How very perceptive of Mumford, and I agree. From the Spiritualist movement of the late 19th Century, to the popularization of schools of thought such as Blavatsky's Theosophy incorporating Hindu cosmology, to the Edwardian Glastonbury Revival and the dawn of the New Age, and the astounding readings of the 'Sleeping Prophet', Edgar Cayce, to the channelling of Higher Wisdom from White Eagle by Grace Cooke, and many more...we can see that the tide was turning, that Mankind was turning once more to face the Light. I think that the mechanistic age served its purpose in gradually spawning the technological age, in which the creation of the virtual may precipitate a shift from occupying an external reality, to an internal one.
 

The sense of dreams and the importance of them is relative to the necessity of them. As a whole, we do not dream if the dreams are already fulfilled. The relocation of interest has a lot to do with perception of the importance of that. All depends not on the timeline, but usually on the survival scale in which we are at the time.
 

I've read Mumford and like him as well. Some of his critiques are original and thought provoking, especially for his time, and it should be said this is really more about socio-economic dynamics than spiritualism. While I can't agree this transformation has necessarily taken place since that time frame, I believe that it will eventually. Cities are the conquering of the organic by the mechanical. But the organic - nature - shall always prevail. A tough lesson to be learned.

 

It's amazing how current this seventy-year-old quote is. I've spent the last two years studying how organisms mediate geochemical processes, which were once thought to be rather stale and mechanistic. Now we know that most earth reactions are not just mediated - but dominated - by the organism.