14 



THE ATLANTIC AND 

 M^ESTERN MAN 



IN OUR foregoing chapters we have tried to keep the focus 

 on man and his fate as he is affected by the natural law of 

 the widespread yet interrelated world of the Ocean River 

 of the Atlantic. Anatole France has well expressed this human- 

 istic view of science. What is admirable, he says, is not so 

 much that the field of the stars is so vast, but rather that it is 

 man who has measured it. Adhering to this point of view, con- 

 sciously or unconsciously we find ourselves swimming up- 

 stream against the flood of acquiescence in the second law 

 of thermodynamics, which so much dominates the scientific 

 mind. 



The law sounds formidable and final, and it most certainly 

 predominates in all natural phenomena. Put simply, it states 

 that though there is a constant volume of energy in the uni- 

 verse, this energy, changing from one phase to another, tends 

 always to reach into lower potentials and become more diffuse. 

 If this can also be applied wholesale to man then we certainly 

 fit the pattern espoused by Spengler and his kind; and the all- 

 too-human question ''Where do we go from here?'' is vain 

 indeed, for our potential of survival is everywhere in retreat. 



Fortunately, the scientists themselves, being human, have 

 evolved an escape from this deadly leveling of creative force. 

 Clerk Maxwell in the nineteenth century invented a demon 



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