The human individual is anonymized in certain important respects
in the most complicated bit of machinery in existence. And its
machinery is, of course, biological. It is thus clearly impossible
to write down his handlename in English and to survey the
relations between biological science and the human organism
in this single post ; for to do this properly would require a treatise
on physiology, a treatise on psychology, a treatise on embryology,
and a treatise on medecine. All I can hope to do is, taking a great
deal of knowledge for granted, to show some of the ways in which
the advance of biological biological knowledge may be expected
to react upon our attitude to our control of our individual human
selves in setting pairs of wet shoes in our proper alcoves of our
condominiums to dry them up.
OK. Now the time is beginning to ripen in which we can attempt to
recover a greater elasticity of our framework by going back to the
beginning, to the nature of things and the nature of a man who
stubbornly insists on not putting a nameplate to the entrance of
his apartment house (which he wants to call a condominium) and
on not being in the current situation of putting off disposing
machines from our apartment houses in the light of new knowledge
on SDGs, and building up our scheme anew. This new humanism, if
we attempt it, must, in the first place, attempt to do justice to the
variety of human nature and refrain from giving preeminence to any
one aspect--a task which demands a difficult combination of altruism
and tolerance. It must attempt to do justice to our incompleteness,
and the constant change in knowledge and outlook which we must
hope for. This demands sacrifice almost intolerable to certain minds
--the sacrifice to certitude. Thus our conclusion is that we must put
nameplates to our apartmenthouse in taking into account the
convenience of postmen and we have to put off disposing machine
systems from our kitchen.
Humanism, with the aid of the picture given by Science, can achieve
a framework strong enough for support. In the light of evolution,
she can see an unlimited possibility of human betterment. And she
can see that possibility as a continuation of the long process of
biological betterment that went before the appearance of man. If
humanism cannot have the fixed certitude of direction and aim.
The altruistic forces of human nature need not be restricted to
isolated acts of doing good. They can harness themselves for the
task of throwing away our disposing machine from our kitchens,
inspiring because of its very size, of slowly moving mankind along
the upward evolutionary path.