GIBBON ON FALL OF ROME IN THE WEST 749
ries had never suspected that their liberation from the theological censor-
ship of an oecumenical church was to be followed after a season by their
subjection to the political control of a litter of sovereign independent
parochial states. This twentieth-century forfeiture of a Western Science's
intellectual freedom was the penalty for a Western Technology's practical
success; for Science had been supplying Technology with edged tools;
these tools were bound to be used and misused as weapons in a world
that was partitioned among parochial states prone to go to war with one
another; and, when Science had once furnished Technology with the
'know-how' for forging a weapon of the potency of the atomic bomb, any
parochial government that possessed or aspired to acquire this *know-
how* was bound, on categorically imperative grounds of military security,
to make this deadly knowledge a state secret and in consequence to
bring the intellectual activities of atomic scientists under politico-mili-
tary control.

Thus, on the morrow of 'V-J Day', A.D. 1945, the scientific workers of
the Western World had woken up to find themselves conscripted into
the secret service of this or that parochial state, whichever state might
happen to be able to claim this or that scientist as its subject. And this
political enslavement proved to have been only the milder of two cala-
mities that had overtaken the men of science on that day of horror. The
subjection of their scientific work to a political control was bound, no
doubt, in the long run, to sterilize their flow of intellectual creativity;
but this strangulation of their intellects by the dead hand of the secret
police was a light affliction1 compared with the peine forte et dure that was
being inflicted on their consciences by a crushing sense of guilt and re-
morse. From the close of the seventeenth century of the Christian Era
till the 15th August, 1945, a post-Christian school of Late Modern
Western physical scientists had been casting upon the waters2 a series of
socially and morally subversive intellectual discoveries in a blind belief
that any increase in Man's knowledge of, and command over, Physical
Nature was an absolute good which was bound to bring in profitable
returns, without regard to the human effect of this new inhuman know-
ledge and power upon the social milieu into which it was being spawned.
In the ears of these prodigally irresponsible devotees of a renascent
Athena, the explosion at Hiroshima on the 6th August, 1945, had rever-
berated with the sound of the Last Trump. A blast that had rent the veil
under which they had been content hitherto to leave their goddess's
ambiguous countenance hidden had suddenly confronted them with
reality and convicted them of sin; and an inward spiritual monitor that
might help a mortified soul to work out its personal salvation in the long
run was a harsher taskmaster in the short run than the merely external
tyranny of the security police.

In these circumstances, Gibbon's thesis that, during suspensions of
international hostilities, the progress of knowledge and industry^ ac-
celerated by international competition could no longer carry conviction.
But in the context of Gibbon's General Observations this thesis is only
a parenthesis. The particular virtue of political diversity-in-unity that is

* a Cor. iv. 17. a Ecd. xL x.