Such I take to be the counsel of wisdom—the simple wisdom of sober common sense. To ascertain the salient facts of our immense human past and then to explain them in terms of their causes and conditions is not an easy task. It is an exceedingly difficult one, requiring the labor of many men, of many generations; but it must be performed; for it is only in proportion as we learn to know the great facts of our human past and their causes that we are enabled to understand our human present, for the present is the child of the past; and it is only in proportion [pg 172] as we thus learn to understand the present that we can face the future with confidence and competence. Past, Present, Future—these can not be understood singly and separately—they are welded together indissolubly as one.
The period of humanity's childhood has been long—300,000 to 500,000 years, according to the witness of human relics, ruins and records of the caves and the rocks—a stretch of time too vast for our imaginations to grasp. Of that immense succession of ages, except a minute fraction of it including our own time, we have, properly speaking, no history; we have only a rude, dim, broken outline. Herodotus, whom we call “the father of history” proper, lived less than 2500 years ago. What is 2500 years compared with the whole backward stretch of human time? We have to say that the father of human history lived but yesterday—a virtual contemporary of those now living. Our humankind groped upon this globe for probably 400,000 years before the writing of what we call history had even begun. If we regard history as a kind of racial memory, what must we say of our race's memory? It is like that of a man of 20 years whose recollection extends back less than 3 months or like that of a man of 60 years whose recollection fails to reach any event of the first 59 years of his life. Owing to the work of geologists, paleontologists, ethnologists and their [pg 173] co-workers, the history of prehistoric man will grow, just as we know to-day more about the life of mankind in the time of Herodotus than Herodotus himself knew. Meanwhile we must try to make the best use of such historical knowledge of man as we now possess.
Even if the story of humanity's childhood were fully recorded in the libraries of the world, it would not be possible in this brief writing to recount the story in even the most summary fashion. Except the tale of recent years, the story is known as I have said, only in outline, rude, dim and broken, but for the present purpose this will suffice. Countless multitudes of details are lost—most of them doubtless forever. But we need not despair. The really great facts of our racial childhood—the massive, dominant, outstanding facts—are sufficiently clear for our guidance in the present enterprise. And what do we know?
We know that the period of our human childhood has been inconceivably long; we know that in the far distant time, the first specimens of humankind—the initial members of the time-binding race of man—were absolutely without human knowledge of the hostile world in which they found themselves; we know that they had no conception of what they themselves were; we know that they had neither speech nor art nor philosophy nor religion nor science [pg 174] nor tools nor human history nor human tradition; we know, though we to-day can hardly imagine it, that their sole equipment for initiating the career of the human race was that peculiar faculty which made them human—the capacity of man for binding time; we know that they actually did that work of initiation, without any guidance or example, maxim or precedent; and we know that they were able to do it just because the power of initiation—the power to originate—is a time-binding power.
What else do we know of the earliest part of humanity's childhood? We know that in that far-distant age, our ancestors—being, not animals, but human creatures—not only began to live in the human dimension of life—forever above the level of animals—but continued therein, taking not only the first step, but the second, the third, and so on indefinitely; we know, in other words, that they were progressive creatures, that they made advancement; we know that their progress was natural to them—as natural as swimming is to fishes or as flying is to birds—for both the impulse and the ability to progress—to make improvement—to do greater things by help of things already done—are of the very nature of the time-binding capacity which makes humans human.
We know that time-binding capacity—the capacity for accumulating racial experience, enlarging it, [pg 175] and transmitting it for future expansion—is the peculiar power, the characteristic energy, the definitive nature, the defining mark, of man; we know that the mental power, the time-binding capacity, of our pre-historic ancestors, was the same in kind as our own, if not in degree; we know that it is natural for this capacity, the highest known agency of Nature, to produce ideas, inventions, insights, doctrines, knowledge and other forms of wealth; we know that progress in what we call civilization, which is nothing but progress in the production and right use of material and spiritual wealth, has been possible and actual simply and solely because the products of time-binding work not only survive, but naturally tend to propagate their kind—ideas begetting ideas, inventions leading to other inventions, knowledge breeding knowledge; we therefore, know that the amount of progress which a single generation can make, if it have an adequate supply of raw material and be unhampered by hostile circumstances, depends, not only upon its native capacity for binding time, but also—and this is of the utmost importance—upon the total progress made by preceding generations—upon the inherited fruit, that is, of the time-binding toil of the dead; accordingly we know that the amount of progress a single generation can thus make is what mathematicians call an increasing function of time, and not [pg 176] only an increasing function but an increasing exponential function of time—a function like PRT, as already explained; we know, too, that the total progress which T successive generations can thus make is:
R/R-1(PRT-P)
which is also an increasing exponential function of time; we know from the differential calculus that these functions—which represent natural laws, laws of human nature, laws of the time-binding energies of man—are very remarkable functions—not only do they increase with time but their rates of increase are also exponential functions of time and so the rates of increase themselves increase at rates which are, again, exponential functions, and so on and on without limit; that, I say, is a marvelous fact, and it is for us a fact of immeasurable significance; for it means that the time-binding power of man is such that, if it be allowed to operate naturally, civilization—the production and right use of material and spiritual wealth—will not only grow towards infinity (as mathematicians say), but will thus grow with a swiftness which is not constant but which itself grows towards infinity with a swiftness which, again, is not constant but increases according to the same law, and so on indefinitely. We thus see, if we will [pg 177] only retire to our cloisters and contemplate it, that the proper life of man as man is not life-in-space like that of animals, but is life-in-time; we thus see that in distinctively human life, in the life of man as man, the past is present and the dead survive destined to greet and to bless the unborn generations: time, bound-up time, is literally of the core and substance of civilization. So it has been since the beginning of man.
