Chapter IV. What Is Man?

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 rôle 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 notsupernatural but is literally a part of nature[pg 067]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. These concepts are basic and impersonal; arrived at mathematically, they are mathematically correct.It does not matter at allhowthe first man, the first time-binder, was produced; the fact remains that he was somewhere, somehow produced. To know anything that is to-day of fundamental interest about man, we have to analyse man in three coordinates—in three capacities; namely, his chemistry, his activities in space, and especially his activities in time; whereas in the study of animals we have to consider only two factors: their chemistry and their activities in space.Let us imagine that the aboriginal—original human specimen was one of two brother apes,AandB; they were alike in every respect; both were animal space-binders; but something strange happened toB; he became the first time-binder, a human. No matter how, this“something”made the change in him that lifted him to a higher dimension; it is enough that in some-wise, over and above[pg 068]his animal capacity for binding space, there was superadded the marvelous new capacity for binding-time. He had thus a new faculty, he belonged to a new dimension; but, of course, he did not realize it; and because he had this new capacity he was able to analyze his brother“A”; he observed“Ais my brother; he is an animal; but he is my brother; therefore,Iam an animal.”This fatal first conclusion, reached by false analogy, by neglecting a fact, has been the chief source of human woe for half a million years and it still survives. The time-binding capacity, first manifest inB, increased more and more, with the days and each generation, until in the course of centuries man felt himself increasingly somehow different from the animal, but he could not explain. He said to himself,“If I am an animal there is also in me something higher, a spark of some thingsupernatural.”With this conclusion he estranged himself, as something apart from nature, and formulated the impasse, which put him in a cul-de-sac of a double life. He was neither true to the“supernatural”which he could not know and therefore, could not emulate, nor was he true to the“animal”which he scorned. Having put himself outside the“natural laws,”he was not really true to any law and condemned himself to a life of hypocrisy, and established speculative, artificial, unnatural laws.[pg 069]“How blind our familiar assumptions make us! Among the animals, man, at least, has long been wont to regard himself as a being quite apart from and not as part of the cosmos round about him. From this he has detached himself in thought, he has estranged and objectified the world, and lost the sense that he is of it. And this age-long habit and point of view, which has fashioned his life and controlled his thought, lending its characteristic mark and color to his whole philosophy and art and learning, is still maintained, partly because of its convenience, no doubt, and partly by force of inertia and sheer conservatism, in the very teeth of the strongest probabilities of biological science. Probably no other single hypothesis has less to recommend it, and yet no other so completely dominates the human mind.”(Cassius J. Keyser, loc. cit.) And this monstrous conception is current to-day: millions still look upon man as a mixture of animal and something supernatural.There is no doubt that the engineering of human society is a difficult and complicated problem of tremendous ethical responsibility, for it involves the welfare of mankind throughout an unending succession of generations. The science of Human Engineering can not be built upon false conceptions of human nature. It can not be built on the conception of man as a kind of animal; it can not be[pg 070]built on the conception of man as a mixture of natural and supernatural. It must be built upon the conception of man as being at once natural and higher in dimensionality than the animals. It must be built upon the scientific conception of mankind as characterized by their time-binding capacity and function. This conception radically alters our whole view of human life, human society, and the world.It must be obvious to any one that time-binding is the only natural criterion and standard for the time-binding class of life. This mighty term—time-binding—when comprehended, will be found to embrace thewholeof the natural laws, the natural ethics, the natural philosophy, the natural sociology, the natural economics, the natural governance, to be brought into the education of time-binders; then really peaceful and progressive civilization, without periodical collapses and violent readjustments, will commence; not before. Everything which is really“time-binding”is inthehuman dimension; therefore, it will represent every quality that is implied in such words as—good,just,right,beautiful; while everything that is merely space-binding will be classified as“animal”and be thus assessed at its proper value. Those ignorant“masters of our destinies”who regard humans as animals or as monstrous hybrids of natural and supernatural must be dethroned by scientific education.[pg 071]Humans can be literally poisoned by false ideas and false teachings. Many people have a just horror at the thought of putting poison into tea or coffee, but seem unable to realize that, when they teach false ideas and false doctrines, they are poisoning the time-binding capacity of their fellow men and women. One has to stop and think! There is nothing mystical about the fact that ideas and words are energies which powerfully affect the physico-chemical base of our time-binding activities. Humans are thus made untrue to“human nature.”Hypnotism is a known fact. It has been proved that a man can be so hypnotized that in a certain time which has been suggested to him, he will murder or commit arson or theft; that, under hypnotic influence, the personal morale of the individual has only a small influence upon his conduct; the subject obeys the hypnotic suggestions, no matter how immoral they are. The conception of man as a mixture of animal and supernatural has for ages kept human beings under the deadly spell of the suggestion that, animal selfishness and animal greediness are their essential character, and the spell has operated to suppress theirreal human natureand to prevent it from expressing itself naturally and freely.On the other hand, when human beings are educated to a lively realization that they are bynaturetime-binding creatures, then they will spontaneously[pg 072]live in accordance with their time-binding nature, which, as I have said, is the source and support of the highest ideals.What is achieved in blaming a man for being selfish and greedy if he acts under the influence of a social environment and education which teach him that he is an animal and that selfishness and greediness are of the essence of his nature?Even so eminent a philosopher and psychologist as Spencer tells us:“Of self-evident truths so dealt with, the one which here concerns us is that a creature must live before it can act ... Ethics has to recognize the truth that egoism comes before altruism.”This is true foranimals, because animals die out from lack of food when their natural supply of it is insufficient because they havenot the capacity to produce artificially. But it is not true for thehuman dimension.Why not? Because humans through their time-binding capacity are first of allcreatorsand so their number is not controlled by the supply of unaided nature, but only by men's artificial productivity, which isthe materialization of their time-binding capacityMan, therefore, by the very intrinsic character of his being,must act first, in order to be able to live(through the action of parents—or society) which is not the case with animals. The misunderstanding[pg 073]of this simple truth is largely accountable for the evil of our ethical and economic systems or lack of systems. As a matter of fact, if humanity were to live incompleteaccord with the animal conception of man, artificial production—time-binding production—would cease and ninety per cent of mankind would perish by starvation. It is just because human beings are not animals but are time-binders—not mere finders but creators of food and shelter—that they are able to live in such vast numbers.Here even the blind must see the effect of higher dimensionality, and this effect becomes in turn the cause of other effects which produce still others, and so on in an endless chain.we live because we produce, because we are acting in time and are not merely acting in space—because man is not a kind of animal. It is all so simple, if only we apply a little sound logic in our thinking about human nature and human affairs. If human ethics are to be human, are to be in the human dimension, the postulates of ethics must be changed;for humanity in order to live must act first; the laws of ethics—the laws of right living—arenaturallaws—laws of human nature—laws having their whole source and sanction in the time-binding capacity and time-binding activity peculiar to man. Human excellence is excellence in time-binding, and[pg 074]must be measured and rewarded by time-binding standards of worth.Humanity, in order to live, must produce creatively and therefore must be guided by applied science, by technology; and this means that the so-called social sciences of ethics, jurisprudence, psychology, economics, sociology, politics, and government must be emancipated from medieval metaphysics; they must be made scientific; they must betechnologized; they must be made to progress and to function in the proper dimension—the human dimension and not that of animals: they must be made time-binding sciences.Can this be done? I have no doubt that it can. For what is human life after all?To a general in the battlefield, human life is a factor which, if properly used, can destroy the enemy. To an engineer human life is an equivalent to energy, or a capacity to do work, mental or muscular, and the moment something is found to be a source of energy and to have the capacity of doing work, the first thing to do, from the engineer's point of view, is to analyse the generator with a view to discovering how best to conserve it, to improve it, and bring it to the level of maximum productivity. Human beings are very complicated energy-producing batteries differing widely in quality and magnitude of productive power. Experience has shown[pg 075]that these batteries are, first of all, chemical batteries producing a mysterious energy. If these batteries are not supplied periodically with a more or less constant quantity of some chemical elements called food and air, the batteries will cease to function—they will die. In the examination of the structure of these batteries we find that the chemical base is very much accentuated all through the structure. This chemical generator is divided into branches each of which has a very different rôle which it must perform in harmony with all the others. The mechanical parts of the structure are built in conformity to the rules of mechanics and are automatically furnished with lubrication and with chemical supplies for automatically renewing worn-out parts. The chemical processes not only deposit particles of mass for the structure of the generator but produce some very powerful unknown kinds of energies or vibrations which make all the chemical parts function; we find also a mysterious apparatus with a complex of wires which we call brain glands, and nerves; and, finally, these human batteries have the remarkable capacity of reproduction.These functions are familiar to everybody. From the knowledge of other physical, mechanical and chemical phenomena of nature, we must come to the conclusion, that this human battery is the most perfect example of a complex engine; it has all the[pg 076]peculiarities of a chemical battery combined with a generator of a peculiar energy called life; above all, it has mental or spiritual capacities; it is thus equipped with both mental and mechanical means for producing work. The parts and functions of this marvelous engine have been the subject of a vast amount of research in various special branches of science. A very noteworthy fact is that both the physical work and the mental work of this human engine are always accompanied by both physical and chemical changes in the structure of its machinery—corresponding to the wear and tear of non-living engines. It also presents certain sexual and spiritual phenomena that have a striking likeness to certain phenomena, especially wireless phenomena, to electricity and to radium. This human engine-battery is of unusual strength, durability and perfection; and yet it is very liable to damage and even wreckage, if not properly used. The controlling factors are very delicate and so the engine is very capricious. Very special training and understanding are necessary for its control.The reader may wish to ask: What is the essence of the time-binding power of Man? Talk of essences is metaphysical—it is not scientific. Let me explain by an example.What is electricity? The scientific answer is: electricity is that which exhibits such and such phenomena.[pg 077]Electricity means nothing but a certain group of phenomena called electric. We are studying electricity when we are studying those phenomena. Thus it is in physics—there is no talk of essences. So, too, in Human Engineering—we shall not talk of theessenceof time-binding but only of the phenomena and the laws thereof. What has led to the development of electric appliances is knowledge of electrical phenomena—not metaphysical talk about the electrical essence. And what will lead to the science and art of Human Engineering is knowledge of time-binding phenomena—not vain babble about an essence of time-binding power. There is no mystery about the word time-binding. Some descriptive term was necessary to indicate that human capacity which discriminates human beings from animals and marks man as man. For that use—the appropriateness of the term time-binding becomes more and more manifest upon reflection.What are the conditions of life upon this earth? Is there war or peace in daily life? All living beings require food; they multiply in a geometrical ratio; and so thenaturalproductivity of the soil becomes increasingly inadequate. The tendency to increase in geometrical ratio is true of all life—vegetable, animal and human, but the tendency is checked by various counteracting influences, natural and artificial. A short time ago these checks had so operated[pg 078]to annul the law of increase as almost to stop the growth of human population. It is only by the time-binding capacity of man—by scientific progress and technological invention—that the checks have been overcome. And so in the last century the population of Europe increased more than it had increased in several centuries before. Impoverished soil, excessive heat or cold, excessive moisture, the lack of rain-fall, and many other factors are hostile to life. It is evident, therefore, that human life must especially struggle for existence; it must carry on a perpetual contest for self preservation. It seems obvious that, if there is perpetual war in every-day life, war methods must be applied.We have just passed through a tremendous world-widemilitarywar and we developed special ways of producing power to overcome the enemy. We were thus driven to discover some of the hidden sources of power and all of our old habits and ideas were bent toward military methods and military technology. The war of every-day life against hostile elements is war for the subjugation of physical nature and not for the conquest of people. It is a war carried on by the time-binding power of men pitted against natural obstacles, and its progressive triumph means progressive advancement in human weal.The lesson of the World War should not be[pg 079]missed through failure to analyse it. When nations war with nations, the normal daily war of millions and millions of individuals to subjugate natural resources to human uses is interrupted, and the slow-gathered fruits of measureless toil are destroyed.But peaceful war, war for the conquest of nature, involves the use of methods of technology and, what is even more important, technological philosophy, law and ethics.What I want to emphasize in this little book, is the need of a thoroughgoing revision of our ideas; and the revision must be made by engineering minds in order that our ideas may be made to match facts. If we are ill, we consult a physician or a surgeon, not a charlatan. We must learn that, when there is trouble with the producing power of the world, we have to consult an engineer, an expert on power. Politicians, diplomats, and lawyers do not understand the problem. What I am advocating is that we must learn to ask those who know how to produce things, instead of asking those whose profession is to fight for the division of things produced by nature or by other human beings.As a matter of fact our civilization has been for a long time disorganized to the point of disease. Lately through the whirl of changing conditions, due to the great release of power in the new-born giant technology, the disorganization has become acute.[pg 080]The sick seldom know the cure for themselves. If the cure is to be enduring, we have to go to the source, and this can be done only by men familiar, not only with effects but also with the causes.Money is not the wealth of a nation, but production is wealth; soordered productionis the main object for humanity. But to have the maximum of production, it is necessary to have production put on a sound basis. No mere preaching of brotherly love, or class hatred, will produce one single brick for the building of the future temple of human victory—the temple ofhumancivilization. Ordered production demands analysis of basic facts.This era is essentially an industrial era. To produce we have to have: (1) raw material or soil; (2) instruments for production—tools and machines; and (3) the application of power.The three requirements may be briefly characterized and appraised as follows:(1) Raw material and soil are products of nature; humanity simply took them and had the use of them for nothing, because it is impossible to call a prayer of thanksgiving (if any) addressed to a“creator”as payment to gods or men. But raw material and soil, in the conditions in which nature produces them, are of very little immediate benefit to humanity, because unfilled soil produces very little food for humans, and raw material such as[pg 081]wood, coal, oil, iron, copper, etc., are completely useless to humanity until after human work is applied to them. It is necessary to cut a tree for the making of timber; it is necessary to excavate the minerals, and even then, only by applying further human work is it possible to make them available for any human use. So, it is obvious that even raw materials in the form in which nature has produced them, are mostly of no value and unavailable for use, unless reproduced through the process of“human creative production.”Therefore, we may well conclude that“raw material”must be divided into two very distinct classes: (a) raw material as produced by nature—nature's free gift—which in its original form and place has practically no use-value; and (b) raw material reproduced by man's mental and muscular activities, by his“time-binding”capacities. Raw materials of the second class have an enormous use-value; indeed they make the existence of humanity possible.As to the second requirement for production, namely:(2) Tools and machines, it is obvious that“tools and machines”are made of raw material by human work, mental and muscular.And, finally:(3) The application of power. Different sources of natural energy and power are known. The most[pg 082]important available source of energy for this globe is the sun—the heat of the sun. This solar heat is the origin of water power, of wind power, and of the power bound up in coal, of the chemistry, growth and transforming agency of plants.10[pg 083]All foods which the animals as well as the humans use are, already, the result of the solar energy transformed into what may be called chemical energy. Transformation of energies is building up of life.It is to be clearly seen that the only source of energy which can be directly appropriated and used by man or animal is vegetable food found in the wilderness; no other sources of power are available[pg 084]fordirectuse; they have first to be mastered and directed by human brain. The same is true in regard to the getting of animal food, the creation of a water- or windmill, or a steam engine, or the art of using a team of horses, or a bushel of wheat; these are not available except by the use of the human“time-binding”power.This short survey of facts, known to everybody, brings us to the conclusion that all problems of production come ultimately to the analysis of(1) Natural resources of raw material and natural energy, freely supplied by nature, which, as we have seen, in the form as produced by nature alone, have very little or no value for humanity;(2) The activity of the human brain (because human muscles are always directed by the brain) which gives value to the otherwise useless raw materials and energies.Hence, to understand the processes of production, it is essential to realize that humanity is able to survive only by virtue of the capacity of humans to exploit natural resources—to convert the products of nature into forms available for human needs. If humanity had only the capacity of apes, depending exclusively on wild fruits and the like, they would be confined to those comparatively small regions of the globe where the climate and the fertility of the soil are specially favorable. But in the case supposed,[pg 085]humans would not be humans, they would not be time-binders—they would be animals—mere space-binders.There are other facts which must be kept constantly in mind. One of them is that, in the world in which we live, there are natural laws of inorganic as well as organic phenomena. Another of the facts is, as before said, that the human class of life has the peculiar capacity of establishing the social laws and customs which regulate and influence its destinies, which help or hinder the processes of production upon which the lives and happiness of mankind essentially and fundamentally depend.It must not be lost sight of in this connection that the human class of life is a part and a product of nature, and that, therefore, there must befundamental laws which are natural for this class of life. A stone obeys the natural laws of stones; a liquid conforms to the natural law of liquids; a plant, to the natural laws of plants; an animal, to the natural laws of animals; it follows inevitably that theremustbe natural laws for humans.But here the problem becomes more complicated; for the stone, the plant and the animal do not possess the intellectual power to create and initiate and so must blindly obey the laws that are natural for them; they are not free to determine their own destinies. Not so with man; man has the capacity and he[pg 086]can, through ignorance or neglect or mal-intent, deviate from, or misinterpret, the natural laws for the human class of life. Just therein lies the secret and the source of human chaos and woe—a fact of such tremendous importance that it cannot be over-emphasized and it seems impossible to evade it longer. To discover the nature of Man and the laws of thatnature, marks the summit of human enterprises. For to solve thisproblem is to open the way to everything which can be of importance to humanity—to human welfare and happiness.The great problem has been felt as a powerful impulse throughout the ages of human striving, for in all times it has been evident to thinkers that upon the right solution of the problem must forever depend the welfare of mankind. Many“solutions”have been offered; and, though they have differed widely, they agree in one respect—they have had a common fate—the fate of being false. What has been the trouble? The trouble has been, in every instance, a radical misconception of what a human being really is. The problem is to discover the natural laws of the human class of life. All the“solutions”offered in the course of history and those which are current to-day are of two and only two kinds—zoologicalandmythological. The zoological solutions are those which grow out of the false conception according to which human beings are animals;[pg 087]if humans are animals, the laws of human nature are the laws of animal nature; and so the social“sciences”of ethics, law, politics, economics, government become nothing but branches of zoology; as sciences, they are the studies of animal life; as arts, they are the arts of managing and controlling animals; according to this zoological philosophy, human wisdom about human beings is animal wisdom about animals.The mythological“solutions”are those which start with the monstrous conception according to which human beings have no proper place in nature but are mixtures of natural andsupernatural—unions or combinations of animality and divinity. Such“solutions”contain no conception ofnaturallaw; scientifically judged, they are mythological absurdities—muddle-headed chattering of crude and irresponsible metaphysics—well-meaning no doubt, but silly, and deadly in their effects upon the interests of mankind, vitiating ethics, law, economics, politics and government.Such have been and still are the regnant philosophies of human nature. What is the remedy? How are the laws of human nature to be discovered?It is evident that the enterprise, like all other scientific enterprises, must be based upon and guided by realities. It is essential to realize that the great, central, dominant, all-embracing reality is the reality[pg 088]ofhuman nature. If we misconceive this fundamental matter, the enterprise must fail; that is both logically clear and clear in the sad light of history; but if we conceive it aright, we may confidently expect the enterprise to prosper. That is why, in the chapter on“The Classes of Life,”I have laid so much stress on the absolute necessity of conceiving Man as being what he really is, and not something else. And we have discovered what man is: we have discovered that man is characterized by the capacity or power to bind time, and so we havedefinedhumanity as the time-binding class of life. That concept is fundamental. It contains the germ of the science and art of Human Engineering. The problem of discovering and applying the“laws of human nature”is the problem of discovering and applying to the conduct of life the laws of time-binding—of time-binding activity—of time-bindingenergy. This fact must be firmly seized and kept steadily in mind.Energy, we have noted, is the capacity to do work. In human economy work may be (1)usefulor (2)neutralor (3)harmful. These words have no significance except in human economy. The energy of the human intellect is a time-binding energy, for it is able to direct, to use, to transform other energies. This time-binding energy is of higher rank—of higher dimensionality—than the other natural energies which it directs, controls, uses, and transforms.[pg 089]This higher energy—which is commonly called the mental or spiritual power of man—istime-binding because it makes past achievements live in the present and present activities in time-to-come. It is an energy that initiates; it is an energy that creates; it is an energy that can understand the past and foretell the future—it is both historian and prophet; it is an energy that loadsabstracttime—the vehicle of events—with an ever-increasing burden of intellectual achievements, of spiritual wealth, destined for the civilization of posterity. And what is the natural law of the increase? What is the natural law of human advancements in all great matters of human concern?The question is of utmost importance both theoretically and practically, for the law—whatever it be—is anaturallaw—a law of human nature—a law of the time-binding energy of man. Whatisthe law? We have already noted the law of arithmetical progression and the law of geometric progression; we have seen the immense difference between them; and we have seen that the natural law of human progress in each and every cardinal matter is a law like that of a rapidly increasing geometric progression. In other words, the natural law of human progress—the natural law of amelioration in human affairs—the fundamental law of human nature—the basic law of the time-binding energy[pg 090]peculiar to man—is a Logarithmic law—a law of logarithmic increase. I beg the reader not to let the term bewilder him but to make it his own. It is easy to understand; and its significance is mighty and everlasting. Even its mathematical formulation can be understood by boys and girls. Let us see how the formulation looks.SupposePRto denote the amount of progress made in some important field by a given generation—which we may call the“first”generation; whereRdenotes the common ratio—the ratio of improvement—that is, the number by which the progress of one generation must be multiplied to give the amount of progress made by the next generation; then the amount of progress made by the second generation will bePR2; that made by the third generation will bePR3; and so on; now denote byTthe number of generations, counting the first one and all that follow in endless succession. Then the following series will show the law of human progress in the chosen field:PR, PR2, PR3, PR4, PR5, ..., PRT, PRT+1, ...;notice how it goes; the first generation ends with PR; the second generation starts withPR, addsPR2, and ends withPR + PR2; the third generation starts withPR + PR2, addsPR3and ends withPR + PR2+ PR3; and so on and on; thegainmade in[pg 091]theTthgeneration isPRT;the total gainmade inTgenerations isPR + PR2+ PR3+ ... + PRT;this total gain is given by the formula,Total gain in T generations = (R ÷ R-1) (PRT-P).If we takeRto be 2 (which is a very small ratio, requiring the progress of each generation to be merely double that of the preceding one) and if we takeTto be (say) 10, then we see that the progress made by the single 10th generation isP× 210, which is 1024 times the progress made in the“first”generation; and we readily compute that the total gain in 10 generations is 2046 times the progress made in the“first”generation. Moreover, to gain a just sense of the impressiveness of this law, the reader must reflect upon the fact that it operates, not merely on one field, but in all fields of human interest.“Operates in all fields”I have just now said; as a matter of fact, as before pointed out, it does not so operatenowinallfields nor has it ever done so. My point is that itwillso operate when we once acquire sense enough to let it do so. That sense we shall have when and only when we discover that by nature we are time-binders and that theeffectivenessof our time-binding capacity is not[pg 092]only a function of time but is, as I have explained, a logarithmic or exponential function of time—a function in which time (T) enters as anexponent, as in the expressionPRT, so that we humans are, unlike animals, naturally qualified not only to progress, but to progress more and more rapidly, with an alwaysaccelerating acceleration, as the generations pass.This great fact is to be at once the basis, the regulator and guide in the science and art of Human Engineering. Whatever squares with that law of time-binding human energy, is right and makes for human weal; whatever contravenes it, is wrong and makes for human woe.And so I repeat that the world will have uninterrupted, peaceful progress when and only when the so-called social“sciences”—the life-regulating“sciences”of ethics, law, philosophy, economics, religion, politics, and government—are technologized; when and only when they are made genuinely scientific in spirit and method; for then and only then will they advance, like the natural, mathematical and technological sciences, in conformity to the fundamental exponential law of the time-binding nature of man; then and then only, by the equal pace of progress in all cardinal matters, the equilibrium of social institutions will remain stable and social cataclysms cease.