The gutenberg galaxy 107 God took the spinning jenny Out of his side. The Lockean swoon was the hypnotic trance induced by stepping up the visual component in experience until it filled the field of attention. Psychologists define hypnosis as the filling of the field of attention by one sense only. At such a moment “the garden” dies. That is, the garden indicates the interplay of all the senses in haptic harmony. With the instressed concern with one sense only, the mechanical principle of abstraction and repetition emerges into explicit form. Technology is explicitness, as Lyman Bryson said. And explicitness means the spelling out of one thing at a time, one sense at a time, one mental or physical operation at a time. Since the object of the present book is to discern the origins and modes of the Gutenberg configuration of events, it will be well to consider the effects of the alphabet on native populations today. For as they are in relation to the phonetic alphabet, so we once were. The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world. J.C.Carothers, writing in Psychiatry (November, 1959) on “Culture, Psychiatry and the Written Word,” set forth a number of observations contrasting non-literate natives with literate natives, and the non-literate man with the Western man generally. He starts (p. 308) with the familiar fact that by reason of the type of educational influences that impinge upon Africans in infancy and early childhood, and indeed throughout their lives, a man comes to regard himself as a rather insignificant part of a much larger organism—the family and the clan—and not as an independent, self-reliant unit; personal initiative and ambition are permitted little outlet; and a meaningful integration of a man’s experience on individual, personal lines is not achieved. By contrast to the constriction at the intellectual level, great freedom is allowed for at the temperamental level, and a man is expected to live very much in the “here and now,” to be highly extraverted, and to give very free expression to his feelings. In a word, our notions of the “uninhibited” native ignore the utter inhibition and suppression of his mental and personal life which is unavoidable in a non-literate world: