Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2200

Penciling by Heath on a notepad, not dated but clipped together with Items 2197-2199

 

 

 

All knowledge is founded primarily on sense impression. Doubtless the inner consciousness of the newly born is organized by the genetic constitution out of the impression it receives through the senses from its outer world.

 

     Thus all knowledge is primarily empirical. As those outer impressions increase in number and variety they are more and more organized within the consciousness. This is the process of learning. Knowledge so learned has a predictive value and can guide conduct in proportion as the inner organization is in agreement with the organization inherent in the outer and objective environment, the world. Such knowledge is called wisdom; the capacity for acquiring it, intelligence. Wisdom as expressed in two unlike ways, primarily through spontaneous intuitions and secondarily through delayed reactions rising out an imaginative inner process involving comparison that is called rational, or reasoning. These inner comparisons are of two kinds: Those between experiences, situations or events that are conceived as desirable or undesirable (favorable or unfavorable to the life) and give rise to moral and esthetic preferences which take into account relationships of magnitude alone — quantity without any regard to quality.

 

     Processes involving comparison as to desirability or the reverse stimulate to action and are called emotional. Those which are based on relative magnitudes (alone) awaken an esthetic appreciation, a sensing of abstract beauty inherent in the pure order of proportionality alone, and are thus energized to develop into self-consistent modes and systems of logical and mathematical, purely quantitative and thereby purely rational thought. And when the quantities compared in a rational process are numerically measured and expressed, then there is rationality in its pure and proper meaning; for it becomes the comparison of ratios between the numbers involved.

 

     However, a process of rational thinking can never be more valid for experience than are the premises upon which it proceeds. If these be only figments of feeling and imagination or any mere abstraction, unverified in objective experience, so will be any conclusions rationally derived and no wise guidance of conduct achieved. Valid rational knowledge of the outer world, with which alone the individual can interact and thus have objective experience, can come only from processes of reasoning based on primary data that is itself drawn empirically from that same objective world. And these data must be such alone as have been found independently verifiable and tested many times. Nature must give her own true clues to the secrets she would yield.

 

     That portion of human knowledge that has been quantified in numerical terms is properly called science. Its basic character is that as knowledge of the objective world it is quantified throughout. The motivation for its pursuit is esthetic, and the application of it towards desired ends and aims, also is esthetic — a sensing of a world of good and beauty that ever lies beyond. But in method both of understanding and in the practice of that understanding it deals in quantities alone and of the ratios subsisting between those quantities as they are numerically measured and compared.

 

     Science has discovered that the world of nature is both discrete and concrete, that all unitary yet changing things or events that can be experienced are compositions of lesser units which are themselves likewise composed, until the units are no longer composite but fundamental, individual in nature, so far as the finite human capacity to react to them is concerned. Yet those fundamental units present themselves in three measurable aspects any one or two of which can be disregarded while the remaining one or two are measured in quantitative terms. All such measurements are abstractions from the concrete three-fold

concrete unity of the unit. The unlimited imagination of man is such that they can be conceived separately and independently and so treated notwithstanding that they are outside the realm of concrete human experience.

 

     These three-fold objective units of objective reality are called quanta of action, action being the inclusive term for events in general. The three separately measurable and conceivably /sic/ but objectively inseparable aspects of a unit of action (as of all other unitary events) are called mass (including force, weight, inertia, etc.), motion (including distance _________ etc.) and time (including rhythm, period, duration, frequency, etc.), and the conventional units (not at all fundamental) employed for the measurement of these three aspects of an event are the gram, the centimeter, and the second. And these three aspects are interrelated by ratios in the composition of the event. In any event, the number of mass units involved is whatever number is related to each single unit of motion. The number of motion units is whatever number of them is rated to a single unit of time. Mass-motion units taken together are a measurement of work. Where the motion is given as its ratio to time, as velocity, this taken with the measurement of mass units measures only the ratio of work per unit of time (called energy). The quantity of work at the given rate during the given period is the product of the rate of work (energy) multiplied by the number of units of time included in the given period. Energy (as a rate) times time as a period is the quantity of energy or work in action — a quantity of action, the objective side of experience which in its totality is the cosmic whole.

 

     The cosmic whole, so far as it can be experienced, is a vast congeries of interrelated events beginning /?/ with quanta of action in their various ratios as to composition of mass (or particle), motion and time but all equal (statistically at least) in their respective over-all magnitudes. These units, quantitatively alike but differently composed in their compositional ratios and thereby qualitatively unlike, enter into the free wave structures as units of high frequencies in radiant or unbound energy. These, in turn enter into the rhythmic ________________________ of which the various atoms with their highly variant frequencies of integration and disintegration are composed. These as the constituent units in myriad molecular organizations constitute the structures of the entire inorganic realm.

 

     Out of the infinite constituent complexities of the inorganic world from granite to highest atomic numbers and giant complex molecules spring the marvel of potentiality, the biological cell.

 

     At this level of organization the unit no longer preserves itself by rigid resistance to the impress of the energy of external events. It is relatively fluid. Except in dormant periods, it can maintain itself only by taking from its environment special forms of energy. Except in dormant periods, it must take on special kinds of energy and by its reaction so transform that energy as continually to reconstitute and enlarge itself in the specific pattern that is peculiar to it. Beyond this, it can reconstitute itself in duplicate and thus multiply its numbers indefinitely, so far as the conditions and circumstances of environment permit. And these organic units can so interact among themselves as to constitute higher and more complex organic unities in all the myriad forms of plant and animal life that constitute the living world. And every living form is composed of units of many kinds, from the fundamental quanta of action through to atomic and molecular to the realm of living things.

 

     At the summit of this progression stands man, the embodiment of all lesser types and forms and with potentialities and powers unique and far transcending all. These powers he has in virtue of his faculty of conception and imagination, his higher and more active consciousness than has any lesser living thing. Yet the individual man is himself the least individual and indivisible unit of his kind. And like all lesser units of organization, these human units are so diverse within their type that they come together in still higher organizational forms in which association the individuals through their interfunctioning are mutually served and move forward against the rigors of environment. Such higher units are the family, clan and tribe under the conscious bond of faith in a common ancestry. Here the organization more serves and has _________ its constituent members than do any lesser associative types or forms.

 

     Yet these organic associations of human units are not unique. They are in no wise different in structure and function from all the humbler organic and associative forms. They can do no more than maintain life at the given level; at their best, no more than stave off dissolution and death. For they are creatures, dependent on and making the best terms they can with environment by both inner and outer adjustment to it, and, in general, making the habitat, soon or late, less habitable and the level or the number of its lives decrease.

 

     The success of the so-called “social” animals, including pre-societal merely tribal man, springs from a single simple law that is common and holds good (for every organic form) from amoeba to the tribes of man, and even in the organizations of the inorganic world, namely:

/Breaks off here/