[pg 093]Chapter V. WealthI beg the reader to allow me to begin this chapter with a word of warning. The reader is aware that Criticism—by which I mean Thought—may be any one of three kinds: it may be purely destructive; it may be purely constructive; or it may be both destructive and constructive at the same time. Purely destructive criticism is sometimes highly useful. If an old idea or a system of old ideas be false and therefore harmful, it is a genuine service to attack it and destroy it even if nothing be offered to take its place, just as it is good to destroy a rattlesnake lurking by a human pathway, even if one does not offer a substitute for the snake. But, however useful destructive criticism may be, it is not an easy service to render; for old ideas, however false and harmful, are protected alike by habit and by the inborn conservatism of many minds. Now, habit indeed is exceedingly useful—even indispensable to the effective conduct of life—for it enables us to do many useful things automatically and therefore easily, without conscious thinking, and thus to save our mental energy for other work; but for the same[pg 094]reason, habit is often very harmful; it makes us protect false ideas automatically, and so when the destructive critic endeavors to destroy such ideas by reasoning with us, he finds that he is trying to reason with automats—with machines. Such is the chief difficulty encountered by destructive criticism. On the other hand, purely constructive criticism—purely constructive thought—consists in introducing new ideas of a kind that do not clash, or do not seem to clash, with old ones. Is such criticism or thought easy? Far from it. It has difficulties of its own. These are of two varieties: the difficulty of showing people who are content with their present stock of old ideas that the new ones are interesting or important; and the great difficulty of makingnewideas clear and intelligible, for the art of being clear and perfectly intelligible is very, very hard to acquire and to practise. The third kind of criticism—the third kind of thought—the kind that is at once both destructive and constructive—has a double aim—that of destroying old ideas that are false and that of replacing them with new ideas that are true; and so the third kind of criticism or thought is the most difficult of all, for it has to overcome both the difficulty of destructive criticism and that of constructive thought.The reader, therefore, if he will be good enough to reflect a little upon the matter, can not fail to appreciate[pg 095]the tremendous difficulties which beset the writing of this little book, for he must perceive, not only that the work belongs to the third kind of critical thought, but—what is much more—the errors it aims to destroy are fundamental, world-wide and old, while the true ideas it seeks to substitute for them are fundamental and new. This great difficulty, felt ateverystage of this writing, is, for a reason to be presently explained, greatly enhanced and felt with especial keenness in the present chapter. I therefore beg the reader to give me here very special cooperation—the cooperation of open-mindedness, candor and critical attention. It is essential to keep in mind the nature of our enterprise as a whole, which is that of pointing the way to the science and art of Human Engineering and laying the foundations thereof; we have seen Human Engineering, when developed, is to be the science and art of so directing human energies and capacities as to make them contribute most effectively to the advancement of human welfare; we have seen that this science and art must have its basis in a true conception of human nature—a just conception of what Man really is and of his natural place in the complex of the world; we have seen that the ages-old and still current conceptions of man—zoological and mythological conceptions, according to which human beings are either animals or else hybrids of animals and gods—are[pg 096]mainly responsible for the dismal things in human history; we have seen that man, far from being an animal or a compound of natural and supernatural, is a perfectly natural being characterized by a certain capacity or power—the capacity or power to bind time; we have seen that humanity is, therefore, to be rightly conceived and scientifically defined as the time-binding class of life; we have seen that, therefore, the laws of time-binding energies and time-binding phenomena are the laws of human nature; we have seen that this conception of man—which must be the basic concept, the fundamental principle and the perpetual guide and regulator of Human Engineering—is bound to work a profound transformation in all our views on human affairs and, in particular, must radically alter the so-called social“sciences”—the life-regulating“sciences”of ethics, sociology, economics, politics and government—advancing them from their present estate of pseudo sciences to the level of genuine sciences and technologizing them for the effective service of mankind. I call them“life-regulating,”not because they play a more important part in human affairs than do the genuine sciences of mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy and biology, for they are not more important than these, but because they are, so to say, closer, more immediate and more obvious in their influence and effects. These life-regulating sciences[pg 097]are, of course, not independent; they depend ultimately upon the genuine sciences for much of their power and ought to go to them for light and guidance; but what I mean here by saying they are not independent is that they are dependent upon each other, interpenetrating and interlocking in innumerable ways. To showin detailhow the so-called sciences will have to be transformed to make them accord with the right conception of man and qualify them for their proper business will eventually require a large volume or indeed volumes.In this introductory work I cannot deal fully with one of those“sciences”nor in suitable outline with each of them separately. I must be content here to deal, very briefly, with one of them by way of illustration and suggestion. Which one shall it be?Now among these life-regulating“sciences”there is one specially marked by the importance of its subject, by its central relation to the others and by its prominence in the public mind. I mean Economics—the“dismal science”of Political Economy. For that reason I have chosen to deal with economics. In the present chapter I shall discuss three of its principal terms—Wealth, Capital and Money—with a view to showing that the current meanings and interpretations of these familiar terms must be very greatly deepened, enlarged and elevated if they are to accord with facts and laws of human nature and if the so-called[pg 098]“science”which employs them is to become a genuine science properly qualified to be a branch of Human Engineering. It is to be shown that the meanings currently attached by political economists and others to the terms in question belong to what I have called the period of humanity's childhood; and it is to be shown that the new meanings which the terms must receive belong to the period of humanity's manhood. It will be seen that the new meanings differ so radically from the old ones as to make it desirable for the sake of clarity to give the new meanings new names. But this, however scientifically desirable, is impracticable because the old terms—wealth, capital, money—are so deeply imbedded in the speech of the world. And here comes into view the very special difficulty alluded to above and which led me to request the reader's special cooperation in this chapter. The difficulty is not merely that of destroying old ideas that are false; it is not merely that of replacing them with true ideas that are new; it is that of causing people habitually to associate meanings that are new and true with terms associated so long, so universally, so uniformly with meanings that are false.The secret of philosophy, said Leibnitz, is to treat familiar things as unfamiliar. By the secret of“philosophy”Leibnitz meant the secret of what we call science. Let us apply this wholesome maxim in[pg 099]our present study; let us, in so far as we can, regard the familiar terms—wealth, capital and money—as unfamiliar; let us deal with them afresh; let us examine openmindedly the facts—the phenomena—to which the terms relate and ascertain scientifically the significance the terms must have in a genuine science of human economy. Examine“the facts”I say—examine“the phenomena”—for bending facts to theories is a vital danger, while bending theories to facts is essential to science and the peaceful progress of society.Human beings have always had some sense of values—some perception or cognition of values. In order to express or measure values, it was necessary to introduce units of measure, or units of exchange. People began to measure values by means of agricultural and other products, such as cattle, for example. The Latin word for cattle waspecus, and the wordpecunia, which came to signify money, accounts for the meaning of our familiar word pecuniary. The earliest units for measuring became unsuited to the increasing needs of growing trade,“business,”or traffic. Finally a unit called money was adopted in which the base was the value of some weight of gold. Thus we see that money came to mean simply the accepted unit for measuring, representing and expressing values of and in wealth.But what is wealth? I have said that the old[pg 100]conceptions of wealth, capital and money—the conceptions that are still current throughout the world—belong to the period of humanity's childhood—they are childish conceptions. I have said that they must be replaced by scientific conceptions—by conceptions fit for humanity's manhood. The change that must be made in our conceptions of the great terms is tremendous. It is necessary to analyse the current conceptions of wealth, capital, and money—the childish conceptions of them—in order to reveal their falseness, stupidity and folly. To do this we must enter the field of Political Economy—a field beset with peculiar difficulties and dangers. All the Furies of private interests are involved. One gains the impression that there is little or no real desire to gain a true conception—a scientific conception—of wealth. Everybody seems to prefer an emotional definition—a definition that suits his personal love of wealth or his hatred of it. Many definitions of wealth, capital and money are to be found in modern books of political economy—definitions and books belonging to humanity's childhood. For the purpose of this writing they all of them look alike—they sufficiently agree—they are all of them childish. Mill, for example, tells us that wealth consists of“useful or agreeable things which possess exchangeable value.”Of capital one of the simplest definitions is this:[pg 101]“Capital is that part of wealth which is devoted to obtaining further wealth.”(Alfred Marshall,Economics of Industry.)Walker (in hisMoney, Trade and Industry) defines money as follows:“Money is that which passes freely from hand to hand throughout the community in final discharge of debts and full payment for commodities, being accepted equally without reference to the character or credit of the person who offers it, and without the intention of the person who receives it to consume it, or to enjoy it, or apply it to any other use than, in turn, to tender it to others in discharge of debts or full payment for commodities.”Political economy has many different schools of thought and methods of classification. Its reasonings are mainly speculative, metaphysical, and legalistic; its ethics is zoological ethics, based on the zoological conception of man as an animal. The elements of natural logic and natural ethics are absent. The sophisticated ideas about the subject of political economy, bluntly do not correspond to facts. Our primitive forefather in the jungle would have died from hunger, cold, heat, blood poisoning or the attacks of wild animals, if he had not used his brain and muscles to take some stone or a piece of wood to knock down fruit from trees, to kill an animal, so as to use his hide for clothes and his meat for food, or to break wood and trees for a shelter and to make some weapons for defense and hunting.[pg 102]“In the first stone which he (the savage) flings at the wild animal he pursues, in the first stick that he seizes to strike down the fruit which hangs above his reach, we see the appropriation of one article for the purpose of aiding in the acquisition of another and thus we discover the origin of capital.”(R. Torrens,An Essay on the Production of Wealth.)Our primitive forefather's first acquaintance with fire was probably through lightning; he discovered, probably by chance, the possibility of making fire by rubbing together two pieces of wood and by striking together two pieces of stone; he established one of the first facts in technology; he felt the warm effect of fire and also the good effect of broiling his food by finding some roasted animals in a fire. Thus nature revealed to him one of its great gifts, the stored-up energy of the sun in vegetation and its primitive beneficial use. He was already a time-binding being; evolution had brought him to that level. Being a product of nature, he was reflecting those natural laws that belong to his class of life; he had ceased to be static—he had become dynamic—progressiveness had got into his blood—he was above the estate of animals.We also observe that primitive man produced commodities, acquired experiences, made observations, and that some of the produced commodities had a use-value for other people and remained good for use, even after his death.[pg 103]The produced commodities were composed of raw material, freely supplied by nature, combined with some mental work which gave him the conception of how to make and to use the object, and some work on his part which finally shaped the thing; all of this mental and manual work consumed an amount of time. It is obvious that all of these elements are indispensable to produce anything of any value, or of any use-value. His child not only directly received some of the use-values produced by him, but was initiated into all of his experiences and observations. (As we know, power, as defined in mechanics, means the ratio of work done to the time used in doing it.)All those things are time-binding phenomena produced by the time-binding capacity of man; but man hasnotknown thatthis capacitywas hisdefining mark. We must notice the strange fact that, from the engineering point of view, humanity, though very developed in some ways, is childishly undeveloped in others. Humanity has some conceptions about dimensions and talks of the world in which we live as having three dimensions; yet even in its wildest imagination it can not picture tangibly afourthdimension; nay, humanity has not learned to grasp the real meanings of things that are basic or fundamental. All of our conceptions are relative and comparative; all of them are based upon matters[pg 104]which we do not yet understand; for example, we talk of time, space, electricity, gravity, and so on, but no one has been able to define them in terms of the data of sensation; nevertheless—and it is a fact of the greatest importance—we learn how to use many things which we do not fully understand and are not yet able to define.In political economy the meagreness of our understanding is especially remarkable; we have not yet grasped the obvious fact—a fact of immeasurable import for all of the social sciences—that with little exception the wealth and capital possessed by a given generation are not produced by its own toil but are the inherited fruit of dead men's toil—a free gift of the past. We have yet to learn and apply the lesson that not only our material wealth and capital but our science and art and learning and wisdom—all that goes to constitute our civilization—were produced, not by our own labor, but by the time-binding energies of past generations.Primitive man used natural laws without knowing them or understanding them, but he was able to cause nature to express itself, by finding a way to release nature's stored up energy. Through the work of his brain and its direction in the use of his muscles, he found that some of his appliances were not good; he made better ones, and thus slowly at first, the progress of humanity went on. I will not enlarge[pg 105]upon the history of the evolution of civilization because it is told in many books.In the earliest times the religious, philosophical, legal and ethical systems had not been invented. The morale at that time was a natural morale. Humans knew that they did not create nature. They did not feel it“proper”to“expropriate the creator”and legalistically appropriate the earth and its treasure for themselves. They felt, in their unsophisticated morale, that being called into existence they had a natural right to exist and to use freely the gifts of nature in the preservation of their life; and that is what they did.After the death of a man, some of the objects produced by him still survived, such as weapons, fishing or hunting instruments, or the caves adapted for living; a baby had to be nourished for some years by its parents or it would have died. Those facts had important consequences; objects made by someone for some particular use could be used by someone else, even after the death of one or more successive users; again the experiences acquired by one member of a family or a group of people were taught by example or precept to others of the same generation and to the next generation. Such simple facts are the corner stones of our whole civilization and they are the direct result of thehuman capacity of time-binding.[pg 106]The world to-day is full of controversy about wealth, capital, and money, and because humanity, through its peculiar time-binding power, binds this element“time”in an ever larger and larger degree, the controversy becomes more and more acute. Civilization as a process is the process of binding time; progress is made by the fact that each generation adds to the material and spiritual wealth which it inherits. Past achievements—the fruit of bygone time—thus live in the present, are augmented in the present, and transmitted to the future; the process goes on; time, the essential element, is so involved that, though it increases arithmetically, its fruit, civilization, advances geometrically.But there is another peculiarity in wealth and money: If a wooden or iron“inch”be allowed to rot or rust quietly on some shelf, this“inch”does not represent anything besides this piece of wood or iron. But if we take thementalvalue of an inch, this unit of one of the measures of space, and use it, with other quantities, in the contemplation of the skies for the solving of an astronomical problem, it gives a prophetic answer that, in a certain place there is a star; this star, may be for years looked for in vain. Was it that the calculation was wrong? No, for after further search with telescopes of greater power, the star is found and the calculation thus verified.[pg 107]It is obvious that the“unit”—inch—has no value by itself, but is very precious as a unit for measuring the phenomenon of length, which it perfectly represents, and that is why it was introduced.It is exactly the same with money if the term be rightly understood. Understood aright, money, being the measure and representative of wealth, is in the main, the measure and the representative of dead men's toil; for, rightly understood, wealth is almost entirely the product of the labor of by-gone generations. This product, we have seen, involves the element of time as the chief factor. And so we discover how money, properly understood, is connected with time—the main function of money is to measure and represent the accumulated products of the labor of past generations. Hoarded money is like an iron“inch”upon a shelf—a useless lump; but when used as a measure and representative of wealth rightly understood, money renders invaluable service, for it then serves to measure and represent the living fruit of dead men's toil.For this reason, it is useless to argue who is the more important, the capitalist who has legal possession of most of the material fruit of dead men's toil, or the laborer who has legal possession of but little of it. In the laborer, we do not now really look for his physical muscular laboralone; for this is replaced by mechanical or animal power as soon as[pg 108]it can be. What we do need from labor, and what we will always need, is hisbrain—his time-binding power.The population of the world may be divided into different classes; if the classes are not here enumerated in the customary way, it is because it is necessary to classify human beings, as nearly as possible according to their“power-value.”There is no assertion that this is an ideal classification, but if someone is moved to exclaim—“what a foolish, unscientific division!”—I will answer by saying:“I grant that the division is foolish and unscientific; butit is the only division which corresponds to facts in life, and it is not the writer's fault. By this‘foolishness’some good may be accomplished.”From an engineer's point of view humanity is apparently to be divided into three classes; (1) the intellectuals; (2) the rich; and (3) the poor. This division would seem to be contrary to all the rules of logic, but it corresponds to facts. Of course some individuals belong to two of the classes or even to all three of them, an after-war product, but essentially, they belong to the one class in proportion to the characteristic which is the most marked in their life; that is, in the sense of social classes—based on magnitude of values.(1) The intellectuals are the men and women[pg 109]who possess the knowledge produced by the labor of by-gone generations but do not possess the material wealth thus produced. In mastering and using this inheritance of knowledge, they are exercising their time-binding energies and making the labor of the dead live in the present and for the future.(2) The rich are those who have possession and control of most of thematerialwealth produced by the toil of bygone generations—wealth that is dead unless animated and transformed by the time-binding labor of the living.(3) The poor are those who have neither the knowledge possessed by the intellectuals nor the material wealth possessed by the rich and who, moreover, because nearly all their efforts, under present conditions, are limited to the struggle for mere existence, have little or no opportunity to exercise their time-binding capacity.Let us now try to ascertain the rôle of the time-binding class of life as a whole. We have by necessity, to go back to the beginning—back to the savage. We have seen what were the conditions of his work and progress; we saw that for each successful achievement he often had to wrestle with a very large number of unsuccessful achievements, and his lifetime being so limited, the total of his successful achievements was very limited, so that he was able to give to his child only a few useful objects and[pg 110]the sum of his experience. Generally speaking, each successor did not start his life at the point where his father started; he started somewhere near where his father left off. His father gave, say, fifty years to discover two truths in nature and succeeded in making two or three simple objects; but the son does not need to give fifty years to discover and create the same achievements, and so he has time to achieve somethingnew. He thus adds his own achievements to those of his father in tools and experience; this is the mathematical equivalent of adding his parent's years of life to his own. His mother's work and experience are of course included—the name father and son being only used representatively.This stupendous fact is the definitive mark of humanity—the power to roll up continuously the ever-increasing achievements of generation after generation endlessly. We have seen that this time-binding power is an exponential power or function of time. Time flows on, increasing in arithmetical progression, adding generation unto generation; but the results of human energies working in time do not go on arithmetically; they pile up or roll up more and more rapidly, augmenting in accordance with the law of a more and more rapidly increasing geometric progression. The typical term of the progression isPRTwherePRdenotes the ending progress made in the generation with which we[pg 111]agree to start our reckoning,Rdenotes the ratio increase, andTdenotes the number of generations after the chosen“start.”The quantity,PRTof progress made in theTthgeneration containsTas an exponent, and so the quantity, varying as timeTpasses, is called an exponential function of the time.Nature is the source of all energy. Plants, the lowest form of life, have a definite rôle to perform in the economy of nature. Their function is the forming of albuminoids and other substances for higher purposes. All of their nitrates are high-explosives, or low explosives, but explosives anyway. They are powerful sources of some new energy. Animal life uses these“explosives”as food and is correspondingly more dynamic, but in animal life time does not play the rôle it plays in human life. Animals are limited by death permanently. If animals make any progress from generation to generation, it is so small as to be negligible. A beaver, for example, is a remarkable builder of dams, but he does not progress in the way of inventions or further development. A beaver dam is always a beaver dam.Finally humanity, the highest known class of life, has time-binding capacity as its characteristic, its discriminant, its peculiar and definitive mark. It is an unrealized fact that in this higher class of[pg 112]life,the law of organic growth develops into the law of energy-growth—the mind—the time-binding energy—an increasing exponential function of time.That fact is of basic importance for the science and art of Human Engineering. In mechanics we have the well-known formula(1) Work ÷ Time = Power.We have seen that, in accordance with the law of geometric progression,PRTrepresents the progress made—the work done—in theTthgeneration (Tbeing counted from some generation taken as starting point of reckoning); this progress, achievement, orwork, being done inonegeneration, we have by (1)(2) ( Work = PRT) / ( Time = 1) = Power,that is,PRT= Power; this means that the numberPRT, which measures the work done in a given generation, is also the measure of the power that does the work. Now, the total work,W, done in theTgenerations is(3)W = PR1+ PR2+ PR3+ ... + PRT;that is,(4)W=R÷ (R-1) × (PRT-P)[pg 113]It should be noticed that by (2) this expression forWmay also be regarded as the sum ofTdifferent powersPR,PR2, etc., each working during one and only one generation; if we divided this sum byT, the quotient would be a power that would have to act throughTgenerations to produceW. The reader should not fail to notice very carefully that the expression (4) forWis an expression for the total progress made—the total work done—the total wealth produced—in the course ofTgenerations and he should especially note how the expression involves the exponential function of time (T), namelyPRT.The formula makes mathematically evident the time-binding capacity characteristic of the human class of life. Properly understood,wealthconsists of the fruits or products of this time-binding capacity of man. Animals do not produce wealth; it is produced by Man and only Man. The foregoing basic formulation should lead to further similar developments throwing much light upon the process of civilization and serving to eliminate "private opinion" from the conduct of human affairs. (In this writing it is not important to look deeper into these proposed series. The fact remains thatP, as well asR, are peculiarly increasing series of a geometrical character—the precise form will be developed in another writing.)[pg 114]Human achievements and progress, because cumulative, are knocking out the barriers of time. This fact is the vital and dynamic difference between animal life and human life. As plants gather in and store up solar energy into sheaves for the use and growth of animal and man—so humans are gathering and binding the knowledge of past centuries into sheaves for the use and development of generations yet unborn.We have seen that the term wealth, rightly understood, means the fruit of the time-binding work of humanity. Wealth is of two kinds: one is material; the other is knowledge. Both kinds have use-value. The first kind perishes—the commodities composing it deteriorate and become useless. The other is permanent in character; it is imperishable; it may be lost or forgotten but it does not wear out.The one is limited in time; the other, unlimited in time; the former I callpotential use-value; the latter,kinetic use-value. Analysis will justify the names. The energy of a body which is due to its position, is called potential energy. The energy of a body which is due to its motion, is called kinetic energy. Here the material use-value has value through its position, shape and so forth; it is immobile if not used, and has not the capacity to progress. Mental use-values are not static but permanently dynamic; one thought, one discovery, is the impulse[pg 115]to others; they follow the law of an increasingpotentialfunction of time. (Seeapp. II.) This is why these names correspond to the two names of the two mentioned classes of energy.Here I must return to the current conceptions of wealth and capital, before cited.“Wealth,”we are told,“is any useful or agreeable thing which possessesexchangeable value.”And we are told that“Capital is that part of wealth which is devoted to obtaining further wealth.”I have said that such conceptions—such definitions—of wealth and capital are childish—they belong to the period of humanity's childhood. That they are indeed childish conceptions the reader can not fail to see if he will reflect upon them and especially if he will compare them with the scientific conception according to which wealth consists of those things—whether they be material commodities or forms of knowledge and understanding—that have been produced by the time-binding energies of humanity, and according to whichnearly all the wealth of the world at any given timeis theaccumulated fruit of the toil of past generations—the living work of the dead. It seems unnecessary to warn the reader against confusing the“making”of money by hook or crook, by trick or trade, with thecreatingof wealth, by the product of labor. In calling the old conceptions childish, I do not mean that they contain no element of truth[pg 116]whatever; I mean that they are shallow, scientifically or spiritually meagre, narrow in their vision, wrong in their accent; I especially mean that they are dumb, because they are blind, regarding the central matter that wealth is the natural offspring of Time and Human Toil. The old conceptions do indeed imply that wealth and capital involve both potential and kinetic use-values, and in so far they are right. But how do such use-values arise?The potential use-values in wealth are created by human work operating in time upon raw material given by nature. The use-values are produced by time-taking transformations of the raw materials; these transformations are wrought by human brain labor and human muscular labor directed by the human brain acting in time. The kinetic use-values of wealth are also created by human toil—mainly by the intellectual labor of observation, experimentation, imagination, deduction and invention, all consuming the precious time of short human lives. It is obvious that in the creation of use-values whether potential or kinetic, the element oftimeenters as an absolutely essential factor. The fundamental importance of time as a factor in the production of wealth—the fact that wealth and the use-values of wealth are literally the natural offspring of the spiritual union of time with toil—has been completely overlooked, not only by the economics, but by the[pg 117]ethics, the jurisprudence and the other branches of speculative reasoning, throughout the long period of humanity's childhood. In the course of the ages there has indeed been much“talk”about time, but there has been no recognition of the basic significance of time as essential in the conception and in the very constitution of human values.It is often said that“Time is Money”; the statement is often false; but the proposition that Money is Time is always true. It is always true in the profound sense that Money is the measure and symbol of Wealth—the product of Time and Toil—the crystallization of the time-binding human capacity.it is thus true that money is a very precious thing, the measure and symbol of work—in part the work of the living but, in the main, the living work of the dead.Nature's laws are supreme; we cannot change them; we can deviate from them for a while, but the end is evil. That is the lesson we must learn from the history of Humanity's childhood. False conceptions of Man—ignorance of the laws of human nature—have given us unscientific economies, unscientific ethics, unscientific law, unscientific politics, unscientific government. These have made human history the history of social cataclysms—insurrections, wars, revolutions—sad tokens not so much of human lust as of human ignorance of the laws of[pg 118]human nature. There is but one remedy, one hope—a science and art of Human Engineering based upon the just conception of humanity as the time-binding class of life and conforming to the laws of nature including the laws of human nature.[pg 119]

