As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
The number of known human fossils only increases slowly. But the manner of regarding and assessing them is capable of progressing rapidly, as indeed it does. In the absence of any absolutely sensational discovery in prehistory, there is an up-to-date and scientific manner of understanding man, which is solidly based on palaeontology.
History is just this froth of artifact production that has appeared in the last ten to fifteen thousand years. It spread across the planet very quickly. But that mind in man just goes back and back into the darkness.
Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.
Man himself is a mysterious object, and the tools to probe his physiologic nature and function have developed only slowly through the millennia.
Archaeology is the peeping Tom of the sciences. It is the sandbox of men who care not where they are going; they merely want to know where everyone else has been.
We live in a world which is changing very fast. What seems contemporary now will be historical in two years.
The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.
What I'm suggesting to you is that this could be a renaissance. We may be on the cusp of a future which could provide a tremendous leap forward for humanity.
Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.