Manhood
of Humanity
IN a previous
chapter I have said that the World War marks the end of one
vast period in the life of humankind and marks the beginning
of another. It marks the end of Humanity's Childhood and the
beginning of Humanity's Manhood.
Our human Past
is a mighty fact of our world. Many facts are unstable, impermanent,
and evanescent-they are here to-day, and to-morrow they are
gone. Not so with the great fact of our human Past. Our past
abides.
"It is permanent.
It can be counted on. It is nearly eternal as the race of man.
Out of that past we have come. Into it we are constantly returning.
Meanwhile, it is of the utmost importance to our lives. It contains
the roots of all we are, and of all we have of wisdom,
of science, of philosophy, of art, of jurisprudence, of customs
and institutions. It contains the record or ruins of all the
experiments that man has made during a quarter or a half million
years in the art of living in this world." (Keyser, Human
Worth of Rigorous Thinking.)
In our relation
to the past there are three wide-open ways in which one may
be a fool. One of the ways is the way of ignoring the past-the
way of remaining blankly ignorant of the human past as the animals
are blankly ignorant of their past and so of drifting
through life as animals do, without reference to the experience
of bygone generations. Fools of this type may be called drifting
fools or Drifters. Another way to be a fool-a very alluring
way-is that of falsifying the past by idealizing it-by
stupidly disregarding its vices, misery, ignorance, slothfulness,
and folly, and stupidly magnifying its virtues, happiness, knowledge,
achievements and wisdom; it is the way of the self-complacent-the
way of those who, being comfortably situated and prosperous,
are opposed to change; the past, they say, was wise for it produced
the present and the present is good-let us alone. Fools of this
type may be called idolatrous fools, worshipping the Past; or
static fools, contented with the Present; or cowardly fools,
opposed to change, fearful of the Future. A third way to be
a fool-which is also alluring-is the opposite of the foregoing;
it is the way of those who falsify the past by stupidly and
contemptuously disregarding its virtues, its happiness, its
knowledge, its great achievements, and its wisdom, and by stupidly
or dishonestly magnifying its vices, its misery, its ignorance,
its great slothfulness, and its folly; it is apt to be the way
of the woeful, the unprosperous, the desperate-especially the
way of such as find escape from the bore of routine life in
the excite meets of unrest, turbulence, and change; the past,
they say, was all wrong, for it produced the present and the
present is thoroughly bad-let us destroy it, root and branch.
Fools of this type may be called scorning fools, Scorners of
the Past; or destroying fools, Destroyers of the Present; or
dynamic fools, Revelers in the excitements of Change.
Such are the children
of folly: (1) Drifting fools -ignorers of the past-disregarders
of race experience-thoughtless floaters on the shifting currents
of human affairs; (2) Static fools-idealizers of the past-complacent
lovers of the present-enemies of change-fearful of the future;
(3) Dynamic fools -scorners of the past-haters of the present-destroyers
of the works of the dead-most modest of fools, each of
them saying: "What ought to be begins with Me; I will
make the world a paradise; but my genius must be free; now
it is hampered by the existing 'order'-the bungling work
of the past; I will destroy it; I will start with chaos; we
need light-the Sun casts shadows-I will begin by blotting out
the Sun; then the world will be full of glory-the light of my
genius."
In striking contrast
with that three-fold division of Folly, the counsel of Wisdom
is one, and it is one with the sober counsel of Common Sense.
What is that counsel? What is the united counsel of wisdom and
common sense respecting the past? The answer is easy and easy
to understand. The counsel is this: Do not ignore the past but
study it-study it diligently as being the mightiest factor among
the great factors of our human world; endeavor to view the past
justly, to contemplate it as it was and is, to see it whole-to
see it in true perspective-magnifying neither its good nor its
evil, neither its knowledge nor its ignorance, neither its enterprise
nor its slothfulness, neither its achievements nor its failures;
as the salient facts are ascertained, endeavor to account for
them, to find their causes, their favoring conditions, to explain
the facts to understand them, applying always the question Why?
Centuries of centuries of cruel superstition-Why? Centuries
of centuries of almost complete ignorance of natural law-Why
? Centuries of centuries of monstrous misconceptions of human
nature-Why ? Measureless creations, wastings and destructions
of wealth-Why? Endless rolling cycles of enterprise, stagnation,
and decay-Why? Interminable alterations of peace and war, enslavements
and emancipations-Why? Age after age of world-wide worship of
man-made gods, silly, savage, enthroned by myth and magic, celebrated
and supported by poetry and the wayward speculations of ignorant
"sages"- Why? Age upon age of world-wide slow developments of
useful inventions, craftsmanship, commerce, and art-Why? Ages
of dark impulsive groping before the slow discovery of reason,
followed by centuries of belief in the sufficiency of ratiocination
unaided by systematic observation and experiment- Why? At length
the dawn of scientific method and science, the growth of natural
knowledge, immeasurable expansion of the universe in Time
and in Space, belief in the lawfulness of Nature,
rapidly increasing subjugation of natural forces to human control,
growing faith in the limitless progressibility of human knowledge
and in the limitless perfectibility of human welfare-Why? The
widely diverse peoples of the world constrained by scientific
progress to live together as in one community upon a greatly
shrunken and rapidly shrinking planet, the unpreparedness of
existing ethics, law, philosophy, economics, politics and government
to meet the exigencies thus arising-Why?
