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

KORZYBSKI'S CONCEPT OF MAN 447
Korzybski believes that the great war marks the end
of the long period of humanity's childhood and the beginning of humanity's manhood. This second period, he
believes, is to be initiated, guided, and characterized by
a right understanding of the distinctive nature of Man.
Is he over-enthusiastic? I do not know. Time will tell.
I hope he is not mistaken. If he is not, there will be
many changes and many transfigurations.
I have spoken of ethics and must do so again, for
ethics, good or bad, is the most powerful of influences,
pervading, fashioning, coloring, controlling all the moods
and ways and institutions of our human world. What
is to be the ethics of humanity's manhood? It will not
be an ethics based upon the zoological conception of man;
it will not, that is, be animalistic ethics, space-binding
ethics, the ethics of beasts fighting for "a place in the
sun," the ethics of might, crowding, and combat; it will
not be a "capitalistic" ethics lusting to keep for self, nor
"proletarian" ethics lusting to get for self; it will not be
an ethics having for its golden rule the law of brutessurvival of the fittest in the sense of the strongest.
Neither will it be an ethics based upon a mythological
conception of man; it will not, that is, be a lawless ethics
cunningly contrived for traffic in magic and myth. It will
be a natural ethics because based upon the distinctive
nature of mankind as the time-binding,-civilization-producing,-class of life; it will be, that is, a scientific ethics
having the understandability, the authority, and the sanction of natural law, for it will be the embodiment, the
living expression, of the laws,-natural laws,-of the
time-binding energies of man; human freedom will be
freedom to live in accord with those laws and righteousness will be the quality of a life that does not contravene