TECHNOLOGY, CLASS-CONFLICT, EMPLOYMENT 639
tionary changes produced in the Western Society's economic and
political life by the psychological effects of the mechanization of its
technology; but changes that are inter-related and concomitant do not,
on that account, all have to take a single uniform, course.

Indeed, so far from the regimentation of Western life on the economic
and political planes being likely to induce a regimentation of Western
life on the religious plane as well, it seemed likely to militate against this;
for one of the devices by which Life achieves the t our deforce of keeping
itself alive is by compensating for a deficit or a surplus in one department
by accumulating a surplus or incurring a deficit in another. Considering
the importance of this lawV role in Life's perpetual struggle for survival,
we should expect a priori that, in a social milieu in which, as in the twen-
tieth-century Western case in point, there is a deficit of freedom or sur-
plus of regimentation in Economics and Politics, the combined effect of
the working of 'the law of interdependence' and *the law of compensa-
tion' would be to produce a surplus of freedom or deficit of regimentation
in Religion. This had, for example, been the history of tie Hellenic
Civilization in its universal state. After the wars and social conflicts of
an Hellenic Time of Troubles had been effectively suppressed by the im-
position of an Augustan Peace, the psychic energy that had thus been
deprived of its former vent hi Politics and Economics had found a new
vent in Religion. The dullness of a world in which War had been banished
to anti-barbarian frontiers beyond the horizon,1 and in which the sterili-
zation of Politics had taken the heart out of public speaking,2 had been
effectively relieved on the religious plane by a compensatory outbreak of
Christian martyrdom. This psychological compensation had been effec-
tive because there could be no surer way of making Life worth living
again than to rediscover a cause for which it was worth sacrificing it. It
will be seen that this chapter of Hellenic history was a precedent that was
significant for Western prospects.

One lesson of this Hellenic episode was that in Life there is always an
irreducible minimum of psychic energy that will insist on discharging
itself through some channel or other; but it is equally true, as we have
observed in an earlier context,3 that there is also a maximum limit to the
quantity of psychic energy which Life has at its disposal; and from this
it follows that, if a reinforcement of energy is required for putting a
greater drive into one activity, the requisite additional supply will have
to be obtained by making economies of energy in other quarters. Life's
device for economizing energy is mechanization. For example, by making
the beating of the heart and the alternating inflation and deflation of the
lungs automatic in the human body, Life had released human thought
and will for other uses than the continual maintenance of physical vita-
lity from moment to moment. If a conscious act of thought and act^of
will had never ceased to be required for the initiation of each successive
breath and successive heart-beat, no human being would ever have had
any margin of intellectual or volitional energy to spare for doing anything
else than just keeping alive; or, to state the point more accurately, no
sub-human being would ever have succeeded in becoming human. On

1 See VI. vii. 123-3. * See V. vi. 80-81. ' In IV. iv. «S-