Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1777

Pencil notes by Heath on notepad paper for a letter to David Dietz, Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.

No date

 

Dear Dr. Dietz:

I write you as one of the many to whom your writings have revealed a mind richly furnished with the accurate data of your own and other men’s precise experiments and observations and, more importantly, so highly gifted in its supreme power of philosophic generalization that reduces infinite diversity to a single unity or process or law. To know how the Cosmic “Energy” (action) is vibratory, pulsing, cyclic — how it pulsates from organization to disintegration to re-integration — being ceaselessly transformed and with frequencies from infinite to infinitesimal in range, yet moving ever in the direction of greater complexities and functional permanency of organization — infrequency of disintegration and repetition.

Your writings have been an aid to this conception of a positive kind of organizational entropy into longer and longer functional periods — the Cosmos becoming more and more alive — as it were. Your Chapter on “The Unity of the Universe” in The Story of Science was very suggestive of this. It first helped me to imagine the Universe as an infinite metamorphosis between two purely theoretical and hypothetical states. — From a primordial Planckian quantum in which the energy (mass and motion) is (mass) infinite and its vibration period infinitesimal to an ultimate hypothetical quantum in which the energy is similarly minimum and its corresponding period maximum. May not the whole process of the Universe of action lie between these two limiting extremes?

    On such hypothesis, every organized entity (as a quantity of action — mass motion and time) may be regarded as in rapport with the Cosmos so far as it achieves interior relationships that lower the frequency of its period (cycle) of integration and disintegration — the lengthening of its functioning wave. Thus the attainment of increasing continuity between discontinuities is the enharmonizing /?/ of the particular with the universal — of the temporal with the eternal.

    Applying this principle to the individual man, those influences of environment that tend most to his functional continuity give him the greatest abundance of life /?/ — bring him most into the continuity of the universal. But the individual man is the creature and not the creator, not the master, of his environment. His inheritance of the earth and dominion over it awaits the coming of the collective man — of a kingdom or relationship of heaven under a golden rule whose links bind men together in mutual service — in a quite objective, impersonal and universal love. As men emerge from barbarism, this high kingdom comes upon them slowly and silently, they know not how. They dream of it as afar but do not see it silently serving and growing in their midst while the wise and learned abuse and scorn it and the great and powerful ride it down.

 

/Is what follows from a different writing?/

    The free communities emergent from the barbarism of North European tribes were not founded on any relationship of ruler and ruled. They were fundamentally democratic, based on voluntary relationships alone.* Not subjection or submission, but mutual covenant, compact or contract was the integrating principle. Royalty was only to leadership, services reciprocal, servitude unknown. Without political or coercive relationships slavery could not take root /?/ in any form. Leadership used force only to protect, not to tax, rule and enslave.

    Through historians’ eyes we see