ENDS AND MEANS
are the ultimate measures of value, the things for which
a reasonable person should live. Introduced suddenly to
this- mechanomorphic cosmology, many of the Polynesian
races have refused to go on multiplying their species and
are in process of dying of a kind of psychological con-
sumption. Europeans are of tougher fibre than the South
Sea Islanders, and besides, they have had nearly three
hundred years in which to become gradually acclimatized
to the new cosmology. But even they have felt the effects
of mechanomorphism. They move through life hollow
with pointlessness, trying to fill the void within them by
external stimuli—newspaper reading, day-dreaming at the
films, radio music and chatter, the playing and above all
the watching of games, 'good times* of every sort. Mean-
while any doctrine that offers to restore point and purpose
to life is eagerly welcomed. Hence the enormous success
of the nationalistic and communistic idolatries which deny
any meaning to the universe as a whole, but insist on the
importance and. significance of certain arbitrarily selected
parts of the whole—the deified nation, the divine class.
Nationalism first became a religion in Germany during
the Napoleonic wars. Communism took its rise some fifty
years later. Those who did not become devotees of the
new idolatries either remained Christians, clinging to
doctrines that became intellectually less and less accept-
able with every advance of science, or else accepted
mechanomorphism and became convinced of the pointless-
ness of life. The World War was a product of nationalism
^ind was tolerated and even welcomed by the great masses
of those who found life pointless. War brought only a
passing relief to the victims of mechanomorphic philosophy.
Disillusion, fatigue and cynicism succeeded the initial
enthusiasm, and when it was over, the sense of pointlessness
became a yawning abyss that demanded to be filled with
ever more and intenser distractions, ever better 'good
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