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 rôle 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 notsupernatural but is literally a part of nature[pg 067]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. These concepts are basic and impersonal; arrived at mathematically, they are mathematically correct.It does not matter at allhowthe first man, the first time-binder, was produced; the fact remains that he was somewhere, somehow produced. To know anything that is to-day of fundamental interest about man, we have to analyse man in three coordinates—in three capacities; namely, his chemistry, his activities in space, and especially his activities in time; whereas in the study of animals we have to consider only two factors: their chemistry and their activities in space.Let us imagine that the aboriginal—original human specimen was one of two brother apes,AandB; they were alike in every respect; both were animal space-binders; but something strange happened toB; he became the first time-binder, a human. No matter how, this“something”made the change in him that lifted him to a higher dimension; it is enough that in some-wise, over and above[pg 068]his animal capacity for binding space, there was superadded the marvelous new capacity for binding-time. He had thus a new faculty, he belonged to a new dimension; but, of course, he did not realize it; and because he had this new capacity he was able to analyze his brother“A”; he observed“Ais my brother; he is an animal; but he is my brother; therefore,Iam an animal.”This fatal first conclusion, reached by false analogy, by neglecting a fact, has been the chief source of human woe for half a million years and it still survives. The time-binding capacity, first manifest inB, increased more and more, with the days and each generation, until in the course of centuries man felt himself increasingly somehow different from the animal, but he could not explain. He said to himself,“If I am an animal there is also in me something higher, a spark of some thingsupernatural.”With this conclusion he estranged himself, as something apart from nature, and formulated the impasse, which put him in a cul-de-sac of a double life. He was neither true to the“supernatural”which he could not know and therefore, could not emulate, nor was he true to the“animal”which he scorned. Having put himself outside the“natural laws,”he was not really true to any law and condemned himself to a life of hypocrisy, and established speculative, artificial, unnatural laws.[pg 069]“How blind our familiar assumptions make us! Among the animals, man, at least, has long been wont to regard himself as a being quite apart from and not as part of the cosmos round about him. From this he has detached himself in thought, he has estranged and objectified the world, and lost the sense that he is of it. And this age-long habit and point of view, which has fashioned his life and controlled his thought, lending its characteristic mark and color to his whole philosophy and art and learning, is still maintained, partly because of its convenience, no doubt, and partly by force of inertia and sheer conservatism, in the very teeth of the strongest probabilities of biological science. Probably no other single hypothesis has less to recommend it, and yet no other so completely dominates the human mind.”(Cassius J. Keyser, loc. cit.) And this monstrous conception is current to-day: millions still look upon man as a mixture of animal and something supernatural.There is no doubt that the engineering of human society is a difficult and complicated problem of tremendous ethical responsibility, for it involves the welfare of mankind throughout an unending succession of generations. The science of Human Engineering can not be built upon false conceptions of human nature. It can not be built on the conception of man as a kind of animal; it can not be[pg 070]built on the conception of man as a mixture of natural and supernatural. It must be built upon the conception of man as being at once natural and higher in dimensionality than the animals. It must be built upon the scientific conception of mankind as characterized by their time-binding capacity and function. This conception radically alters our whole view of human life, human society, and the world.It must be obvious to any one that time-binding is the only natural criterion and standard for the time-binding class of life. This mighty term—time-binding—when comprehended, will be found to embrace thewholeof the natural laws, the natural ethics, the natural philosophy, the natural sociology, the natural economics, the natural governance, to be brought into the education of time-binders; then really peaceful and progressive civilization, without periodical collapses and violent readjustments, will commence; not before. Everything which is really“time-binding”is inthehuman dimension; therefore, it will represent every quality that is implied in such words as—good,just,right,beautiful; while everything that is merely space-binding will be classified as“animal”and be thus assessed at its proper value. Those ignorant“masters of our destinies”who regard humans as animals or as monstrous hybrids of natural and supernatural must be dethroned by scientific education.[pg 071]Humans can be literally poisoned by false ideas and false teachings. Many people have a just horror at the thought of putting poison into tea or coffee, but seem unable to realize that, when they teach false ideas and false doctrines, they are poisoning the time-binding capacity of their fellow men and women. One has to stop and think! There is nothing mystical about the fact that ideas and words are energies which powerfully affect the physico-chemical base of our time-binding activities. Humans are thus made untrue to“human nature.”Hypnotism is a known fact. It has been proved that a man can be so hypnotized that in a certain time which has been suggested to him, he will murder or commit arson or theft; that, under hypnotic influence, the personal morale of the individual has only a small influence upon his conduct; the subject obeys the hypnotic suggestions, no matter how immoral they are. The conception of man as a mixture of animal and supernatural has for ages kept human beings under the deadly spell of the suggestion that, animal selfishness and animal greediness are their essential character, and the spell has operated to suppress theirreal human natureand to prevent it from expressing itself naturally and freely.On the other hand, when human beings are educated to a lively realization that they are bynaturetime-binding creatures, then they will spontaneously[pg 072]live in accordance with their time-binding nature, which, as I have said, is the source and support of the highest ideals.What is achieved in blaming a man for being selfish and greedy if he acts under the influence of a social environment and education which teach him that he is an animal and that selfishness and greediness are of the essence of his nature?Even so eminent a philosopher and psychologist as Spencer tells us:“Of self-evident truths so dealt with, the one which here concerns us is that a creature must live before it can act ... Ethics has to recognize the truth that egoism comes before altruism.”This is true foranimals, because animals die out from lack of food when their natural supply of it is insufficient because they havenot the capacity to produce artificially. But it is not true for thehuman dimension.Why not? Because humans through their time-binding capacity are first of allcreatorsand so their number is not controlled by the supply of unaided nature, but only by men's artificial productivity, which isthe materialization of their time-binding capacityMan, therefore, by the very intrinsic character of his being,must act first, in order to be able to live(through the action of parents—or society) which is not the case with animals. The misunderstanding[pg 073]of this simple truth is largely accountable for the evil of our ethical and economic systems or lack of systems. As a matter of fact, if humanity were to live incompleteaccord with the animal conception of man, artificial production—time-binding production—would cease and ninety per cent of mankind would perish by starvation. It is just because human beings are not animals but are time-binders—not mere finders but creators of food and shelter—that they are able to live in such vast numbers.Here even the blind must see the effect of higher dimensionality, and this effect becomes in turn the cause of other effects which produce still others, and so on in an endless chain.we live because we produce, because we are acting in time and are not merely acting in space—because man is not a kind of animal. It is all so simple, if only we apply a little sound logic in our thinking about human nature and human affairs. If human ethics are to be human, are to be in the human dimension, the postulates of ethics must be changed;for humanity in order to live must act first; the laws of ethics—the laws of right living—arenaturallaws—laws of human nature—laws having their whole source and sanction in the time-binding capacity and time-binding activity peculiar to man. Human excellence is excellence in time-binding, and[pg 074]must be measured and rewarded by time-binding standards of worth.Humanity, in order to live, must produce creatively and therefore must be guided by applied science, by technology; and this means that the so-called social sciences of ethics, jurisprudence, psychology, economics, sociology, politics, and government must be emancipated from medieval metaphysics; they must be made scientific; they must betechnologized; they must be made to progress and to function in the proper dimension—the human dimension and not that of animals: they must be made time-binding sciences.Can this be done? I have no doubt that it can. For what is human life after all?To a general in the battlefield, human life is a factor which, if properly used, can destroy the enemy. To an engineer human life is an equivalent to energy, or a capacity to do work, mental or muscular, and the moment something is found to be a source of energy and to have the capacity of doing work, the first thing to do, from the engineer's point of view, is to analyse the generator with a view to discovering how best to conserve it, to improve it, and bring it to the level of maximum productivity. Human beings are very complicated energy-producing batteries differing widely in quality and magnitude of productive power. Experience has shown[pg 075]that these batteries are, first of all, chemical batteries producing a mysterious energy. If these batteries are not supplied periodically with a more or less constant quantity of some chemical elements called food and air, the batteries will cease to function—they will die. In the examination of the structure of these batteries we find that the chemical base is very much accentuated all through the structure. This chemical generator is divided into branches each of which has a very different rôle which it must perform in harmony with all the others. The mechanical parts of the structure are built in conformity to the rules of mechanics and are automatically furnished with lubrication and with chemical supplies for automatically renewing worn-out parts. The chemical processes not only deposit particles of mass for the structure of the generator but produce some very powerful unknown kinds of energies or vibrations which make all the chemical parts function; we find also a mysterious apparatus with a complex of wires which we call brain glands, and nerves; and, finally, these human batteries have the remarkable capacity of reproduction.These functions are familiar to everybody. From the knowledge of other physical, mechanical and chemical phenomena of nature, we must come to the conclusion, that this human battery is the most perfect example of a complex engine; it has all the[pg 076]peculiarities of a chemical battery combined with a generator of a peculiar energy called life; above all, it has mental or spiritual capacities; it is thus equipped with both mental and mechanical means for producing work. The parts and functions of this marvelous engine have been the subject of a vast amount of research in various special branches of science. A very noteworthy fact is that both the physical work and the mental work of this human engine are always accompanied by both physical and chemical changes in the structure of its machinery—corresponding to the wear and tear of non-living engines. It also presents certain sexual and spiritual phenomena that have a striking likeness to certain phenomena, especially wireless phenomena, to electricity and to radium. This human engine-battery is of unusual strength, durability and perfection; and yet it is very liable to damage and even wreckage, if not properly used. The controlling factors are very delicate and so the engine is very capricious. Very special training and understanding are necessary for its control.The reader may wish to ask: What is the essence of the time-binding power of Man? Talk of essences is metaphysical—it is not scientific. Let me explain by an example.What is electricity? The scientific answer is: electricity is that which exhibits such and such phenomena.[pg 077]Electricity means nothing but a certain group of phenomena called electric. We are studying electricity when we are studying those phenomena. Thus it is in physics—there is no talk of essences. So, too, in Human Engineering—we shall not talk of theessenceof time-binding but only of the phenomena and the laws thereof. What has led to the development of electric appliances is knowledge of electrical phenomena—not metaphysical talk about the electrical essence. And what will lead to the science and art of Human Engineering is knowledge of time-binding phenomena—not vain babble about an essence of time-binding power. There is no mystery about the word time-binding. Some descriptive term was necessary to indicate that human capacity which discriminates human beings from animals and marks man as man. For that use—the appropriateness of the term time-binding becomes more and more manifest upon reflection.What are the conditions of life upon this earth? Is there war or peace in daily life? All living beings require food; they multiply in a geometrical ratio; and so thenaturalproductivity of the soil becomes increasingly inadequate. The tendency to increase in geometrical ratio is true of all life—vegetable, animal and human, but the tendency is checked by various counteracting influences, natural and artificial. A short time ago these checks had so operated[pg 078]to annul the law of increase as almost to stop the growth of human population. It is only by the time-binding capacity of man—by scientific progress and technological invention—that the checks have been overcome. And so in the last century the population of Europe increased more than it had increased in several centuries before. Impoverished soil, excessive heat or cold, excessive moisture, the lack of rain-fall, and many other factors are hostile to life. It is evident, therefore, that human life must especially struggle for existence; it must carry on a perpetual contest for self preservation. It seems obvious that, if there is perpetual war in every-day life, war methods must be applied.We have just passed through a tremendous world-widemilitarywar and we developed special ways of producing power to overcome the enemy. We were thus driven to discover some of the hidden sources of power and all of our old habits and ideas were bent toward military methods and military technology. The war of every-day life against hostile elements is war for the subjugation of physical nature and not for the conquest of people. It is a war carried on by the time-binding power of men pitted against natural obstacles, and its progressive triumph means progressive advancement in human weal.The lesson of the World War should not be[pg 079]missed through failure to analyse it. When nations war with nations, the normal daily war of millions and millions of individuals to subjugate natural resources to human uses is interrupted, and the slow-gathered fruits of measureless toil are destroyed.But peaceful war, war for the conquest of nature, involves the use of methods of technology and, what is even more important, technological philosophy, law and ethics.What I want to emphasize in this little book, is the need of a thoroughgoing revision of our ideas; and the revision must be made by engineering minds in order that our ideas may be made to match facts. If we are ill, we consult a physician or a surgeon, not a charlatan. We must learn that, when there is trouble with the producing power of the world, we have to consult an engineer, an expert on power. Politicians, diplomats, and lawyers do not understand the problem. What I am advocating is that we must learn to ask those who know how to produce things, instead of asking those whose profession is to fight for the division of things produced by nature or by other human beings.As a matter of fact our civilization has been for a long time disorganized to the point of disease. Lately through the whirl of changing conditions, due to the great release of power in the new-born giant technology, the disorganization has become acute.[pg 080]The sick seldom know the cure for themselves. If the cure is to be enduring, we have to go to the source, and this can be done only by men familiar, not only with effects but also with the causes.Money is not the wealth of a nation, but production is wealth; soordered productionis the main object for humanity. But to have the maximum of production, it is necessary to have production put on a sound basis. No mere preaching of brotherly love, or class hatred, will produce one single brick for the building of the future temple of human victory—the temple ofhumancivilization. Ordered production demands analysis of basic facts.This era is essentially an industrial era. To produce we have to have: (1) raw material or soil; (2) instruments for production—tools and machines; and (3) the application of power.The three requirements may be briefly characterized and appraised as follows:(1) Raw material and soil are products of nature; humanity simply took them and had the use of them for nothing, because it is impossible to call a prayer of thanksgiving (if any) addressed to a“creator”as payment to gods or men. But raw material and soil, in the conditions in which nature produces them, are of very little immediate benefit to humanity, because unfilled soil produces very little food for humans, and raw material such as[pg 081]wood, coal, oil, iron, copper, etc., are completely useless to humanity until after human work is applied to them. It is necessary to cut a tree for the making of timber; it is necessary to excavate the minerals, and even then, only by applying further human work is it possible to make them available for any human use. So, it is obvious that even raw materials in the form in which nature has produced them, are mostly of no value and unavailable for use, unless reproduced through the process of“human creative production.”Therefore, we may well conclude that“raw material”must be divided into two very distinct classes: (a) raw material as produced by nature—nature's free gift—which in its original form and place has practically no use-value; and (b) raw material reproduced by man's mental and muscular activities, by his“time-binding”capacities. Raw materials of the second class have an enormous use-value; indeed they make the existence of humanity possible.As to the second requirement for production, namely:(2) Tools and machines, it is obvious that“tools and machines”are made of raw material by human work, mental and muscular.And, finally:(3) The application of power. Different sources of natural energy and power are known. The most[pg 082]important available source of energy for this globe is the sun—the heat of the sun. This solar heat is the origin of water power, of wind power, and of the power bound up in coal, of the chemistry, growth and transforming agency of plants.10[pg 083]All foods which the animals as well as the humans use are, already, the result of the solar energy transformed into what may be called chemical energy. Transformation of energies is building up of life.It is to be clearly seen that the only source of energy which can be directly appropriated and used by man or animal is vegetable food found in the wilderness; no other sources of power are available[pg 084]fordirectuse; they have first to be mastered and directed by human brain. The same is true in regard to the getting of animal food, the creation of a water- or windmill, or a steam engine, or the art of using a team of horses, or a bushel of wheat; these are not available except by the use of the human“time-binding”power.This short survey of facts, known to everybody, brings us to the conclusion that all problems of production come ultimately to the analysis of(1) Natural resources of raw material and natural energy, freely supplied by nature, which, as we have seen, in the form as produced by nature alone, have very little or no value for humanity;(2) The activity of the human brain (because human muscles are always directed by the brain) which gives value to the otherwise useless raw materials and energies.Hence, to understand the processes of production, it is essential to realize that humanity is able to survive only by virtue of the capacity of humans to exploit natural resources—to convert the products of nature into forms available for human needs. If humanity had only the capacity of apes, depending exclusively on wild fruits and the like, they would be confined to those comparatively small regions of the globe where the climate and the fertility of the soil are specially favorable. But in the case supposed,[pg 085]humans would not be humans, they would not be time-binders—they would be animals—mere space-binders.There are other facts which must be kept constantly in mind. One of them is that, in the world in which we live, there are natural laws of inorganic as well as organic phenomena. Another of the facts is, as before said, that the human class of life has the peculiar capacity of establishing the social laws and customs which regulate and influence its destinies, which help or hinder the processes of production upon which the lives and happiness of mankind essentially and fundamentally depend.It must not be lost sight of in this connection that the human class of life is a part and a product of nature, and that, therefore, there must befundamental laws which are natural for this class of life. A stone obeys the natural laws of stones; a liquid conforms to the natural law of liquids; a plant, to the natural laws of plants; an animal, to the natural laws of animals; it follows inevitably that theremustbe natural laws for humans.But here the problem becomes more complicated; for the stone, the plant and the animal do not possess the intellectual power to create and initiate and so must blindly obey the laws that are natural for them; they are not free to determine their own destinies. Not so with man; man has the capacity and he[pg 086]can, through ignorance or neglect or mal-intent, deviate from, or misinterpret, the natural laws for the human class of life. Just therein lies the secret and the source of human chaos and woe—a fact of such tremendous importance that it cannot be over-emphasized and it seems impossible to evade it longer. To discover the nature of Man and the laws of thatnature, marks the summit of human enterprises. For to solve thisproblem is to open the way to everything which can be of importance to humanity—to human welfare and happiness.The great problem has been felt as a powerful impulse throughout the ages of human striving, for in all times it has been evident to thinkers that upon the right solution of the problem must forever depend the welfare of mankind. Many“solutions”have been offered; and, though they have differed widely, they agree in one respect—they have had a common fate—the fate of being false. What has been the trouble? The trouble has been, in every instance, a radical misconception of what a human being really is. The problem is to discover the natural laws of the human class of life. All the“solutions”offered in the course of history and those which are current to-day are of two and only two kinds—zoologicalandmythological. The zoological solutions are those which grow out of the false conception according to which human beings are animals;[pg 087]if humans are animals, the laws of human nature are the laws of animal nature; and so the social“sciences”of ethics, law, politics, economics, government become nothing but branches of zoology; as sciences, they are the studies of animal life; as arts, they are the arts of managing and controlling animals; according to this zoological philosophy, human wisdom about human beings is animal wisdom about animals.The mythological“solutions”are those which start with the monstrous conception according to which human beings have no proper place in nature but are mixtures of natural andsupernatural—unions or combinations of animality and divinity. Such“solutions”contain no conception ofnaturallaw; scientifically judged, they are mythological absurdities—muddle-headed chattering of crude and irresponsible metaphysics—well-meaning no doubt, but silly, and deadly in their effects upon the interests of mankind, vitiating ethics, law, economics, politics and government.Such have been and still are the regnant philosophies of human nature. What is the remedy? How are the laws of human nature to be discovered?It is evident that the enterprise, like all other scientific enterprises, must be based upon and guided by realities. It is essential to realize that the great, central, dominant, all-embracing reality is the reality[pg 088]ofhuman nature. If we misconceive this fundamental matter, the enterprise must fail; that is both logically clear and clear in the sad light of history; but if we conceive it aright, we may confidently expect the enterprise to prosper. That is why, in the chapter on“The Classes of Life,”I have laid so much stress on the absolute necessity of conceiving Man as being what he really is, and not something else. And we have discovered what man is: we have discovered that man is characterized by the capacity or power to bind time, and so we havedefinedhumanity as the time-binding class of life. That concept is fundamental. It contains the germ of the science and art of Human Engineering. The problem of discovering and applying the“laws of human nature”is the problem of discovering and applying to the conduct of life the laws of time-binding—of time-binding activity—of time-bindingenergy. This fact must be firmly seized and kept steadily in mind.Energy, we have noted, is the capacity to do work. In human economy work may be (1)usefulor (2)neutralor (3)harmful. These words have no significance except in human economy. The energy of the human intellect is a time-binding energy, for it is able to direct, to use, to transform other energies. This time-binding energy is of higher rank—of higher dimensionality—than the other natural energies which it directs, controls, uses, and transforms.[pg 089]This higher energy—which is commonly called the mental or spiritual power of man—istime-binding because it makes past achievements live in the present and present activities in time-to-come. It is an energy that initiates; it is an energy that creates; it is an energy that can understand the past and foretell the future—it is both historian and prophet; it is an energy that loadsabstracttime—the vehicle of events—with an ever-increasing burden of intellectual achievements, of spiritual wealth, destined for the civilization of posterity. And what is the natural law of the increase? What is the natural law of human advancements in all great matters of human concern?The question is of utmost importance both theoretically and practically, for the law—whatever it be—is anaturallaw—a law of human nature—a law of the time-binding energy of man. Whatisthe law? We have already noted the law of arithmetical progression and the law of geometric progression; we have seen the immense difference between them; and we have seen that the natural law of human progress in each and every cardinal matter is a law like that of a rapidly increasing geometric progression. In other words, the natural law of human progress—the natural law of amelioration in human affairs—the fundamental law of human nature—the basic law of the time-binding energy[pg 090]peculiar to man—is a Logarithmic law—a law of logarithmic increase. I beg the reader not to let the term bewilder him but to make it his own. It is easy to understand; and its significance is mighty and everlasting. Even its mathematical formulation can be understood by boys and girls. Let us see how the formulation looks.SupposePRto denote the amount of progress made in some important field by a given generation—which we may call the“first”generation; whereRdenotes the common ratio—the ratio of improvement—that is, the number by which the progress of one generation must be multiplied to give the amount of progress made by the next generation; then the amount of progress made by the second generation will bePR2; that made by the third generation will bePR3; and so on; now denote byTthe number of generations, counting the first one and all that follow in endless succession. Then the following series will show the law of human progress in the chosen field:PR, PR2, PR3, PR4, PR5, ..., PRT, PRT+1, ...;notice how it goes; the first generation ends with PR; the second generation starts withPR, addsPR2, and ends withPR + PR2; the third generation starts withPR + PR2, addsPR3and ends withPR + PR2+ PR3; and so on and on; thegainmade in[pg 091]theTthgeneration isPRT;the total gainmade inTgenerations isPR + PR2+ PR3+ ... + PRT;this total gain is given by the formula,Total gain in T generations = (R ÷ R-1) (PRT-P).If we takeRto be 2 (which is a very small ratio, requiring the progress of each generation to be merely double that of the preceding one) and if we takeTto be (say) 10, then we see that the progress made by the single 10th generation isP× 210, which is 1024 times the progress made in the“first”generation; and we readily compute that the total gain in 10 generations is 2046 times the progress made in the“first”generation. Moreover, to gain a just sense of the impressiveness of this law, the reader must reflect upon the fact that it operates, not merely on one field, but in all fields of human interest.“Operates in all fields”I have just now said; as a matter of fact, as before pointed out, it does not so operatenowinallfields nor has it ever done so. My point is that itwillso operate when we once acquire sense enough to let it do so. That sense we shall have when and only when we discover that by nature we are time-binders and that theeffectivenessof our time-binding capacity is not[pg 092]only a function of time but is, as I have explained, a logarithmic or exponential function of time—a function in which time (T) enters as anexponent, as in the expressionPRT, so that we humans are, unlike animals, naturally qualified not only to progress, but to progress more and more rapidly, with an alwaysaccelerating acceleration, as the generations pass.This great fact is to be at once the basis, the regulator and guide in the science and art of Human Engineering. Whatever squares with that law of time-binding human energy, is right and makes for human weal; whatever contravenes it, is wrong and makes for human woe.And so I repeat that the world will have uninterrupted, peaceful progress when and only when the so-called social“sciences”—the life-regulating“sciences”of ethics, law, philosophy, economics, religion, politics, and government—are technologized; when and only when they are made genuinely scientific in spirit and method; for then and only then will they advance, like the natural, mathematical and technological sciences, in conformity to the fundamental exponential law of the time-binding nature of man; then and then only, by the equal pace of progress in all cardinal matters, the equilibrium of social institutions will remain stable and social cataclysms cease.[pg 093]Chapter V. WealthI beg the reader to allow me to begin this chapter with a word of warning. The reader is aware that Criticism—by which I mean Thought—may be any one of three kinds: it may be purely destructive; it may be purely constructive; or it may be both destructive and constructive at the same time. Purely destructive criticism is sometimes highly useful. If an old idea or a system of old ideas be false and therefore harmful, it is a genuine service to attack it and destroy it even if nothing be offered to take its place, just as it is good to destroy a rattlesnake lurking by a human pathway, even if one does not offer a substitute for the snake. But, however useful destructive criticism may be, it is not an easy service to render; for old ideas, however false and harmful, are protected alike by habit and by the inborn conservatism of many minds. Now, habit indeed is exceedingly useful—even indispensable to the effective conduct of life—for it enables us to do many useful things automatically and therefore easily, without conscious thinking, and thus to save our mental energy for other work; but for the same[pg 094]reason, habit is often very harmful; it makes us protect false ideas automatically, and so when the destructive critic endeavors to destroy such ideas by reasoning with us, he finds that he is trying to reason with automats—with machines. Such is the chief difficulty encountered by destructive criticism. On the other hand, purely constructive criticism—purely constructive thought—consists in introducing new ideas of a kind that do not clash, or do not seem to clash, with old ones. Is such criticism or thought easy? Far from it. It has difficulties of its own. These are of two varieties: the difficulty of showing people who are content with their present stock of old ideas that the new ones are interesting or important; and the great difficulty of makingnewideas clear and intelligible, for the art of being clear and perfectly intelligible is very, very hard to acquire and to practise. The third kind of criticism—the third kind of thought—the kind that is at once both destructive and constructive—has a double aim—that of destroying old ideas that are false and that of replacing them with new ideas that are true; and so the third kind of criticism or thought is the most difficult of all, for it has to overcome both the difficulty of destructive criticism and that of constructive thought.The reader, therefore, if he will be good enough to reflect a little upon the matter, can not fail to appreciate[pg 095]the tremendous difficulties which beset the writing of this little book, for he must perceive, not only that the work belongs to the third kind of critical thought, but—what is much more—the errors it aims to destroy are fundamental, world-wide and old, while the true ideas it seeks to substitute for them are fundamental and new. This great difficulty, felt ateverystage of this writing, is, for a reason to be presently explained, greatly enhanced and felt with especial keenness in the present chapter. I therefore beg the reader to give me here very special cooperation—the cooperation of open-mindedness, candor and critical attention. It is essential to keep in mind the nature of our enterprise as a whole, which is that of pointing the way to the science and art of Human Engineering and laying the foundations thereof; we have seen Human Engineering, when developed, is to be the science and art of so directing human energies and capacities as to make them contribute most effectively to the advancement of human welfare; we have seen that this science and art must have its basis in a true conception of human nature—a just conception of what Man really is and of his natural place in the complex of the world; we have seen that the ages-old and still current conceptions of man—zoological and mythological conceptions, according to which human beings are either animals or else hybrids of animals and gods—are[pg 096]mainly responsible for the dismal things in human history; we have seen that man, far from being an animal or a compound of natural and supernatural, is a perfectly natural being characterized by a certain capacity or power—the capacity or power to bind time; we have seen that humanity is, therefore, to be rightly conceived and scientifically defined as the time-binding class of life; we have seen that, therefore, the laws of time-binding energies and time-binding phenomena are the laws of human nature; we have seen that this conception of man—which must be the basic concept, the fundamental principle and the perpetual guide and regulator of Human Engineering—is bound to work a profound transformation in all our views on human affairs and, in particular, must radically alter the so-called social“sciences”—the life-regulating“sciences”of ethics, sociology, economics, politics and government—advancing them from their present estate of pseudo sciences to the level of genuine sciences and technologizing them for the effective service of mankind. I call them“life-regulating,”not because they play a more important part in human affairs than do the genuine sciences of mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy and biology, for they are not more important than these, but because they are, so to say, closer, more immediate and more obvious in their influence and effects. These life-regulating sciences[pg 097]are, of course, not independent; they depend ultimately upon the genuine sciences for much of their power and ought to go to them for light and guidance; but what I mean here by saying they are not independent is that they are dependent upon each other, interpenetrating and interlocking in innumerable ways. To showin detailhow the so-called sciences will have to be transformed to make them accord with the right conception of man and qualify them for their proper business will eventually require a large volume or indeed volumes.In this introductory work I cannot deal fully with one of those“sciences”nor in suitable outline with each of them separately. I must be content here to deal, very briefly, with one of them by way of illustration and suggestion. Which one shall it be?Now among these life-regulating“sciences”there is one specially marked by the importance of its subject, by its central relation to the others and by its prominence in the public mind. I mean Economics—the“dismal science”of Political Economy. For that reason I have chosen to deal with economics. In the present chapter I shall discuss three of its principal terms—Wealth, Capital and Money—with a view to showing that the current meanings and interpretations of these familiar terms must be very greatly deepened, enlarged and elevated if they are to accord with facts and laws of human nature and if the so-called[pg 098]“science”which employs them is to become a genuine science properly qualified to be a branch of Human Engineering. It is to be shown that the meanings currently attached by political economists and others to the terms in question belong to what I have called the period of humanity's childhood; and it is to be shown that the new meanings which the terms must receive belong to the period of humanity's manhood. It will be seen that the new meanings differ so radically from the old ones as to make it desirable for the sake of clarity to give the new meanings new names. But this, however scientifically desirable, is impracticable because the old terms—wealth, capital, money—are so deeply imbedded in the speech of the world. And here comes into view the very special difficulty alluded to above and which led me to request the reader's special cooperation in this chapter. The difficulty is not merely that of destroying old ideas that are false; it is not merely that of replacing them with true ideas that are new; it is that of causing people habitually to associate meanings that are new and true with terms associated so long, so universally, so uniformly with meanings that are false.The secret of philosophy, said Leibnitz, is to treat familiar things as unfamiliar. By the secret of“philosophy”Leibnitz meant the secret of what we call science. Let us apply this wholesome maxim in[pg 099]our present study; let us, in so far as we can, regard the familiar terms—wealth, capital and money—as unfamiliar; let us deal with them afresh; let us examine openmindedly the facts—the phenomena—to which the terms relate and ascertain scientifically the significance the terms must have in a genuine science of human economy. Examine“the facts”I say—examine“the phenomena”—for bending facts to theories is a vital danger, while bending theories to facts is essential to science and the peaceful progress of society.Human beings have always had some sense of values—some perception or cognition of values. In order to express or measure values, it was necessary to introduce units of measure, or units of exchange. People began to measure values by means of agricultural and other products, such as cattle, for example. The Latin word for cattle waspecus, and the wordpecunia, which came to signify money, accounts for the meaning of our familiar word pecuniary. The earliest units for measuring became unsuited to the increasing needs of growing trade,“business,”or traffic. Finally a unit called money was adopted in which the base was the value of some weight of gold. Thus we see that money came to mean simply the accepted unit for measuring, representing and expressing values of and in wealth.But what is wealth? I have said that the old[pg 100]conceptions of wealth, capital and money—the conceptions that are still current throughout the world—belong to the period of humanity's childhood—they are childish conceptions. I have said that they must be replaced by scientific conceptions—by conceptions fit for humanity's manhood. The change that must be made in our conceptions of the great terms is tremendous. It is necessary to analyse the current conceptions of wealth, capital, and money—the childish conceptions of them—in order to reveal their falseness, stupidity and folly. To do this we must enter the field of Political Economy—a field beset with peculiar difficulties and dangers. All the Furies of private interests are involved. One gains the impression that there is little or no real desire to gain a true conception—a scientific conception—of wealth. Everybody seems to prefer an emotional definition—a definition that suits his personal love of wealth or his hatred of it. Many definitions of wealth, capital and money are to be found in modern books of political economy—definitions and books belonging to humanity's childhood. For the purpose of this writing they all of them look alike—they sufficiently agree—they are all of them childish. Mill, for example, tells us that wealth consists of“useful or agreeable things which possess exchangeable value.”Of capital one of the simplest definitions is this:[pg 101]“Capital is that part of wealth which is devoted to obtaining further wealth.”(Alfred Marshall,Economics of Industry.)Walker (in hisMoney, Trade and Industry) defines money as follows:“Money is that which passes freely from hand to hand throughout the community in final discharge of debts and full payment for commodities, being accepted equally without reference to the character or credit of the person who offers it, and without the intention of the person who receives it to consume it, or to enjoy it, or apply it to any other use than, in turn, to tender it to others in discharge of debts or full payment for commodities.”Political economy has many different schools of thought and methods of classification. Its reasonings are mainly speculative, metaphysical, and legalistic; its ethics is zoological ethics, based on the zoological conception of man as an animal. The elements of natural logic and natural ethics are absent. The sophisticated ideas about the subject of political economy, bluntly do not correspond to facts. Our primitive forefather in the jungle would have died from hunger, cold, heat, blood poisoning or the attacks of wild animals, if he had not used his brain and muscles to take some stone or a piece of wood to knock down fruit from trees, to kill an animal, so as to use his hide for clothes and his meat for food, or to break wood and trees for a shelter and to make some weapons for defense and hunting.[pg 102]“In the first stone which he (the savage) flings at the wild animal he pursues, in the first stick that he seizes to strike down the fruit which hangs above his reach, we see the appropriation of one article for the purpose of aiding in the acquisition of another and thus we discover the origin of capital.”(R. Torrens,An Essay on the Production of Wealth.)Our primitive forefather's first acquaintance with fire was probably through lightning; he discovered, probably by chance, the possibility of making fire by rubbing together two pieces of wood and by striking together two pieces of stone; he established one of the first facts in technology; he felt the warm effect of fire and also the good effect of broiling his food by finding some roasted animals in a fire. Thus nature revealed to him one of its great gifts, the stored-up energy of the sun in vegetation and its primitive beneficial use. He was already a time-binding being; evolution had brought him to that level. Being a product of nature, he was reflecting those natural laws that belong to his class of life; he had ceased to be static—he had become dynamic—progressiveness had got into his blood—he was above the estate of animals.We also observe that primitive man produced commodities, acquired experiences, made observations, and that some of the produced commodities had a use-value for other people and remained good for use, even after his death.[pg 103]The produced commodities were composed of raw material, freely supplied by nature, combined with some mental work which gave him the conception of how to make and to use the object, and some work on his part which finally shaped the thing; all of this mental and manual work consumed an amount of time. It is obvious that all of these elements are indispensable to produce anything of any value, or of any use-value. His child not only directly received some of the use-values produced by him, but was initiated into all of his experiences and observations. (As we know, power, as defined in mechanics, means the ratio of work done to the time used in doing it.)All those things are time-binding phenomena produced by the time-binding capacity of man; but man hasnotknown thatthis capacitywas hisdefining mark. We must notice the strange fact that, from the engineering point of view, humanity, though very developed in some ways, is childishly undeveloped in others. Humanity has some conceptions about dimensions and talks of the world in which we live as having three dimensions; yet even in its wildest imagination it can not picture tangibly afourthdimension; nay, humanity has not learned to grasp the real meanings of things that are basic or fundamental. All of our conceptions are relative and comparative; all of them are based upon matters[pg 104]which we do not yet understand; for example, we talk of time, space, electricity, gravity, and so on, but no one has been able to define them in terms of the data of sensation; nevertheless—and it is a fact of the greatest importance—we learn how to use many things which we do not fully understand and are not yet able to define.In political economy the meagreness of our understanding is especially remarkable; we have not yet grasped the obvious fact—a fact of immeasurable import for all of the social sciences—that with little exception the wealth and capital possessed by a given generation are not produced by its own toil but are the inherited fruit of dead men's toil—a free gift of the past. We have yet to learn and apply the lesson that not only our material wealth and capital but our science and art and learning and wisdom—all that goes to constitute our civilization—were produced, not by our own labor, but by the time-binding energies of past generations.Primitive man used natural laws without knowing them or understanding them, but he was able to cause nature to express itself, by finding a way to release nature's stored up energy. Through the work of his brain and its direction in the use of his muscles, he found that some of his appliances were not good; he made better ones, and thus slowly at first, the progress of humanity went on. I will not enlarge[pg 105]upon the history of the evolution of civilization because it is told in many books.In the earliest times the religious, philosophical, legal and ethical systems had not been invented. The morale at that time was a natural morale. Humans knew that they did not create nature. They did not feel it“proper”to“expropriate the creator”and legalistically appropriate the earth and its treasure for themselves. They felt, in their unsophisticated morale, that being called into existence they had a natural right to exist and to use freely the gifts of nature in the preservation of their life; and that is what they did.After the death of a man, some of the objects produced by him still survived, such as weapons, fishing or hunting instruments, or the caves adapted for living; a baby had to be nourished for some years by its parents or it would have died. Those facts had important consequences; objects made by someone for some particular use could be used by someone else, even after the death of one or more successive users; again the experiences acquired by one member of a family or a group of people were taught by example or precept to others of the same generation and to the next generation. Such simple facts are the corner stones of our whole civilization and they are the direct result of thehuman capacity of time-binding.[pg 106]The world to-day is full of controversy about wealth, capital, and money, and because humanity, through its peculiar time-binding power, binds this element“time”in an ever larger and larger degree, the controversy becomes more and more acute. Civilization as a process is the process of binding time; progress is made by the fact that each generation adds to the material and spiritual wealth which it inherits. Past achievements—the fruit of bygone time—thus live in the present, are augmented in the present, and transmitted to the future; the process goes on; time, the essential element, is so involved that, though it increases arithmetically, its fruit, civilization, advances geometrically.But there is another peculiarity in wealth and money: If a wooden or iron“inch”be allowed to rot or rust quietly on some shelf, this“inch”does not represent anything besides this piece of wood or iron. But if we take thementalvalue of an inch, this unit of one of the measures of space, and use it, with other quantities, in the contemplation of the skies for the solving of an astronomical problem, it gives a prophetic answer that, in a certain place there is a star; this star, may be for years looked for in vain. Was it that the calculation was wrong? No, for after further search with telescopes of greater power, the star is found and the calculation thus verified.[pg 107]It is obvious that the“unit”—inch—has no value by itself, but is very precious as a unit for measuring the phenomenon of length, which it perfectly represents, and that is why it was introduced.It is exactly the same with money if the term be rightly understood. Understood aright, money, being the measure and representative of wealth, is in the main, the measure and the representative of dead men's toil; for, rightly understood, wealth is almost entirely the product of the labor of by-gone generations. This product, we have seen, involves the element of time as the chief factor. And so we discover how money, properly understood, is connected with time—the main function of money is to measure and represent the accumulated products of the labor of past generations. Hoarded money is like an iron“inch”upon a shelf—a useless lump; but when used as a measure and representative of wealth rightly understood, money renders invaluable service, for it then serves to measure and represent the living fruit of dead men's toil.For this reason, it is useless to argue who is the more important, the capitalist who has legal possession of most of the material fruit of dead men's toil, or the laborer who has legal possession of but little of it. In the laborer, we do not now really look for his physical muscular laboralone; for this is replaced by mechanical or animal power as soon as[pg 108]it can be. What we do need from labor, and what we will always need, is hisbrain—his time-binding power.The population of the world may be divided into different classes; if the classes are not here enumerated in the customary way, it is because it is necessary to classify human beings, as nearly as possible according to their“power-value.”There is no assertion that this is an ideal classification, but if someone is moved to exclaim—“what a foolish, unscientific division!”—I will answer by saying:“I grant that the division is foolish and unscientific; butit is the only division which corresponds to facts in life, and it is not the writer's fault. By this‘foolishness’some good may be accomplished.”From an engineer's point of view humanity is apparently to be divided into three classes; (1) the intellectuals; (2) the rich; and (3) the poor. This division would seem to be contrary to all the rules of logic, but it corresponds to facts. Of course some individuals belong to two of the classes or even to all three of them, an after-war product, but essentially, they belong to the one class in proportion to the characteristic which is the most marked in their life; that is, in the sense of social classes—based on magnitude of values.(1) The intellectuals are the men and women[pg 109]who possess the knowledge produced by the labor of by-gone generations but do not possess the material wealth thus produced. In mastering and using this inheritance of knowledge, they are exercising their time-binding energies and making the labor of the dead live in the present and for the future.(2) The rich are those who have possession and control of most of thematerialwealth produced by the toil of bygone generations—wealth that is dead unless animated and transformed by the time-binding labor of the living.(3) The poor are those who have neither the knowledge possessed by the intellectuals nor the material wealth possessed by the rich and who, moreover, because nearly all their efforts, under present conditions, are limited to the struggle for mere existence, have little or no opportunity to exercise their time-binding capacity.Let us now try to ascertain the rôle of the time-binding class of life as a whole. We have by necessity, to go back to the beginning—back to the savage. We have seen what were the conditions of his work and progress; we saw that for each successful achievement he often had to wrestle with a very large number of unsuccessful achievements, and his lifetime being so limited, the total of his successful achievements was very limited, so that he was able to give to his child only a few useful objects and[pg 110]the sum of his experience. Generally speaking, each successor did not start his life at the point where his father started; he started somewhere near where his father left off. His father gave, say, fifty years to discover two truths in nature and succeeded in making two or three simple objects; but the son does not need to give fifty years to discover and create the same achievements, and so he has time to achieve somethingnew. He thus adds his own achievements to those of his father in tools and experience; this is the mathematical equivalent of adding his parent's years of life to his own. His mother's work and experience are of course included—the name father and son being only used representatively.This stupendous fact is the definitive mark of humanity—the power to roll up continuously the ever-increasing achievements of generation after generation endlessly. We have seen that this time-binding power is an exponential power or function of time. Time flows on, increasing in arithmetical progression, adding generation unto generation; but the results of human energies working in time do not go on arithmetically; they pile up or roll up more and more rapidly, augmenting in accordance with the law of a more and more rapidly increasing geometric progression. The typical term of the progression isPRTwherePRdenotes the ending progress made in the generation with which we[pg 111]agree to start our reckoning,Rdenotes the ratio increase, andTdenotes the number of generations after the chosen“start.”The quantity,PRTof progress made in theTthgeneration containsTas an exponent, and so the quantity, varying as timeTpasses, is called an exponential function of the time.Nature is the source of all energy. Plants, the lowest form of life, have a definite rôle to perform in the economy of nature. Their function is the forming of albuminoids and other substances for higher purposes. All of their nitrates are high-explosives, or low explosives, but explosives anyway. They are powerful sources of some new energy. Animal life uses these“explosives”as food and is correspondingly more dynamic, but in animal life time does not play the rôle it plays in human life. Animals are limited by death permanently. If animals make any progress from generation to generation, it is so small as to be negligible. A beaver, for example, is a remarkable builder of dams, but he does not progress in the way of inventions or further development. A beaver dam is always a beaver dam.Finally humanity, the highest known class of life, has time-binding capacity as its characteristic, its discriminant, its peculiar and definitive mark. It is an unrealized fact that in this higher class of[pg 112]life,the law of organic growth develops into the law of energy-growth—the mind—the time-binding energy—an increasing exponential function of time.That fact is of basic importance for the science and art of Human Engineering. In mechanics we have the well-known formula(1) Work ÷ Time = Power.We have seen that, in accordance with the law of geometric progression,PRTrepresents the progress made—the work done—in theTthgeneration (Tbeing counted from some generation taken as starting point of reckoning); this progress, achievement, orwork, being done inonegeneration, we have by (1)(2) ( Work = PRT) / ( Time = 1) = Power,that is,PRT= Power; this means that the numberPRT, which measures the work done in a given generation, is also the measure of the power that does the work. Now, the total work,W, done in theTgenerations is(3)W = PR1+ PR2+ PR3+ ... + PRT;that is,(4)W=R÷ (R-1) × (PRT-P)[pg 113]It should be noticed that by (2) this expression forWmay also be regarded as the sum ofTdifferent powersPR,PR2, etc., each working during one and only one generation; if we divided this sum byT, the quotient would be a power that would have to act throughTgenerations to produceW. The reader should not fail to notice very carefully that the expression (4) forWis an expression for the total progress made—the total work done—the total wealth produced—in the course ofTgenerations and he should especially note how the expression involves the exponential function of time (T), namelyPRT.The formula makes mathematically evident the time-binding capacity characteristic of the human class of life. Properly understood,wealthconsists of the fruits or products of this time-binding capacity of man. Animals do not produce wealth; it is produced by Man and only Man. The foregoing basic formulation should lead to further similar developments throwing much light upon the process of civilization and serving to eliminate "private opinion" from the conduct of human affairs. (In this writing it is not important to look deeper into these proposed series. The fact remains thatP, as well asR, are peculiarly increasing series of a geometrical character—the precise form will be developed in another writing.)[pg 114]Human achievements and progress, because cumulative, are knocking out the barriers of time. This fact is the vital and dynamic difference between animal life and human life. As plants gather in and store up solar energy into sheaves for the use and growth of animal and man—so humans are gathering and binding the knowledge of past centuries into sheaves for the use and development of generations yet unborn.We have seen that the term wealth, rightly understood, means the fruit of the time-binding work of humanity. Wealth is of two kinds: one is material; the other is knowledge. Both kinds have use-value. The first kind perishes—the commodities composing it deteriorate and become useless. The other is permanent in character; it is imperishable; it may be lost or forgotten but it does not wear out.The one is limited in time; the other, unlimited in time; the former I callpotential use-value; the latter,kinetic use-value. Analysis will justify the names. The energy of a body which is due to its position, is called potential energy. The energy of a body which is due to its motion, is called kinetic energy. Here the material use-value has value through its position, shape and so forth; it is immobile if not used, and has not the capacity to progress. Mental use-values are not static but permanently dynamic; one thought, one discovery, is the impulse[pg 115]to others; they follow the law of an increasingpotentialfunction of time. (Seeapp. II.) This is why these names correspond to the two names of the two mentioned classes of energy.Here I must return to the current conceptions of wealth and capital, before cited.“Wealth,”we are told,“is any useful or agreeable thing which possessesexchangeable value.”And we are told that“Capital is that part of wealth which is devoted to obtaining further wealth.”I have said that such conceptions—such definitions—of wealth and capital are childish—they belong to the period of humanity's childhood. That they are indeed childish conceptions the reader can not fail to see if he will reflect upon them and especially if he will compare them with the scientific conception according to which wealth consists of those things—whether they be material commodities or forms of knowledge and understanding—that have been produced by the time-binding energies of humanity, and according to whichnearly all the wealth of the world at any given timeis theaccumulated fruit of the toil of past generations—the living work of the dead. It seems unnecessary to warn the reader against confusing the“making”of money by hook or crook, by trick or trade, with thecreatingof wealth, by the product of labor. In calling the old conceptions childish, I do not mean that they contain no element of truth[pg 116]whatever; I mean that they are shallow, scientifically or spiritually meagre, narrow in their vision, wrong in their accent; I especially mean that they are dumb, because they are blind, regarding the central matter that wealth is the natural offspring of Time and Human Toil. The old conceptions do indeed imply that wealth and capital involve both potential and kinetic use-values, and in so far they are right. But how do such use-values arise?The potential use-values in wealth are created by human work operating in time upon raw material given by nature. The use-values are produced by time-taking transformations of the raw materials; these transformations are wrought by human brain labor and human muscular labor directed by the human brain acting in time. The kinetic use-values of wealth are also created by human toil—mainly by the intellectual labor of observation, experimentation, imagination, deduction and invention, all consuming the precious time of short human lives. It is obvious that in the creation of use-values whether potential or kinetic, the element oftimeenters as an absolutely essential factor. The fundamental importance of time as a factor in the production of wealth—the fact that wealth and the use-values of wealth are literally the natural offspring of the spiritual union of time with toil—has been completely overlooked, not only by the economics, but by the[pg 117]ethics, the jurisprudence and the other branches of speculative reasoning, throughout the long period of humanity's childhood. In the course of the ages there has indeed been much“talk”about time, but there has been no recognition of the basic significance of time as essential in the conception and in the very constitution of human values.It is often said that“Time is Money”; the statement is often false; but the proposition that Money is Time is always true. It is always true in the profound sense that Money is the measure and symbol of Wealth—the product of Time and Toil—the crystallization of the time-binding human capacity.it is thus true that money is a very precious thing, the measure and symbol of work—in part the work of the living but, in the main, the living work of the dead.Nature's laws are supreme; we cannot change them; we can deviate from them for a while, but the end is evil. That is the lesson we must learn from the history of Humanity's childhood. False conceptions of Man—ignorance of the laws of human nature—have given us unscientific economies, unscientific ethics, unscientific law, unscientific politics, unscientific government. These have made human history the history of social cataclysms—insurrections, wars, revolutions—sad tokens not so much of human lust as of human ignorance of the laws of[pg 118]human nature. There is but one remedy, one hope—a science and art of Human Engineering based upon the just conception of humanity as the time-binding class of life and conforming to the laws of nature including the laws of human nature.[pg 119]

