Mathematical philosophy, a study of fate and freedom; lectures for educated laymen, by Cassius J. Keyser.

KORZYBSKI'S CONCEPT OF MAN 423
upon us as at once the posterity of the dead and the
ancestry of the yet unborn. We had been born in the
midst of a great civilization, and, in accord with our
breeding, we lived in it and upon it like butterflies in a
garden of flowers, not to say as "maggots in a cheese."
Since then a change has come. The World War
awoke us. The awakening was rude but it was effectual.
Everywhere men and women are now thinking as never
before, and they are thinking about realities for they
know that there is no other way to cope with the great
problems of a troubled world. They have learned, too,
that, of all the realities with which we humans have to
deal, the supreme reality is Man; and so the questions
that men and women are everywhere asking are questions
regarding Man, for they are questions of ethics, of social
institutions, of education, of economics, of philosophy, of
industrial methods, of politics and government. The
questions have led to some curious results,-to doctrines
that alarm, to proposals that startle,-and we are wont
to call them radical, revolutionary, red. Is it true that
our thinking has been too radical? How the question
would have made Plato smile-Plato who had seen his
venerated teacher condemned to death for radical criticism. No, the trouble is that, in the proper sense of that
much abused term, our thought has not been radical
enough. Our questionings have been eager and wideranging but our thought has been shallow. It has been
passionate and it has been daring but it has not been
deep. For, if it had been deep, we could not have failed,
as we have failed, to ask ourselves the fundamental
question: What is that in virtue of which human beings
are human? What is the distinctive place of our human
kind in the hierarchy of the world's life? What is Man?