Such I take to
be the counsel of wisdom-the simple wisdom of sober common sense.
To ascertain the salient facts of our immense human past and
then to explain them in terms of their causes and conditions
is not an easy task. It is an exceedingly difficult one, requiring
the labor of many men, of many generations; but it must be performed;
for it is only in proportion as we learn to know the great facts
of our human past and their causes that we are enabled to understand
our human present, for the present is the child of the past;
and it is only in proportion as we thus learn to understand
the present that we can face the future with confidence and
competence. Past, Present, Future-these can not be understood
singly and separately-they are welded together indissolubly
as one.
The period of
humanity's childhood has been long-300,000 to 500,000 years,
according to the witness of human relics, ruins and records
of the caves and the rocks-a stretch of time too vast for our
imaginations to grasp. Of that immense succession of ages, except
a minute fraction of it including our own time, we have, properly
speaking, no history; we have only a rude, dim, broken outline.
Herodotus, whom we call "the father of history" proper, lived
less than 2500 years ago. What is 2500 years compared with the
whole backward stretch of human time? We have to say that the
father of human history lived but yesterday-a virtual contemporary
of those now living. Our humankind groped upon this globe for
probably 400,000 years before the writing of what we call history
had even begun. If we regard history as a kind of racial
memory, what must we say of our race's memory? It is like
that of a man of 20 years whose recollection extends back less
than 3 months or like that of a man of 60 years whose recollection
fails to reach any event of the first 59 years of his life.
Owing to the work of geologists, paleontologists, ethnologists
and their co-workers, the history of prehistoric man will grow,
just as we know to-day more about the life of mankind in the
time of Herodotus than Herodotus himself knew. Meanwhile we
must try to make the best use of such historical knowledge of
man as we now possess.
Even if the story
of humanity's childhood were fully recorded in the libraries
of the world, it would not be possible in this brief writing
to recount the story in even the most summary fashion. Except
the tale of recent years, the story is known as I have said,
only in outline, rude, dim and broken, but for the present purpose
this will suffice. Countless multitudes of details are lost-most
of them doubtless forever. But we need not despair. The really
great facts of our racial childhood-the massive, dominant, outstanding
facts are sufficiently clear for our guidance in the present
enterprise. And what do we know ?
We know that the
period of our human childhood has been inconceivably long; we
know that in the far distant time, the first specimens of humankind-the
initial members of the time-binding race of man-were absolutely
without human knowledge of the hostile world in which they found
themselves; we know that they had no conception of what they
themselves were; we know that they had neither speech nor art
nor philosophy nor religion nor science nor tools nor human
history nor human tradition; we know, though we to-day can hardly
imagine it, that their sole equipment for initiating
the career of the human race was that peculiar faculty which
made them human-the capacity of man for binding time; we know
that they actually did that work of initiation, without any
guidance or example, maxim or precedent; and we know that they
were able to do it just because the power of initiation-the
power to originate-is a time-binding power.
What else do we
know of the earliest part of humanity's childhood? We know that
in that far-distant age, our ancestors-being, not animals, but
human creatures-not only began to live in the human dimension
of life-forever above the level of animals-but continued
therein, taking not only the first step, but the second,
the third, and so on indefinitely; we know, in other words,
that they were progressive creatures, that they made advancement;
we know that their progress was natural to them- as natural
as swimming is to fishes or as flying is to birds-for both the
impulse and the ability to progress-to make improvement-to do
greater things by help of things already done-are of the very
nature of the time-binding capacity which makes humans human.
We know that time-binding
capacity-the capacity for accumulating racial experience, enlarging
it, and transmitting it for future expansion-is the peculiar
power, the characteristic energy, the definitive nature, the
defining mark, of man; we know that the mental power, the time-binding
capacity of our pre-historic ancestors, was the same in kind
as our own, if not in degree; we know that it is natural
for this capacity, the highest known agency of Nature, to produce
ideas, inventions, insights doctrines, knowledge and other forms
of wealth 5 we know that progress in what we call civilization.
