THE ATLANTIC AND WESTERN MAN 301 



Although Adams used a different idiom from Lord Acton, 

 it is interesting to follow his exposition of the speed-up we 

 have been talking about in the historically recent affairs of 

 men since the time Columbus ventured forth into the realms 

 of the Ocean River. Europe, he points out, in the fifteenth 

 century was in the deadly grip of medieval inertia except for 

 scattered individual minds that were forcing a search for new 

 patterns and a new lease on life. The dammed-up forces of 

 communication and freer thinking were typified in the inven- 

 tion of printing by Gutenberg, by Galileo's thesis on the shape 

 and unity of the earth, and by Bacon's earlier insistence — 

 in the face of excommunication — that the truth lay in a 

 methodical and fearless study of accumulated facts. This 

 grew out of the fresh stimulus of classic Greek thought with 

 all its unorthodox curiosity that flooded into Europe with the 

 Renaissance. 



The beginnings of acceleration in the pace of man's self- 

 development from 1500 on to 1700 can largely be accounted 

 for by the factors we have just mentioned — applied, of course, 

 to the new horizon of the western world. The maximum 

 movement possible to the world of the Church of Saint 

 Augustine was suddenly exceeded from there on with each 

 succeeding century, as first steam was harnessed and finally 

 electrical energy came in with the dynamo. The pace of action 

 and thought keeping up with invention or ahead of it has 

 forced our modern world at such a speed of material progress 

 that, according to Adam's theory of ''phase" in history, very 

 few years remain to modem man to readjust and resolve his 

 tremendous evocations of power into fresh patterns, now that 

 the lid has been lifted off Pandora's box by the splitting of 

 the atom. 



The mechanistic extensions of individual power have out- 

 raced both our emotional adjustment to this power and our 

 ability to devise social and political controls to handle it in 

 our own best interest. Adams in 1910 predicted that by 1940 



