his spiritual outlook by once more taking for his qiblah
his father Abraham's Mecca in place of his prospector Bentham's New
Jerusalem.

If this act of reconversion was what was required of Western souls
seeking, at the eleventh hour, to find salvation, was it possible to esti-
mate how far they had already travelled by this date on their spiritual
Odyssey, and what experiences they had been encountering on the way ?
By the time when, under the surface of Western Man's spiritual life, the
Subconscious Psyche was somnambulantly veering eastward, a van-
guard of more alert—or more apprehensive—Western spirits had been
racing so far ahead that they had already reached a critical divide in the
road. Hie locus estpartis ubise viafindit in airibas? and this parting of the
ways was critical because of the contrast between the two spiritual ter-
rains into which the forking branches led; for one of them was as invit-
ingly sheltering as the other was deterrently bleak.

In this valley of decision,5 where the prodigal found himself confronted
by the two frowning baetyls that had been waiting for his arrival there to
bear witness against him,6 his temptation was to retreat into the bosom
of some established church enshrining some historic higher religion.

Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee.7

In the spiritual life of the Western World mid-way through the twentieth
century of the Christian Era there were already unmistakable signs of a
movement of withdrawal that had been detected, and been stigmatized as
'the second bout of religiosity' ('die zweite Religiositat'), by a Western
philosopher writing on the morrow of a First World War,8 In the disin-
tegration of the Hellenic Civilization, this tendency to seek shelter in a
reversion to traditional religious observances had begun to be perceptible
in the second century B.C., after the onset of the second paroxysm of an

* Matt. xiii. 46. 2 Matt. xvi. z6.

a 'Adoro te devote, latens Deitas'—the first line of the hymn, attributed to Saint
Thomas Aquinas, that, in a Catholic Western Christian church, was sung during pro-
cessions on Corpus Christ! Day.

+ Virgil: Aendd, Book VI, I. 540.

s Joeliii. 14. 6 Auden, W. H.; The Ttoo Witnesses.

7 In the writer of this hymn, A. M. Toplady, Western Man's subconscious psyche
was as prescient as it was complacent in'the author of The History of ike Dectnte and Fail
of the Roman Empire. Toplady published Rock of Ages in A.D. 1775, a year before the
date of the publication of the first volume of Gibbon's work.

* See Spengler, O.: Der Untergaxg des Abeadhmdes> vol. ii (Munich 1922, Beck), pp.
381-3-