Subject: The Ethereal Phase
From: Robert G Eckert (robertgeraldeckert@JUNO.COM)
Date: Tue Nov 02 1999 - 14:01:04 EST
From: Robert G. Eckert <robertgeraldeckert@juno.com>
Subject: The Ethereal Phase
Date: Tue, 02 Nov 1999
This is from the Peirce-L.
Wonder what Percy would have made of Y2K?
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From: <low@cdi.com.au>
> ...civil defence training is something that becomes embedded in the
minds >and social frameworks of a country, it can be mobilised in any
number of
>different emergency situations, such as those that might arise just
after
>midnight 31.12.1999.
.............................................................................................................
This reminds me of what I was thinking of at the beginning of the *The
Origin of Computers?* thread. We seem to be in a phase of culture that
Henry Adams predicted would arive. H. Stuart Hughes writes of it in his
book on Spengler:
======================================================== "Henry
Adams..."had developed by the year 1909 a complete "Rule of Phase Applied
to History." In this essay, he divided the modern era into three periods,
culminating in an Ethereal Phase, of pure, abstract, mathematical
thought. Since--by a rather far-fetched analogy with the appropriate laws
of physics--the length of each phase could be presumed to be the square
root of that of its predecessor, the end of our civilization was
obviously descending upon us at a vertiginous pace: "Supposing the
Mechanical Phase to have lasted 300 years, from 1600 to 1900, the next or
Electric Phase would have a life equal to [the square root of] 300, or
about seventeen years and a half, when--that is, in 1917--it would pass
into another or Ethereal Phase, which...would last only [the square root
of] 17.5, or about four years, and bring Thought to the limit of its
possibilities in the year 1921. It may well be!...Even if the life of the
previous phase, 1600-1900, were extended another
hundred years, the difference to the last term would be negligible. In
that case, the Ethereal Phase would last till about 2025."
(_Degradation of Democratic Dogma_, p. 308.) Farther than this point,
the temerity of no cyclical historian has ever reached. It is more
charitable to Henry Adams to forget his psuedo-mathematical predictions,
and to remember the fragmentary observations in which he sketched with
lively awareness the outlines of the approaching age."(p.42 _Oswald
Spengler: A Critical Estimate_ 1952)
========================================================== A simple
movement of numbers such as the changing of a particular date
would not be nearly so important if our culture were not so dependent
upon electro-mathematical machines.
Robert Gerald Eckert
Rochester, New York
robertgeraldeckert@juno.com
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