Such knowledge and such teaching will inaugurate the period of humanity’s manhood. It can be made an endless period of rapid developments in True civilization. All the developments must grow out of the true conception of human beings as constituting the time-binding class of life, and so the work must begin with a campaign of education wide enough to embrace the world. The cooperation of all educational agencies—the home, the school, the church, the press—must be enlisted to make known the fundamental truth concerning the nature of man so that it shall become the guiding _light_ and _habit_ of men, women, and children everywhere. Gradual indeed but profound will be the transformations wrought in all the affairs of mankind, but especially and first of all in the so-called arts and sciences of ethics, economics, politics and government.
The ethics of humanity’s manhood will be neither “animal” ethics nor “_super_natural” ethics. It will be a natural ethics based upon a knowledge of the laws of human nature. It will not be a branch of zoology, the ethics of tooth and claw, the ethics of profiteering, the ethics of space-binding beasts fighting for “a place in the sun.” It will be a branch of humanology, a branch of Human Engineering; it will be a time-binding ethics, the ethics of the entirely natural civilization-producing energies of humanity. Whatever accords with the natural activity of those energies will be _right_ and _good_; whatever does not, will be _wrong_ and _bad_. “Survival of the fittest” in the sense of the _strongest_ is a space-binding standard, the ethical standard of beasts; in the ethics of humanity’s manhood survival of the fittest will mean survival of the _best_ in competitions for excellence, and excellence will mean time-binding excellence—excellence in the production and right use of material and spiritual wealth—excellence in science, in art, in wisdom, in justice, in promoting the weal and protecting the rights both of the living and of the unborn. The ethics that arose in the dark period of humanity’s childhood from the conception of human beings as mysterious unions of animality and divinity gave birth to two repulsive species of traffic—traffic in men regarded as animals, fit to be slaves, and traffic in the “supernatural,” in the sale of indulgences in one form or another and the “divine wisdom” of ignorant priests. It is needless to say that in the natural ethics of humanity’s manhood those species of commerce will not be found.