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 rôle 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 notsupernatural but is literally a part of nature[pg 067]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. These concepts are basic and impersonal; arrived at mathematically, they are mathematically correct.It does not matter at allhowthe first man, the first time-binder, was produced; the fact remains that he was somewhere, somehow produced. To know anything that is to-day of fundamental interest about man, we have to analyse man in three coordinates—in three capacities; namely, his chemistry, his activities in space, and especially his activities in time; whereas in the study of animals we have to consider only two factors: their chemistry and their activities in space.Let us imagine that the aboriginal—original human specimen was one of two brother apes,AandB; they were alike in every respect; both were animal space-binders; but something strange happened toB; he became the first time-binder, a human. No matter how, this“something”made the change in him that lifted him to a higher dimension; it is enough that in some-wise, over and above[pg 068]his animal capacity for binding space, there was superadded the marvelous new capacity for binding-time. He had thus a new faculty, he belonged to a new dimension; but, of course, he did not realize it; and because he had this new capacity he was able to analyze his brother“A”; he observed“Ais my brother; he is an animal; but he is my brother; therefore,Iam an animal.”This fatal first conclusion, reached by false analogy, by neglecting a fact, has been the chief source of human woe for half a million years and it still survives. The time-binding capacity, first manifest inB, increased more and more, with the days and each generation, until in the course of centuries man felt himself increasingly somehow different from the animal, but he could not explain. He said to himself,“If I am an animal there is also in me something higher, a spark of some thingsupernatural.”With this conclusion he estranged himself, as something apart from nature, and formulated the impasse, which put him in a cul-de-sac of a double life. He was neither true to the“supernatural”which he could not know and therefore, could not emulate, nor was he true to the“animal”which he scorned. Having put himself outside the“natural laws,”he was not really true to any law and condemned himself to a life of hypocrisy, and established speculative, artificial, unnatural laws.[pg 069]“How blind our familiar assumptions make us! Among the animals, man, at least, has long been wont to regard himself as a being quite apart from and not as part of the cosmos round about him. From this he has detached himself in thought, he has estranged and objectified the world, and lost the sense that he is of it. And this age-long habit and point of view, which has fashioned his life and controlled his thought, lending its characteristic mark and color to his whole philosophy and art and learning, is still maintained, partly because of its convenience, no doubt, and partly by force of inertia and sheer conservatism, in the very teeth of the strongest probabilities of biological science. Probably no other single hypothesis has less to recommend it, and yet no other so completely dominates the human mind.”(Cassius J. Keyser, loc. cit.) And this monstrous conception is current to-day: millions still look upon man as a mixture of animal and something supernatural.There is no doubt that the engineering of human society is a difficult and complicated problem of tremendous ethical responsibility, for it involves the welfare of mankind throughout an unending succession of generations. The science of Human Engineering can not be built upon false conceptions of human nature. It can not be built on the conception of man as a kind of animal; it can not be[pg 070]built on the conception of man as a mixture of natural and supernatural. It must be built upon the conception of man as being at once natural and higher in dimensionality than the animals. It must be built upon the scientific conception of mankind as characterized by their time-binding capacity and function. This conception radically alters our whole view of human life, human society, and the world.It must be obvious to any one that time-binding is the only natural criterion and standard for the time-binding class of life. This mighty term—time-binding—when comprehended, will be found to embrace thewholeof the natural laws, the natural ethics, the natural philosophy, the natural sociology, the natural economics, the natural governance, to be brought into the education of time-binders; then really peaceful and progressive civilization, without periodical collapses and violent readjustments, will commence; not before. Everything which is really“time-binding”is inthehuman dimension; therefore, it will represent every quality that is implied in such words as—good,just,right,beautiful; while everything that is merely space-binding will be classified as“animal”and be thus assessed at its proper value. Those ignorant“masters of our destinies”who regard humans as animals or as monstrous hybrids of natural and supernatural must be dethroned by scientific education.[pg 071]Humans can be literally poisoned by false ideas and false teachings. Many people have a just horror at the thought of putting poison into tea or coffee, but seem unable to realize that, when they teach false ideas and false doctrines, they are poisoning the time-binding capacity of their fellow men and women. One has to stop and think! There is nothing mystical about the fact that ideas and words are energies which powerfully affect the physico-chemical base of our time-binding activities. Humans are thus made untrue to“human nature.”Hypnotism is a known fact. It has been proved that a man can be so hypnotized that in a certain time which has been suggested to him, he will murder or commit arson or theft; that, under hypnotic influence, the personal morale of the individual has only a small influence upon his conduct; the subject obeys the hypnotic suggestions, no matter how immoral they are. The conception of man as a mixture of animal and supernatural has for ages kept human beings under the deadly spell of the suggestion that, animal selfishness and animal greediness are their essential character, and the spell has operated to suppress theirreal human natureand to prevent it from expressing itself naturally and freely.On the other hand, when human beings are educated to a lively realization that they are bynaturetime-binding creatures, then they will spontaneously[pg 072]live in accordance with their time-binding nature, which, as I have said, is the source and support of the highest ideals.What is achieved in blaming a man for being selfish and greedy if he acts under the influence of a social environment and education which teach him that he is an animal and that selfishness and greediness are of the essence of his nature?Even so eminent a philosopher and psychologist as Spencer tells us:“Of self-evident truths so dealt with, the one which here concerns us is that a creature must live before it can act ... Ethics has to recognize the truth that egoism comes before altruism.”This is true foranimals, because animals die out from lack of food when their natural supply of it is insufficient because they havenot the capacity to produce artificially. But it is not true for thehuman dimension.Why not? Because humans through their time-binding capacity are first of allcreatorsand so their number is not controlled by the supply of unaided nature, but only by men's artificial productivity, which isthe materialization of their time-binding capacityMan, therefore, by the very intrinsic character of his being,must act first, in order to be able to live(through the action of parents—or society) which is not the case with animals. The misunderstanding[pg 073]of this simple truth is largely accountable for the evil of our ethical and economic systems or lack of systems. As a matter of fact, if humanity were to live incompleteaccord with the animal conception of man, artificial production—time-binding production—would cease and ninety per cent of mankind would perish by starvation. It is just because human beings are not animals but are time-binders—not mere finders but creators of food and shelter—that they are able to live in such vast numbers.Here even the blind must see the effect of higher dimensionality, and this effect becomes in turn the cause of other effects which produce still others, and so on in an endless chain.we live because we produce, because we are acting in time and are not merely acting in space—because man is not a kind of animal. It is all so simple, if only we apply a little sound logic in our thinking about human nature and human affairs. If human ethics are to be human, are to be in the human dimension, the postulates of ethics must be changed;for humanity in order to live must act first; the laws of ethics—the laws of right living—arenaturallaws—laws of human nature—laws having their whole source and sanction in the time-binding capacity and time-binding activity peculiar to man. Human excellence is excellence in time-binding, and[pg 074]must be measured and rewarded by time-binding standards of worth.Humanity, in order to live, must produce creatively and therefore must be guided by applied science, by technology; and this means that the so-called social sciences of ethics, jurisprudence, psychology, economics, sociology, politics, and government must be emancipated from medieval metaphysics; they must be made scientific; they must betechnologized; they must be made to progress and to function in the proper dimension—the human dimension and not that of animals: they must be made time-binding sciences.Can this be done? I have no doubt that it can. For what is human life after all?To a general in the battlefield, human life is a factor which, if properly used, can destroy the enemy. To an engineer human life is an equivalent to energy, or a capacity to do work, mental or muscular, and the moment something is found to be a source of energy and to have the capacity of doing work, the first thing to do, from the engineer's point of view, is to analyse the generator with a view to discovering how best to conserve it, to improve it, and bring it to the level of maximum productivity. Human beings are very complicated energy-producing batteries differing widely in quality and magnitude of productive power. Experience has shown[pg 075]that these batteries are, first of all, chemical batteries producing a mysterious energy. If these batteries are not supplied periodically with a more or less constant quantity of some chemical elements called food and air, the batteries will cease to function—they will die. In the examination of the structure of these batteries we find that the chemical base is very much accentuated all through the structure. This chemical generator is divided into branches each of which has a very different rôle which it must perform in harmony with all the others. The mechanical parts of the structure are built in conformity to the rules of mechanics and are automatically furnished with lubrication and with chemical supplies for automatically renewing worn-out parts. The chemical processes not only deposit particles of mass for the structure of the generator but produce some very powerful unknown kinds of energies or vibrations which make all the chemical parts function; we find also a mysterious apparatus with a complex of wires which we call brain glands, and nerves; and, finally, these human batteries have the remarkable capacity of reproduction.These functions are familiar to everybody. From the knowledge of other physical, mechanical and chemical phenomena of nature, we must come to the conclusion, that this human battery is the most perfect example of a complex engine; it has all the[pg 076]peculiarities of a chemical battery combined with a generator of a peculiar energy called life; above all, it has mental or spiritual capacities; it is thus equipped with both mental and mechanical means for producing work. The parts and functions of this marvelous engine have been the subject of a vast amount of research in various special branches of science. A very noteworthy fact is that both the physical work and the mental work of this human engine are always accompanied by both physical and chemical changes in the structure of its machinery—corresponding to the wear and tear of non-living engines. It also presents certain sexual and spiritual phenomena that have a striking likeness to certain phenomena, especially wireless phenomena, to electricity and to radium. This human engine-battery is of unusual strength, durability and perfection; and yet it is very liable to damage and even wreckage, if not properly used. The controlling factors are very delicate and so the engine is very capricious. Very special training and understanding are necessary for its control.The reader may wish to ask: What is the essence of the time-binding power of Man? Talk of essences is metaphysical—it is not scientific. Let me explain by an example.What is electricity? The scientific answer is: electricity is that which exhibits such and such phenomena.[pg 077]Electricity means nothing but a certain group of phenomena called electric. We are studying electricity when we are studying those phenomena. Thus it is in physics—there is no talk of essences. So, too, in Human Engineering—we shall not talk of theessenceof time-binding but only of the phenomena and the laws thereof. What has led to the development of electric appliances is knowledge of electrical phenomena—not metaphysical talk about the electrical essence. And what will lead to the science and art of Human Engineering is knowledge of time-binding phenomena—not vain babble about an essence of time-binding power. There is no mystery about the word time-binding. Some descriptive term was necessary to indicate that human capacity which discriminates human beings from animals and marks man as man. For that use—the appropriateness of the term time-binding becomes more and more manifest upon reflection.What are the conditions of life upon this earth? Is there war or peace in daily life? All living beings require food; they multiply in a geometrical ratio; and so thenaturalproductivity of the soil becomes increasingly inadequate. The tendency to increase in geometrical ratio is true of all life—vegetable, animal and human, but the tendency is checked by various counteracting influences, natural and artificial. A short time ago these checks had so operated[pg 078]to annul the law of increase as almost to stop the growth of human population. It is only by the time-binding capacity of man—by scientific progress and technological invention—that the checks have been overcome. And so in the last century the population of Europe increased more than it had increased in several centuries before. Impoverished soil, excessive heat or cold, excessive moisture, the lack of rain-fall, and many other factors are hostile to life. It is evident, therefore, that human life must especially struggle for existence; it must carry on a perpetual contest for self preservation. It seems obvious that, if there is perpetual war in every-day life, war methods must be applied.We have just passed through a tremendous world-widemilitarywar and we developed special ways of producing power to overcome the enemy. We were thus driven to discover some of the hidden sources of power and all of our old habits and ideas were bent toward military methods and military technology. The war of every-day life against hostile elements is war for the subjugation of physical nature and not for the conquest of people. It is a war carried on by the time-binding power of men pitted against natural obstacles, and its progressive triumph means progressive advancement in human weal.The lesson of the World War should not be[pg 079]missed through failure to analyse it. When nations war with nations, the normal daily war of millions and millions of individuals to subjugate natural resources to human uses is interrupted, and the slow-gathered fruits of measureless toil are destroyed.But peaceful war, war for the conquest of nature, involves the use of methods of technology and, what is even more important, technological philosophy, law and ethics.What I want to emphasize in this little book, is the need of a thoroughgoing revision of our ideas; and the revision must be made by engineering minds in order that our ideas may be made to match facts. If we are ill, we consult a physician or a surgeon, not a charlatan. We must learn that, when there is trouble with the producing power of the world, we have to consult an engineer, an expert on power. Politicians, diplomats, and lawyers do not understand the problem. What I am advocating is that we must learn to ask those who know how to produce things, instead of asking those whose profession is to fight for the division of things produced by nature or by other human beings.As a matter of fact our civilization has been for a long time disorganized to the point of disease. Lately through the whirl of changing conditions, due to the great release of power in the new-born giant technology, the disorganization has become acute.[pg 080]The sick seldom know the cure for themselves. If the cure is to be enduring, we have to go to the source, and this can be done only by men familiar, not only with effects but also with the causes.Money is not the wealth of a nation, but production is wealth; soordered productionis the main object for humanity. But to have the maximum of production, it is necessary to have production put on a sound basis. No mere preaching of brotherly love, or class hatred, will produce one single brick for the building of the future temple of human victory—the temple ofhumancivilization. Ordered production demands analysis of basic facts.This era is essentially an industrial era. To produce we have to have: (1) raw material or soil; (2) instruments for production—tools and machines; and (3) the application of power.The three requirements may be briefly characterized and appraised as follows:(1) Raw material and soil are products of nature; humanity simply took them and had the use of them for nothing, because it is impossible to call a prayer of thanksgiving (if any) addressed to a“creator”as payment to gods or men. But raw material and soil, in the conditions in which nature produces them, are of very little immediate benefit to humanity, because unfilled soil produces very little food for humans, and raw material such as[pg 081]wood, coal, oil, iron, copper, etc., are completely useless to humanity until after human work is applied to them. It is necessary to cut a tree for the making of timber; it is necessary to excavate the minerals, and even then, only by applying further human work is it possible to make them available for any human use. So, it is obvious that even raw materials in the form in which nature has produced them, are mostly of no value and unavailable for use, unless reproduced through the process of“human creative production.”Therefore, we may well conclude that“raw material”must be divided into two very distinct classes: (a) raw material as produced by nature—nature's free gift—which in its original form and place has practically no use-value; and (b) raw material reproduced by man's mental and muscular activities, by his“time-binding”capacities. Raw materials of the second class have an enormous use-value; indeed they make the existence of humanity possible.As to the second requirement for production, namely:(2) Tools and machines, it is obvious that“tools and machines”are made of raw material by human work, mental and muscular.And, finally:(3) The application of power. Different sources of natural energy and power are known. The most[pg 082]important available source of energy for this globe is the sun—the heat of the sun. This solar heat is the origin of water power, of wind power, and of the power bound up in coal, of the chemistry, growth and transforming agency of plants.10[pg 083]All foods which the animals as well as the humans use are, already, the result of the solar energy transformed into what may be called chemical energy. Transformation of energies is building up of life.It is to be clearly seen that the only source of energy which can be directly appropriated and used by man or animal is vegetable food found in the wilderness; no other sources of power are available[pg 084]fordirectuse; they have first to be mastered and directed by human brain. The same is true in regard to the getting of animal food, the creation of a water- or windmill, or a steam engine, or the art of using a team of horses, or a bushel of wheat; these are not available except by the use of the human“time-binding”power.This short survey of facts, known to everybody, brings us to the conclusion that all problems of production come ultimately to the analysis of(1) Natural resources of raw material and natural energy, freely supplied by nature, which, as we have seen, in the form as produced by nature alone, have very little or no value for humanity;(2) The activity of the human brain (because human muscles are always directed by the brain) which gives value to the otherwise useless raw materials and energies.Hence, to understand the processes of production, it is essential to realize that humanity is able to survive only by virtue of the capacity of humans to exploit natural resources—to convert the products of nature into forms available for human needs. If humanity had only the capacity of apes, depending exclusively on wild fruits and the like, they would be confined to those comparatively small regions of the globe where the climate and the fertility of the soil are specially favorable. But in the case supposed,[pg 085]humans would not be humans, they would not be time-binders—they would be animals—mere space-binders.There are other facts which must be kept constantly in mind. One of them is that, in the world in which we live, there are natural laws of inorganic as well as organic phenomena. Another of the facts is, as before said, that the human class of life has the peculiar capacity of establishing the social laws and customs which regulate and influence its destinies, which help or hinder the processes of production upon which the lives and happiness of mankind essentially and fundamentally depend.It must not be lost sight of in this connection that the human class of life is a part and a product of nature, and that, therefore, there must befundamental laws which are natural for this class of life. A stone obeys the natural laws of stones; a liquid conforms to the natural law of liquids; a plant, to the natural laws of plants; an animal, to the natural laws of animals; it follows inevitably that theremustbe natural laws for humans.But here the problem becomes more complicated; for the stone, the plant and the animal do not possess the intellectual power to create and initiate and so must blindly obey the laws that are natural for them; they are not free to determine their own destinies. Not so with man; man has the capacity and he[pg 086]can, through ignorance or neglect or mal-intent, deviate from, or misinterpret, the natural laws for the human class of life. Just therein lies the secret and the source of human chaos and woe—a fact of such tremendous importance that it cannot be over-emphasized and it seems impossible to evade it longer. To discover the nature of Man and the laws of thatnature, marks the summit of human enterprises. For to solve thisproblem is to open the way to everything which can be of importance to humanity—to human welfare and happiness.The great problem has been felt as a powerful impulse throughout the ages of human striving, for in all times it has been evident to thinkers that upon the right solution of the problem must forever depend the welfare of mankind. Many“solutions”have been offered; and, though they have differed widely, they agree in one respect—they have had a common fate—the fate of being false. What has been the trouble? The trouble has been, in every instance, a radical misconception of what a human being really is. The problem is to discover the natural laws of the human class of life. All the“solutions”offered in the course of history and those which are current to-day are of two and only two kinds—zoologicalandmythological. The zoological solutions are those which grow out of the false conception according to which human beings are animals;[pg 087]if humans are animals, the laws of human nature are the laws of animal nature; and so the social“sciences”of ethics, law, politics, economics, government become nothing but branches of zoology; as sciences, they are the studies of animal life; as arts, they are the arts of managing and controlling animals; according to this zoological philosophy, human wisdom about human beings is animal wisdom about animals.The mythological“solutions”are those which start with the monstrous conception according to which human beings have no proper place in nature but are mixtures of natural andsupernatural—unions or combinations of animality and divinity. Such“solutions”contain no conception ofnaturallaw; scientifically judged, they are mythological absurdities—muddle-headed chattering of crude and irresponsible metaphysics—well-meaning no doubt, but silly, and deadly in their effects upon the interests of mankind, vitiating ethics, law, economics, politics and government.Such have been and still are the regnant philosophies of human nature. What is the remedy? How are the laws of human nature to be discovered?It is evident that the enterprise, like all other scientific enterprises, must be based upon and guided by realities. It is essential to realize that the great, central, dominant, all-embracing reality is the reality[pg 088]ofhuman nature. If we misconceive this fundamental matter, the enterprise must fail; that is both logically clear and clear in the sad light of history; but if we conceive it aright, we may confidently expect the enterprise to prosper. That is why, in the chapter on“The Classes of Life,”I have laid so much stress on the absolute necessity of conceiving Man as being what he really is, and not something else. And we have discovered what man is: we have discovered that man is characterized by the capacity or power to bind time, and so we havedefinedhumanity as the time-binding class of life. That concept is fundamental. It contains the germ of the science and art of Human Engineering. The problem of discovering and applying the“laws of human nature”is the problem of discovering and applying to the conduct of life the laws of time-binding—of time-binding activity—of time-bindingenergy. This fact must be firmly seized and kept steadily in mind.Energy, we have noted, is the capacity to do work. In human economy work may be (1)usefulor (2)neutralor (3)harmful. These words have no significance except in human economy. The energy of the human intellect is a time-binding energy, for it is able to direct, to use, to transform other energies. This time-binding energy is of higher rank—of higher dimensionality—than the other natural energies which it directs, controls, uses, and transforms.[pg 089]This higher energy—which is commonly called the mental or spiritual power of man—istime-binding because it makes past achievements live in the present and present activities in time-to-come. It is an energy that initiates; it is an energy that creates; it is an energy that can understand the past and foretell the future—it is both historian and prophet; it is an energy that loadsabstracttime—the vehicle of events—with an ever-increasing burden of intellectual achievements, of spiritual wealth, destined for the civilization of posterity. And what is the natural law of the increase? What is the natural law of human advancements in all great matters of human concern?The question is of utmost importance both theoretically and practically, for the law—whatever it be—is anaturallaw—a law of human nature—a law of the time-binding energy of man. Whatisthe law? We have already noted the law of arithmetical progression and the law of geometric progression; we have seen the immense difference between them; and we have seen that the natural law of human progress in each and every cardinal matter is a law like that of a rapidly increasing geometric progression. In other words, the natural law of human progress—the natural law of amelioration in human affairs—the fundamental law of human nature—the basic law of the time-binding energy[pg 090]peculiar to man—is a Logarithmic law—a law of logarithmic increase. I beg the reader not to let the term bewilder him but to make it his own. It is easy to understand; and its significance is mighty and everlasting. Even its mathematical formulation can be understood by boys and girls. Let us see how the formulation looks.SupposePRto denote the amount of progress made in some important field by a given generation—which we may call the“first”generation; whereRdenotes the common ratio—the ratio of improvement—that is, the number by which the progress of one generation must be multiplied to give the amount of progress made by the next generation; then the amount of progress made by the second generation will bePR2; that made by the third generation will bePR3; and so on; now denote byTthe number of generations, counting the first one and all that follow in endless succession. Then the following series will show the law of human progress in the chosen field:PR, PR2, PR3, PR4, PR5, ..., PRT, PRT+1, ...;notice how it goes; the first generation ends with PR; the second generation starts withPR, addsPR2, and ends withPR + PR2; the third generation starts withPR + PR2, addsPR3and ends withPR + PR2+ PR3; and so on and on; thegainmade in[pg 091]theTthgeneration isPRT;the total gainmade inTgenerations isPR + PR2+ PR3+ ... + PRT;this total gain is given by the formula,Total gain in T generations = (R ÷ R-1) (PRT-P).If we takeRto be 2 (which is a very small ratio, requiring the progress of each generation to be merely double that of the preceding one) and if we takeTto be (say) 10, then we see that the progress made by the single 10th generation isP× 210, which is 1024 times the progress made in the“first”generation; and we readily compute that the total gain in 10 generations is 2046 times the progress made in the“first”generation. Moreover, to gain a just sense of the impressiveness of this law, the reader must reflect upon the fact that it operates, not merely on one field, but in all fields of human interest.“Operates in all fields”I have just now said; as a matter of fact, as before pointed out, it does not so operatenowinallfields nor has it ever done so. My point is that itwillso operate when we once acquire sense enough to let it do so. That sense we shall have when and only when we discover that by nature we are time-binders and that theeffectivenessof our time-binding capacity is not[pg 092]only a function of time but is, as I have explained, a logarithmic or exponential function of time—a function in which time (T) enters as anexponent, as in the expressionPRT, so that we humans are, unlike animals, naturally qualified not only to progress, but to progress more and more rapidly, with an alwaysaccelerating acceleration, as the generations pass.This great fact is to be at once the basis, the regulator and guide in the science and art of Human Engineering. Whatever squares with that law of time-binding human energy, is right and makes for human weal; whatever contravenes it, is wrong and makes for human woe.And so I repeat that the world will have uninterrupted, peaceful progress when and only when the so-called social“sciences”—the life-regulating“sciences”of ethics, law, philosophy, economics, religion, politics, and government—are technologized; when and only when they are made genuinely scientific in spirit and method; for then and only then will they advance, like the natural, mathematical and technological sciences, in conformity to the fundamental exponential law of the time-binding nature of man; then and then only, by the equal pace of progress in all cardinal matters, the equilibrium of social institutions will remain stable and social cataclysms cease.[pg 093]Chapter V. WealthI beg the reader to allow me to begin this chapter with a word of warning. The reader is aware that Criticism—by which I mean Thought—may be any one of three kinds: it may be purely destructive; it may be purely constructive; or it may be both destructive and constructive at the same time. Purely destructive criticism is sometimes highly useful. If an old idea or a system of old ideas be false and therefore harmful, it is a genuine service to attack it and destroy it even if nothing be offered to take its place, just as it is good to destroy a rattlesnake lurking by a human pathway, even if one does not offer a substitute for the snake. But, however useful destructive criticism may be, it is not an easy service to render; for old ideas, however false and harmful, are protected alike by habit and by the inborn conservatism of many minds. Now, habit indeed is exceedingly useful—even indispensable to the effective conduct of life—for it enables us to do many useful things automatically and therefore easily, without conscious thinking, and thus to save our mental energy for other work; but for the same[pg 094]reason, habit is often very harmful; it makes us protect false ideas automatically, and so when the destructive critic endeavors to destroy such ideas by reasoning with us, he finds that he is trying to reason with automats—with machines. Such is the chief difficulty encountered by destructive criticism. On the other hand, purely constructive criticism—purely constructive thought—consists in introducing new ideas of a kind that do not clash, or do not seem to clash, with old ones. Is such criticism or thought easy? Far from it. It has difficulties of its own. These are of two varieties: the difficulty of showing people who are content with their present stock of old ideas that the new ones are interesting or important; and the great difficulty of makingnewideas clear and intelligible, for the art of being clear and perfectly intelligible is very, very hard to acquire and to practise. The third kind of criticism—the third kind of thought—the kind that is at once both destructive and constructive—has a double aim—that of destroying old ideas that are false and that of replacing them with new ideas that are true; and so the third kind of criticism or thought is the most difficult of all, for it has to overcome both the difficulty of destructive criticism and that of constructive thought.The reader, therefore, if he will be good enough to reflect a little upon the matter, can not fail to appreciate[pg 095]the tremendous difficulties which beset the writing of this little book, for he must perceive, not only that the work belongs to the third kind of critical thought, but—what is much more—the errors it aims to destroy are fundamental, world-wide and old, while the true ideas it seeks to substitute for them are fundamental and new. This great difficulty, felt ateverystage of this writing, is, for a reason to be presently explained, greatly enhanced and felt with especial keenness in the present chapter. I therefore beg the reader to give me here very special cooperation—the cooperation of open-mindedness, candor and critical attention. It is essential to keep in mind the nature of our enterprise as a whole, which is that of pointing the way to the science and art of Human Engineering and laying the foundations thereof; we have seen Human Engineering, when developed, is to be the science and art of so directing human energies and capacities as to make them contribute most effectively to the advancement of human welfare; we have seen that this science and art must have its basis in a true conception of human nature—a just conception of what Man really is and of his natural place in the complex of the world; we have seen that the ages-old and still current conceptions of man—zoological and mythological conceptions, according to which human beings are either animals or else hybrids of animals and gods—are[pg 096]mainly responsible for the dismal things in human history; we have seen that man, far from being an animal or a compound of natural and supernatural, is a perfectly natural being characterized by a certain capacity or power—the capacity or power to bind time; we have seen that humanity is, therefore, to be rightly conceived and scientifically defined as the time-binding class of life; we have seen that, therefore, the laws of time-binding energies and time-binding phenomena are the laws of human nature; we have seen that this conception of man—which must be the basic concept, the fundamental principle and the perpetual guide and regulator of Human Engineering—is bound to work a profound transformation in all our views on human affairs and, in particular, must radically alter the so-called social“sciences”—the life-regulating“sciences”of ethics, sociology, economics, politics and government—advancing them from their present estate of pseudo sciences to the level of genuine sciences and technologizing them for the effective service of mankind. I call them“life-regulating,”not because they play a more important part in human affairs than do the genuine sciences of mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy and biology, for they are not more important than these, but because they are, so to say, closer, more immediate and more obvious in their influence and effects. These life-regulating sciences[pg 097]are, of course, not independent; they depend ultimately upon the genuine sciences for much of their power and ought to go to them for light and guidance; but what I mean here by saying they are not independent is that they are dependent upon each other, interpenetrating and interlocking in innumerable ways. To showin detailhow the so-called sciences will have to be transformed to make them accord with the right conception of man and qualify them for their proper business will eventually require a large volume or indeed volumes.In this introductory work I cannot deal fully with one of those“sciences”nor in suitable outline with each of them separately. I must be content here to deal, very briefly, with one of them by way of illustration and suggestion. Which one shall it be?Now among these life-regulating“sciences”there is one specially marked by the importance of its subject, by its central relation to the others and by its prominence in the public mind. I mean Economics—the“dismal science”of Political Economy. For that reason I have chosen to deal with economics. In the present chapter I shall discuss three of its principal terms—Wealth, Capital and Money—with a view to showing that the current meanings and interpretations of these familiar terms must be very greatly deepened, enlarged and elevated if they are to accord with facts and laws of human nature and if the so-called[pg 098]“science”which employs them is to become a genuine science properly qualified to be a branch of Human Engineering. It is to be shown that the meanings currently attached by political economists and others to the terms in question belong to what I have called the period of humanity's childhood; and it is to be shown that the new meanings which the terms must receive belong to the period of humanity's manhood. It will be seen that the new meanings differ so radically from the old ones as to make it desirable for the sake of clarity to give the new meanings new names. But this, however scientifically desirable, is impracticable because the old terms—wealth, capital, money—are so deeply imbedded in the speech of the world. And here comes into view the very special difficulty alluded to above and which led me to request the reader's special cooperation in this chapter. The difficulty is not merely that of destroying old ideas that are false; it is not merely that of replacing them with true ideas that are new; it is that of causing people habitually to associate meanings that are new and true with terms associated so long, so universally, so uniformly with meanings that are false.The secret of philosophy, said Leibnitz, is to treat familiar things as unfamiliar. By the secret of“philosophy”Leibnitz meant the secret of what we call science. Let us apply this wholesome maxim in[pg 099]our present study; let us, in so far as we can, regard the familiar terms—wealth, capital and money—as unfamiliar; let us deal with them afresh; let us examine openmindedly the facts—the phenomena—to which the terms relate and ascertain scientifically the significance the terms must have in a genuine science of human economy. Examine“the facts”I say—examine“the phenomena”—for bending facts to theories is a vital danger, while bending theories to facts is essential to science and the peaceful progress of society.Human beings have always had some sense of values—some perception or cognition of values. In order to express or measure values, it was necessary to introduce units of measure, or units of exchange. People began to measure values by means of agricultural and other products, such as cattle, for example. The Latin word for cattle waspecus, and the wordpecunia, which came to signify money, accounts for the meaning of our familiar word pecuniary. The earliest units for measuring became unsuited to the increasing needs of growing trade,“business,”or traffic. Finally a unit called money was adopted in which the base was the value of some weight of gold. Thus we see that money came to mean simply the accepted unit for measuring, representing and expressing values of and in wealth.But what is wealth? I have said that the old[pg 100]conceptions of wealth, capital and money—the conceptions that are still current throughout the world—belong to the period of humanity's childhood—they are childish conceptions. I have said that they must be replaced by scientific conceptions—by conceptions fit for humanity's manhood. The change that must be made in our conceptions of the great terms is tremendous. It is necessary to analyse the current conceptions of wealth, capital, and money—the childish conceptions of them—in order to reveal their falseness, stupidity and folly. To do this we must enter the field of Political Economy—a field beset with peculiar difficulties and dangers. All the Furies of private interests are involved. One gains the impression that there is little or no real desire to gain a true conception—a scientific conception—of wealth. Everybody seems to prefer an emotional definition—a definition that suits his personal love of wealth or his hatred of it. Many definitions of wealth, capital and money are to be found in modern books of political economy—definitions and books belonging to humanity's childhood. For the purpose of this writing they all of them look alike—they sufficiently agree—they are all of them childish. Mill, for example, tells us that wealth consists of“useful or agreeable things which possess exchangeable value.”Of capital one of the simplest definitions is this:[pg 101]“Capital is that part of wealth which is devoted to obtaining further wealth.”(Alfred Marshall,Economics of Industry.)Walker (in hisMoney, Trade and Industry) defines money as follows:“Money is that which passes freely from hand to hand throughout the community in final discharge of debts and full payment for commodities, being accepted equally without reference to the character or credit of the person who offers it, and without the intention of the person who receives it to consume it, or to enjoy it, or apply it to any other use than, in turn, to tender it to others in discharge of debts or full payment for commodities.”Political economy has many different schools of thought and methods of classification. Its reasonings are mainly speculative, metaphysical, and legalistic; its ethics is zoological ethics, based on the zoological conception of man as an animal. The elements of natural logic and natural ethics are absent. The sophisticated ideas about the subject of political economy, bluntly do not correspond to facts. Our primitive forefather in the jungle would have died from hunger, cold, heat, blood poisoning or the attacks of wild animals, if he had not used his brain and muscles to take some stone or a piece of wood to knock down fruit from trees, to kill an animal, so as to use his hide for clothes and his meat for food, or to break wood and trees for a shelter and to make some weapons for defense and hunting.[pg 102]“In the first stone which he (the savage) flings at the wild animal he pursues, in the first stick that he seizes to strike down the fruit which hangs above his reach, we see the appropriation of one article for the purpose of aiding in the acquisition of another and thus we discover the origin of capital.”(R. Torrens,An Essay on the Production of Wealth.)Our primitive forefather's first acquaintance with fire was probably through lightning; he discovered, probably by chance, the possibility of making fire by rubbing together two pieces of wood and by striking together two pieces of stone; he established one of the first facts in technology; he felt the warm effect of fire and also the good effect of broiling his food by finding some roasted animals in a fire. Thus nature revealed to him one of its great gifts, the stored-up energy of the sun in vegetation and its primitive beneficial use. He was already a time-binding being; evolution had brought him to that level. Being a product of nature, he was reflecting those natural laws that belong to his class of life; he had ceased to be static—he had become dynamic—progressiveness had got into his blood—he was above the estate of animals.We also observe that primitive man produced commodities, acquired experiences, made observations, and that some of the produced commodities had a use-value for other people and remained good for use, even after his death.[pg 103]The produced commodities were composed of raw material, freely supplied by nature, combined with some mental work which gave him the conception of how to make and to use the object, and some work on his part which finally shaped the thing; all of this mental and manual work consumed an amount of time. It is obvious that all of these elements are indispensable to produce anything of any value, or of any use-value. His child not only directly received some of the use-values produced by him, but was initiated into all of his experiences and observations. (As we know, power, as defined in mechanics, means the ratio of work done to the time used in doing it.)All those things are time-binding phenomena produced by the time-binding capacity of man; but man hasnotknown thatthis capacitywas hisdefining mark. We must notice the strange fact that, from the engineering point of view, humanity, though very developed in some ways, is childishly undeveloped in others. Humanity has some conceptions about dimensions and talks of the world in which we live as having three dimensions; yet even in its wildest imagination it can not picture tangibly afourthdimension; nay, humanity has not learned to grasp the real meanings of things that are basic or fundamental. All of our conceptions are relative and comparative; all of them are based upon matters[pg 104]which we do not yet understand; for example, we talk of time, space, electricity, gravity, and so on, but no one has been able to define them in terms of the data of sensation; nevertheless—and it is a fact of the greatest importance—we learn how to use many things which we do not fully understand and are not yet able to define.In political economy the meagreness of our understanding is especially remarkable; we have not yet grasped the obvious fact—a fact of immeasurable import for all of the social sciences—that with little exception the wealth and capital possessed by a given generation are not produced by its own toil but are the inherited fruit of dead men's toil—a free gift of the past. We have yet to learn and apply the lesson that not only our material wealth and capital but our science and art and learning and wisdom—all that goes to constitute our civilization—were produced, not by our own labor, but by the time-binding energies of past generations.Primitive man used natural laws without knowing them or understanding them, but he was able to cause nature to express itself, by finding a way to release nature's stored up energy. Through the work of his brain and its direction in the use of his muscles, he found that some of his appliances were not good; he made better ones, and thus slowly at first, the progress of humanity went on. I will not enlarge[pg 105]upon the history of the evolution of civilization because it is told in many books.In the earliest times the religious, philosophical, legal and ethical systems had not been invented. The morale at that time was a natural morale. Humans knew that they did not create nature. They did not feel it“proper”to“expropriate the creator”and legalistically appropriate the earth and its treasure for themselves. They felt, in their unsophisticated morale, that being called into existence they had a natural right to exist and to use freely the gifts of nature in the preservation of their life; and that is what they did.After the death of a man, some of the objects produced by him still survived, such as weapons, fishing or hunting instruments, or the caves adapted for living; a baby had to be nourished for some years by its parents or it would have died. Those facts had important consequences; objects made by someone for some particular use could be used by someone else, even after the death of one or more successive users; again the experiences acquired by one member of a family or a group of people were taught by example or precept to others of the same generation and to the next generation. Such simple facts are the corner stones of our whole civilization and they are the direct result of thehuman capacity of time-binding.[pg 106]The world to-day is full of controversy about wealth, capital, and money, and because humanity, through its peculiar time-binding power, binds this element“time”in an ever larger and larger degree, the controversy becomes more and more acute. Civilization as a process is the process of binding time; progress is made by the fact that each generation adds to the material and spiritual wealth which it inherits. Past achievements—the fruit of bygone time—thus live in the present, are augmented in the present, and transmitted to the future; the process goes on; time, the essential element, is so involved that, though it increases arithmetically, its fruit, civilization, advances geometrically.But there is another peculiarity in wealth and money: If a wooden or iron“inch”be allowed to rot or rust quietly on some shelf, this“inch”does not represent anything besides this piece of wood or iron. But if we take thementalvalue of an inch, this unit of one of the measures of space, and use it, with other quantities, in the contemplation of the skies for the solving of an astronomical problem, it gives a prophetic answer that, in a certain place there is a star; this star, may be for years looked for in vain. Was it that the calculation was wrong? No, for after further search with telescopes of greater power, the star is found and the calculation thus verified.[pg 107]It is obvious that the“unit”—inch—has no value by itself, but is very precious as a unit for measuring the phenomenon of length, which it perfectly represents, and that is why it was introduced.It is exactly the same with money if the term be rightly understood. Understood aright, money, being the measure and representative of wealth, is in the main, the measure and the representative of dead men's toil; for, rightly understood, wealth is almost entirely the product of the labor of by-gone generations. This product, we have seen, involves the element of time as the chief factor. And so we discover how money, properly understood, is connected with time—the main function of money is to measure and represent the accumulated products of the labor of past generations. Hoarded money is like an iron“inch”upon a shelf—a useless lump; but when used as a measure and representative of wealth rightly understood, money renders invaluable service, for it then serves to measure and represent the living fruit of dead men's toil.For this reason, it is useless to argue who is the more important, the capitalist who has legal possession of most of the material fruit of dead men's toil, or the laborer who has legal possession of but little of it. In the laborer, we do not now really look for his physical muscular laboralone; for this is replaced by mechanical or animal power as soon as[pg 108]it can be. What we do need from labor, and what we will always need, is hisbrain—his time-binding power.The population of the world may be divided into different classes; if the classes are not here enumerated in the customary way, it is because it is necessary to classify human beings, as nearly as possible according to their“power-value.”There is no assertion that this is an ideal classification, but if someone is moved to exclaim—“what a foolish, unscientific division!”—I will answer by saying:“I grant that the division is foolish and unscientific; butit is the only division which corresponds to facts in life, and it is not the writer's fault. By this‘foolishness’some good may be accomplished.”From an engineer's point of view humanity is apparently to be divided into three classes; (1) the intellectuals; (2) the rich; and (3) the poor. This division would seem to be contrary to all the rules of logic, but it corresponds to facts. Of course some individuals belong to two of the classes or even to all three of them, an after-war product, but essentially, they belong to the one class in proportion to the characteristic which is the most marked in their life; that is, in the sense of social classes—based on magnitude of values.(1) The intellectuals are the men and women[pg 109]who possess the knowledge produced by the labor of by-gone generations but do not possess the material wealth thus produced. In mastering and using this inheritance of knowledge, they are exercising their time-binding energies and making the labor of the dead live in the present and for the future.(2) The rich are those who have possession and control of most of thematerialwealth produced by the toil of bygone generations—wealth that is dead unless animated and transformed by the time-binding labor of the living.(3) The poor are those who have neither the knowledge possessed by the intellectuals nor the material wealth possessed by the rich and who, moreover, because nearly all their efforts, under present conditions, are limited to the struggle for mere existence, have little or no opportunity to exercise their time-binding capacity.Let us now try to ascertain the rôle of the time-binding class of life as a whole. We have by necessity, to go back to the beginning—back to the savage. We have seen what were the conditions of his work and progress; we saw that for each successful achievement he often had to wrestle with a very large number of unsuccessful achievements, and his lifetime being so limited, the total of his successful achievements was very limited, so that he was able to give to his child only a few useful objects and[pg 110]the sum of his experience. Generally speaking, each successor did not start his life at the point where his father started; he started somewhere near where his father left off. His father gave, say, fifty years to discover two truths in nature and succeeded in making two or three simple objects; but the son does not need to give fifty years to discover and create the same achievements, and so he has time to achieve somethingnew. He thus adds his own achievements to those of his father in tools and experience; this is the mathematical equivalent of adding his parent's years of life to his own. His mother's work and experience are of course included—the name father and son being only used representatively.This stupendous fact is the definitive mark of humanity—the power to roll up continuously the ever-increasing achievements of generation after generation endlessly. We have seen that this time-binding power is an exponential power or function of time. Time flows on, increasing in arithmetical progression, adding generation unto generation; but the results of human energies working in time do not go on arithmetically; they pile up or roll up more and more rapidly, augmenting in accordance with the law of a more and more rapidly increasing geometric progression. The typical term of the progression isPRTwherePRdenotes the ending progress made in the generation with which we[pg 111]agree to start our reckoning,Rdenotes the ratio increase, andTdenotes the number of generations after the chosen“start.”The quantity,PRTof progress made in theTthgeneration containsTas an exponent, and so the quantity, varying as timeTpasses, is called an exponential function of the time.Nature is the source of all energy. Plants, the lowest form of life, have a definite rôle to perform in the economy of nature. Their function is the forming of albuminoids and other substances for higher purposes. All of their nitrates are high-explosives, or low explosives, but explosives anyway. They are powerful sources of some new energy. Animal life uses these“explosives”as food and is correspondingly more dynamic, but in animal life time does not play the rôle it plays in human life. Animals are limited by death permanently. If animals make any progress from generation to generation, it is so small as to be negligible. A beaver, for example, is a remarkable builder of dams, but he does not progress in the way of inventions or further development. A beaver dam is always a beaver dam.Finally humanity, the highest known class of life, has time-binding capacity as its characteristic, its discriminant, its peculiar and definitive mark. It is an unrealized fact that in this higher class of[pg 112]life,the law of organic growth develops into the law of energy-growth—the mind—the time-binding energy—an increasing exponential function of time.That fact is of basic importance for the science and art of Human Engineering. In mechanics we have the well-known formula(1) Work ÷ Time = Power.We have seen that, in accordance with the law of geometric progression,PRTrepresents the progress made—the work done—in theTthgeneration (Tbeing counted from some generation taken as starting point of reckoning); this progress, achievement, orwork, being done inonegeneration, we have by (1)(2) ( Work = PRT) / ( Time = 1) = Power,that is,PRT= Power; this means that the numberPRT, which measures the work done in a given generation, is also the measure of the power that does the work. Now, the total work,W, done in theTgenerations is(3)W = PR1+ PR2+ PR3+ ... + PRT;that is,(4)W=R÷ (R-1) × (PRT-P)[pg 113]It should be noticed that by (2) this expression forWmay also be regarded as the sum ofTdifferent powersPR,PR2, etc., each working during one and only one generation; if we divided this sum byT, the quotient would be a power that would have to act throughTgenerations to produceW. The reader should not fail to notice very carefully that the expression (4) forWis an expression for the total progress made—the total work done—the total wealth produced—in the course ofTgenerations and he should especially note how the expression involves the exponential function of time (T), namelyPRT.The formula makes mathematically evident the time-binding capacity characteristic of the human class of life. Properly understood,wealthconsists of the fruits or products of this time-binding capacity of man. Animals do not produce wealth; it is produced by Man and only Man. The foregoing basic formulation should lead to further similar developments throwing much light upon the process of civilization and serving to eliminate "private opinion" from the conduct of human affairs. (In this writing it is not important to look deeper into these proposed series. The fact remains thatP, as well asR, are peculiarly increasing series of a geometrical character—the precise form will be developed in another writing.)[pg 114]Human achievements and progress, because cumulative, are knocking out the barriers of time. This fact is the vital and dynamic difference between animal life and human life. As plants gather in and store up solar energy into sheaves for the use and growth of animal and man—so humans are gathering and binding the knowledge of past centuries into sheaves for the use and development of generations yet unborn.We have seen that the term wealth, rightly understood, means the fruit of the time-binding work of humanity. Wealth is of two kinds: one is material; the other is knowledge. Both kinds have use-value. The first kind perishes—the commodities composing it deteriorate and become useless. The other is permanent in character; it is imperishable; it may be lost or forgotten but it does not wear out.The one is limited in time; the other, unlimited in time; the former I callpotential use-value; the latter,kinetic use-value. Analysis will justify the names. The energy of a body which is due to its position, is called potential energy. The energy of a body which is due to its motion, is called kinetic energy. Here the material use-value has value through its position, shape and so forth; it is immobile if not used, and has not the capacity to progress. Mental use-values are not static but permanently dynamic; one thought, one discovery, is the impulse[pg 115]to others; they follow the law of an increasingpotentialfunction of time. (Seeapp. II.) This is why these names correspond to the two names of the two mentioned classes of energy.Here I must return to the current conceptions of wealth and capital, before cited.“Wealth,”we are told,“is any useful or agreeable thing which possessesexchangeable value.”And we are told that“Capital is that part of wealth which is devoted to obtaining further wealth.”I have said that such conceptions—such definitions—of wealth and capital are childish—they belong to the period of humanity's childhood. That they are indeed childish conceptions the reader can not fail to see if he will reflect upon them and especially if he will compare them with the scientific conception according to which wealth consists of those things—whether they be material commodities or forms of knowledge and understanding—that have been produced by the time-binding energies of humanity, and according to whichnearly all the wealth of the world at any given timeis theaccumulated fruit of the toil of past generations—the living work of the dead. It seems unnecessary to warn the reader against confusing the“making”of money by hook or crook, by trick or trade, with thecreatingof wealth, by the product of labor. In calling the old conceptions childish, I do not mean that they contain no element of truth[pg 116]whatever; I mean that they are shallow, scientifically or spiritually meagre, narrow in their vision, wrong in their accent; I especially mean that they are dumb, because they are blind, regarding the central matter that wealth is the natural offspring of Time and Human Toil. The old conceptions do indeed imply that wealth and capital involve both potential and kinetic use-values, and in so far they are right. But how do such use-values arise?The potential use-values in wealth are created by human work operating in time upon raw material given by nature. The use-values are produced by time-taking transformations of the raw materials; these transformations are wrought by human brain labor and human muscular labor directed by the human brain acting in time. The kinetic use-values of wealth are also created by human toil—mainly by the intellectual labor of observation, experimentation, imagination, deduction and invention, all consuming the precious time of short human lives. It is obvious that in the creation of use-values whether potential or kinetic, the element oftimeenters as an absolutely essential factor. The fundamental importance of time as a factor in the production of wealth—the fact that wealth and the use-values of wealth are literally the natural offspring of the spiritual union of time with toil—has been completely overlooked, not only by the economics, but by the[pg 117]ethics, the jurisprudence and the other branches of speculative reasoning, throughout the long period of humanity's childhood. In the course of the ages there has indeed been much“talk”about time, but there has been no recognition of the basic significance of time as essential in the conception and in the very constitution of human values.It is often said that“Time is Money”; the statement is often false; but the proposition that Money is Time is always true. It is always true in the profound sense that Money is the measure and symbol of Wealth—the product of Time and Toil—the crystallization of the time-binding human capacity.it is thus true that money is a very precious thing, the measure and symbol of work—in part the work of the living but, in the main, the living work of the dead.Nature's laws are supreme; we cannot change them; we can deviate from them for a while, but the end is evil. That is the lesson we must learn from the history of Humanity's childhood. False conceptions of Man—ignorance of the laws of human nature—have given us unscientific economies, unscientific ethics, unscientific law, unscientific politics, unscientific government. These have made human history the history of social cataclysms—insurrections, wars, revolutions—sad tokens not so much of human lust as of human ignorance of the laws of[pg 118]human nature. There is but one remedy, one hope—a science and art of Human Engineering based upon the just conception of humanity as the time-binding class of life and conforming to the laws of nature including the laws of human nature.[pg 119]

