Spencer Heath Archive

Item 76

Penciled by Heath in a note pad.  

February 5, 1942

 

Original is in item 75 envelope.

 

 

     Physics postulates a cosmos of action, happenings, events. It classifies action or events as (1) subjective and (2) objective. Examination of subjective events it leaves to psychology and physiology. It views and regards experience as inter-action between subjective and objective events.

     Within this field of experience, physics is concerned with objective events as they are reflected in three and only three measurable and therefore discontinuous aspects: (1) The aspect of mass, particle, substance, structure in motion. (2) The aspect of motion as pertaining to mass, and, (3) The aspect of interval or succession, period or frequency, time or times, as pertaining to mass and motion.

     For measuring these fundamental aspects as constituting objective events, physics employs, correspondingly, three kinds of measuring units and thereby ascertains three kinds of dimensions as pertaining to the action or events that constitute its physical world.

 

     The preferred fundamental measuring or dimensional units are, (1) The gram. (2) The centimeter. (3) The second.

 

     Dimensions thus taken reflect, when taken together, quantitatively the over-all magnitude or dimension of a particular event. When taken by their ratios and thus rationally they reflect, not the magnitude but the specific and inherent quality of a particular action or event. Their quantity resides in the over-all magnitudes of events while their quality is inherent in the rationality, the ratios in which their constituent magnitudes are composed.

     Objective events are indissolubly composed. Their constituents, mass, motion and time, may be separately measured and so conceived, but they do not constitute events and thus come into experience otherwise than in their composite unity. Mass, motion and time therefore are but abstract conceptions in reflection upon a concrete unity. In their discreteness they are subjective. Only in their unity as events do they become objective; only so do they constitute objects of experience.

     The same is true of these subjective fundamentals in any binary combination. Any unity of mass and motion alone, whether as rate or as a quantity of energy, is without objective content, remains less than an event, for lack of any interval or period of time. And any unity of motion and time alone, either as a ratio, velocity, or as a quantity of motion (motion units in succession, as many times) remains less than any object of experience for lack of any content of mass or particle, inertia or force. Only in the full unity of its three fundamentals does the action, the events, the objective reality, of the physical world constitute the objective side of human experience.

 

     Thus it appears that mass, motion and time, energy and velocity, all are subjective reactions and conceptions, particular and discrete within the human consciousness but always integrated and concrete in the events which constitute the objects of consciousness.

     Now consciousness of events is limited to such events as come into consciousness through finite experience. When consciousness resolves such events into the numerical ratios between their measured subjective constituents, mass, motion and time, such analysis provides rational knowledge and understanding of them. And such knowledge, exposing not merely the over-all magnitudes of the events but also the ratios of their constituents as their rationale, is qualita­tive and key to the purposeful and creative transformation of actions and events.

     But objective events having entered the consciousness and having been rationally resolved into their subjective elements, the consciousness possesses an indefinite, perhaps unlimited capacity for reproportioning these subjec­tive concepts. It is, therefore, in its subjective and con­ceptual world, essentially qualitative. It has a capacity to dream. And in the degree it resolves the events of objective experience into their qualitative ratios, it gains facility to transform qualitatively its environing world — to realize its dreams.