which is nothing but progress in the production and right use
of material and spiritual wealth, has been possible and actual
simply and solely because the products of time-binding work
not only survive, but naturally tend to propagate their
kind-ideas begetting ideas, inventions leading to other inventions,
knowledge breeding knowledge; we therefore know that the amount
of progress which a single generation can make, if it have an
adequate supply of raw material and be unhampered by hostile
circumstances, depends, not only upon its native capacity for
binding time, but also-and this is of the utmost importance-upon
the total progress made by preceding generations-upon the inherited
fruit, that is, of the time-binding toil of the dead; accordingly
we know that the amount of progress a single generation can
thus make is what mathematicians call an increasing function
of time, and not only an increasing function but an increasing
exponential function of time-a function like PRT,
as already explained; we know, too, that the total progress
which T successive generations can thus make is:
(PRT-P)
which
is also an increasing exponential function of time; we know
from the differential calculus that these functions-which
represent natural laws, laws of human nature, laws
of the time-binding energies of man-are very remarkable
functions-not only do they increase with time but their
rates of increase are also exponential functions
of time and so the rates of increase themselves increase
at rates which are, again, exponential functions, and so
on and on without limit; that, I say, is a marvelous fact,
and it is for us a fact of immeasurable significance; for
it means that the time-binding power of man is such that,
if it be allowed to operate naturally, civilization -the
production and right use of material and spiritual wealth-will
not only grow towards infinity (as mathematicians say),
but will thus grow with a swiftness which is not
constant but which itself grows towards infinity with a
swiftness which, again, is not constant but increases according
to the same law, and so on indefinitely. We thus see, if
we will only retire to our cloisters and contemplate it,
that the proper life of man as man is not life-in-space
like that of animals, but is life-in-time; we thus see that
in distinctively human life, in the life of man as man,
the past is present and the dead survive destined to greet
and to bless the unborn generations: time, bound-up time,
is literally of the core and substance of civilization.
So it has been since the beginning of man.
We know that the
total progress made in the long course of humanity's childhood,
though it is absolutely great, is relatively small; we know
that, compared with no-civilization, our present civilization
is vast and rich in many ways; we know, however, that, if the
time-binding energies of humanity had been always permitted
to operate unhampered by hostile circumstances, they would long
ere now have produced a state of civilization compared with
which our present estate would seem mean, meagre, savage. For
we know that those peculiar energies-the civilization-producing
energies of man-far from being always permitted to operate according
to the laws of their nature, have never been permitted
so to operate, but have always been hampered and are hampered
to-day by hostile circumstances. And, if we reflect, we may
know well enough what the enemies-the hostile circumstances-have
been and are. We know that in the beginning of humanity's childhood-in
its babyhood, so to speak-there was, as already said, no capital
whatever to start with- no material wealth-no spiritual
wealth in the form of knowledge of the world or the nature of
man- no existing fruit of dead men's toil-no bound-up time-nothing
but wild and raw material, whose very location, properties and
potencies had all to be discovered; even now, because we have
inherited so much bound-up time and because our imaginations
have been so little disciplined to understand realities, we
can scarcely picture to ourselves the actual conditions of that
far-off time of humanity's babyhood; still less do we realize
that present civilization has hardly begun to be that of enlightened
men. We know, moreover, that the time-binding energies of our
remote ancestors were hampered and baulked, in a measure too
vast for our imaginations, by immense geologic and climatic
changes, both sudden and secular, unforeseen and irresistible-by
earthquake and storm, by age-long seasons of flood and frost
and heat and drought, not only destroying both natural resources
and the slowly accumulated products of by-gone generations but
often extinguishing the people themselves with the centers and
abodes of struggling civilization.
Of all the hostile
circumstances, of all the causes which throughout the long period
of humanity's childhood have operated to keep civilization and
human welfare from progressing in full accord with the natural
laws of the time-binding energies of man, the most potent cause
and most disastrous, a cause still everywhere in operation,
remains to be mentioned. I mean human ignorance. I do not mean
ignorance of physical facts and the laws of physical nature
for this latter ignorance is in large measure the effect of
the cause I have in mind. The ignorance I mean is far more fundamental
and far more potent. I mean human ignorance of Human Nature
-I mean man's ignorance of what Man is-I mean false conceptions
of the rightfu1 place of man in the scheme of life and the order
of the world. What the false conceptions are I have already
pointed out. They are two. One of them is the conception according
to which human beings are animals. The other one is the conception
according to which human beings have no place in Nature but
are hybrids of natural and supernatural, animals combined
with something "divine." Both of them are characteristic of
humanity's childhood; both of them are erroneous, and both of
them have done infinite harm in a thousand ways. Whose is the
fault? In a deep sense, it is the fault of none. Man started
with no capital-on knowledge-with nothing but his physical strength
and the natural stirring within of the capacity for binding
time; and so he had to grope. It is not strange that he was
puzzled by himself. It is not strange that he thought himself
an animal; for he has animal propensities as a cube has surfaces,
and his animal propensities were so obtrusive, so very evident
to physical sense-he was born, grew, had legs and hair, ate,
ran, slept, died-all just like animals-while his distinctive
mark, his time-binding capacity, was subtle; it was spiritual;
it was not a visible organ but an invisible function;
it was the energy called intellect or mind, which the physical
senses do not perceive; and so I say it is not strange -it is
indeed very sad and very pathetic-but it is not to be wondered
at that human beings have falsely believed themselves to be
animals. So, too, of the rival belief-the belief that humans
are neither natural nor supernatural but are both at once, at
once brutal and divine, hybrid offspring of beast and god. The
belief is monstrous, it is very pathetic and very sad, but its
origin is easy to understand; once invented, it became a powerful
instrument for evil men, for impostors, but it was not invented
by them; it was only an erroneous result of an honest effort
to understand and to explain. For the obvious facts created
a real puzzle to be explained: On the one hand, men, women and
children-animal-hunting and animal-hunted human beings-certainly
resembled animals physically in a hundred unmistakable ways;
on the other hand, it became more and more evident that the
same animal-resembling human beings could do many things which
animals never did and could not do. Here was a puzzle, a mystery.
