Abstract

The World's Great Age

This article focuses on the book "These Hurrying Years," by Gerald Heard. In external form "These Hurrying Years" belongs with the various popular books dealing with recent history, but it differs from the others in two important respects. In the first place, its stress is upon crucial events instead of, as the custom has been, upon fads, fashions, and other picturesque superficialities. In the second place, the record is presented in accordance with a quasi-mystical philosophy of history which is then projected forward into prophecy. Heard insists, not with a crisis in human affairs but with the crisis. The accelerated rate of increase in the efficiency of the machine and in people's ability to control nature is one thing, but it is almost unimportant by comparison with an entirely new insight into human psychology and an entirely new metaphysical knowledge of the relationship between mind and what used to be called external reality.