The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times

<p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>René Guénon (1886-1951) was one of the great luminaries of the twentieth century whose critique of the modern world has stood fast against the shifting sands of intellectual fashion. His extensive writings now finally available in English are a providential treasure-trove for the modern seeker: while pointing ceaselessly to the perennial wisdom found in past cultures ranging from the Shamanistic to the Indian and Chinese the Hellenic and Judaic the Christian and Islamic and including also Alchemy Hermeticism and other esoteric currents they direct the reader also to the deepest level of religious </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>praxis</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> emphasizing the need for affiliation with a revealed tradition even while acknowledging the final identity of all spiritual paths as they approach the summit of spiritual realization.</span></p><p></p><p><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> is René Guénon's most prophetic work. Having seen his telling analysis of Western culture </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>The Crisis of the Modern World</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> swiftly overtaken by events he based this his final and most profound critique squarely on changeless metaphysical principles. He exposes with his fabled clarity the precise nature of the modern deviation devoting special attention to the part played by modern philosophy and science (with their accompanying notions of progress and evolution) in the formation of the industrial and democratic society that we now regard as normal.  He sees history as a descent from Form (or Quality) toward Matter (or Quantity). But following after the Reign of Quantity (modern materialism and the rise of the masses) Guénon predicts a reign of inverted quality just before the end of the age: the triumph of the counter-initiation: the kingdom of Antichrist. Although Guénon bases his critique on abstract principles his examples are satisfyingly concrete: his remarks on the degeneration of coinage could easily be updated to include the transformation of money into electronically-stored digital information; his treatment of the significance of metallurgy as regards its occult dangers points directly to our own well-founded fear of such man-made elements as plutonium; and his chapter on the cracks in the Great Wall gives solid metaphysical grounding to our twenty-first century demonology including the UFO phenomenon. This text is considered the </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>magnum opus</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> among Guénon's works of civilizational criticism as is </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Symbols of Sacred Science</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> among his studies on symbols and cosmology and </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Man and His Becoming according to the Vedanta</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> among his more purely metaphysical works.</span></p>