Time-binding curiosity demanded an explanation. What was it
to be? Natural science had not yet arisen; critical conception-conception
that avoids the mixing of dimensions-was in the state of feeble
infancy. It is easy to understand what the answer had to be-childish
and mythical; and so it was-humans are neither animals nor gods,
neither natural nor supernatural, they are both at once,
a mixture, a mysterious union of animal with something "divine."
Such, then, are
the two rival answers which, in the long dark, groping course
of humanity's childhood, human beings have given to the most
important of all questions-the question: What is Man? I have
said that the answers, no matter how sincere, no matter how
honestly arrived at, are erroneous, false to fact, and monstrous.
I have said, and I repeat, that the misconceptions involved
in them have done more throughout the by-gone centuries, and
are doing more to-day, than all other hindering causes, to hamper
and thwart the natural activity of the time-binding energies
of man and thus to retard the natural progress of civilization.
It is not merely our privilege, it is our high and solemn duty,
to examine them. To perform the great duty is not an easy task.
The misconceptions in question have come down to us from remote
antiquity; they have not come down singly, separately, clean-cut,
clear and well-defined; they have come entangled in the
complicated mesh of traditional opinions and creeds that constitute
the vulgar "philosophy"-the mental fog -of our time. If we are
to perform the duty of examining them we have first of all to
draw them forth, to disengage them from our inherited tangle
of beliefs and frame them in suitable words; we have next to
bring ourselves to realize vividly and keenly that the conceptions,
thus disentangled and framed, are in fact, whether they be true
or false, at the very heart of the social philosophy of the
world; we have in the third place to detect the fundamental
character of the blunder involved in them-to see clearly and
coldly wherein they are wrong and why they are ruinous; we have,
finally, to trace, if we can, their deadly effects both in the
course of human history and in the present status of our human
world.
The task of disengaging
the two monstrous misconceptions from the tangled skein of inherited
beliefs and framing them in words, I have already repeatedly
performed. Let us keep the results in mind. Here they are in
their nakedness: (1) Human beings-men, women, and children-are
animals (and so they are natural): (2) human beings are neither
natural nor supernatural, neither wholly animal nor wholly
"divine," but are both natural and supernatural
at once-a sort of mysterious hybrid compound of brute and
gods.
The second part
of our task-which is the reader's task as much as mine-is not
so easy; and the reason is evident. It is this: The false creeds
in question- the fatal misconceptions they involve-are so familiar
to us-they have been so long and so deeply imbedded in our
thought and speech and ways of life-we have been so thoroughly
bred in them by home and school and church and state-that
we habitually and unconsciously take them for
granted and have to be virtually stung into an awareness
of the fact that we do actually hold them and that they do actually
reign to-day throughout the world and have so reigned from time
immemorial. We have, therefore, to shake ourselves awake, to
prick ourselves into a realization of the truth.
I assume that
the reader is at once hard-headed, rational, I mean, and interested
in the welfare of mankind. If he is not, he will not be a "reader"
of this book. He, therefore, knows that the third task-the task
of detecting and exposing the fundamental error of the misconceptions
in question-is a task of the utmost importance. What is that
error? It is, I have said, an error in logic. But logical errors
are not all alike-they are of many kinds. What is the "kind"
of this one? It is the kind that consists in what mathematicians
call "confusion of types," or "mixing of dimensions." The answer
can not be made too clear nor too emphatic, for its importance
in the criticism of all our thinking is great beyond
measure. There are millions of examples that help to make the
matter clear. I will again employ the simplest of them-one so
simple that a child can understand it. It is a mathematical
example, as it ought to be, for the whole question of logical
types, or dimensions, is a mathematical one. I beg the reader
not to shy at, or run away from, the mere word mathematical,
for, although most of us have but little mathematical knowledge,
we all of us have the mathematical spirit, for else we
should not be human-we are all of us mathematicians at heart.
Let us, then, proceed confidently and at once to our simple
example. Here is a surf ace, say a plane surface.
It has length and breadth-and so it has, we say, two dimensions;
next consider a solid, say a cube. It has length,
breadth and thickness- and so it has, we say, three
dimensions. Now we notice that the cube has surfaces
and so has certain surface properties. Do we, therefore,
say that a solid is a surface? That the cube is a member
of the class of surfaces? If we did, we should be fools -type-confusing
fools-dimension-mixing fools. That is evident. Or suppose we
notice that solids have certain surf ace properties and
certain properties that surfaces do not have; and suppose
we say the surface properties of solids are natural
but the other properties are so mysterious that they must
be "supernatural" or somehow "divine"; and suppose we
then say that solids are unions, mixtures, compounds or hybrids
of surfaces and something divine or supernatural; is
it not evident that, if we did that, we should be again blundering
like fools? Type-confusing fools ? Dimension-mixing fools ?
That such would be the case any one can see. Let !IS now consider
animals and human beings, and let us look squarely and candidly
at the facts. To get a start, think for a moment of plants.
