MYTH AND HISTORY
25
the means of controlling events (as exemplified by the deliberate
falsification of the past which is such a sinister power
in
modern
political life) .
Such, in most general outline, is the origin, part literary and
part metaphysical, of the specific "world of Art" from which Mann
draws
his
higher measure and value.
As
a perspective, it shares the
shakiness and intermittence of all forms of poetic and metaphorical
insight, which at times lights up relations and at other times obscures
them. In so far as it set itself up, however, as a metaphysic of absolutes
to replace science, it can function only as a source of mystification, by
insisting on a portion of unreason in every idea.
Science and the Destiny of the Individual
Despite the frequent complaint of "traditionalists" that modern
experience is lacking in poetic unity, a complex tradition of accepted
likenesses and symbolic identifications colors the emotional and intel–
lectual life of our epoch. Certain similarities have been noted so often
that the medium in which the careful analogist works actually con–
tains a high percentage of plausibility. The existence of platitudes im–
plies, of course, a common situation and a common response.
Among the most powerfully recurring insights of the past hun–
dred years is that which finds modern society to be in essential respects
a vast lifeless mechanism, a fetjshistic and inhuman engine of "men
behaving like things." Caught in a vault of iron relations, which con–
tract about him or relax according to laws of their own, the modern
individual has been recognized as lost and alienated, a stranger to the
world and to himself. He is separated from the old order of heaven–
which was at least an expression of his own deepest feelings-yet he
is
held at bay, too, from the natural and the human where he might
feel at home. In his inner life, modern man discovers The Double, The
Split Personality-for on the one hand,
his
most intimate definition
springs from the night mystery of private existence, while on the
other, the needs of life force him to masquerade under the alias of
the efficient Abstract Citizen. The objective and psychological anti–
thesis between the individual and society is a fundamental fact of
modern culture.
This tension sinks deeply into our consciousness and our sensi–
bility;
and where the image it casts is a static one, it shows science
to be the mental counterpart of oppressive, life-sapping order, of
mechanical, "outside" organization. In science . the individual is
brought face to face with a death devised by the human intellect.
Here, the relation between science and reality is no longer a theoretical
