Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2845

Transcription by Spencer MacCallum of tape recording of an interview with Heath at Claremont Men’s College on the life sciences. Present were Heath, Spencer MacCallum, and Professors Blaustone, Guliserian, and Mangum. Does not appear to be the complete interview.

No date

 

 

Blaustone:  I’ll stay out of this conversation as much as possible, because the only thing I know about biology is, well, Henry’s collection of shells.

 

SH:  Are we off?

 

Blaustone:  We’re off. And running.

 

SH:  About all I know about it is, it’s a live topic. (Laughter)

 

Mangum:  Do you have quite an interest in life science?

 

SH:  Yes. Science itself is extremely interesting, being in modern times a more and more significant part of life, and being somewhat segregated from life in general, in the minds of most people.

 

Mangum:  The physical sciences perhaps are more segregated than the life sciences.

 

SH:  The interest, of course, is at the present time centering on the physical sciences. But over time generally, we are always more interested in life than in anything else.

 

Guliserian:  But we depend so much upon the physical sciences for our life sciences..

 

SH:  Yes, and I think that’s a very wonderful dependence, because physical science is dealing with simpler data. Less complex data are susceptible of philosophic understanding — not merely knowledge, /but/ deep understanding of elements, the essentials — the a prioris, I might call it — of the physical sciences. That gives us more authentic data, probably, for understanding the universe — or the cosmos, I prefer to call it — in its other aspects. And particularly in that aspect called life, which is so dear to ourselves.

 

Guliserian:  Such a complex thing, life is.

 

SH:  Yes.

 

Guliserian:  It’s unbelievable, I think, that Mr. Mangum and myself, the more we study about life, the more we realize that it’s just so compli­cated.

 

SH:  Well of course, anything that we don’t understand is complicated. Like the multiplication table. It would be utter mystery to a person first introduced to it. Yet it becomes perfectly simple /as we come to understand it,/ no matter how complex.

 

[Interruption in the tape]

 

SH:  The life sciences are of paramount interest because if there is anything that we can take for primary data — or I might even say datum — it is life: we are alive.

 

Mangum:  Of course this is really the hard thing to describe.

 

SH:  There has been a new approach, I think it’s fairly new, in modern times anyway. The name of Percy Bridgman is associated with it: the operative test. Not what a thing is, but how it acts. That’s what tells the story; by their works ye shall know them. And science, since Darwin especially, has been examining different aspects of the cosmos in terms of how they operate — of how they work.

 

Mangum:  Yes, in fact I would say it has only been in the last twenty years, perhaps, that there has really been any emphasis on this, and just recently in certain parts of it.

 

SH:  Of course we are very much committed to the pathological view of things, always trying to find out how things don’t work — giving us a great deal of information on how not to do it. But the real progress that science has made, it seems to me has come exclusively from finding out how nature operates at the different levels, and then finding out our capacity to take a part in that operation. To take a part in that operation, the first necessity is not to experience it, merely, not merely to perceive events, but to conceive them — to consider them. What Emerson calls, “give intelligent consideration.” That intelligent consideration, then, incorporates us in a part of the cosmos in an understanding way so that we can work with it — as we can work with one another when we make contracts, engagements with one another, and fulfill them — the bringing about new events, new cosmic order, order in the universe that wouldn’t be there but for our so relating ourselves to one another as to create order — which, of course, means to create life. Because that’s one proper definition, I think, of life, that it’s order — more and more order.

 

 The more and more abundant life can be taken as poetic expression of more and more of the cosmic order. Some have generalized that up to the point of thinking it’s the Divinity, realizing Himself, by the increasing order throughout the — what is it Tennyson says, “Throughout the ages one increasing purpose runs, the minds of men are broadened by the process of the suns?” That can be coupled up with the philosophic ideal of individual self realization as a special department of the Cosmic realization of Itself.

 

Blaustone:  The problem here, then, as far as we’re concerned as teachers, is trying to get a point like this across to students that many times cannot be stimulated other than to think of life as being something to have a good time or get through as easily as you can.