Plants are living things; they take, transform and appropriate
the energies of sun, soil, and air, but they have not the
autonomous power to move about in space; we may say that
plants constitute the lowest order or class or type or dimension
of life-the dimension one; plants, we see are binders
of the basic energies of the world. What of animals?
Like the plants, animals, too, take in, transform and appropriate
the energies of sun, soil and air, though in large part they
take them in forms already prepared by the plants themselves;
but, unlike the plants, animals possess the autonomous
power to move about in space-to creep or crawl or run or
swim or fly-it is thus evident that, compared with plants, animals
belong to a higher order, or higher class, or higher type, or
higher dimension of life; we may therefore say that the type
of animal life is a type of two dimensions-a two-dimensional
type; I have called them space-binders because they are distinguished,
or marked, by their autonomous power to move about in space,
to abandon one place and occupy another and so to appropriate
the natural fruits of many localities; the life of animals is
thus a life-in-space in a sense evidently not applicable to
plants. And now what shall we say of Man? Like the animals,
human beings have indeed the power of mobility- the autonomous
power to move-the capacity for binding space, and it is obvious
that, if they possessed no capacity of higher order, men, women
and children would indeed be animals. But what are the facts?
The facts, if we will but note them and reflect upon them, are
such as to show us that the chasm separating human nature from
animal nature is even wider and deeper than the chasm between
animal life and the life of plants. For man improves, animals
do not; man progresses, animals do not; man invents more and
more complicated tools, animals do not; man is a creator of
material and spiritual wealth, animals are not; man is a builder
of civilization, animals are not; man makes the past live
in the present and the present in the future, animals do
not; man is thus a binder of time, animals are
not. In the light of such considerations, if only we will attend
to their mighty significance, it is as clear as anything can
be or can become, that the life of man-the time-binder-is as
radically distinct from that of animals-mere space-binders-as
animal life is distinct from that of plants or as the nature
of a solid is distinct from that of a surface, or that of a
surface from that of a line. It is, therefore, perfectly manifest
that, when we regard human beings as animals or as mixtures
of animal nature with something mysteriously supernatural,
we are guilty of the same kind of blunder as if we regarded
animals as plants or as plants touched by "divinity"-the same
kind of blunder as that of regarding a solid as a surface
or as a surface miraculously transfigured by some mysterious
influence from outside the universe of space. It is thus evident
that our guilt in the matter is the guilt of a blunder that
is fundamental-a confusing of types, a mixing of dimensions.
Nothing can be
more disastrous. For what are the consequences of that kind
of error? Let the reader reflect. He knows that, if our ancestors
had committed that kind of error regarding lines and surfaces
and solids, there would to-day be no science of geometry; and
he knows that, if there were no geometry, there would be no
architecture in the world, no surveying, no railroads, no astronomy,
no charting of the seas, no steamships, no engineering, nothing
whatever of the now familiar world-wide affairs made possible
by the scientific conquest of space. I say again, let the reader
reflect; for if he does not, he will here miss the gravity of
a most momentous truth. He readily sees, in the case supposed,
how very appalling the consequences would have been if, throughout
the period of humanity's childhood, there had occurred a certain
confusion of types, a certain mixing of dimensions, and he is
enabled to see it just because, happily, the blunder
was not made or, if made, was not persisted in, for,
if it had been made and persisted in, then the great and now
familiar things of which it would have deprived the world would
not be here; we should not now be able even to imagine them,
and so we could not now compute even roughly the tremendous
magnitude of the blunder's disastrous consequences. Let the
reader not deviate nor falter nor stagger here; let him shoulder
the burden of the mighty argument and bear it to the goal. He
easily perceives the truly appalling consequences that would
have inevitably followed from the error of confusing types-the
error of mixing dimensions-in the matter of lines and surfaces
and solids, if that error had been committed and persisted
in throughout the centuries; he can perceive those consequences
just because the error was not made and hence the great
things of which (had the blunder been made) it would have deprived
the world are here, so that he can say: "Behold those splendid
things-the science of geometry and its manifold applications
everywhere shining in human affairs-imagine all of them gone,
imagine the world if they had never been, and you will have
a measure of the consequences that would have followed violation
of the law of types, the law of dimensions, in the matter of
lines, surfaces and solids." But, now, in regard to the exactly
similar error respecting the nature of man, the situation is
reversed; for this blunder, unlike the other one, is not merely
hypothetical; we have seen that it was actually committed and
has been actually persisted in from time immemorial; not merely
for years or for decades or for centuries but for centuries
of centuries including our own day, it has lain athwart
the course of human progress; age after age it has hampered
and baulked the natural activity of the time-binding energies-the
civilization-producing energies-of humanity. How are we to estimate
its consequences ? Let the reader keep in mind that the error
is fundamental-a type-confusing blunder (like that supposed
regarding geometric entities); let him reflect, moreover, that
it affects, not merely one of our human concerns, but all
of them, since it is an error regarding the center of
them all-regarding the very nature of man himself; and
he will know, as well as anything can be known, that the consequences
of the ages-old blunder have been and are very momentous and
very terrible. Their measure is indeed beyond our power; we
cannot describe them adequately, we cannot delineate their proportions,
for we cannot truly imagine them; and the reason is plain: it
is that those advancements of civilization, those augmentations
of material and spiritual wealth, all of the glorious achievements
of which the tragic blunder has deprived the world, are none
of them here; they have not been produced; and so we cannot
say, as in the other case: "Look upon these splendid treasures
of bound-up time, imagine them taken away, and your sense of
the appalling loss will give you the measure required." It is
evident that the glories of which the misconceptions of human
nature have deprived manhood must long remain, perhaps forever,
in the sad realm of dreams regarding great and noble things
that might have been.
