Tantalus, Or The Future Of Man

Excerpt: "When I read in Mr Haldane’s Daedalus the wonderful things that Science was going to do for us, and in Mr Russell’s Icarus how easily both we and it might come to grief in consequence, it at once became plain to me that of all the heroes of antiquity Tantalus would be the one best fitted to prognosticate the probable future of Man. For, if we interpret the history of Daedalus as meaning the collapse of Minoan civilization under the strain imposed on its moral fibre by material progress, and the fate of Icarus as meaning man’s inability to use the powers of the air without crashing, one could gauge the probability that history would repeat itself still further, and that man would once more allow his vices to cheat him of the happiness that seemed so clearly within his reach."