Socio-Astrology

              Man has been so often denned that there can be no harm in adding another definition, and calling him the animal who invented the future.
Squirrels, chipmunks, and other hoarding animals seem moved by some vague awareness of a future, but the nobler quadrupeds live simply in the present. Man however, has never taken the poet's advice seriously, and corpe diem remains among the most unheeded of aphorisms. There are, indeed, various ways of being concerned about the future. Farmer, stockbroker, and dic-thrower are interested in knowing what lies just ahead. But there are also men who are troubled over a future so remote that they can never hope, at least as mortals, to know whether or not they have successfully called the turn. Their thirst for fore knowledge absolute is not to be slaked by any piddling guess about tomorrow. They will be right for a century or a millenium; and there are those whose future must be cast in astronomical spans, who worriedly count the billions of years this earth is going to take to freeze into uninhabilability. This concern is certainly often genuinely impersonal, philosophical,theological. At any rate, it is probably wise to accept it as one of the given things about human beings. Here, as so often,the utilitarian explanation is. for the true believer, a mere verbal answer. No doubt the prophet of the distant future feels thai he has in his Tightness made himself one with the cosmic process; has found the clue to past, present, and future; has placed himself, at least, comfortably in the Universe. His belief is of some use to