I have said that
the duty of examining the misconceptions imposes upon us four
obligations. Three of these we have performed: we have disengaged
the beliefs in question from the complicated tangle of opinions
in which they have come down to us from remote antiquity; we
have recognized the necessity and the duty of virtually stinging
ourselves into an awareness of the fact that we have actually
held them for true and that from time immemorial they have poured
their virus into the heart of ethics, economics, politics and
government throughout the world; we have seen not only that
the beliefs are false but that their falseness is due to a blunder
of the most fundamental kind-the blunder of mixing dimensions
or confusing types. As already said, the fourth one of the mentioned
tasks is that of tracing, if we can, the blunder's deadly effects
both in human history and in the present status of the world.
We have just reached the conclusion that this task cannot be
fully performed; for there can be no doubt, as we have
seen, that, if the blunder had not been committed and persisted
in, the world would now possess a civilization so far advanced,
so rich in the spiritual fruits of time and toil, as to be utterly
beyond our present power to conceive or imagine it.
But, though we
cannot perform the task fully, our plight is far from hopeless.
The World War has goaded us into thinking as we never thought
before. It has constrained us to think of realities and especially
to think of the supreme reality-the reality of Man. That is
why the great Catastrophe marks the close of humanity's childhood.
The period has been long and the manner of its end is memorable
forever-a sudden, flaming, world-wide cataclysmic demonstration
of fundamental ignorance-human ignorance of human nature. It
is just that tragic demonstration, brutal as an earthquake,
pitiless as fate or famine, that gives us ground for future
hope. It has forced us to think of realities and it is thought
of reality that will heal the world. And so I say that these
days, despite their fear and gloom, are the beginning of a new
order in human affairs-the order of permanent peace and swift
advancement of human weal. For we know at length what human
beings are, and the knowledge can be taught to men and women
and children by home and school and church and press throughout
the world; we know at length, and we can teach the world, that
man is neither an animal nor a miraculous mixture of angel and
beast; we know at length, and we can teach, that, throughout
the centuries, these monstrous misconceptions have made countless
millions mourn and that they are doing so to-day, for, though
we cannot compute the good of which they have deprived
mankind, we can trace the dark ramifications of their positive
evil in a thousand ways; we know at length, and we can
teach, that man, though he is not an animal, is a natural being,
having a definite place, a rank of his own, in the hierarchy
of natural life; we know at length, and we can teach the world,
that what is characteristic of the human class of life-that
which makes us human-is the power to create material
and spiritual wealth-to beget the light of reasoned understanding-to
produce civilization-it is the unique capacity of man for binding
time, uniting past, present and future in a single growing
reality charged at once with the surviving creations of
the dead, with the productive labor of the living, with the
rights and hopes of the yet unborn; we know at length, and we
can teach, that the natural rate of human progress is
the rate of a swiftly increasing exponential function of time;
we know, and we can teach, that what is good in present civilization-all
that is precious in it, sacred and holy-is the fruit of the
time-binding toil struggling blindly through the ages against
the perpetual barrier of human ignorance of human nature; we
know at length, we can teach, and the world will understand,
that in proportion as we rid our ethics and social philosophy
of monstrous misrepresentations of human nature, the time-binding
energies of humanity will advance civilization in accordance
with their natural law PRT, the forward-leaping
function of time.
Such knowledge
and such teaching will inaugurate the period of humanity's manhood.
It can be made an endless period of rapid developments in True
civilization. All the developments must grow out of the true
conception of human beings as constituting the time-binding
class of life, and so the work must begin with a campaign of
education wide enough to embrace the world. The cooperation
of all educational agencies-the home, the school, the church,
the press-must be enlisted to make known the fundamental truth
concerning the nature of man so that it shall become the guiding
light and habit of men, women, and children everywhere.
Gradual indeed but profound will be the transformations wrought
in all the affairs of mankind, but especially and first of all
in the so-called arts and sciences of ethics, economics, politics
and government.
