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SCIENCE 



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



immortal offspring of the marriage of Time 

 and human Toil. 



And here arises a great question which I 

 have hardly time enough to touch. The ques- 

 tion is: Has civilization always advanced in 

 accord with the mentioned law? And, if not, 

 why not? The time-binding energies of man 

 have been in operation long — 300,000 to 500,- 

 000 years, according to the witness of human 

 relics, ruins and records of the caves and the 

 rocks. If progress had followed the mentioned 

 law throughout that vast period, our planet 

 would no doubt be now clothed with a civiliz- 

 • ation so advanced that we are powerless to 

 imagine it or to conceive it or even to con- 

 jecture it in dreams. And yet that law is 

 a natural law of the time-binding energies 

 of man. What has been the trouble? Wliat 

 the main trouble has been is pretty plain. 

 As already said, what we human beings do 

 depends, not merely upon what we are but, 

 in equal or greater measure, upon what we 

 thinh we are. From time immemorial the 

 characteristic energies of our humankind have 

 been hampered by the falSe conception that 

 man is a species of animal and hampered by 

 the false conception that man is a miracul- 

 ous mixture of natural and supernatural. 

 Throughout the long period of our race's 

 childhood, from which we have not yet 

 emerged, those misconceptions have lain 

 athwart the course of civilization. All that 

 is precious in present civilization has been 

 accomplished in spite of them. The goods, the 

 glorious achievements, of which they have 

 deprived the world, we can not now know 

 but the subtle ramifications of their positive 

 evil we can trace in a thousand ways. And 

 it is your duty and mine to trace them. Who- 

 ever preforms the duty will be appalled. I 

 can not dwell upon the matter here. Suffice 

 it to say that, if we humans do not in fact 

 constitute a perfectly natural class of life, 

 then there never has been and never can be a 

 human ethics having the understandability, 

 the sanction and the authority of natural law ; 

 if we do constitute such a class of life but 

 continue to thinlc we do not, the result will 

 be much the same — our ethics will continue 



to carry the confusion and darkness produced 

 by the presence in it of mythological elements. 

 If, on the other hand, human beings continue 

 to regard man as a species of animal, then 

 the social life of the world in all its aspects 

 will continue to reflect the misconception; 

 especially our ethics, which subtly pervades, 

 colors and fashions all of the social sciences, 

 will continue to be — what it always has been 

 in large measure — a zoological ethics, animal 

 ethics, the ethics of tooth and claw, space- 

 binding ethics, the ethics of strife, violence, 

 combat and war. 



So it has been, but it will not continue 

 so to be if we have the wisdom to learn the 

 fundamental lesson of our recent experience. 

 What is that lesson? It is this: the World 

 War was an unforeseen, sudden, cataclysmic 

 demonstration of human ignorance of human 

 nature — a demonstration, pitiless as fate or 

 famine, that human beings have never rightly 

 conceived Man to be what Man is — not a 

 mixture of natural and supernatural nor a 

 species of animal, but the natural agency 

 for those time-binding energies in the world 

 whose peculiar function it is to produce 

 civilization and to do so in conformity with 

 its marvelous law of an increasing function 

 of time. 



That conception will be found, I believe, 

 to initiate a new epoch — the epoch of human- 

 ity's manhood. The concept is easy to 

 grasp — all, and especially the young, can 

 understand it. Once it is understood, human 

 life will accord with human nature, the time- 

 binding energies will be freed from the old 

 bondage, and civilization will at length 

 advance in accord with its natural Law as the 

 great forward-leaping exponential function of 

 Time. There will be great changes and many 

 transfigurations. Education — education in 

 home, school and church — will have for its 

 supreme function to teach the children of man 

 what man is and what they are. Ethics will 

 abandon the space-binding standards of ani- 

 mals and will become human ethics based upon 

 the natural laws of the time-binding energies 

 of man. Ereedom will be freedom to live in 

 accord with those laws and righteousness will 



