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

KORZYBSKI'S CONCEPT OF MAN 427
What is that central concept? What is Korzybski's
Concept of Man? I wish to present it as clearly as I
can. It is a concept defining man in terms of Time.
"Humanity," says the author, "is the time-binding class
of life." What do the words mean? What is meant by
time-binding or the binding of time? The meaning,
which is indeed momentous, will be clearer to us if we
prepare for it by a little preliminary reflection.
Long ages ago there appeared upon this planet-no
matter how-the first specimens of our human kind.
What was their condition? It requires some meditation
and some exercise of imagination to realize keenly what
it must have been. Of knowledge, in the sense in which
we humans now use the term, they had none-no science,
no philosophy, no art, no religion; they did not know
what they were nor where they were; they knew nothing
of the past, for they had no history, not even tradition;
they could not foretell the future, for they had no knowledge of natural law; they had no capital,-no material
or spiritual wealth,-no inheritance, that is, from the
time and toil of by-gone generations; they were without
tools, without precedents, without guiding maxims, without speech, without any light of human experience; their
ignorance, as we understand the term, was almost absolute. And yet, compared with the beasts, they were
miracles of genius, for they contrived to do the most
wonderful of all things that have happened on our globe
-they initiated, I mean, the creative movement which
their remote descendants call Civilization.
Why? What is the secret? Have you ever tried to
find it? The secret is that those rude animal-resembling,
animal-hunting, animal-hunted ancestors of ours were a
new kind of creature in the world-a new kind because