Had Spengler taken the time to discover the origins of both number and Euclidean space in the psychological effects of the phonetic alphabet, The Decline of the West might never have been written. That work is based on the assumption that classical man, Apollonian man, was not the product of a technological bias in Greek culture (namely, the early impact of literacy on a tribal society), but rather the result of a special tremor in the soul stuff that embosomed the Greek world. This is a striking instance of how easily men of any one particular culture will panic when some familiar pattern or landmark gets smudged or shifted because of the indirect pressure of new media. Spengler, as much as Hitler, had derived from radio a subconscious mandate to announce the end of all "rational" or visual values. He was acting like Pip in Dickens' Great Expectations. Pip was a poor boy who had a hidden benefactor who wanted to raise Pip to the status of a gentleman. Pip was ready and willing until he found that his benefactor was an escaped convict. Spengler and Hitler and many more of the would-be "irrationalists" of our century are like singing-telegram delivery boys, who are quite innocent of any understanding of the medium that prompts the song they sing. So far as Tobias Dantzig is concerned in his Number: The Language of Science, the progress from the tactile fingering of toes and fingers to "the homogeneous number concept, which made mathematics possible" is the result of visual abstraction from the operation of tactile manipulation. We have both extremes of this process in our daily speech. The gangster term "to put the finger on" says that somebody's "number" has come up. At the extreme of the graph profiles of the statisticians there is the frankly expressed object of manipulation of population for varieties of power purposes. For example, in any large stockbroker's office there is a modern medicine man known as "Mr. Odd Lots." His magical function is to study the daily purchases and sales of the small buyers on the big exchanges. Long experience