After all, these were the major intellectual movements of the past two hundred years, and the murderous consequences of their social expansion could be clearly foreseen by such perceptive nineteenth-century thinkers as Dostoyevski and Nietzsche. Moreover they had clothed themselves in the authority of the most successful branch of our civilization--modern since--as befitted the original connotation of the term ideology. It had been coined to describe the application of the methods of the natural sciences to the study of man and society. The intention was to reduce all human behavior to a single causal system that could be fitted within the comprehensive science of zoology.

        But most telling of all is that the ideological thinkers have sought no more than to carry out the central modern project described by Francis Bacon, of applying the power of man for "the relief of man's estate." Such a realization compels us to confront anew, and even more resolutely, the question with which we began: How can the pursuit of universal human well-being result in so much universal human misery? How can an age that sets itself up to surpass all predecessors in satisfying the needs of humanity surpass all others in the suffering inflicted on mankind?

        The answer cannot lie in ignorance, error, or accident, but in what has been essential to the humanitarian project form the start. Integral to the dream of limitlessly expanded power in the service of man have been the seeds of the nightmarish abuse of that power in the destruction of man. For it is not something incidental, an inevitable by-product, but an essential consequence that as man's power has increased, the capacity to virtuously guide its use has declined. In the beginning, this was hardly noticeable as men like Galileo and Bacon sought to shake off the Aristotelian and scholastic understanding of the universe, in order to make room for a mathematical experimental science tat lifted us "from the closed world to an infinite universe."