To the American Rationalist Federation:

I deeply appreciate the honor of having been selected as Rationalist of 1960 by the American Rationalist Federation, and I thank my fellow Rationalists for having honored me in this way.

During the past few decades it has become possible for man to throw off the shackles of supernaturalism and authoritarian revelation, and to begin to understand himself and the world and to solve the problems facing mankind by the application of his powers of reason.

We do not blame our ancestors for their supernaturalism or their belief in revelation. Their beliefs were the result of their primitive efforts to understand the world. Jove's thunderbolts with their erratic and terrifying effects could not be understood until something was known about the nature of electricity. The birth of grossly defective children, sometimes occurring with high frequency in certain families, could not have been interpreted in the way that we now interpret it - that is, as the result of the presence of mutated genes or of some abnormality in development, such as the inheritance by the child of an extra chromosome - until an understanding had been obtained of the nature of the process of inheritance of characters.

I believe that there is no limit to the capabilities of man to understand himself and the world and to solve his problems in a rational way.

Life began on earth about three billion years ago, as a result of the accidental combination of atoms into molecules with the power of organizing the environment in a special way, such as to produce replicas of themselves. In the course of time more and more complex organisms came into existence by the process of mutation. Then some seven hundred years ago a great mutation occurred, when from the precursor of man there developed an early human being with much greater brain capacity and with increased powers of thinking, remembering and imagining. It did not take very long for man with his increased mental powers to develop a new way of inheritance. The new way of inheritance is something that only man has achieved. The mechanism involved is the use of memory and communication. For example, a man who had invented the bow and arrow, giving him great ability to obtain animals for food, was able to pass this character on to his friends and children by communicating the knowledge to them - it was not necessary to wait for a chance mutation in the genes that included this knowledge. In this way, because of man's increased power of thinking and memory and communication, it became possible for a discovery, once made by one human being, to be passed on to other human beings of the same generation and of later generations.

Moreover, as thousands of years have gone by another change has taken place in the human race. A man now is not an individual living organism in the same way that a rabbit is, or a quail, or a sea lion. Instead, he is a part of a larger organism, the human race. The means of communication between people talking to one another, by the use of the telephone, the telegraph, radio, television, airplanes, has reached such a point that we have now properly to consider that the whole of mankind is a single organism. A man does not live his life by himself in the way that individuals of other species to a large extent live their lives by themselves or at any rate together with only a small number of other individuals.

We have now come to the time when there is the possibility that this great organism will not continue to exist. I do not need to recapitulate the story of the development of atomic bombs and superbombs and the construction of nuclear stockpiles that could destroy civilization and kill every human being on earth, if they were used in an effective manner for this purpose.

I believe that the only security that we can have now consists in making international agreements to control nuclear weapons, to prevent the use of nuclear stockpiles as a means of political pressure, and to achieve complete disarmament, with systems of control and inspection designed to make the safety of the nations of the world and the people of the world as great as possible. The time has come now when selfish nationalism must be given up in favor of the well being of the whole of humanity.

I believe that the path that mankind should follow is clearly indicated by our reason, and I believe that we are going to follow it, into a future of peace for the world.

Linus Pauling