The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

by Arthur Koestler

Whenever a branch of knowledge became isolated from the mainstream, its frozen surface had to crack up and thaw before it could be reunited with living reality.

As a result, man’s destiny was no longer determined from ‘above’ by a super-human wisdom and will, but from ‘below’ by the sub-human agencies of glands, genes, atoms, or waves of probability. This shift of the locus of destiny was decisive. So long as destiny had operated from a level of the hierarchy higher than man’s own, it had not only shaped his fate, but also guided his conscience and imbued his world with meaning and value. The new masters of destiny were placed lower in the scale than the being they controlled; they could determine his fate, but could provide him with no moral guidance, no values and meaning. A puppet of the Gods is a tragic figure, a puppet suspended on his chromosomes is merely grotesque.

We would be obliged to use units of time at first of a hundred thousand, then of a thousand years, while, as we approach the present, the vertical rise of the power-curve is greater in a single year than it was in ten thousand earlier ones. Thus within the foreseeable future, man will either destroy himself or take off for the stars.