Because of their origin and purpose, the meanings of art are of a different order from the operational meanings of science and technics: they relate,… - Lewis Mumford

Every attempt to give objective reality to the billions of years the cosmos supposedly passed through before man appeared, secretly smuggles a human observer into the statement, for it is man's ability to think backwards and forwards that creates and counts and reckons with those years. Without man's time-keeping activities, the universe is yearless, as without his spatial conceptions, without his discovery of forms, patterns, rhythms, it is an insensate, formless, timeless, meaningless void. Meaning lives and dies with man, or rather, with the creative process that brought him into existence and gave him a mind.

The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.

Richter compares the conditions of rat domestication with those now provided by the 'Welfare State'-ample food, no danger, no stress, uniform environment and climate, and so forth. But he notes that, under these seemingly favorable conditions, organic deterioration has taken place: a decrease in the size of the adrenal glands, which help the organism meet stress or fatigue and forfend certain diseases: while the thyroid gland, the regulator of metabolism, becomes less active. Not strangely, perhaps, the brains of the domestic rat, and perhaps their mental ability, are smaller. At the same time, the sex glands mature earlier, become bigger, show more activity, and result in a higher rate of fertility. How human!