i86 evolution: the ages and tomorrow 



coming increasingly aware of the different orders of ab- 

 straction they use. On the other hand, semantic principles 

 are violated by the behavior of rigid believers of supersti- 

 tious dogma, of demagogues, and the like. Here the word 

 is confused with the thing, orders of abstraction are mixed 

 and get out of control, absolute and unalterable meanings 

 are assigned to words, and so forth. The tribal shaman and 

 the modem demagogue gain a hold over people because 

 the nonsemantic man reacts to words as though they were 

 facts— word magic, constantly repeated statements channel- 

 izing reactions of people into immediate, uncritical, and au- 

 tomatic responses. Korzybski saw in these unthinking re- 

 actions many evils, from advertising techniques at verbal 

 levels far above the quality of product through the persist- 

 ent acquiescence of groups to the inevitability of war. 



In his Science a?id Sa?iity Korzybski set himself the task 

 of developing means of retraining the human nervous sys- 

 tem toward better neuro-linguistic habits and toward greater 

 sanity. He began the organization of a new "empirical sci- 

 ence" of man which is being continued by many of his stu- 

 dents and followers. A day is now dawning when a true 

 science of man, with all the promise that that may mean, 

 will be established. Independent of the Korzybski contri- 

 bution is the new biological mathematics of Nicolas Rashev- 

 sky and the theory of cybernetics of Norbert Wiener. 

 These show a definite direction that future science may 

 take. They need not be reviewed here, but later we shall 

 look into the arguments still put forth in some quarters, al- 

 though rather weakly now, that one cannot develop a true 

 science of man. 



Obviously, a part of our language difficulties would be 

 eliminated if we were in possession of, and eventually 

 adopted everywhere, a universal language. The incredible 

 multipHcity of tongues on this earth is one of the unfortu- 

 nate results of our early evolutionary isolation. Many would 

 hope that the future will bring to us a universal tongue, at 