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 rôle 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 notsupernatural but is literally a part of nature[pg 067]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. These concepts are basic and impersonal; arrived at mathematically, they are mathematically correct.It does not matter at allhowthe first man, the first time-binder, was produced; the fact remains that he was somewhere, somehow produced. To know anything that is to-day of fundamental interest about man, we have to analyse man in three coordinates—in three capacities; namely, his chemistry, his activities in space, and especially his activities in time; whereas in the study of animals we have to consider only two factors: their chemistry and their activities in space.Let us imagine that the aboriginal—original human specimen was one of two brother apes,AandB; they were alike in every respect; both were animal space-binders; but something strange happened toB; he became the first time-binder, a human. No matter how, this“something”made the change in him that lifted him to a higher dimension; it is enough that in some-wise, over and above[pg 068]his animal capacity for binding space, there was superadded the marvelous new capacity for binding-time. He had thus a new faculty, he belonged to a new dimension; but, of course, he did not realize it; and because he had this new capacity he was able to analyze his brother“A”; he observed“Ais my brother; he is an animal; but he is my brother; therefore,Iam an animal.”This fatal first conclusion, reached by false analogy, by neglecting a fact, has been the chief source of human woe for half a million years and it still survives. The time-binding capacity, first manifest inB, increased more and more, with the days and each generation, until in the course of centuries man felt himself increasingly somehow different from the animal, but he could not explain. He said to himself,“If I am an animal there is also in me something higher, a spark of some thingsupernatural.”With this conclusion he estranged himself, as something apart from nature, and formulated the impasse, which put him in a cul-de-sac of a double life. He was neither true to the“supernatural”which he could not know and therefore, could not emulate, nor was he true to the“animal”which he scorned. Having put himself outside the“natural laws,”he was not really true to any law and condemned himself to a life of hypocrisy, and established speculative, artificial, unnatural laws.[pg 069]“How blind our familiar assumptions make us! Among the animals, man, at least, has long been wont to regard himself as a being quite apart from and not as part of the cosmos round about him. From this he has detached himself in thought, he has estranged and objectified the world, and lost the sense that he is of it. And this age-long habit and point of view, which has fashioned his life and controlled his thought, lending its characteristic mark and color to his whole philosophy and art and learning, is still maintained, partly because of its convenience, no doubt, and partly by force of inertia and sheer conservatism, in the very teeth of the strongest probabilities of biological science. Probably no other single hypothesis has less to recommend it, and yet no other so completely dominates the human mind.”(Cassius J. Keyser, loc. cit.) And this monstrous conception is current to-day: millions still look upon man as a mixture of animal and something supernatural.There is no doubt that the engineering of human society is a difficult and complicated problem of tremendous ethical responsibility, for it involves the welfare of mankind throughout an unending succession of generations. The science of Human Engineering can not be built upon false conceptions of human nature. It can not be built on the conception of man as a kind of animal; it can not be[pg 070]built on the conception of man as a mixture of natural and supernatural. It must be built upon the conception of man as being at once natural and higher in dimensionality than the animals. It must be built upon the scientific conception of mankind as characterized by their time-binding capacity and function. This conception radically alters our whole view of human life, human society, and the world.It must be obvious to any one that time-binding is the only natural criterion and standard for the time-binding class of life. This mighty term—time-binding—when comprehended, will be found to embrace thewholeof the natural laws, the natural ethics, the natural philosophy, the natural sociology, the natural economics, the natural governance, to be brought into the education of time-binders; then really peaceful and progressive civilization, without periodical collapses and violent readjustments, will commence; not before. Everything which is really“time-binding”is inthehuman dimension; therefore, it will represent every quality that is implied in such words as—good,just,right,beautiful; while everything that is merely space-binding will be classified as“animal”and be thus assessed at its proper value. Those ignorant“masters of our destinies”who regard humans as animals or as monstrous hybrids of natural and supernatural must be dethroned by scientific education.[pg 071]Humans can be literally poisoned by false ideas and false teachings. Many people have a just horror at the thought of putting poison into tea or coffee, but seem unable to realize that, when they teach false ideas and false doctrines, they are poisoning the time-binding capacity of their fellow men and women. One has to stop and think! There is nothing mystical about the fact that ideas and words are energies which powerfully affect the physico-chemical base of our time-binding activities. Humans are thus made untrue to“human nature.”Hypnotism is a known fact. It has been proved that a man can be so hypnotized that in a certain time which has been suggested to him, he will murder or commit arson or theft; that, under hypnotic influence, the personal morale of the individual has only a small influence upon his conduct; the subject obeys the hypnotic suggestions, no matter how immoral they are. The conception of man as a mixture of animal and supernatural has for ages kept human beings under the deadly spell of the suggestion that, animal selfishness and animal greediness are their essential character, and the spell has operated to suppress theirreal human natureand to prevent it from expressing itself naturally and freely.On the other hand, when human beings are educated to a lively realization that they are bynaturetime-binding creatures, then they will spontaneously[pg 072]live in accordance with their time-binding nature, which, as I have said, is the source and support of the highest ideals.What is achieved in blaming a man for being selfish and greedy if he acts under the influence of a social environment and education which teach him that he is an animal and that selfishness and greediness are of the essence of his nature?Even so eminent a philosopher and psychologist as Spencer tells us:“Of self-evident truths so dealt with, the one which here concerns us is that a creature must live before it can act ... Ethics has to recognize the truth that egoism comes before altruism.”This is true foranimals, because animals die out from lack of food when their natural supply of it is insufficient because they havenot the capacity to produce artificially. But it is not true for thehuman dimension.Why not? Because humans through their time-binding capacity are first of allcreatorsand so their number is not controlled by the supply of unaided nature, but only by men's artificial productivity, which isthe materialization of their time-binding capacityMan, therefore, by the very intrinsic character of his being,must act first, in order to be able to live(through the action of parents—or society) which is not the case with animals. The misunderstanding[pg 073]of this simple truth is largely accountable for the evil of our ethical and economic systems or lack of systems. As a matter of fact, if humanity were to live incompleteaccord with the animal conception of man, artificial production—time-binding production—would cease and ninety per cent of mankind would perish by starvation. It is just because human beings are not animals but are time-binders—not mere finders but creators of food and shelter—that they are able to live in such vast numbers.Here even the blind must see the effect of higher dimensionality, and this effect becomes in turn the cause of other effects which produce still others, and so on in an endless chain.we live because we produce, because we are acting in time and are not merely acting in space—because man is not a kind of animal. It is all so simple, if only we apply a little sound logic in our thinking about human nature and human affairs. If human ethics are to be human, are to be in the human dimension, the postulates of ethics must be changed;for humanity in order to live must act first; the laws of ethics—the laws of right living—arenaturallaws—laws of human nature—laws having their whole source and sanction in the time-binding capacity and time-binding activity peculiar to man. Human excellence is excellence in time-binding, and[pg 074]must be measured and rewarded by time-binding standards of worth.Humanity, in order to live, must produce creatively and therefore must be guided by applied science, by technology; and this means that the so-called social sciences of ethics, jurisprudence, psychology, economics, sociology, politics, and government must be emancipated from medieval metaphysics; they must be made scientific; they must betechnologized; they must be made to progress and to function in the proper dimension—the human dimension and not that of animals: they must be made time-binding sciences.Can this be done? I have no doubt that it can. For what is human life after all?To a general in the battlefield, human life is a factor which, if properly used, can destroy the enemy. To an engineer human life is an equivalent to energy, or a capacity to do work, mental or muscular, and the moment something is found to be a source of energy and to have the capacity of doing work, the first thing to do, from the engineer's point of view, is to analyse the generator with a view to discovering how best to conserve it, to improve it, and bring it to the level of maximum productivity. Human beings are very complicated energy-producing batteries differing widely in quality and magnitude of productive power. Experience has shown[pg 075]that these batteries are, first of all, chemical batteries producing a mysterious energy. If these batteries are not supplied periodically with a more or less constant quantity of some chemical elements called food and air, the batteries will cease to function—they will die. In the examination of the structure of these batteries we find that the chemical base is very much accentuated all through the structure. This chemical generator is divided into branches each of which has a very different rôle which it must perform in harmony with all the others. The mechanical parts of the structure are built in conformity to the rules of mechanics and are automatically furnished with lubrication and with chemical supplies for automatically renewing worn-out parts. The chemical processes not only deposit particles of mass for the structure of the generator but produce some very powerful unknown kinds of energies or vibrations which make all the chemical parts function; we find also a mysterious apparatus with a complex of wires which we call brain glands, and nerves; and, finally, these human batteries have the remarkable capacity of reproduction.These functions are familiar to everybody. From the knowledge of other physical, mechanical and chemical phenomena of nature, we must come to the conclusion, that this human battery is the most perfect example of a complex engine; it has all the[pg 076]peculiarities of a chemical battery combined with a generator of a peculiar energy called life; above all, it has mental or spiritual capacities; it is thus equipped with both mental and mechanical means for producing work. The parts and functions of this marvelous engine have been the subject of a vast amount of research in various special branches of science. A very noteworthy fact is that both the physical work and the mental work of this human engine are always accompanied by both physical and chemical changes in the structure of its machinery—corresponding to the wear and tear of non-living engines. It also presents certain sexual and spiritual phenomena that have a striking likeness to certain phenomena, especially wireless phenomena, to electricity and to radium. This human engine-battery is of unusual strength, durability and perfection; and yet it is very liable to damage and even wreckage, if not properly used. The controlling factors are very delicate and so the engine is very capricious. Very special training and understanding are necessary for its control.The reader may wish to ask: What is the essence of the time-binding power of Man? Talk of essences is metaphysical—it is not scientific. Let me explain by an example.What is electricity? The scientific answer is: electricity is that which exhibits such and such phenomena.[pg 077]Electricity means nothing but a certain group of phenomena called electric. We are studying electricity when we are studying those phenomena. Thus it is in physics—there is no talk of essences. So, too, in Human Engineering—we shall not talk of theessenceof time-binding but only of the phenomena and the laws thereof. What has led to the development of electric appliances is knowledge of electrical phenomena—not metaphysical talk about the electrical essence. And what will lead to the science and art of Human Engineering is knowledge of time-binding phenomena—not vain babble about an essence of time-binding power. There is no mystery about the word time-binding. Some descriptive term was necessary to indicate that human capacity which discriminates human beings from animals and marks man as man. For that use—the appropriateness of the term time-binding becomes more and more manifest upon reflection.What are the conditions of life upon this earth? Is there war or peace in daily life? All living beings require food; they multiply in a geometrical ratio; and so thenaturalproductivity of the soil becomes increasingly inadequate. The tendency to increase in geometrical ratio is true of all life—vegetable, animal and human, but the tendency is checked by various counteracting influences, natural and artificial. A short time ago these checks had so operated[pg 078]to annul the law of increase as almost to stop the growth of human population. It is only by the time-binding capacity of man—by scientific progress and technological invention—that the checks have been overcome. And so in the last century the population of Europe increased more than it had increased in several centuries before. Impoverished soil, excessive heat or cold, excessive moisture, the lack of rain-fall, and many other factors are hostile to life. It is evident, therefore, that human life must especially struggle for existence; it must carry on a perpetual contest for self preservation. It seems obvious that, if there is perpetual war in every-day life, war methods must be applied.We have just passed through a tremendous world-widemilitarywar and we developed special ways of producing power to overcome the enemy. We were thus driven to discover some of the hidden sources of power and all of our old habits and ideas were bent toward military methods and military technology. The war of every-day life against hostile elements is war for the subjugation of physical nature and not for the conquest of people. It is a war carried on by the time-binding power of men pitted against natural obstacles, and its progressive triumph means progressive advancement in human weal.The lesson of the World War should not be[pg 079]missed through failure to analyse it. When nations war with nations, the normal daily war of millions and millions of individuals to subjugate natural resources to human uses is interrupted, and the slow-gathered fruits of measureless toil are destroyed.But peaceful war, war for the conquest of nature, involves the use of methods of technology and, what is even more important, technological philosophy, law and ethics.What I want to emphasize in this little book, is the need of a thoroughgoing revision of our ideas; and the revision must be made by engineering minds in order that our ideas may be made to match facts. If we are ill, we consult a physician or a surgeon, not a charlatan. We must learn that, when there is trouble with the producing power of the world, we have to consult an engineer, an expert on power. Politicians, diplomats, and lawyers do not understand the problem. What I am advocating is that we must learn to ask those who know how to produce things, instead of asking those whose profession is to fight for the division of things produced by nature or by other human beings.As a matter of fact our civilization has been for a long time disorganized to the point of disease. Lately through the whirl of changing conditions, due to the great release of power in the new-born giant technology, the disorganization has become acute.[pg 080]The sick seldom know the cure for themselves. If the cure is to be enduring, we have to go to the source, and this can be done only by men familiar, not only with effects but also with the causes.Money is not the wealth of a nation, but production is wealth; soordered productionis the main object for humanity. But to have the maximum of production, it is necessary to have production put on a sound basis. No mere preaching of brotherly love, or class hatred, will produce one single brick for the building of the future temple of human victory—the temple ofhumancivilization. Ordered production demands analysis of basic facts.This era is essentially an industrial era. To produce we have to have: (1) raw material or soil; (2) instruments for production—tools and machines; and (3) the application of power.The three requirements may be briefly characterized and appraised as follows:(1) Raw material and soil are products of nature; humanity simply took them and had the use of them for nothing, because it is impossible to call a prayer of thanksgiving (if any) addressed to a“creator”as payment to gods or men. But raw material and soil, in the conditions in which nature produces them, are of very little immediate benefit to humanity, because unfilled soil produces very little food for humans, and raw material such as[pg 081]wood, coal, oil, iron, copper, etc., are completely useless to humanity until after human work is applied to them. It is necessary to cut a tree for the making of timber; it is necessary to excavate the minerals, and even then, only by applying further human work is it possible to make them available for any human use. So, it is obvious that even raw materials in the form in which nature has produced them, are mostly of no value and unavailable for use, unless reproduced through the process of“human creative production.”Therefore, we may well conclude that“raw material”must be divided into two very distinct classes: (a) raw material as produced by nature—nature's free gift—which in its original form and place has practically no use-value; and (b) raw material reproduced by man's mental and muscular activities, by his“time-binding”capacities. Raw materials of the second class have an enormous use-value; indeed they make the existence of humanity possible.As to the second requirement for production, namely:(2) Tools and machines, it is obvious that“tools and machines”are made of raw material by human work, mental and muscular.And, finally:(3) The application of power. Different sources of natural energy and power are known. The most[pg 082]important available source of energy for this globe is the sun—the heat of the sun. This solar heat is the origin of water power, of wind power, and of the power bound up in coal, of the chemistry, growth and transforming agency of plants.10[pg 083]All foods which the animals as well as the humans use are, already, the result of the solar energy transformed into what may be called chemical energy. Transformation of energies is building up of life.It is to be clearly seen that the only source of energy which can be directly appropriated and used by man or animal is vegetable food found in the wilderness; no other sources of power are available[pg 084]fordirectuse; they have first to be mastered and directed by human brain. The same is true in regard to the getting of animal food, the creation of a water- or windmill, or a steam engine, or the art of using a team of horses, or a bushel of wheat; these are not available except by the use of the human“time-binding”power.This short survey of facts, known to everybody, brings us to the conclusion that all problems of production come ultimately to the analysis of(1) Natural resources of raw material and natural energy, freely supplied by nature, which, as we have seen, in the form as produced by nature alone, have very little or no value for humanity;(2) The activity of the human brain (because human muscles are always directed by the brain) which gives value to the otherwise useless raw materials and energies.Hence, to understand the processes of production, it is essential to realize that humanity is able to survive only by virtue of the capacity of humans to exploit natural resources—to convert the products of nature into forms available for human needs. If humanity had only the capacity of apes, depending exclusively on wild fruits and the like, they would be confined to those comparatively small regions of the globe where the climate and the fertility of the soil are specially favorable. But in the case supposed,[pg 085]humans would not be humans, they would not be time-binders—they would be animals—mere space-binders.There are other facts which must be kept constantly in mind. One of them is that, in the world in which we live, there are natural laws of inorganic as well as organic phenomena. Another of the facts is, as before said, that the human class of life has the peculiar capacity of establishing the social laws and customs which regulate and influence its destinies, which help or hinder the processes of production upon which the lives and happiness of mankind essentially and fundamentally depend.It must not be lost sight of in this connection that the human class of life is a part and a product of nature, and that, therefore, there must befundamental laws which are natural for this class of life. A stone obeys the natural laws of stones; a liquid conforms to the natural law of liquids; a plant, to the natural laws of plants; an animal, to the natural laws of animals; it follows inevitably that theremustbe natural laws for humans.But here the problem becomes more complicated; for the stone, the plant and the animal do not possess the intellectual power to create and initiate and so must blindly obey the laws that are natural for them; they are not free to determine their own destinies. Not so with man; man has the capacity and he[pg 086]can, through ignorance or neglect or mal-intent, deviate from, or misinterpret, the natural laws for the human class of life. Just therein lies the secret and the source of human chaos and woe—a fact of such tremendous importance that it cannot be over-emphasized and it seems impossible to evade it longer. To discover the nature of Man and the laws of thatnature, marks the summit of human enterprises. For to solve thisproblem is to open the way to everything which can be of importance to humanity—to human welfare and happiness.The great problem has been felt as a powerful impulse throughout the ages of human striving, for in all times it has been evident to thinkers that upon the right solution of the problem must forever depend the welfare of mankind. Many“solutions”have been offered; and, though they have differed widely, they agree in one respect—they have had a common fate—the fate of being false. What has been the trouble? The trouble has been, in every instance, a radical misconception of what a human being really is. The problem is to discover the natural laws of the human class of life. All the“solutions”offered in the course of history and those which are current to-day are of two and only two kinds—zoologicalandmythological. The zoological solutions are those which grow out of the false conception according to which human beings are animals;[pg 087]if humans are animals, the laws of human nature are the laws of animal nature; and so the social“sciences”of ethics, law, politics, economics, government become nothing but branches of zoology; as sciences, they are the studies of animal life; as arts, they are the arts of managing and controlling animals; according to this zoological philosophy, human wisdom about human beings is animal wisdom about animals.The mythological“solutions”are those which start with the monstrous conception according to which human beings have no proper place in nature but are mixtures of natural andsupernatural—unions or combinations of animality and divinity. Such“solutions”contain no conception ofnaturallaw; scientifically judged, they are mythological absurdities—muddle-headed chattering of crude and irresponsible metaphysics—well-meaning no doubt, but silly, and deadly in their effects upon the interests of mankind, vitiating ethics, law, economics, politics and government.Such have been and still are the regnant philosophies of human nature. What is the remedy? How are the laws of human nature to be discovered?It is evident that the enterprise, like all other scientific enterprises, must be based upon and guided by realities. It is essential to realize that the great, central, dominant, all-embracing reality is the reality[pg 088]ofhuman nature. If we misconceive this fundamental matter, the enterprise must fail; that is both logically clear and clear in the sad light of history; but if we conceive it aright, we may confidently expect the enterprise to prosper. That is why, in the chapter on“The Classes of Life,”I have laid so much stress on the absolute necessity of conceiving Man as being what he really is, and not something else. And we have discovered what man is: we have discovered that man is characterized by the capacity or power to bind time, and so we havedefinedhumanity as the time-binding class of life. That concept is fundamental. It contains the germ of the science and art of Human Engineering. The problem of discovering and applying the“laws of human nature”is the problem of discovering and applying to the conduct of life the laws of time-binding—of time-binding activity—of time-bindingenergy. This fact must be firmly seized and kept steadily in mind.Energy, we have noted, is the capacity to do work. In human economy work may be (1)usefulor (2)neutralor (3)harmful. These words have no significance except in human economy. The energy of the human intellect is a time-binding energy, for it is able to direct, to use, to transform other energies. This time-binding energy is of higher rank—of higher dimensionality—than the other natural energies which it directs, controls, uses, and transforms.[pg 089]This higher energy—which is commonly called the mental or spiritual power of man—istime-binding because it makes past achievements live in the present and present activities in time-to-come. It is an energy that initiates; it is an energy that creates; it is an energy that can understand the past and foretell the future—it is both historian and prophet; it is an energy that loadsabstracttime—the vehicle of events—with an ever-increasing burden of intellectual achievements, of spiritual wealth, destined for the civilization of posterity. And what is the natural law of the increase? What is the natural law of human advancements in all great matters of human concern?The question is of utmost importance both theoretically and practically, for the law—whatever it be—is anaturallaw—a law of human nature—a law of the time-binding energy of man. Whatisthe law? We have already noted the law of arithmetical progression and the law of geometric progression; we have seen the immense difference between them; and we have seen that the natural law of human progress in each and every cardinal matter is a law like that of a rapidly increasing geometric progression. In other words, the natural law of human progress—the natural law of amelioration in human affairs—the fundamental law of human nature—the basic law of the time-binding energy[pg 090]peculiar to man—is a Logarithmic law—a law of logarithmic increase. I beg the reader not to let the term bewilder him but to make it his own. It is easy to understand; and its significance is mighty and everlasting. Even its mathematical formulation can be understood by boys and girls. Let us see how the formulation looks.SupposePRto denote the amount of progress made in some important field by a given generation—which we may call the“first”generation; whereRdenotes the common ratio—the ratio of improvement—that is, the number by which the progress of one generation must be multiplied to give the amount of progress made by the next generation; then the amount of progress made by the second generation will bePR2; that made by the third generation will bePR3; and so on; now denote byTthe number of generations, counting the first one and all that follow in endless succession. Then the following series will show the law of human progress in the chosen field:PR, PR2, PR3, PR4, PR5, ..., PRT, PRT+1, ...;notice how it goes; the first generation ends with PR; the second generation starts withPR, addsPR2, and ends withPR + PR2; the third generation starts withPR + PR2, addsPR3and ends withPR + PR2+ PR3; and so on and on; thegainmade in[pg 091]theTthgeneration isPRT;the total gainmade inTgenerations isPR + PR2+ PR3+ ... + PRT;this total gain is given by the formula,Total gain in T generations = (R ÷ R-1) (PRT-P).If we takeRto be 2 (which is a very small ratio, requiring the progress of each generation to be merely double that of the preceding one) and if we takeTto be (say) 10, then we see that the progress made by the single 10th generation isP× 210, which is 1024 times the progress made in the“first”generation; and we readily compute that the total gain in 10 generations is 2046 times the progress made in the“first”generation. Moreover, to gain a just sense of the impressiveness of this law, the reader must reflect upon the fact that it operates, not merely on one field, but in all fields of human interest.“Operates in all fields”I have just now said; as a matter of fact, as before pointed out, it does not so operatenowinallfields nor has it ever done so. My point is that itwillso operate when we once acquire sense enough to let it do so. That sense we shall have when and only when we discover that by nature we are time-binders and that theeffectivenessof our time-binding capacity is not[pg 092]only a function of time but is, as I have explained, a logarithmic or exponential function of time—a function in which time (T) enters as anexponent, as in the expressionPRT, so that we humans are, unlike animals, naturally qualified not only to progress, but to progress more and more rapidly, with an alwaysaccelerating acceleration, as the generations pass.This great fact is to be at once the basis, the regulator and guide in the science and art of Human Engineering. Whatever squares with that law of time-binding human energy, is right and makes for human weal; whatever contravenes it, is wrong and makes for human woe.And so I repeat that the world will have uninterrupted, peaceful progress when and only when the so-called social“sciences”—the life-regulating“sciences”of ethics, law, philosophy, economics, religion, politics, and government—are technologized; when and only when they are made genuinely scientific in spirit and method; for then and only then will they advance, like the natural, mathematical and technological sciences, in conformity to the fundamental exponential law of the time-binding nature of man; then and then only, by the equal pace of progress in all cardinal matters, the equilibrium of social institutions will remain stable and social cataclysms cease.

