now say, “The medium is the message” quite naturally. Before 
the electric speed and total field, it was not obvious that the 
medium is the message. The message, it seemed, was the 
“content,” as people used to ask what a painting was about . 
Yet they never thought to ask what a melody was about, nor 
what a house or a dress was about. In such matters, people 
retained some sense of the whole pattern, of form and function 
as a unity. But in the electric age this integral idea of structure 
and configuration has become so prevalent that educational 
theory has taken up the matter. Instead of working with 
specialized “problems” in arithmetic, the structural approach 
now follows the linea of force in the field of number and has 
small children meditating about number theory and “sets.”

     Cardinal Newman said of Napoleon, “He understood the 
grammar of gunpowder.” Napoleon had paid some attention to