The intellect, uncontrolled by intuition and unguided by revelation, has spawned the two great masters of our time--Science holding the atom bomb and Communism holding revolution. Science, which in the last century promised so much, gave us the terrible problem of atomic war instead. Its ardent advocates pointed at it only yesterday as the road to our salvation. Today it has become the road to our destruction. This is not to say that it was a false light, but that we mistook its proper place and claimed too much for its human possibilities. We let it run away with us and with our religion. We lost ourselves and our bearings. It made us regard Nature as self-operative in a solely mechanical way. It left life on earth without spiritual meaning, without moral purpose. Communism is the other heaven-promising panacea which has helped to make this earth a little hell. There can be no worthwhile future for humanity if it accepts the leadership of men, such as Communists, who regard conscience as a disease. The Communist insensibility in practice to human suffering accords ill with its vaunted idealism in theory. Communism's twisted ethic of wild hatred, its hard cruel face, its blind slavish obedience to a brutal organization which cares more for itself than for the workers it was supposed to save, its insane preachments against religion and denial of life beyond matter, have brought enough suffering to make its claims sound absurdly exaggerated. But the intellectual movement which produced Science and the social movement which produced Communism will not continue unchecked. They are approaching the utmost limit possible. The violent materialism for which they are responsible will culminate in the next Armageddon, which will not only end them, but also end the epoch itself.
-- Notebooks Category 11: The Negatives > Chapter 3 : Their Presence in The World > # 122