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 rôle 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 notsupernatural but is literally a part of nature[pg 067]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. These concepts are basic and impersonal; arrived at mathematically, they are mathematically correct.

It does not matter at allhowthe first man, the first time-binder, was produced; the fact remains that he was somewhere, somehow produced. To know anything that is to-day of fundamental interest about man, we have to analyse man in three coordinates—in three capacities; namely, his chemistry, his activities in space, and especially his activities in time; whereas in the study of animals we have to consider only two factors: their chemistry and their activities in space.

Let us imagine that the aboriginal—original human specimen was one of two brother apes,AandB; they were alike in every respect; both were animal space-binders; but something strange happened toB; he became the first time-binder, a human. No matter how, this“something”made the change in him that lifted him to a higher dimension; it is enough that in some-wise, over and above[pg 068]his animal capacity for binding space, there was superadded the marvelous new capacity for binding-time. He had thus a new faculty, he belonged to a new dimension; but, of course, he did not realize it; and because he had this new capacity he was able to analyze his brother“A”; he observed“Ais my brother; he is an animal; but he is my brother; therefore,Iam an animal.”This fatal first conclusion, reached by false analogy, by neglecting a fact, has been the chief source of human woe for half a million years and it still survives. The time-binding capacity, first manifest inB, increased more and more, with the days and each generation, until in the course of centuries man felt himself increasingly somehow different from the animal, but he could not explain. He said to himself,“If I am an animal there is also in me something higher, a spark of some thingsupernatural.”

With this conclusion he estranged himself, as something apart from nature, and formulated the impasse, which put him in a cul-de-sac of a double life. He was neither true to the“supernatural”which he could not know and therefore, could not emulate, nor was he true to the“animal”which he scorned. Having put himself outside the“natural laws,”he was not really true to any law and condemned himself to a life of hypocrisy, and established speculative, artificial, unnatural laws.

“How blind our familiar assumptions make us! Among the animals, man, at least, has long been wont to regard himself as a being quite apart from and not as part of the cosmos round about him. From this he has detached himself in thought, he has estranged and objectified the world, and lost the sense that he is of it. And this age-long habit and point of view, which has fashioned his life and controlled his thought, lending its characteristic mark and color to his whole philosophy and art and learning, is still maintained, partly because of its convenience, no doubt, and partly by force of inertia and sheer conservatism, in the very teeth of the strongest probabilities of biological science. Probably no other single hypothesis has less to recommend it, and yet no other so completely dominates the human mind.”(Cassius J. Keyser, loc. cit.) And this monstrous conception is current to-day: millions still look upon man as a mixture of animal and something supernatural.

There is no doubt that the engineering of human society is a difficult and complicated problem of tremendous ethical responsibility, for it involves the welfare of mankind throughout an unending succession of generations. The science of Human Engineering can not be built upon false conceptions of human nature. It can not be built on the conception of man as a kind of animal; it can not be[pg 070]built on the conception of man as a mixture of natural and supernatural. It must be built upon the conception of man as being at once natural and higher in dimensionality than the animals. It must be built upon the scientific conception of mankind as characterized by their time-binding capacity and function. This conception radically alters our whole view of human life, human society, and the world.

It must be obvious to any one that time-binding is the only natural criterion and standard for the time-binding class of life. This mighty term—time-binding—when comprehended, will be found to embrace thewholeof the natural laws, the natural ethics, the natural philosophy, the natural sociology, the natural economics, the natural governance, to be brought into the education of time-binders; then really peaceful and progressive civilization, without periodical collapses and violent readjustments, will commence; not before. Everything which is really“time-binding”is inthehuman dimension; therefore, it will represent every quality that is implied in such words as—good,just,right,beautiful; while everything that is merely space-binding will be classified as“animal”and be thus assessed at its proper value. Those ignorant“masters of our destinies”who regard humans as animals or as monstrous hybrids of natural and supernatural must be dethroned by scientific education.

Humans can be literally poisoned by false ideas and false teachings. Many people have a just horror at the thought of putting poison into tea or coffee, but seem unable to realize that, when they teach false ideas and false doctrines, they are poisoning the time-binding capacity of their fellow men and women. One has to stop and think! There is nothing mystical about the fact that ideas and words are energies which powerfully affect the physico-chemical base of our time-binding activities. Humans are thus made untrue to“human nature.”Hypnotism is a known fact. It has been proved that a man can be so hypnotized that in a certain time which has been suggested to him, he will murder or commit arson or theft; that, under hypnotic influence, the personal morale of the individual has only a small influence upon his conduct; the subject obeys the hypnotic suggestions, no matter how immoral they are. The conception of man as a mixture of animal and supernatural has for ages kept human beings under the deadly spell of the suggestion that, animal selfishness and animal greediness are their essential character, and the spell has operated to suppress theirreal human natureand to prevent it from expressing itself naturally and freely.

On the other hand, when human beings are educated to a lively realization that they are bynaturetime-binding creatures, then they will spontaneously[pg 072]live in accordance with their time-binding nature, which, as I have said, is the source and support of the highest ideals.

What is achieved in blaming a man for being selfish and greedy if he acts under the influence of a social environment and education which teach him that he is an animal and that selfishness and greediness are of the essence of his nature?

Even so eminent a philosopher and psychologist as Spencer tells us:“Of self-evident truths so dealt with, the one which here concerns us is that a creature must live before it can act ... Ethics has to recognize the truth that egoism comes before altruism.”This is true foranimals, because animals die out from lack of food when their natural supply of it is insufficient because they havenot the capacity to produce artificially. But it is not true for thehuman dimension.

Why not? Because humans through their time-binding capacity are first of allcreatorsand so their number is not controlled by the supply of unaided nature, but only by men's artificial productivity, which isthe materialization of their time-binding capacity

Man, therefore, by the very intrinsic character of his being,must act first, in order to be able to live(through the action of parents—or society) which is not the case with animals. The misunderstanding[pg 073]of this simple truth is largely accountable for the evil of our ethical and economic systems or lack of systems. As a matter of fact, if humanity were to live incompleteaccord with the animal conception of man, artificial production—time-binding production—would cease and ninety per cent of mankind would perish by starvation. It is just because human beings are not animals but are time-binders—not mere finders but creators of food and shelter—that they are able to live in such vast numbers.

Here even the blind must see the effect of higher dimensionality, and this effect becomes in turn the cause of other effects which produce still others, and so on in an endless chain.we live because we produce, because we are acting in time and are not merely acting in space—because man is not a kind of animal. It is all so simple, if only we apply a little sound logic in our thinking about human nature and human affairs. If human ethics are to be human, are to be in the human dimension, the postulates of ethics must be changed;for humanity in order to live must act first; the laws of ethics—the laws of right living—arenaturallaws—laws of human nature—laws having their whole source and sanction in the time-binding capacity and time-binding activity peculiar to man. Human excellence is excellence in time-binding, and[pg 074]must be measured and rewarded by time-binding standards of worth.

Humanity, in order to live, must produce creatively and therefore must be guided by applied science, by technology; and this means that the so-called social sciences of ethics, jurisprudence, psychology, economics, sociology, politics, and government must be emancipated from medieval metaphysics; they must be made scientific; they must betechnologized; they must be made to progress and to function in the proper dimension—the human dimension and not that of animals: they must be made time-binding sciences.

Can this be done? I have no doubt that it can. For what is human life after all?

To a general in the battlefield, human life is a factor which, if properly used, can destroy the enemy. To an engineer human life is an equivalent to energy, or a capacity to do work, mental or muscular, and the moment something is found to be a source of energy and to have the capacity of doing work, the first thing to do, from the engineer's point of view, is to analyse the generator with a view to discovering how best to conserve it, to improve it, and bring it to the level of maximum productivity. Human beings are very complicated energy-producing batteries differing widely in quality and magnitude of productive power. Experience has shown[pg 075]that these batteries are, first of all, chemical batteries producing a mysterious energy. If these batteries are not supplied periodically with a more or less constant quantity of some chemical elements called food and air, the batteries will cease to function—they will die. In the examination of the structure of these batteries we find that the chemical base is very much accentuated all through the structure. This chemical generator is divided into branches each of which has a very different rôle which it must perform in harmony with all the others. The mechanical parts of the structure are built in conformity to the rules of mechanics and are automatically furnished with lubrication and with chemical supplies for automatically renewing worn-out parts. The chemical processes not only deposit particles of mass for the structure of the generator but produce some very powerful unknown kinds of energies or vibrations which make all the chemical parts function; we find also a mysterious apparatus with a complex of wires which we call brain glands, and nerves; and, finally, these human batteries have the remarkable capacity of reproduction.

These functions are familiar to everybody. From the knowledge of other physical, mechanical and chemical phenomena of nature, we must come to the conclusion, that this human battery is the most perfect example of a complex engine; it has all the[pg 076]peculiarities of a chemical battery combined with a generator of a peculiar energy called life; above all, it has mental or spiritual capacities; it is thus equipped with both mental and mechanical means for producing work. The parts and functions of this marvelous engine have been the subject of a vast amount of research in various special branches of science. A very noteworthy fact is that both the physical work and the mental work of this human engine are always accompanied by both physical and chemical changes in the structure of its machinery—corresponding to the wear and tear of non-living engines. It also presents certain sexual and spiritual phenomena that have a striking likeness to certain phenomena, especially wireless phenomena, to electricity and to radium. This human engine-battery is of unusual strength, durability and perfection; and yet it is very liable to damage and even wreckage, if not properly used. The controlling factors are very delicate and so the engine is very capricious. Very special training and understanding are necessary for its control.

The reader may wish to ask: What is the essence of the time-binding power of Man? Talk of essences is metaphysical—it is not scientific. Let me explain by an example.

What is electricity? The scientific answer is: electricity is that which exhibits such and such phenomena.[pg 077]Electricity means nothing but a certain group of phenomena called electric. We are studying electricity when we are studying those phenomena. Thus it is in physics—there is no talk of essences. So, too, in Human Engineering—we shall not talk of theessenceof time-binding but only of the phenomena and the laws thereof. What has led to the development of electric appliances is knowledge of electrical phenomena—not metaphysical talk about the electrical essence. And what will lead to the science and art of Human Engineering is knowledge of time-binding phenomena—not vain babble about an essence of time-binding power. There is no mystery about the word time-binding. Some descriptive term was necessary to indicate that human capacity which discriminates human beings from animals and marks man as man. For that use—the appropriateness of the term time-binding becomes more and more manifest upon reflection.

What are the conditions of life upon this earth? Is there war or peace in daily life? All living beings require food; they multiply in a geometrical ratio; and so thenaturalproductivity of the soil becomes increasingly inadequate. The tendency to increase in geometrical ratio is true of all life—vegetable, animal and human, but the tendency is checked by various counteracting influences, natural and artificial. A short time ago these checks had so operated[pg 078]to annul the law of increase as almost to stop the growth of human population. It is only by the time-binding capacity of man—by scientific progress and technological invention—that the checks have been overcome. And so in the last century the population of Europe increased more than it had increased in several centuries before. Impoverished soil, excessive heat or cold, excessive moisture, the lack of rain-fall, and many other factors are hostile to life. It is evident, therefore, that human life must especially struggle for existence; it must carry on a perpetual contest for self preservation. It seems obvious that, if there is perpetual war in every-day life, war methods must be applied.

We have just passed through a tremendous world-widemilitarywar and we developed special ways of producing power to overcome the enemy. We were thus driven to discover some of the hidden sources of power and all of our old habits and ideas were bent toward military methods and military technology. The war of every-day life against hostile elements is war for the subjugation of physical nature and not for the conquest of people. It is a war carried on by the time-binding power of men pitted against natural obstacles, and its progressive triumph means progressive advancement in human weal.

The lesson of the World War should not be[pg 079]missed through failure to analyse it. When nations war with nations, the normal daily war of millions and millions of individuals to subjugate natural resources to human uses is interrupted, and the slow-gathered fruits of measureless toil are destroyed.

But peaceful war, war for the conquest of nature, involves the use of methods of technology and, what is even more important, technological philosophy, law and ethics.

What I want to emphasize in this little book, is the need of a thoroughgoing revision of our ideas; and the revision must be made by engineering minds in order that our ideas may be made to match facts. If we are ill, we consult a physician or a surgeon, not a charlatan. We must learn that, when there is trouble with the producing power of the world, we have to consult an engineer, an expert on power. Politicians, diplomats, and lawyers do not understand the problem. What I am advocating is that we must learn to ask those who know how to produce things, instead of asking those whose profession is to fight for the division of things produced by nature or by other human beings.

As a matter of fact our civilization has been for a long time disorganized to the point of disease. Lately through the whirl of changing conditions, due to the great release of power in the new-born giant technology, the disorganization has become acute.[pg 080]The sick seldom know the cure for themselves. If the cure is to be enduring, we have to go to the source, and this can be done only by men familiar, not only with effects but also with the causes.

Money is not the wealth of a nation, but production is wealth; soordered productionis the main object for humanity. But to have the maximum of production, it is necessary to have production put on a sound basis. No mere preaching of brotherly love, or class hatred, will produce one single brick for the building of the future temple of human victory—the temple ofhumancivilization. Ordered production demands analysis of basic facts.

This era is essentially an industrial era. To produce we have to have: (1) raw material or soil; (2) instruments for production—tools and machines; and (3) the application of power.

