WHAT IS MAN? 



What is man? What is the defining 

 characteristic mark of humankind? 

 In the scheme of nature, what is the 

 place — the distinctive place — of the 

 human class of life? Have we pro- 

 pounded the question to ourselves? 

 Professor Keyser thinks not, and in a 

 brilliant address before the annual 

 meeting of the Phi Beta Kappa Society 

 at Columbia University discusses and 

 expands a philosophy of life first spon- 

 sored by a Polish engineer, Count 

 Alfred Korzybski.' 



Humans, he points out, entertain two 

 concepts of man, inherited in the mesh 

 of inherited opinions; the one biological 

 or zoological; the other mythological. 

 According to the zoological conception 

 man is an animal, a conception having 

 at least the merit of regarding humans 

 as natural — a merit not possessed by 

 the mythological conception which 

 accords man no place in nature, he 

 being neither natural nor supernatural, 

 but a kind of miraculous union or hy- 

 brid of the two. 



Are these conceptions true? Or 

 rather since they can not both be true, 

 is one of them true? It should not be 

 amazing to find that both are false; 

 for the concepts are man's and their 

 object is man; thus the difficulty is 

 unique; it is that of a self-conscious 

 being having to regard its kind as an 

 object and rightly conceiving what the 

 object is. If they are not true what is 

 the error in these traditional concep- 

 tions? The error is believed to lie in 

 a confusion of types. Plants, the 

 lowest order of living things, are classed 

 as the basic-energy-binding or chemis- 

 try binding class of life, while the 

 animals are the space binders — the 

 space binding class of life. What now 

 of human beings, who, like the animals, 

 have the capacity for binding space 

 but with no capacit\- of a higher order 

 woulfl indeed be animals? The difTer- 

 ence lies in the i)ower of initiative, of 

 creative ability, of imagination or rea- 

 son, the power that makes progress 

 po.ssible, a power not possessed by 

 animals. By virtue of that familiar 

 yet ever strange human power, each 



generation inherits the frin't of the 

 creati\e toil of bygone generations, 

 augments the inheritance, and trans- 

 mits it to the generations to come; 

 then the dead sur\'i\'e in the living, 

 destined with the living to greet and 

 bless the yet unborn. Past, present, 

 and future are not three; in man they 

 are spiritually united to constitute 

 one living reality and because this 

 capacity for binding time under a law 

 of ever-increasing amelioration is pecu- 

 liar to man the class of human beings 

 is to be conceived and scientifically 

 defined to be the time-binding class of 

 life. Not, as Professor Keyser points 

 out, time binding animals, for time 

 binding, chemistry binding, and space 

 binding constitute three dimensions — 

 three types of life to which belong 

 man, plants and animals. Time-bind- 

 ing activity — ^the defining mark of 

 man — may involve and often docs 

 involve space-binding as a higher 

 involves a lower; but to say that, there- 

 fore, man is a species of animal — a 

 time-binding species thereof — is like 

 saying that a solid is a species of sur- 

 face or that a violin is a species of 

 wood or that symphony is a species of 

 sound. 



With this new conception of time 

 binding, a study of man becomes the 

 study of his time-binding energies; the 

 laws of human nature are the natural 

 laws of these energies. One of these 

 laws is conceived as a law of perpetual 

 growth and continued progress; a law 

 of rapidly increasing geometric prog- 

 ression which reduces to the formula 

 PRT-i -where P is the progress made in 

 a given generation, R the ratio, and T 

 the time. This then is the natural 

 law for the advancement of civilization, 

 only retarded in operation, the author 

 believes, by the misconceptions man 

 entertains of man, the misconception 

 that man is but an animal and imtil 

 man ceases to regard man as a species 

 of animal the social life of the world and 

 especially the ethical life will continue 

 to be what it always has been in a 

 large measure — zoological ethics. — 

 J.H. K. 



' Keyser, Cassias J., The Nature of .Man, Science. Vol. LIV, No. 130,? pp. 205-213, Kridav 

 Sept. 9, 1921. 



43^ 