The ethics of
humanity's manhood will be neither "animal" ethics nor "supernatural"
ethics. It will be a natural ethics based upon a knowledge of
the laws of human nature. It will not be a branch of zoology,
the ethics of tooth and claw, the ethics of profiteering, the
ethics of space-binding beasts fighting for "a place in the
sun." It will be a branch of humanology, a branch of Human Engineering;
it will be a time-binding ethics, the ethics of the entirely
natural civilization-producing energies of humanity. Whatever
accords with the natural activity of those energies will be
right and good; whatever does not, will be wrong
and bad. "Survival of the fittest" in the sense of
the strongest is a space-binding standard, the ethical
standard of beasts; in the ethics of humanity's manhood survival
of the fittest will mean survival of the best in competitions
for excellence, and excellence will mean time-binding excellence-
excellence in the production and right use of material and spiritual
wealth-excellence in science, in art, in wisdom, in justice,
in promoting the weal and protecting the rights both of the
living and of the unborn. The ethics that arose in the dark
period of humanity's childhood from the conception of human
beings as mysterious unions of animality and divinity gave birth
to two repulsive species of traffic-traffic in men regarded
as animals, fit to be slaves, and traffic in the "supernatural,"
in the sale of indulgences in one form or another and the "divine
wisdom" of ignorant priests. It is needless to say that in the
natural ethics of humanity's manhood those species of commerce
will not be found.
And what shall
we say in particular of economics, of "industry," "business
as usual," and the "finance" of "normalcy" ? There lies before
me an established handbook of Corporation Finance, by
Mr. E. S. Mead, Ph.D. (Appleton, N. Y.), whose purpose is not
that of adverse criticism but is that of showing the generally
accepted "sound" bases for prosperous business. I can hardly
do better than to ask the reader to ponder a few extracts from
that work, showing the established, and amazing theories, for
then I have only to say that in the period of humanity's manhood
the moral blindness of such "principles," their space-binding
spirit of calculating selfishness and greed, will be regarded
with utter loathing as slavery is regarded to-day. Behold the
picture:
"Since the bondholder
is solely interested in the security of his principal, and regular
payment of his interest, and since both security and interest
depend upon the permanence of income, other things being equal
the companies with the most stable earnings or a market . .
. furnish the best security for bonds. Stability of earnings
depends upon (1) the possession of a monopoly.... Monopoly
is exclusive or dominant control over a market. The more complete
this control, the more valuable is the monopoly. The advantage
of monopoly lies in the fact that the prices of services or
commodities are controlled by the producers (meaning owners-Author),
rather than by the consumer.... Monopolies are of various origins.
The most familiar are (1) franchises, the right to use public
property for private purposes, for example, the furnishing
of light, water and transportation, (2) control of sources
of raw material . . . , (3) patents, . . . , (4) high cost
of duplicating plant.... In manufacturing industries, for example,
those enterprises which produce raw materials and the
necessities of life have a more stable demand.... Railroads
furnish perhaps the best basis of bond issue because of the
stability of the demand for the transportation service . . .
the high cost of duplicating the railroad plant, . . . enables
them to fix their rates on freight and passenger traffic....
The security of the creditors is here the profitableness of
the business which is carried on in the factory. Furthermore,
a business is not an aggregate of physical property but consists
of physical property-buildings, boilers, machine tools-plus
an industrial opportunity, plus the organization and ability
to operate business." (Italics indicated by the author.)
There we see the
animal standards in their studied perfection. Comment would
be superfluous. In the period of humanity's manhood, the so-called
"science" of economics, the "dismal science" of political economy,
will become a genuine science based upon the laws of the time-binding
energies of humanity; it will become the light of Human Engineering-promoter,
guardian, and guide of human weal. For it will discover, and
will teach that a human life, a time-binding life, is
not merely a civilized life but a civilizing life;
it will know and will teach that a civilizing life is a life
devoted to the production of potential and kinetic use-values-to
the creation, that is, of material and spiritual wealth; it
will know and will teach that wealth-both material and spiritual
wealth-is a natural phenomenon -offspring of the marriage of
Time and human Toil; it will know and will teach that the wealth
in the world at any given moment is almost wholly the inherited
fruit of time and the labor of the dead; and so it will
ask: To whom does the inheritance rightly belong? Does it of
right belong to Smith and Brown ? If so, why? Or does
it of right belong to man-to humanity? If so, why? And
what does "humanity" include? Only the living, who are relatively
few? Or both the living and unborn? The Economics of humanity's
manhood will not only ask these questions but it will answer
them and answer them aright. In seeking the answers, it will
discover some obvious truths and many old words will acquire
new meanings consistent with the time-binding nature of man.
It will discover and will teach that the time-binders of a given
generation are posterity and ancestry at once-posterity
of the dead, ancestry of all the generations to come; it will
discover and will teach that in this time-binding double relationship
uniting past and future in a single living growing Reality,
are to be found the obligations of time-binding ethics and the
seat of its authority; economics will know and will teach that
human posterity- time-binding posterity-can not inherit
the fruits of time and dead men's toil as animals inherit
the wild fruits of the earth, to fight about them and to devour
them, but only as trustees for the generations to
come; it will know and will teach that "capitalistic" lust to
keep for SELF and "proletarian" lust to get for
SELF are both of them space-binding lust-animal lust-beneath
the level of time-binding life. The economics of humanity's
manhood will know and will teach that the characteristic energies
of man as man are by nature civilizing energies, wealth-producing
energies, time-binding energies, the peaceful energies of inventive
mind, of growing knowledge and understanding and skill and light;
it will know and will teach that these energies of existing
men united with one billion six hundred million available sun-man-powers
united with the ten billion living "man-powers of the dead,"
if they be not wasted by ignorance and selfishness, by conflict
and competition characteristic of beasts, are more than sufficient
to produce a high order of increasing prosperity everywhere
throughout the world; in the period of its manhood economics
will discover and will teach that to produce world prosperity,
cooperation-not the fighting of man against man-but the peaceful
cooperation of all is both necessary and sufficient;
it will know and will teach that such cooperation demands scientific
leadership and a common aim; it will know, however,
and will teach, for the lesson of Germany is plain, that scientific
knowledge and a common aim are not alone sufficient; it will
know and teach and all will understand that the common aim,
the unifying principle, the basis of cooperation, cannot be
the welfare of a family nor that of a province or a state or
a race, but must be the welfare of all mankind, the prosperity
of humanity, the weal of the world-the peaceful production of
Wealth without the destruction of War.