The three requirements may be briefly characterized and appraised as follows:

(1) Raw material and soil are products of nature; humanity simply took them and had the use of them for nothing, because it is impossible to call a prayer of thanksgiving (if any) addressed to a“creator”as payment to gods or men. But raw material and soil, in the conditions in which nature produces them, are of very little immediate benefit to humanity, because unfilled soil produces very little food for humans, and raw material such as[pg 081]wood, coal, oil, iron, copper, etc., are completely useless to humanity until after human work is applied to them. It is necessary to cut a tree for the making of timber; it is necessary to excavate the minerals, and even then, only by applying further human work is it possible to make them available for any human use. So, it is obvious that even raw materials in the form in which nature has produced them, are mostly of no value and unavailable for use, unless reproduced through the process of“human creative production.”Therefore, we may well conclude that“raw material”must be divided into two very distinct classes: (a) raw material as produced by nature—nature's free gift—which in its original form and place has practically no use-value; and (b) raw material reproduced by man's mental and muscular activities, by his“time-binding”capacities. Raw materials of the second class have an enormous use-value; indeed they make the existence of humanity possible.

As to the second requirement for production, namely:

(2) Tools and machines, it is obvious that“tools and machines”are made of raw material by human work, mental and muscular.

And, finally:

(3) The application of power. Different sources of natural energy and power are known. The most[pg 082]important available source of energy for this globe is the sun—the heat of the sun. This solar heat is the origin of water power, of wind power, and of the power bound up in coal, of the chemistry, growth and transforming agency of plants.10

All foods which the animals as well as the humans use are, already, the result of the solar energy transformed into what may be called chemical energy. Transformation of energies is building up of life.

It is to be clearly seen that the only source of energy which can be directly appropriated and used by man or animal is vegetable food found in the wilderness; no other sources of power are available[pg 084]fordirectuse; they have first to be mastered and directed by human brain. The same is true in regard to the getting of animal food, the creation of a water- or windmill, or a steam engine, or the art of using a team of horses, or a bushel of wheat; these are not available except by the use of the human“time-binding”power.

This short survey of facts, known to everybody, brings us to the conclusion that all problems of production come ultimately to the analysis of

(1) Natural resources of raw material and natural energy, freely supplied by nature, which, as we have seen, in the form as produced by nature alone, have very little or no value for humanity;

(2) The activity of the human brain (because human muscles are always directed by the brain) which gives value to the otherwise useless raw materials and energies.

Hence, to understand the processes of production, it is essential to realize that humanity is able to survive only by virtue of the capacity of humans to exploit natural resources—to convert the products of nature into forms available for human needs. If humanity had only the capacity of apes, depending exclusively on wild fruits and the like, they would be confined to those comparatively small regions of the globe where the climate and the fertility of the soil are specially favorable. But in the case supposed,[pg 085]humans would not be humans, they would not be time-binders—they would be animals—mere space-binders.

There are other facts which must be kept constantly in mind. One of them is that, in the world in which we live, there are natural laws of inorganic as well as organic phenomena. Another of the facts is, as before said, that the human class of life has the peculiar capacity of establishing the social laws and customs which regulate and influence its destinies, which help or hinder the processes of production upon which the lives and happiness of mankind essentially and fundamentally depend.

It must not be lost sight of in this connection that the human class of life is a part and a product of nature, and that, therefore, there must befundamental laws which are natural for this class of life. A stone obeys the natural laws of stones; a liquid conforms to the natural law of liquids; a plant, to the natural laws of plants; an animal, to the natural laws of animals; it follows inevitably that theremustbe natural laws for humans.

But here the problem becomes more complicated; for the stone, the plant and the animal do not possess the intellectual power to create and initiate and so must blindly obey the laws that are natural for them; they are not free to determine their own destinies. Not so with man; man has the capacity and he[pg 086]can, through ignorance or neglect or mal-intent, deviate from, or misinterpret, the natural laws for the human class of life. Just therein lies the secret and the source of human chaos and woe—a fact of such tremendous importance that it cannot be over-emphasized and it seems impossible to evade it longer. To discover the nature of Man and the laws of thatnature, marks the summit of human enterprises. For to solve thisproblem is to open the way to everything which can be of importance to humanity—to human welfare and happiness.

The great problem has been felt as a powerful impulse throughout the ages of human striving, for in all times it has been evident to thinkers that upon the right solution of the problem must forever depend the welfare of mankind. Many“solutions”have been offered; and, though they have differed widely, they agree in one respect—they have had a common fate—the fate of being false. What has been the trouble? The trouble has been, in every instance, a radical misconception of what a human being really is. The problem is to discover the natural laws of the human class of life. All the“solutions”offered in the course of history and those which are current to-day are of two and only two kinds—zoologicalandmythological. The zoological solutions are those which grow out of the false conception according to which human beings are animals;[pg 087]if humans are animals, the laws of human nature are the laws of animal nature; and so the social“sciences”of ethics, law, politics, economics, government become nothing but branches of zoology; as sciences, they are the studies of animal life; as arts, they are the arts of managing and controlling animals; according to this zoological philosophy, human wisdom about human beings is animal wisdom about animals.

The mythological“solutions”are those which start with the monstrous conception according to which human beings have no proper place in nature but are mixtures of natural andsupernatural—unions or combinations of animality and divinity. Such“solutions”contain no conception ofnaturallaw; scientifically judged, they are mythological absurdities—muddle-headed chattering of crude and irresponsible metaphysics—well-meaning no doubt, but silly, and deadly in their effects upon the interests of mankind, vitiating ethics, law, economics, politics and government.

Such have been and still are the regnant philosophies of human nature. What is the remedy? How are the laws of human nature to be discovered?

It is evident that the enterprise, like all other scientific enterprises, must be based upon and guided by realities. It is essential to realize that the great, central, dominant, all-embracing reality is the reality[pg 088]ofhuman nature. If we misconceive this fundamental matter, the enterprise must fail; that is both logically clear and clear in the sad light of history; but if we conceive it aright, we may confidently expect the enterprise to prosper. That is why, in the chapter on“The Classes of Life,”I have laid so much stress on the absolute necessity of conceiving Man as being what he really is, and not something else. And we have discovered what man is: we have discovered that man is characterized by the capacity or power to bind time, and so we havedefinedhumanity as the time-binding class of life. That concept is fundamental. It contains the germ of the science and art of Human Engineering. The problem of discovering and applying the“laws of human nature”is the problem of discovering and applying to the conduct of life the laws of time-binding—of time-binding activity—of time-bindingenergy. This fact must be firmly seized and kept steadily in mind.

Energy, we have noted, is the capacity to do work. In human economy work may be (1)usefulor (2)neutralor (3)harmful. These words have no significance except in human economy. The energy of the human intellect is a time-binding energy, for it is able to direct, to use, to transform other energies. This time-binding energy is of higher rank—of higher dimensionality—than the other natural energies which it directs, controls, uses, and transforms.[pg 089]This higher energy—which is commonly called the mental or spiritual power of man—istime-binding because it makes past achievements live in the present and present activities in time-to-come. It is an energy that initiates; it is an energy that creates; it is an energy that can understand the past and foretell the future—it is both historian and prophet; it is an energy that loadsabstracttime—the vehicle of events—with an ever-increasing burden of intellectual achievements, of spiritual wealth, destined for the civilization of posterity. And what is the natural law of the increase? What is the natural law of human advancements in all great matters of human concern?

The question is of utmost importance both theoretically and practically, for the law—whatever it be—is anaturallaw—a law of human nature—a law of the time-binding energy of man. Whatisthe law? We have already noted the law of arithmetical progression and the law of geometric progression; we have seen the immense difference between them; and we have seen that the natural law of human progress in each and every cardinal matter is a law like that of a rapidly increasing geometric progression. In other words, the natural law of human progress—the natural law of amelioration in human affairs—the fundamental law of human nature—the basic law of the time-binding energy[pg 090]peculiar to man—is a Logarithmic law—a law of logarithmic increase. I beg the reader not to let the term bewilder him but to make it his own. It is easy to understand; and its significance is mighty and everlasting. Even its mathematical formulation can be understood by boys and girls. Let us see how the formulation looks.

SupposePRto denote the amount of progress made in some important field by a given generation—which we may call the“first”generation; whereRdenotes the common ratio—the ratio of improvement—that is, the number by which the progress of one generation must be multiplied to give the amount of progress made by the next generation; then the amount of progress made by the second generation will bePR2; that made by the third generation will bePR3; and so on; now denote byTthe number of generations, counting the first one and all that follow in endless succession. Then the following series will show the law of human progress in the chosen field:

PR, PR2, PR3, PR4, PR5, ..., PRT, PRT+1, ...;

notice how it goes; the first generation ends with PR; the second generation starts withPR, addsPR2, and ends withPR + PR2; the third generation starts withPR + PR2, addsPR3and ends withPR + PR2+ PR3; and so on and on; thegainmade in[pg 091]theTthgeneration isPRT;the total gainmade inTgenerations is

PR + PR2+ PR3+ ... + PRT;

this total gain is given by the formula,

Total gain in T generations = (R ÷ R-1) (PRT-P).

If we takeRto be 2 (which is a very small ratio, requiring the progress of each generation to be merely double that of the preceding one) and if we takeTto be (say) 10, then we see that the progress made by the single 10th generation isP× 210, which is 1024 times the progress made in the“first”generation; and we readily compute that the total gain in 10 generations is 2046 times the progress made in the“first”generation. Moreover, to gain a just sense of the impressiveness of this law, the reader must reflect upon the fact that it operates, not merely on one field, but in all fields of human interest.“Operates in all fields”I have just now said; as a matter of fact, as before pointed out, it does not so operatenowinallfields nor has it ever done so. My point is that itwillso operate when we once acquire sense enough to let it do so. That sense we shall have when and only when we discover that by nature we are time-binders and that theeffectivenessof our time-binding capacity is not[pg 092]only a function of time but is, as I have explained, a logarithmic or exponential function of time—a function in which time (T) enters as anexponent, as in the expressionPRT, so that we humans are, unlike animals, naturally qualified not only to progress, but to progress more and more rapidly, with an alwaysaccelerating acceleration, as the generations pass.

This great fact is to be at once the basis, the regulator and guide in the science and art of Human Engineering. Whatever squares with that law of time-binding human energy, is right and makes for human weal; whatever contravenes it, is wrong and makes for human woe.

And so I repeat that the world will have uninterrupted, peaceful progress when and only when the so-called social“sciences”—the life-regulating“sciences”of ethics, law, philosophy, economics, religion, politics, and government—are technologized; when and only when they are made genuinely scientific in spirit and method; for then and only then will they advance, like the natural, mathematical and technological sciences, in conformity to the fundamental exponential law of the time-binding nature of man; then and then only, by the equal pace of progress in all cardinal matters, the equilibrium of social institutions will remain stable and social cataclysms cease.

Chapter V. WealthI beg the reader to allow me to begin this chapter with a word of warning. The reader is aware that Criticism—by which I mean Thought—may be any one of three kinds: it may be purely destructive; it may be purely constructive; or it may be both destructive and constructive at the same time. Purely destructive criticism is sometimes highly useful. If an old idea or a system of old ideas be false and therefore harmful, it is a genuine service to attack it and destroy it even if nothing be offered to take its place, just as it is good to destroy a rattlesnake lurking by a human pathway, even if one does not offer a substitute for the snake. But, however useful destructive criticism may be, it is not an easy service to render; for old ideas, however false and harmful, are protected alike by habit and by the inborn conservatism of many minds. Now, habit indeed is exceedingly useful—even indispensable to the effective conduct of life—for it enables us to do many useful things automatically and therefore easily, without conscious thinking, and thus to save our mental energy for other work; but for the same[pg 094]reason, habit is often very harmful; it makes us protect false ideas automatically, and so when the destructive critic endeavors to destroy such ideas by reasoning with us, he finds that he is trying to reason with automats—with machines. Such is the chief difficulty encountered by destructive criticism. On the other hand, purely constructive criticism—purely constructive thought—consists in introducing new ideas of a kind that do not clash, or do not seem to clash, with old ones. Is such criticism or thought easy? Far from it. It has difficulties of its own. These are of two varieties: the difficulty of showing people who are content with their present stock of old ideas that the new ones are interesting or important; and the great difficulty of makingnewideas clear and intelligible, for the art of being clear and perfectly intelligible is very, very hard to acquire and to practise. The third kind of criticism—the third kind of thought—the kind that is at once both destructive and constructive—has a double aim—that of destroying old ideas that are false and that of replacing them with new ideas that are true; and so the third kind of criticism or thought is the most difficult of all, for it has to overcome both the difficulty of destructive criticism and that of constructive thought.The reader, therefore, if he will be good enough to reflect a little upon the matter, can not fail to appreciate[pg 095]the tremendous difficulties which beset the writing of this little book, for he must perceive, not only that the work belongs to the third kind of critical thought, but—what is much more—the errors it aims to destroy are fundamental, world-wide and old, while the true ideas it seeks to substitute for them are fundamental and new. This great difficulty, felt ateverystage of this writing, is, for a reason to be presently explained, greatly enhanced and felt with especial keenness in the present chapter. I therefore beg the reader to give me here very special cooperation—the cooperation of open-mindedness, candor and critical attention. It is essential to keep in mind the nature of our enterprise as a whole, which is that of pointing the way to the science and art of Human Engineering and laying the foundations thereof; we have seen Human Engineering, when developed, is to be the science and art of so directing human energies and capacities as to make them contribute most effectively to the advancement of human welfare; we have seen that this science and art must have its basis in a true conception of human nature—a just conception of what Man really is and of his natural place in the complex of the world; we have seen that the ages-old and still current conceptions of man—zoological and mythological conceptions, according to which human beings are either animals or else hybrids of animals and gods—are[pg 096]mainly responsible for the dismal things in human history; we have seen that man, far from being an animal or a compound of natural and supernatural, is a perfectly natural being characterized by a certain capacity or power—the capacity or power to bind time; we have seen that humanity is, therefore, to be rightly conceived and scientifically defined as the time-binding class of life; we have seen that, therefore, the laws of time-binding energies and time-binding phenomena are the laws of human nature; we have seen that this conception of man—which must be the basic concept, the fundamental principle and the perpetual guide and regulator of Human Engineering—is bound to work a profound transformation in all our views on human affairs and, in particular, must radically alter the so-called social“sciences”—the life-regulating“sciences”of ethics, sociology, economics, politics and government—advancing them from their present estate of pseudo sciences to the level of genuine sciences and technologizing them for the effective service of mankind. I call them“life-regulating,”not because they play a more important part in human affairs than do the genuine sciences of mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy and biology, for they are not more important than these, but because they are, so to say, closer, more immediate and more obvious in their influence and effects. These life-regulating sciences[pg 097]are, of course, not independent; they depend ultimately upon the genuine sciences for much of their power and ought to go to them for light and guidance; but what I mean here by saying they are not independent is that they are dependent upon each other, interpenetrating and interlocking in innumerable ways. To showin detailhow the so-called sciences will have to be transformed to make them accord with the right conception of man and qualify them for their proper business will eventually require a large volume or indeed volumes.In this introductory work I cannot deal fully with one of those“sciences”nor in suitable outline with each of them separately. I must be content here to deal, very briefly, with one of them by way of illustration and suggestion. Which one shall it be?Now among these life-regulating“sciences”there is one specially marked by the importance of its subject, by its central relation to the others and by its prominence in the public mind. I mean Economics—the“dismal science”of Political Economy. For that reason I have chosen to deal with economics. In the present chapter I shall discuss three of its principal terms—Wealth, Capital and Money—with a view to showing that the current meanings and interpretations of these familiar terms must be very greatly deepened, enlarged and elevated if they are to accord with facts and laws of human nature and if the so-called[pg 098]“science”which employs them is to become a genuine science properly qualified to be a branch of Human Engineering. It is to be shown that the meanings currently attached by political economists and others to the terms in question belong to what I have called the period of humanity's childhood; and it is to be shown that the new meanings which the terms must receive belong to the period of humanity's manhood. It will be seen that the new meanings differ so radically from the old ones as to make it desirable for the sake of clarity to give the new meanings new names. But this, however scientifically desirable, is impracticable because the old terms—wealth, capital, money—are so deeply imbedded in the speech of the world. And here comes into view the very special difficulty alluded to above and which led me to request the reader's special cooperation in this chapter. The difficulty is not merely that of destroying old ideas that are false; it is not merely that of replacing them with true ideas that are new; it is that of causing people habitually to associate meanings that are new and true with terms associated so long, so universally, so uniformly with meanings that are false.The secret of philosophy, said Leibnitz, is to treat familiar things as unfamiliar. By the secret of“philosophy”Leibnitz meant the secret of what we call science. Let us apply this wholesome maxim in[pg 099]our present study; let us, in so far as we can, regard the familiar terms—wealth, capital and money—as unfamiliar; let us deal with them afresh; let us examine openmindedly the facts—the phenomena—to which the terms relate and ascertain scientifically the significance the terms must have in a genuine science of human economy. Examine“the facts”I say—examine“the phenomena”—for bending facts to theories is a vital danger, while bending theories to facts is essential to science and the peaceful progress of society.Human beings have always had some sense of values—some perception or cognition of values. In order to express or measure values, it was necessary to introduce units of measure, or units of exchange. People began to measure values by means of agricultural and other products, such as cattle, for example. The Latin word for cattle waspecus, and the wordpecunia, which came to signify money, accounts for the meaning of our familiar word pecuniary. The earliest units for measuring became unsuited to the increasing needs of growing trade,“business,”or traffic. Finally a unit called money was adopted in which the base was the value of some weight of gold. Thus we see that money came to mean simply the accepted unit for measuring, representing and expressing values of and in wealth.But what is wealth? I have said that the old[pg 100]conceptions of wealth, capital and money—the conceptions that are still current throughout the world—belong to the period of humanity's childhood—they are childish conceptions. I have said that they must be replaced by scientific conceptions—by conceptions fit for humanity's manhood. The change that must be made in our conceptions of the great terms is tremendous. It is necessary to analyse the current conceptions of wealth, capital, and money—the childish conceptions of them—in order to reveal their falseness, stupidity and folly. To do this we must enter the field of Political Economy—a field beset with peculiar difficulties and dangers. All the Furies of private interests are involved. One gains the impression that there is little or no real desire to gain a true conception—a scientific conception—of wealth. Everybody seems to prefer an emotional definition—a definition that suits his personal love of wealth or his hatred of it. Many definitions of wealth, capital and money are to be found in modern books of political economy—definitions and books belonging to humanity's childhood. For the purpose of this writing they all of them look alike—they sufficiently agree—they are all of them childish. Mill, for example, tells us that wealth consists of“useful or agreeable things which possess exchangeable value.”Of capital one of the simplest definitions is this:[pg 101]“Capital is that part of wealth which is devoted to obtaining further wealth.”(Alfred Marshall,Economics of Industry.)Walker (in hisMoney, Trade and Industry) defines money as follows:“Money is that which passes freely from hand to hand throughout the community in final discharge of debts and full payment for commodities, being accepted equally without reference to the character or credit of the person who offers it, and without the intention of the person who receives it to consume it, or to enjoy it, or apply it to any other use than, in turn, to tender it to others in discharge of debts or full payment for commodities.”Political economy has many different schools of thought and methods of classification. Its reasonings are mainly speculative, metaphysical, and legalistic; its ethics is zoological ethics, based on the zoological conception of man as an animal. The elements of natural logic and natural ethics are absent. The sophisticated ideas about the subject of political economy, bluntly do not correspond to facts. Our primitive forefather in the jungle would have died from hunger, cold, heat, blood poisoning or the attacks of wild animals, if he had not used his brain and muscles to take some stone or a piece of wood to knock down fruit from trees, to kill an animal, so as to use his hide for clothes and his meat for food, or to break wood and trees for a shelter and to make some weapons for defense and hunting.[pg 102]“In the first stone which he (the savage) flings at the wild animal he pursues, in the first stick that he seizes to strike down the fruit which hangs above his reach, we see the appropriation of one article for the purpose of aiding in the acquisition of another and thus we discover the origin of capital.”(R. Torrens,An Essay on the Production of Wealth.)Our primitive forefather's first acquaintance with fire was probably through lightning; he discovered, probably by chance, the possibility of making fire by rubbing together two pieces of wood and by striking together two pieces of stone; he established one of the first facts in technology; he felt the warm effect of fire and also the good effect of broiling his food by finding some roasted animals in a fire. Thus nature revealed to him one of its great gifts, the stored-up energy of the sun in vegetation and its primitive beneficial use. He was already a time-binding being; evolution had brought him to that level. Being a product of nature, he was reflecting those natural laws that belong to his class of life; he had ceased to be static—he had become dynamic—progressiveness had got into his blood—he was above the estate of animals.We also observe that primitive man produced commodities, acquired experiences, made observations, and that some of the produced commodities had a use-value for other people and remained good for use, even after his death.[pg 103]The produced commodities were composed of raw material, freely supplied by nature, combined with some mental work which gave him the conception of how to make and to use the object, and some work on his part which finally shaped the thing; all of this mental and manual work consumed an amount of time. It is obvious that all of these elements are indispensable to produce anything of any value, or of any use-value. His child not only directly received some of the use-values produced by him, but was initiated into all of his experiences and observations. (As we know, power, as defined in mechanics, means the ratio of work done to the time used in doing it.)All those things are time-binding phenomena produced by the time-binding capacity of man; but man hasnotknown thatthis capacitywas hisdefining mark. We must notice the strange fact that, from the engineering point of view, humanity, though very developed in some ways, is childishly undeveloped in others. Humanity has some conceptions about dimensions and talks of the world in which we live as having three dimensions; yet even in its wildest imagination it can not picture tangibly afourthdimension; nay, humanity has not learned to grasp the real meanings of things that are basic or fundamental. All of our conceptions are relative and comparative; all of them are based upon matters[pg 104]which we do not yet understand; for example, we talk of time, space, electricity, gravity, and so on, but no one has been able to define them in terms of the data of sensation; nevertheless—and it is a fact of the greatest importance—we learn how to use many things which we do not fully understand and are not yet able to define.In political economy the meagreness of our understanding is especially remarkable; we have not yet grasped the obvious fact—a fact of immeasurable import for all of the social sciences—that with little exception the wealth and capital possessed by a given generation are not produced by its own toil but are the inherited fruit of dead men's toil—a free gift of the past. We have yet to learn and apply the lesson that not only our material wealth and capital but our science and art and learning and wisdom—all that goes to constitute our civilization—were produced, not by our own labor, but by the time-binding energies of past generations.Primitive man used natural laws without knowing them or understanding them, but he was able to cause nature to express itself, by finding a way to release nature's stored up energy. Through the work of his brain and its direction in the use of his muscles, he found that some of his appliances were not good; he made better ones, and thus slowly at first, the progress of humanity went on. I will not enlarge[pg 105]upon the history of the evolution of civilization because it is told in many books.In the earliest times the religious, philosophical, legal and ethical systems had not been invented. The morale at that time was a natural morale. Humans knew that they did not create nature. They did not feel it“proper”to“expropriate the creator”and legalistically appropriate the earth and its treasure for themselves. They felt, in their unsophisticated morale, that being called into existence they had a natural right to exist and to use freely the gifts of nature in the preservation of their life; and that is what they did.After the death of a man, some of the objects produced by him still survived, such as weapons, fishing or hunting instruments, or the caves adapted for living; a baby had to be nourished for some years by its parents or it would have died. Those facts had important consequences; objects made by someone for some particular use could be used by someone else, even after the death of one or more successive users; again the experiences acquired by one member of a family or a group of people were taught by example or precept to others of the same generation and to the next generation. Such simple facts are the corner stones of our whole civilization and they are the direct result of thehuman capacity of time-binding.[pg 106]The world to-day is full of controversy about wealth, capital, and money, and because humanity, through its peculiar time-binding power, binds this element“time”in an ever larger and larger degree, the controversy becomes more and more acute. Civilization as a process is the process of binding time; progress is made by the fact that each generation adds to the material and spiritual wealth which it inherits. Past achievements—the fruit of bygone time—thus live in the present, are augmented in the present, and transmitted to the future; the process goes on; time, the essential element, is so involved that, though it increases arithmetically, its fruit, civilization, advances geometrically.But there is another peculiarity in wealth and money: If a wooden or iron“inch”be allowed to rot or rust quietly on some shelf, this“inch”does not represent anything besides this piece of wood or iron. But if we take thementalvalue of an inch, this unit of one of the measures of space, and use it, with other quantities, in the contemplation of the skies for the solving of an astronomical problem, it gives a prophetic answer that, in a certain place there is a star; this star, may be for years looked for in vain. Was it that the calculation was wrong? No, for after further search with telescopes of greater power, the star is found and the calculation thus verified.[pg 107]It is obvious that the“unit”—inch—has no value by itself, but is very precious as a unit for measuring the phenomenon of length, which it perfectly represents, and that is why it was introduced.It is exactly the same with money if the term be rightly understood. Understood aright, money, being the measure and representative of wealth, is in the main, the measure and the representative of dead men's toil; for, rightly understood, wealth is almost entirely the product of the labor of by-gone generations. This product, we have seen, involves the element of time as the chief factor. And so we discover how money, properly understood, is connected with time—the main function of money is to measure and represent the accumulated products of the labor of past generations. Hoarded money is like an iron“inch”upon a shelf—a useless lump; but when used as a measure and representative of wealth rightly understood, money renders invaluable service, for it then serves to measure and represent the living fruit of dead men's toil.For this reason, it is useless to argue who is the more important, the capitalist who has legal possession of most of the material fruit of dead men's toil, or the laborer who has legal possession of but little of it. In the laborer, we do not now really look for his physical muscular laboralone; for this is replaced by mechanical or animal power as soon as[pg 108]it can be. What we do need from labor, and what we will always need, is hisbrain—his time-binding power.The population of the world may be divided into different classes; if the classes are not here enumerated in the customary way, it is because it is necessary to classify human beings, as nearly as possible according to their“power-value.”There is no assertion that this is an ideal classification, but if someone is moved to exclaim—“what a foolish, unscientific division!”—I will answer by saying:“I grant that the division is foolish and unscientific; butit is the only division which corresponds to facts in life, and it is not the writer's fault. By this‘foolishness’some good may be accomplished.”From an engineer's point of view humanity is apparently to be divided into three classes; (1) the intellectuals; (2) the rich; and (3) the poor. This division would seem to be contrary to all the rules of logic, but it corresponds to facts. Of course some individuals belong to two of the classes or even to all three of them, an after-war product, but essentially, they belong to the one class in proportion to the characteristic which is the most marked in their life; that is, in the sense of social classes—based on magnitude of values.(1) The intellectuals are the men and women[pg 109]who possess the knowledge produced by the labor of by-gone generations but do not possess the material wealth thus produced. In mastering and using this inheritance of knowledge, they are exercising their time-binding energies and making the labor of the dead live in the present and for the future.(2) The rich are those who have possession and control of most of thematerialwealth produced by the toil of bygone generations—wealth that is dead unless animated and transformed by the time-binding labor of the living.(3) The poor are those who have neither the knowledge possessed by the intellectuals nor the material wealth possessed by the rich and who, moreover, because nearly all their efforts, under present conditions, are limited to the struggle for mere existence, have little or no opportunity to exercise their time-binding capacity.Let us now try to ascertain the rôle of the time-binding class of life as a whole. We have by necessity, to go back to the beginning—back to the savage. We have seen what were the conditions of his work and progress; we saw that for each successful achievement he often had to wrestle with a very large number of unsuccessful achievements, and his lifetime being so limited, the total of his successful achievements was very limited, so that he was able to give to his child only a few useful objects and[pg 110]the sum of his experience. Generally speaking, each successor did not start his life at the point where his father started; he started somewhere near where his father left off. His father gave, say, fifty years to discover two truths in nature and succeeded in making two or three simple objects; but the son does not need to give fifty years to discover and create the same achievements, and so he has time to achieve somethingnew. He thus adds his own achievements to those of his father in tools and experience; this is the mathematical equivalent of adding his parent's years of life to his own. His mother's work and experience are of course included—the name father and son being only used representatively.This stupendous fact is the definitive mark of humanity—the power to roll up continuously the ever-increasing achievements of generation after generation endlessly. We have seen that this time-binding power is an exponential power or function of time. Time flows on, increasing in arithmetical progression, adding generation unto generation; but the results of human energies working in time do not go on arithmetically; they pile up or roll up more and more rapidly, augmenting in accordance with the law of a more and more rapidly increasing geometric progression. The typical term of the progression isPRTwherePRdenotes the ending progress made in the generation with which we[pg 111]agree to start our reckoning,Rdenotes the ratio increase, andTdenotes the number of generations after the chosen“start.”The quantity,PRTof progress made in theTthgeneration containsTas an exponent, and so the quantity, varying as timeTpasses, is called an exponential function of the time.Nature is the source of all energy. Plants, the lowest form of life, have a definite rôle to perform in the economy of nature. Their function is the forming of albuminoids and other substances for higher purposes. All of their nitrates are high-explosives, or low explosives, but explosives anyway. They are powerful sources of some new energy. Animal life uses these“explosives”as food and is correspondingly more dynamic, but in animal life time does not play the rôle it plays in human life. Animals are limited by death permanently. If animals make any progress from generation to generation, it is so small as to be negligible. A beaver, for example, is a remarkable builder of dams, but he does not progress in the way of inventions or further development. A beaver dam is always a beaver dam.Finally humanity, the highest known class of life, has time-binding capacity as its characteristic, its discriminant, its peculiar and definitive mark. It is an unrealized fact that in this higher class of[pg 112]life,the law of organic growth develops into the law of energy-growth—the mind—the time-binding energy—an increasing exponential function of time.That fact is of basic importance for the science and art of Human Engineering. In mechanics we have the well-known formula(1) Work ÷ Time = Power.We have seen that, in accordance with the law of geometric progression,PRTrepresents the progress made—the work done—in theTthgeneration (Tbeing counted from some generation taken as starting point of reckoning); this progress, achievement, orwork, being done inonegeneration, we have by (1)(2) ( Work = PRT) / ( Time = 1) = Power,that is,PRT= Power; this means that the numberPRT, which measures the work done in a given generation, is also the measure of the power that does the work. Now, the total work,W, done in theTgenerations is(3)W = PR1+ PR2+ PR3+ ... + PRT;that is,(4)W=R÷ (R-1) × (PRT-P)[pg 113]It should be noticed that by (2) this expression forWmay also be regarded as the sum ofTdifferent powersPR,PR2, etc., each working during one and only one generation; if we divided this sum byT, the quotient would be a power that would have to act throughTgenerations to produceW. The reader should not fail to notice very carefully that the expression (4) forWis an expression for the total progress made—the total work done—the total wealth produced—in the course ofTgenerations and he should especially note how the expression involves the exponential function of time (T), namelyPRT.The formula makes mathematically evident the time-binding capacity characteristic of the human class of life. Properly understood,wealthconsists of the fruits or products of this time-binding capacity of man. Animals do not produce wealth; it is produced by Man and only Man. The foregoing basic formulation should lead to further similar developments throwing much light upon the process of civilization and serving to eliminate "private opinion" from the conduct of human affairs. (In this writing it is not important to look deeper into these proposed series. The fact remains thatP, as well asR, are peculiarly increasing series of a geometrical character—the precise form will be developed in another writing.)[pg 114]Human achievements and progress, because cumulative, are knocking out the barriers of time. This fact is the vital and dynamic difference between animal life and human life. As plants gather in and store up solar energy into sheaves for the use and growth of animal and man—so humans are gathering and binding the knowledge of past centuries into sheaves for the use and development of generations yet unborn.We have seen that the term wealth, rightly understood, means the fruit of the time-binding work of humanity. Wealth is of two kinds: one is material; the other is knowledge. Both kinds have use-value. The first kind perishes—the commodities composing it deteriorate and become useless. The other is permanent in character; it is imperishable; it may be lost or forgotten but it does not wear out.The one is limited in time; the other, unlimited in time; the former I callpotential use-value; the latter,kinetic use-value. Analysis will justify the names. The energy of a body which is due to its position, is called potential energy. The energy of a body which is due to its motion, is called kinetic energy. Here the material use-value has value through its position, shape and so forth; it is immobile if not used, and has not the capacity to progress. Mental use-values are not static but permanently dynamic; one thought, one discovery, is the impulse[pg 115]to others; they follow the law of an increasingpotentialfunction of time. (Seeapp. II.) This is why these names correspond to the two names of the two mentioned classes of energy.Here I must return to the current conceptions of wealth and capital, before cited.“Wealth,”we are told,“is any useful or agreeable thing which possessesexchangeable value.”And we are told that“Capital is that part of wealth which is devoted to obtaining further wealth.”I have said that such conceptions—such definitions—of wealth and capital are childish—they belong to the period of humanity's childhood. That they are indeed childish conceptions the reader can not fail to see if he will reflect upon them and especially if he will compare them with the scientific conception according to which wealth consists of those things—whether they be material commodities or forms of knowledge and understanding—that have been produced by the time-binding energies of humanity, and according to whichnearly all the wealth of the world at any given timeis theaccumulated fruit of the toil of past generations—the living work of the dead. It seems unnecessary to warn the reader against confusing the“making”of money by hook or crook, by trick or trade, with thecreatingof wealth, by the product of labor. In calling the old conceptions childish, I do not mean that they contain no element of truth[pg 116]whatever; I mean that they are shallow, scientifically or spiritually meagre, narrow in their vision, wrong in their accent; I especially mean that they are dumb, because they are blind, regarding the central matter that wealth is the natural offspring of Time and Human Toil. The old conceptions do indeed imply that wealth and capital involve both potential and kinetic use-values, and in so far they are right. But how do such use-values arise?The potential use-values in wealth are created by human work operating in time upon raw material given by nature. The use-values are produced by time-taking transformations of the raw materials; these transformations are wrought by human brain labor and human muscular labor directed by the human brain acting in time. The kinetic use-values of wealth are also created by human toil—mainly by the intellectual labor of observation, experimentation, imagination, deduction and invention, all consuming the precious time of short human lives. It is obvious that in the creation of use-values whether potential or kinetic, the element oftimeenters as an absolutely essential factor. The fundamental importance of time as a factor in the production of wealth—the fact that wealth and the use-values of wealth are literally the natural offspring of the spiritual union of time with toil—has been completely overlooked, not only by the economics, but by the[pg 117]ethics, the jurisprudence and the other branches of speculative reasoning, throughout the long period of humanity's childhood. In the course of the ages there has indeed been much“talk”about time, but there has been no recognition of the basic significance of time as essential in the conception and in the very constitution of human values.It is often said that“Time is Money”; the statement is often false; but the proposition that Money is Time is always true. It is always true in the profound sense that Money is the measure and symbol of Wealth—the product of Time and Toil—the crystallization of the time-binding human capacity.it is thus true that money is a very precious thing, the measure and symbol of work—in part the work of the living but, in the main, the living work of the dead.Nature's laws are supreme; we cannot change them; we can deviate from them for a while, but the end is evil. That is the lesson we must learn from the history of Humanity's childhood. False conceptions of Man—ignorance of the laws of human nature—have given us unscientific economies, unscientific ethics, unscientific law, unscientific politics, unscientific government. These have made human history the history of social cataclysms—insurrections, wars, revolutions—sad tokens not so much of human lust as of human ignorance of the laws of[pg 118]human nature. There is but one remedy, one hope—a science and art of Human Engineering based upon the just conception of humanity as the time-binding class of life and conforming to the laws of nature including the laws of human nature.

