WESTERN CIVILISATION at the present day is passing through a crisis which is essentially different from anything that has been previously experienced. Other societies in the past have changed their social institutions or their religious beliefs under the influence of external forces or the slow development of internal growth. But none, like our own, has ever consciously faced the prospect of a fundamental alteration of the beliefs and institutions on which the whole fabric of social life rests. . . .Civilisation is being uprooted from its foundations in nature and tradition and is being reconstituted in a new organisation which...