In humanity's
manhood, patriotism-the love of country-will not perish-far
from it-it will grow to embrace the world, for your country
and mine will be the world. Your "state" and mine will be the
Human State-a Cooperative Commonwealth of Man-a democracy in
fact and not merely in name. It will be a natural organic embodiment
of the civilizing energies-the wealth-producing energies-characteristic
of the human class of life. Its larger affairs will be guided
by the science and art of Human Engineering-not by ignorant
and grafting "politicians"-but by scientific men, by honest
men who know.
Is it a dream?
It is a dream, but the dream will come true. It is a
scientific dream and science will make it a living reality.
How is the thing
to be done? No one can foresee all the details, but in general
outline the process is clear. Violence is to be avoided. There
must be a period of transition-a period of adjustment. A natural
first step would probably be the establishment of a new institution
which might be called a Dynamic Department-Department of Coordination
or a Department of Cooperation-the name is of little importance,
but it would be the nucleus of the new civilization.
Its functions would be those of encouraging, helping and protecting
the people in such cooperative enterprises as agriculture, manufactures,
finance, and distribution.
The Department
of Cooperation should include various sections, which might
be as follows:
(1) The Section
of Mathematical Sociology or Humanology: composed
of at least one sociologist, one biologist, one mechanical engineer,
and one mathematician. Their work would be the development of
human engineering and mathematical sociology or humanology;
promoting the progress of science; providing and supervising
instruction in the theory of values and the rudiments of humanology
for elementary schools and the public at large. The members
of the section would be selected by the appropriate scientific
societies for a term fixed by the selectors.
(2) The Section
of Mathematical Legislation: composed of (say) one lawyer,
one mathematician, one mechanical engineer, selected as above.
Their task would be to recommend legislation, to provide means
for eliminating "Legalism" from the theory and practice of law,
and to bring jurisprudence into accord with the laws of time-binding
human nature and the changing needs of human society. Their
legislative proposals, if ratified in a joint session of sections
(1) and (2), would then be recommended to the appropriate legislative
bodies.
(3) The Educational
Section: composed of two or three teachers, one sociologist,
one mechanical engineer, one mathematician, selected as above.
They would elaborate educational projects and revise school
methods and books; their decisions being subject to the approval
of the joint session of sections (1), (2), and (3).
(4) The Cooperative
Section: composed of mechanical engineers, chemical engineers,
production engineers, expert bookkeepers, accountants, business
managers, lawyers and other specialists in their respective
lines. This section would be an "Industrial Red Cross" (Charles
Ferguson) giving expert advice when asked for by any cooperative
society.
(5) The Cooperative
Banking Section: composed of financial experts, sociologists,
and mathematicians; its task being to help with expert advice
new cooperative people's banks.
(6) The Promoters'
Section: composed of engineers whose duty would be to study
all of the latest scientific facts, collect data, and elaborate
plans. Those plans would be published, and no private person,
but only cooperative societies, would be permitted by law to
use them. The department would also study and give advice respecting
the general conditions of the market and the needs in the various
lines of production. This section would regulate the duplication
of production.
(7) The Farming
Section: composed of specialists in scientific and cooperative
agriculture.
(8) The Foreign
Section: for inter-cooperative foreign relations.
(9) The Commercial
Section.
(10) The News
Section: to edit a large daily paper giving true,
uncolored news with a special supplement relating to
progress in the work of Human Engineering. This paper would
give daily news about the whole cooperative movement, markets,
etc., etc.
All men selected
to the places for this work should be the very best men in the
nation. They should be well paid to enable them to give their
full energy and time to their duties. All the selections for
this work should be made in the same manner as mentioned above-through
proven merits not clever oratory. Such appointments should be
considered the highest honor that a country can offer to its
citizens. Every selection should be a demonstration that the
person selected was a person of the highest attainments in the
field of his work.
The outline of
this plan is vague; it aims merely at being suggestive. Its
principal purpose is to accentuate the imperative necessity
of establishing a national time-binding agency-a Dynamic Department
for stimulating, guiding and guarding the civilizing energies,
the wealth producing energies, the time-binding energies, in
virtue of which human beings are human. For then and only then
human welfare, unretarded by monstrous misconceptions of human
nature, by vicious ethics, vicious economics and vicious politics,
will advance peacefully, continuously, and rapidly, under the
leadership of human engineering, happily and without fear, in
accord with the exponential law-the natural law-of the
time binding energies of Man.
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