I beg the reader to allow me to begin this chapter with a word of warning. The reader is aware that Criticism—by which I mean Thought—may be any one of three kinds: it may be purely destructive; it may be purely constructive; or it may be both destructive and constructive at the same time. Purely destructive criticism is sometimes highly useful. If an old idea or a system of old ideas be false and therefore harmful, it is a genuine service to attack it and destroy it even if nothing be offered to take its place, just as it is good to destroy a rattlesnake lurking by a human pathway, even if one does not offer a substitute for the snake. But, however useful destructive criticism may be, it is not an easy service to render; for old ideas, however false and harmful, are protected alike by habit and by the inborn conservatism of many minds. Now, habit indeed is exceedingly useful—even indispensable to the effective conduct of life—for it enables us to do many useful things automatically and therefore easily, without conscious thinking, and thus to save our mental energy for other work; but for the same[pg 094]reason, habit is often very harmful; it makes us protect false ideas automatically, and so when the destructive critic endeavors to destroy such ideas by reasoning with us, he finds that he is trying to reason with automats—with machines. Such is the chief difficulty encountered by destructive criticism. On the other hand, purely constructive criticism—purely constructive thought—consists in introducing new ideas of a kind that do not clash, or do not seem to clash, with old ones. Is such criticism or thought easy? Far from it. It has difficulties of its own. These are of two varieties: the difficulty of showing people who are content with their present stock of old ideas that the new ones are interesting or important; and the great difficulty of makingnewideas clear and intelligible, for the art of being clear and perfectly intelligible is very, very hard to acquire and to practise. The third kind of criticism—the third kind of thought—the kind that is at once both destructive and constructive—has a double aim—that of destroying old ideas that are false and that of replacing them with new ideas that are true; and so the third kind of criticism or thought is the most difficult of all, for it has to overcome both the difficulty of destructive criticism and that of constructive thought.

The reader, therefore, if he will be good enough to reflect a little upon the matter, can not fail to appreciate[pg 095]the tremendous difficulties which beset the writing of this little book, for he must perceive, not only that the work belongs to the third kind of critical thought, but—what is much more—the errors it aims to destroy are fundamental, world-wide and old, while the true ideas it seeks to substitute for them are fundamental and new. This great difficulty, felt ateverystage of this writing, is, for a reason to be presently explained, greatly enhanced and felt with especial keenness in the present chapter. I therefore beg the reader to give me here very special cooperation—the cooperation of open-mindedness, candor and critical attention. It is essential to keep in mind the nature of our enterprise as a whole, which is that of pointing the way to the science and art of Human Engineering and laying the foundations thereof; we have seen Human Engineering, when developed, is to be the science and art of so directing human energies and capacities as to make them contribute most effectively to the advancement of human welfare; we have seen that this science and art must have its basis in a true conception of human nature—a just conception of what Man really is and of his natural place in the complex of the world; we have seen that the ages-old and still current conceptions of man—zoological and mythological conceptions, according to which human beings are either animals or else hybrids of animals and gods—are[pg 096]mainly responsible for the dismal things in human history; we have seen that man, far from being an animal or a compound of natural and supernatural, is a perfectly natural being characterized by a certain capacity or power—the capacity or power to bind time; we have seen that humanity is, therefore, to be rightly conceived and scientifically defined as the time-binding class of life; we have seen that, therefore, the laws of time-binding energies and time-binding phenomena are the laws of human nature; we have seen that this conception of man—which must be the basic concept, the fundamental principle and the perpetual guide and regulator of Human Engineering—is bound to work a profound transformation in all our views on human affairs and, in particular, must radically alter the so-called social“sciences”—the life-regulating“sciences”of ethics, sociology, economics, politics and government—advancing them from their present estate of pseudo sciences to the level of genuine sciences and technologizing them for the effective service of mankind. I call them“life-regulating,”not because they play a more important part in human affairs than do the genuine sciences of mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy and biology, for they are not more important than these, but because they are, so to say, closer, more immediate and more obvious in their influence and effects. These life-regulating sciences[pg 097]are, of course, not independent; they depend ultimately upon the genuine sciences for much of their power and ought to go to them for light and guidance; but what I mean here by saying they are not independent is that they are dependent upon each other, interpenetrating and interlocking in innumerable ways. To showin detailhow the so-called sciences will have to be transformed to make them accord with the right conception of man and qualify them for their proper business will eventually require a large volume or indeed volumes.

In this introductory work I cannot deal fully with one of those“sciences”nor in suitable outline with each of them separately. I must be content here to deal, very briefly, with one of them by way of illustration and suggestion. Which one shall it be?

Now among these life-regulating“sciences”there is one specially marked by the importance of its subject, by its central relation to the others and by its prominence in the public mind. I mean Economics—the“dismal science”of Political Economy. For that reason I have chosen to deal with economics. In the present chapter I shall discuss three of its principal terms—Wealth, Capital and Money—with a view to showing that the current meanings and interpretations of these familiar terms must be very greatly deepened, enlarged and elevated if they are to accord with facts and laws of human nature and if the so-called[pg 098]“science”which employs them is to become a genuine science properly qualified to be a branch of Human Engineering. It is to be shown that the meanings currently attached by political economists and others to the terms in question belong to what I have called the period of humanity's childhood; and it is to be shown that the new meanings which the terms must receive belong to the period of humanity's manhood. It will be seen that the new meanings differ so radically from the old ones as to make it desirable for the sake of clarity to give the new meanings new names. But this, however scientifically desirable, is impracticable because the old terms—wealth, capital, money—are so deeply imbedded in the speech of the world. And here comes into view the very special difficulty alluded to above and which led me to request the reader's special cooperation in this chapter. The difficulty is not merely that of destroying old ideas that are false; it is not merely that of replacing them with true ideas that are new; it is that of causing people habitually to associate meanings that are new and true with terms associated so long, so universally, so uniformly with meanings that are false.

The secret of philosophy, said Leibnitz, is to treat familiar things as unfamiliar. By the secret of“philosophy”Leibnitz meant the secret of what we call science. Let us apply this wholesome maxim in[pg 099]our present study; let us, in so far as we can, regard the familiar terms—wealth, capital and money—as unfamiliar; let us deal with them afresh; let us examine openmindedly the facts—the phenomena—to which the terms relate and ascertain scientifically the significance the terms must have in a genuine science of human economy. Examine“the facts”I say—examine“the phenomena”—for bending facts to theories is a vital danger, while bending theories to facts is essential to science and the peaceful progress of society.

Human beings have always had some sense of values—some perception or cognition of values. In order to express or measure values, it was necessary to introduce units of measure, or units of exchange. People began to measure values by means of agricultural and other products, such as cattle, for example. The Latin word for cattle waspecus, and the wordpecunia, which came to signify money, accounts for the meaning of our familiar word pecuniary. The earliest units for measuring became unsuited to the increasing needs of growing trade,“business,”or traffic. Finally a unit called money was adopted in which the base was the value of some weight of gold. Thus we see that money came to mean simply the accepted unit for measuring, representing and expressing values of and in wealth.

But what is wealth? I have said that the old[pg 100]conceptions of wealth, capital and money—the conceptions that are still current throughout the world—belong to the period of humanity's childhood—they are childish conceptions. I have said that they must be replaced by scientific conceptions—by conceptions fit for humanity's manhood. The change that must be made in our conceptions of the great terms is tremendous. It is necessary to analyse the current conceptions of wealth, capital, and money—the childish conceptions of them—in order to reveal their falseness, stupidity and folly. To do this we must enter the field of Political Economy—a field beset with peculiar difficulties and dangers. All the Furies of private interests are involved. One gains the impression that there is little or no real desire to gain a true conception—a scientific conception—of wealth. Everybody seems to prefer an emotional definition—a definition that suits his personal love of wealth or his hatred of it. Many definitions of wealth, capital and money are to be found in modern books of political economy—definitions and books belonging to humanity's childhood. For the purpose of this writing they all of them look alike—they sufficiently agree—they are all of them childish. Mill, for example, tells us that wealth consists of“useful or agreeable things which possess exchangeable value.”Of capital one of the simplest definitions is this:

“Capital is that part of wealth which is devoted to obtaining further wealth.”(Alfred Marshall,Economics of Industry.)

“Capital is that part of wealth which is devoted to obtaining further wealth.”(Alfred Marshall,Economics of Industry.)

Walker (in hisMoney, Trade and Industry) defines money as follows:

“Money is that which passes freely from hand to hand throughout the community in final discharge of debts and full payment for commodities, being accepted equally without reference to the character or credit of the person who offers it, and without the intention of the person who receives it to consume it, or to enjoy it, or apply it to any other use than, in turn, to tender it to others in discharge of debts or full payment for commodities.”

“Money is that which passes freely from hand to hand throughout the community in final discharge of debts and full payment for commodities, being accepted equally without reference to the character or credit of the person who offers it, and without the intention of the person who receives it to consume it, or to enjoy it, or apply it to any other use than, in turn, to tender it to others in discharge of debts or full payment for commodities.”

Political economy has many different schools of thought and methods of classification. Its reasonings are mainly speculative, metaphysical, and legalistic; its ethics is zoological ethics, based on the zoological conception of man as an animal. The elements of natural logic and natural ethics are absent. The sophisticated ideas about the subject of political economy, bluntly do not correspond to facts. Our primitive forefather in the jungle would have died from hunger, cold, heat, blood poisoning or the attacks of wild animals, if he had not used his brain and muscles to take some stone or a piece of wood to knock down fruit from trees, to kill an animal, so as to use his hide for clothes and his meat for food, or to break wood and trees for a shelter and to make some weapons for defense and hunting.

“In the first stone which he (the savage) flings at the wild animal he pursues, in the first stick that he seizes to strike down the fruit which hangs above his reach, we see the appropriation of one article for the purpose of aiding in the acquisition of another and thus we discover the origin of capital.”(R. Torrens,An Essay on the Production of Wealth.)

“In the first stone which he (the savage) flings at the wild animal he pursues, in the first stick that he seizes to strike down the fruit which hangs above his reach, we see the appropriation of one article for the purpose of aiding in the acquisition of another and thus we discover the origin of capital.”(R. Torrens,An Essay on the Production of Wealth.)

Our primitive forefather's first acquaintance with fire was probably through lightning; he discovered, probably by chance, the possibility of making fire by rubbing together two pieces of wood and by striking together two pieces of stone; he established one of the first facts in technology; he felt the warm effect of fire and also the good effect of broiling his food by finding some roasted animals in a fire. Thus nature revealed to him one of its great gifts, the stored-up energy of the sun in vegetation and its primitive beneficial use. He was already a time-binding being; evolution had brought him to that level. Being a product of nature, he was reflecting those natural laws that belong to his class of life; he had ceased to be static—he had become dynamic—progressiveness had got into his blood—he was above the estate of animals.

We also observe that primitive man produced commodities, acquired experiences, made observations, and that some of the produced commodities had a use-value for other people and remained good for use, even after his death.

The produced commodities were composed of raw material, freely supplied by nature, combined with some mental work which gave him the conception of how to make and to use the object, and some work on his part which finally shaped the thing; all of this mental and manual work consumed an amount of time. It is obvious that all of these elements are indispensable to produce anything of any value, or of any use-value. His child not only directly received some of the use-values produced by him, but was initiated into all of his experiences and observations. (As we know, power, as defined in mechanics, means the ratio of work done to the time used in doing it.)

All those things are time-binding phenomena produced by the time-binding capacity of man; but man hasnotknown thatthis capacitywas hisdefining mark. We must notice the strange fact that, from the engineering point of view, humanity, though very developed in some ways, is childishly undeveloped in others. Humanity has some conceptions about dimensions and talks of the world in which we live as having three dimensions; yet even in its wildest imagination it can not picture tangibly afourthdimension; nay, humanity has not learned to grasp the real meanings of things that are basic or fundamental. All of our conceptions are relative and comparative; all of them are based upon matters[pg 104]which we do not yet understand; for example, we talk of time, space, electricity, gravity, and so on, but no one has been able to define them in terms of the data of sensation; nevertheless—and it is a fact of the greatest importance—we learn how to use many things which we do not fully understand and are not yet able to define.

In political economy the meagreness of our understanding is especially remarkable; we have not yet grasped the obvious fact—a fact of immeasurable import for all of the social sciences—that with little exception the wealth and capital possessed by a given generation are not produced by its own toil but are the inherited fruit of dead men's toil—a free gift of the past. We have yet to learn and apply the lesson that not only our material wealth and capital but our science and art and learning and wisdom—all that goes to constitute our civilization—were produced, not by our own labor, but by the time-binding energies of past generations.

Primitive man used natural laws without knowing them or understanding them, but he was able to cause nature to express itself, by finding a way to release nature's stored up energy. Through the work of his brain and its direction in the use of his muscles, he found that some of his appliances were not good; he made better ones, and thus slowly at first, the progress of humanity went on. I will not enlarge[pg 105]upon the history of the evolution of civilization because it is told in many books.

In the earliest times the religious, philosophical, legal and ethical systems had not been invented. The morale at that time was a natural morale. Humans knew that they did not create nature. They did not feel it“proper”to“expropriate the creator”and legalistically appropriate the earth and its treasure for themselves. They felt, in their unsophisticated morale, that being called into existence they had a natural right to exist and to use freely the gifts of nature in the preservation of their life; and that is what they did.

After the death of a man, some of the objects produced by him still survived, such as weapons, fishing or hunting instruments, or the caves adapted for living; a baby had to be nourished for some years by its parents or it would have died. Those facts had important consequences; objects made by someone for some particular use could be used by someone else, even after the death of one or more successive users; again the experiences acquired by one member of a family or a group of people were taught by example or precept to others of the same generation and to the next generation. Such simple facts are the corner stones of our whole civilization and they are the direct result of thehuman capacity of time-binding.

The world to-day is full of controversy about wealth, capital, and money, and because humanity, through its peculiar time-binding power, binds this element“time”in an ever larger and larger degree, the controversy becomes more and more acute. Civilization as a process is the process of binding time; progress is made by the fact that each generation adds to the material and spiritual wealth which it inherits. Past achievements—the fruit of bygone time—thus live in the present, are augmented in the present, and transmitted to the future; the process goes on; time, the essential element, is so involved that, though it increases arithmetically, its fruit, civilization, advances geometrically.

But there is another peculiarity in wealth and money: If a wooden or iron“inch”be allowed to rot or rust quietly on some shelf, this“inch”does not represent anything besides this piece of wood or iron. But if we take thementalvalue of an inch, this unit of one of the measures of space, and use it, with other quantities, in the contemplation of the skies for the solving of an astronomical problem, it gives a prophetic answer that, in a certain place there is a star; this star, may be for years looked for in vain. Was it that the calculation was wrong? No, for after further search with telescopes of greater power, the star is found and the calculation thus verified.

It is obvious that the“unit”—inch—has no value by itself, but is very precious as a unit for measuring the phenomenon of length, which it perfectly represents, and that is why it was introduced.

It is exactly the same with money if the term be rightly understood. Understood aright, money, being the measure and representative of wealth, is in the main, the measure and the representative of dead men's toil; for, rightly understood, wealth is almost entirely the product of the labor of by-gone generations. This product, we have seen, involves the element of time as the chief factor. And so we discover how money, properly understood, is connected with time—the main function of money is to measure and represent the accumulated products of the labor of past generations. Hoarded money is like an iron“inch”upon a shelf—a useless lump; but when used as a measure and representative of wealth rightly understood, money renders invaluable service, for it then serves to measure and represent the living fruit of dead men's toil.

For this reason, it is useless to argue who is the more important, the capitalist who has legal possession of most of the material fruit of dead men's toil, or the laborer who has legal possession of but little of it. In the laborer, we do not now really look for his physical muscular laboralone; for this is replaced by mechanical or animal power as soon as[pg 108]it can be. What we do need from labor, and what we will always need, is hisbrain—his time-binding power.

The population of the world may be divided into different classes; if the classes are not here enumerated in the customary way, it is because it is necessary to classify human beings, as nearly as possible according to their“power-value.”There is no assertion that this is an ideal classification, but if someone is moved to exclaim—“what a foolish, unscientific division!”—I will answer by saying:“I grant that the division is foolish and unscientific; butit is the only division which corresponds to facts in life, and it is not the writer's fault. By this‘foolishness’some good may be accomplished.”

From an engineer's point of view humanity is apparently to be divided into three classes; (1) the intellectuals; (2) the rich; and (3) the poor. This division would seem to be contrary to all the rules of logic, but it corresponds to facts. Of course some individuals belong to two of the classes or even to all three of them, an after-war product, but essentially, they belong to the one class in proportion to the characteristic which is the most marked in their life; that is, in the sense of social classes—based on magnitude of values.

(1) The intellectuals are the men and women[pg 109]who possess the knowledge produced by the labor of by-gone generations but do not possess the material wealth thus produced. In mastering and using this inheritance of knowledge, they are exercising their time-binding energies and making the labor of the dead live in the present and for the future.

(2) The rich are those who have possession and control of most of thematerialwealth produced by the toil of bygone generations—wealth that is dead unless animated and transformed by the time-binding labor of the living.

(3) The poor are those who have neither the knowledge possessed by the intellectuals nor the material wealth possessed by the rich and who, moreover, because nearly all their efforts, under present conditions, are limited to the struggle for mere existence, have little or no opportunity to exercise their time-binding capacity.

Let us now try to ascertain the rôle of the time-binding class of life as a whole. We have by necessity, to go back to the beginning—back to the savage. We have seen what were the conditions of his work and progress; we saw that for each successful achievement he often had to wrestle with a very large number of unsuccessful achievements, and his lifetime being so limited, the total of his successful achievements was very limited, so that he was able to give to his child only a few useful objects and[pg 110]the sum of his experience. Generally speaking, each successor did not start his life at the point where his father started; he started somewhere near where his father left off. His father gave, say, fifty years to discover two truths in nature and succeeded in making two or three simple objects; but the son does not need to give fifty years to discover and create the same achievements, and so he has time to achieve somethingnew. He thus adds his own achievements to those of his father in tools and experience; this is the mathematical equivalent of adding his parent's years of life to his own. His mother's work and experience are of course included—the name father and son being only used representatively.

This stupendous fact is the definitive mark of humanity—the power to roll up continuously the ever-increasing achievements of generation after generation endlessly. We have seen that this time-binding power is an exponential power or function of time. Time flows on, increasing in arithmetical progression, adding generation unto generation; but the results of human energies working in time do not go on arithmetically; they pile up or roll up more and more rapidly, augmenting in accordance with the law of a more and more rapidly increasing geometric progression. The typical term of the progression isPRTwherePRdenotes the ending progress made in the generation with which we[pg 111]agree to start our reckoning,Rdenotes the ratio increase, andTdenotes the number of generations after the chosen“start.”The quantity,PRTof progress made in theTthgeneration containsTas an exponent, and so the quantity, varying as timeTpasses, is called an exponential function of the time.

Nature is the source of all energy. Plants, the lowest form of life, have a definite rôle to perform in the economy of nature. Their function is the forming of albuminoids and other substances for higher purposes. All of their nitrates are high-explosives, or low explosives, but explosives anyway. They are powerful sources of some new energy. Animal life uses these“explosives”as food and is correspondingly more dynamic, but in animal life time does not play the rôle it plays in human life. Animals are limited by death permanently. If animals make any progress from generation to generation, it is so small as to be negligible. A beaver, for example, is a remarkable builder of dams, but he does not progress in the way of inventions or further development. A beaver dam is always a beaver dam.

Finally humanity, the highest known class of life, has time-binding capacity as its characteristic, its discriminant, its peculiar and definitive mark. It is an unrealized fact that in this higher class of[pg 112]life,the law of organic growth develops into the law of energy-growth—the mind—the time-binding energy—an increasing exponential function of time.That fact is of basic importance for the science and art of Human Engineering. In mechanics we have the well-known formula

(1) Work ÷ Time = Power.

We have seen that, in accordance with the law of geometric progression,PRTrepresents the progress made—the work done—in theTthgeneration (Tbeing counted from some generation taken as starting point of reckoning); this progress, achievement, orwork, being done inonegeneration, we have by (1)

(2) ( Work = PRT) / ( Time = 1) = Power,

that is,PRT= Power; this means that the numberPRT, which measures the work done in a given generation, is also the measure of the power that does the work. Now, the total work,W, done in theTgenerations is

(3)W = PR1+ PR2+ PR3+ ... + PRT;

that is,

(4)W=R÷ (R-1) × (PRT-P)

It should be noticed that by (2) this expression forWmay also be regarded as the sum ofTdifferent powersPR,PR2, etc., each working during one and only one generation; if we divided this sum byT, the quotient would be a power that would have to act throughTgenerations to produceW. The reader should not fail to notice very carefully that the expression (4) forWis an expression for the total progress made—the total work done—the total wealth produced—in the course ofTgenerations and he should especially note how the expression involves the exponential function of time (T), namelyPRT.

The formula makes mathematically evident the time-binding capacity characteristic of the human class of life. Properly understood,wealthconsists of the fruits or products of this time-binding capacity of man. Animals do not produce wealth; it is produced by Man and only Man. The foregoing basic formulation should lead to further similar developments throwing much light upon the process of civilization and serving to eliminate "private opinion" from the conduct of human affairs. (In this writing it is not important to look deeper into these proposed series. The fact remains thatP, as well asR, are peculiarly increasing series of a geometrical character—the precise form will be developed in another writing.)

Human achievements and progress, because cumulative, are knocking out the barriers of time. This fact is the vital and dynamic difference between animal life and human life. As plants gather in and store up solar energy into sheaves for the use and growth of animal and man—so humans are gathering and binding the knowledge of past centuries into sheaves for the use and development of generations yet unborn.

We have seen that the term wealth, rightly understood, means the fruit of the time-binding work of humanity. Wealth is of two kinds: one is material; the other is knowledge. Both kinds have use-value. The first kind perishes—the commodities composing it deteriorate and become useless. The other is permanent in character; it is imperishable; it may be lost or forgotten but it does not wear out.

The one is limited in time; the other, unlimited in time; the former I callpotential use-value; the latter,kinetic use-value. Analysis will justify the names. The energy of a body which is due to its position, is called potential energy. The energy of a body which is due to its motion, is called kinetic energy. Here the material use-value has value through its position, shape and so forth; it is immobile if not used, and has not the capacity to progress. Mental use-values are not static but permanently dynamic; one thought, one discovery, is the impulse[pg 115]to others; they follow the law of an increasingpotentialfunction of time. (Seeapp. II.) This is why these names correspond to the two names of the two mentioned classes of energy.

Here I must return to the current conceptions of wealth and capital, before cited.“Wealth,”we are told,“is any useful or agreeable thing which possessesexchangeable value.”And we are told that“Capital is that part of wealth which is devoted to obtaining further wealth.”I have said that such conceptions—such definitions—of wealth and capital are childish—they belong to the period of humanity's childhood. That they are indeed childish conceptions the reader can not fail to see if he will reflect upon them and especially if he will compare them with the scientific conception according to which wealth consists of those things—whether they be material commodities or forms of knowledge and understanding—that have been produced by the time-binding energies of humanity, and according to whichnearly all the wealth of the world at any given timeis theaccumulated fruit of the toil of past generations—the living work of the dead. It seems unnecessary to warn the reader against confusing the“making”of money by hook or crook, by trick or trade, with thecreatingof wealth, by the product of labor. In calling the old conceptions childish, I do not mean that they contain no element of truth[pg 116]whatever; I mean that they are shallow, scientifically or spiritually meagre, narrow in their vision, wrong in their accent; I especially mean that they are dumb, because they are blind, regarding the central matter that wealth is the natural offspring of Time and Human Toil. The old conceptions do indeed imply that wealth and capital involve both potential and kinetic use-values, and in so far they are right. But how do such use-values arise?

The potential use-values in wealth are created by human work operating in time upon raw material given by nature. The use-values are produced by time-taking transformations of the raw materials; these transformations are wrought by human brain labor and human muscular labor directed by the human brain acting in time. The kinetic use-values of wealth are also created by human toil—mainly by the intellectual labor of observation, experimentation, imagination, deduction and invention, all consuming the precious time of short human lives. It is obvious that in the creation of use-values whether potential or kinetic, the element oftimeenters as an absolutely essential factor. The fundamental importance of time as a factor in the production of wealth—the fact that wealth and the use-values of wealth are literally the natural offspring of the spiritual union of time with toil—has been completely overlooked, not only by the economics, but by the[pg 117]ethics, the jurisprudence and the other branches of speculative reasoning, throughout the long period of humanity's childhood. In the course of the ages there has indeed been much“talk”about time, but there has been no recognition of the basic significance of time as essential in the conception and in the very constitution of human values.

It is often said that“Time is Money”; the statement is often false; but the proposition that Money is Time is always true. It is always true in the profound sense that Money is the measure and symbol of Wealth—the product of Time and Toil—the crystallization of the time-binding human capacity.it is thus true that money is a very precious thing, the measure and symbol of work—in part the work of the living but, in the main, the living work of the dead.

Nature's laws are supreme; we cannot change them; we can deviate from them for a while, but the end is evil. That is the lesson we must learn from the history of Humanity's childhood. False conceptions of Man—ignorance of the laws of human nature—have given us unscientific economies, unscientific ethics, unscientific law, unscientific politics, unscientific government. These have made human history the history of social cataclysms—insurrections, wars, revolutions—sad tokens not so much of human lust as of human ignorance of the laws of[pg 118]human nature. There is but one remedy, one hope—a science and art of Human Engineering based upon the just conception of humanity as the time-binding class of life and conforming to the laws of nature including the laws of human nature.

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