William Thompson, like Henry Adams before him, attempts to project a literary-hostorical triangulation into the future. Whereas Adams picked the span from thirteenth century Europe to twentieth century America as his base; Thompson utilized a span of only fifty-one years. Though unfamiliar with his base's lower boundary, The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916, I hazard the guess that in using such a short base Thompson has sacrificed the accuracy of the predictions that result.

        The author of At the Edge of History journeys through the ruins of Los Angeles among a people who lack the historical connective tissue which strong family ties provide (Thompson, 1971, 14). "People who come here [Disneyland]," he notes in describing the California consciousness, "suddenly feel like making apocalyptic prophecies (Ibid., 22)." Unsurprisingly, then, he himself succumbs to the urge.

        Up north in Big Sur he finds Esalen bread to be a great improvement over the white paste of middle-America, and yet too tame for his tastes. "The future talked about [at Esalen] was nothing more than the present, 1967, the summer of the hippie. It was not about the emerging civil war between opposite ends of the great American middle class, ... the ecological disasters of our technology, ... the world-wide famine of 1975, or the doubling of the earth's population by 2000; it was about acid, pure and simple (Thompson, 1971, 48-49)." Thompson feels the approach in the industrial technology which M.I.T. represents. Triumph and disaster are coming together in a modern day tragedy of the Greek style. "As long as we fail to step back and call into question our most basic assumptions," warns Thompson, "there is no way to go but deeper and deeper into the trap (Ibid., 168)."

        With this dispersed to the winds, he moves deeper and deeper into the wild thoughts suggested by Daniel Bell. Drawing upon his knowledge of Irish history, he presents three distinct phases for the apocalyptic transformation of Western society. Literary foreshadowings will give way to political, then military actions (Thompson, 1971, 9). Consequently he turns to the science fiction of Edgar Cayce and Arthur C. Clarke to catch a glimmer of the new dawn.

        Like the technocrats of which he complains, Thompson continually refers all questions to this committee of experts through allusions to their writings. Unlike poor Professor de Sloa Pool, however, he carefully avoids any concrete conclusions whose errors the future might expose. He ventures only that "Western Civilization is drawing to a close in an age of apocalyptic turmoil in which the old species ... and the new species ... are in collusion with one another to end what we know as human nature (Thompson, 1971, 229)." He apparently sees as insurmountable the barrier to technological civilization over which Henry Adams thought we might jump (Blair, 1975).

        Any comments on this article will be welcomed and should be mailed to the author at Aichi Gakuin University, General Education Division, 12 Araike, Iwasaki-cho, Nisshin, Japan 470-0195 or e-mailed to him. Other papers and works in progress may be accessed at http:// www3.aichi-gakuin.ac.jp/ ~jeffreyb/ research/ index.html .

Blair, R. Jeffrey (1975). Education, Darwinism, and the Scientific Revolution. Unpublished paper. Pasadena: California Institute of Technology.