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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. LIV. No. 1393 



their autonomous power to move, to abandon 

 one place and occupy another and so to ap- 

 propriate the natural fruits of many locali- 

 ties, the animals are called space-binders — 

 the space-binding class of life. 



And now we come to the crux. What 

 are we to say of man? Like the animals, 

 human beings have the autonomous power 

 to move — the capacity for binding space — for 

 taking now one and now another " place in 

 the sun" with the goods thereof, and it is 

 plain that, if human beings had no capacity 

 of higher order, men, women, and children 

 would indeed be animals. But what are the 

 facts? Be good enough to examine them 

 carefully ; they are familiar ; let us, if we can, 

 reflect upon them as if they were unfamiliar, 

 for that is half the secret of philosophy and 

 of science, too. Long, long ago, a quarter or 

 half million years ago, there came into 

 existence upon this globe— no matter how— 

 a new kind of beings; they did not know 

 what they were; they knew nothing of the 

 world, nothing of its size or shape or place in 

 the universe, nothing of its resources, their 

 locations or properties, nothing of natural 

 law; they were without guiding maxims, pre- 

 cepts or precedents; they had no science, 

 no philosophy, no art, no wealth, no instru- 

 ments, no history — not even ti-adition: their 

 ignorance was almost absolute; and yet, com- 

 pared with the animals, which they hunted 

 and which hunted them, they were marvels 

 of genius; for there was in them a strange 

 new gift — a strange new energy — that mys- 

 terious power in virtue of which they did 

 that most wonderful of all things — initiated 

 the creative movement called civilization. 

 That power, first manifest in the infancy of 

 our race, is the power that invents, the power 

 that imagines, conceives, reasons; it is the 

 power that makes philosophy, science, art and 

 all the other forms of material and spiritual 

 wealth; the power that detects the uniformi- 

 ties of nature, creates history, and foretells the 

 future; it is the power that makes progress 

 possible and actual, discerns excellence, ac- 

 quires wisdom, and, in the midst of a hostile 

 world, more and more determines its own 



destiny. The animals have it not or, if they 

 have, they have it in a measure so small that 

 we may neglect it as mathematicians neglect 

 infinitesimals of higher order. Do not fail to 

 observe how it relates us to that mysterious 

 thing called Time, which so many thinkers — 

 psychologists, philosophers, astronomers, phy- 

 sicists, and mathematicians — are just now as 

 never before engaged in studying, each in his 

 own way. By virtue of that familiar yet 

 ever strange human power, each generation 

 inherits the fruit of the creative toil of by- 

 gone generations, augments the inheritance, 

 and transmits it to the generations to come; 

 thus the dead survive in the living, destined 

 with the living to greet and bless the yet 

 unborn. If this be poetry it is also fact. 

 Past, Present and Future are not three; in 

 man they are spiritually united to constitute 

 one living reality. And now we behold, and 

 are at length prepared to gi'asp, Korzybski's 

 great Concept. Because this capacity for 

 binding time, under a law of ever-increasing 

 amelioration, is peculiar to man or is at all 

 events his in an incomparable degree, the 

 class of human beings is to be conceived and 

 scientifically defined to be the Time-binding 

 class of Ufa We have here, you see, a new 

 dimension, a new type, of life— life-in-Time. 

 Animals are binders of space; man is a time- 

 binder. Allow me a word of caution. Since, 

 like the animals, man, too, binds space, may 

 we not say that man is a time-binding animal ? 

 No; to say that would be the same kind of 

 blunder as to say that a solid is a surface 

 because it has surfaces and some surface 

 properties or to say that fractions are a 

 species of whole numbers because they happen 

 to have some of the properties of whole 

 numbers. It is fatal to confuse types, or 

 to mix dimensions. Time-binding activity — 

 the defining mark of man — may involve and 

 often does involve space-binding as a higher 

 involves a lower; but to say that, therefore, 

 man is a species of animal — a time-binding 

 species thereof — is like saying that a solid 

 is a species of surface or that water is a 

 species of oxygen or that wine is a species 

 of water or that a violin is a species of wood 



