conception, our sciences and our activities; it powerfully
stimulated the development of all the branches of natural and
technological knowledge. Even in the event of the Newtonian laws being
proved to be not quite correct, they have served a great purpose in
enabling us to understand natural phenomena in a sufficiently approximate
way to make it possible to build up modern technology and to develop our
physical science to the point where it was necessary and possible to make
a correction of the Newtonian laws.

A similar organic change in our conception of human life and its phenomena
is involved in the foregoing definitions of the classes of life; they will
replace basic errors with scientific truths of fundamental importance;
they will form the basis for scientific development of a permanent
civilization in place of the periodically convulsive so-called
civilizations of the past and present. To know the cause of evil and error
is to find the cure.

Chapter IV. What Is Man?

Man has ever been the greatest puzzle to man. There are many and important
reasons for this fact. As the subject of this book is not a theoretical,
academic study of man, of which too many have already been written, I will
not recount the reasons, but will confine myself to the more pressing
matters of the task in hand, which is that of pointing the way to the
science and art of Human Engineering. The two facts which have to be dealt
with first, are the two which have most retarded human progress: (1) there
has never been a true definition of man nor a just conception of his role
in the curious drama of the world; in consequence of which there has never
been a proper principle or starting point for a science of humanity. It
has never been realized that man is a being of a dimension or type
different from that of animals and the characteristic nature of man has
not been understood; (2) man has always been regarded either as an animal
or as a supernatural phenomenon. The facts are that man is not
_super_natural but is literally a part of nature and that human beings are
not animals. We have seen that the animals are truly characterized by
their autonomous mobility--their space-binding capacity--animals are
space-binders. We have seen that human beings are characterized by their
creative power, by the power to make the past live in the present and the
present for the future, by their capacity to bind time--human beings are
time-binders. Th