We know that the total progress made in the long course of humanity's childhood, though it is absolutely great, is relatively small; we know that, compared with no-civilization, our present civilization is vast and rich in many ways; we know, however, that, if the time-binding energies of humanity had been always permitted to operate unhampered by hostile circumstances, they would long ere now have produced a state of civilization compared with which our present estate would seem mean, meagre, savage. For we know that those peculiar energies—the civilization-producing energies of man—far from being always permitted to operate according to the laws of their nature, have never been permitted so to operate, but have always been hampered and are hampered to-day by hostile circumstances. And, if we reflect, we may know well enough what the enemies—the hostile circumstances—have been and are. We know that in the beginning of humanity's [pg 178] childhood—in its babyhood, so to speak—there was, as already said, no capital whatever to start with—no material wealth—no spiritual wealth in the form of knowledge of the world or the nature of man—no existing fruit of dead men's toil—no bound-up time—nothing but wild and raw material, whose very location, properties and potencies had all to be discovered; even now, because we have inherited so much bound-up time and because our imaginations have been so little disciplined to understand realities, we can scarcely picture to ourselves the actual conditions of that far-off time of humanity's babyhood; still less do we realize that present civilization has hardly begun to be that of enlightened men. We know, moreover, that the time-binding energies of our remote ancestors were hampered and baulked, in a measure too vast for our imaginations, by immense geologic and climatic changes, both sudden and secular, unforeseen and irresistible—by earthquake and storm, by age-long seasons of flood and frost and heat and drought, not only destroying both natural resources and the slowly accumulated products of by-gone generations but often extinguishing the people themselves with the centers and abodes of struggling civilization.
Of all the hostile circumstances, of all the causes which throughout the long period of humanity's childhood have operated to keep civilization and [pg 179] human welfare from progressing in full accord with the natural laws of the time-binding energies of man, the most potent cause and most disastrous, a cause still everywhere in operation, remains to be mentioned. I mean human ignorance. I do not mean ignorance of physical facts and the laws of physical nature for this latter ignorance is in large measure the effect of the cause I have in mind. The ignorance I mean is far more fundamental and far more potent. I mean human ignorance of Human Nature—I mean man's ignorance of what Man is—I mean false conceptions of the rightful place of man in the scheme of life and the order of the world. What the false conceptions are I have already pointed out. They are two. One of them is the conception according to which human beings are animals. The other one is the conception according to which human beings have no place in Nature but are hybrids of natural and supernatural, animals combined with something “divine.” Both of them are characteristic of humanity's childhood; both of them are erroneous, and both of them have done infinite harm in a thousand ways. Whose is the fault? In a deep sense, it is the fault of none. Man started with no capital—on knowledge—with nothing but his physical strength and the natural stirring within of the capacity for binding time; and so he had to grope. It is not strange that he was puzzled by himself. It [pg 180] is not strange that he thought himself an animal; for he has animal propensities as a cube has surfaces, and his animal propensities were so obtrusive, so very evident to physical sense—he was born, grew, had legs and hair, ate, ran, slept, died—all just like animals—while his distinctive mark, his time-binding capacity, was subtle; it was spiritual; it was not a visible organ but an invisible function; it was the energy called intellect or mind, which the physical senses do not perceive; and so I say it is not strange—it is indeed very sad and very pathetic—but it is not to be wondered at that human beings have falsely believed themselves to be animals. So, too, of the rival belief—the belief that humans are neither natural nor supernatural but are both at once, at once brutal and divine, hybrid offspring of beast and god. The belief is monstrous, it is very pathetic and very sad, but its origin is easy to understand; once invented, it became a powerful instrument for evil men, for impostors, but it was not invented by them; it was only an erroneous result of an honest effort to understand and to explain. For the obvious facts created a real puzzle to be explained: On the one hand, men, women and children—animal-hunting and animal-hunted human beings—certainly resembled animals physically in a hundred unmistakable ways; on the other hand, it became more and more evident that the same animal-resembling [pg 181] human beings could do many things which animals never did and could not do. Here was a puzzle, a mystery. Time-binding curiosity demanded an explanation. What was it to be? Natural science had not yet arisen; critical conception—conception that avoids the mixing of dimensions—was in the state of feeble infancy. It is easy to understand what the answer had to be—childish and mythical; and so it was—humans are neither animals nor gods, neither natural nor supernatural, they are both at once, a mixture, a mysterious union of animal with something “divine.”