 

SH:  That’s the _______ of life. You see, there are two departments of life. In biology of course you are familiar with the phenomenon of mutation, which broadly speaking means that life has evolved up to a certain species, perhaps has evolved up to a certain level of internal organization, which enables it to make better terms with its external environment, and suddenly, as though it had been accumulating for a long, long time, it bursts out into new potentialities, new functions it had never exhibited before. And there is a fresh start in nature, representing the discontinuity principle, perhaps, not only in physics but in biology as well. A mutation might be called discontinuity. To me, the most interesting discontinuity, and the most significant to us all, is the discontinuity between the highest animal form and the lowest human form. There must have been a tremendous mutation there, because as the legend says, the later form has new characteristics. A divine breath was blown into him and he became a living soul, and was invested with dominion over all other things — especially all other living things. So I sometimes think that the evolutionists started at the _____ physical evolution, and animal evolution, but at a certain level, which has been worked out very minutely by the natural scientists. But they have tried to make a continuum, from there across into the human world, when the legend says that there was a distinct break at that point — new powers and potentialities.

 

Mangum:  Well did they mean a distinct break — it depends on how you interpret this — a distinct break in structure, or a distinct break in the fact that it received a soul?

 

SH:  I was about to say, in potentialities..

 

Mangum:  Oh.

 

SH:  Because this new form, this new mutation, had powers and functions not possessed by the old. The animal world, the world of creatures, conditioned by their environment, absolutely, have no power to improve their environment but only power to deteriorate it, diminish its usefulness to them. And so all forms of life below man are under sentence of death, exhibited by the fact that they must prey upon one another in order to subsist. They don’t create anything. All they can eat, then, is eat each other, or eat each other’s food, which according to Malthus is the same thing.

 

Mangum:  Sure, the purpose there is to stay alive and reproduce.

 

Guliserian:  And keep the balance of nature.

 

SH:  To eat without being eaten. I think that’s the way it’s often phrased. So I, if I might call myself a biologist, which I’m not of course in any technical sense, my special interest is in that phase of evolution which begins with man as man, distinguished from less than man, following Pope’s essay, I think it was, “The proper study of mankind, is man” — not the anthropoids, not those who are on the way to becoming man perhaps, and perhaps never arriving. But there is a distinct species, known as man, in the biological world, and some say that he enters into the spiritual world, that is, the world of a creator, because he has the power of understanding things — not merely perceptions but also conceptions, and through giving intelligent consideration to his perceptions, he can reverse the process and put his impact upon the environment itself. He is a creator. So I like to think that in biology man belongs in a special class, the only creative power — and thereby the only spiritual power, because the characteristic of all the divinities of course is that they are the creators of things. So when man conceives some­thing, has a dream of it, he can make it in his own image — as he images it. So modern man, man whom I think we can most fruitfully study, would be man in his capacity as a creator — and so I might say in his spiritual capacity, to emulate his own creator. If we could draw that distinction more clearly and more frequently we would be doing well at following Plato’s maxim, “He shall be as a god to me who can rightly define and divide.” So if we can define and divide man from the lessor orders of creation — make that our beginning point — we’ll find out more about man. We might not find out as much about the anthropoids and still lower forms, but if we are interested — as biologists — in the human form of life, I think we should begin at where life took the human form, and the human potentialities which are so remarkable.

 

Guliserian to MacCallum:  With that statement, he kind of lets you out, doesn’t he?

 

MacCallum:  I was just going to say: let the anthropologists take this particular interest in man.

 

SH:  I think that’s very hopeful, that anthropology is giving more and more attention…

 

Mangum:  I was just wondering, what do you mean by different class from the other animals? Do you mean divorce him from the other animals just in study, or…

 

============================= 1:

 

SH:  Just as a mutant is different from its predecessors, so man can be regarded as a mutant in the world of creation.

 

MacCallum:  Of course there remains the physical side of man to be studied in biology, and I think physical anthropology in some places is coming to be called human biology.

 

Blaustone:  You mean the evolution of the physical frame per se.

 

MacCallum:  Physical anthropology is getting much more sophisticated than it used to be. It is largely interested in genetics just now and a good many things.

 

SH:  This grandson is stealing some of my thunder, of course. (Laughter) Which is a happy thing. Grandparents are always happy to have their grandchildren follow in their footsteps. It’s quite a compliment for them to do that. They’re not always so ready to do it. But I’m very serious in my interest that anthropology is becoming more and more concerned with man per se, even contemporary man, and especially contemporary man. And of course when anthro­pologists pursue that field, they are trenching on the field of the sociologist.

 

Mangum:  They certainly are.

 

SH:  But what I like about them is that whereas sociologists are so much concerned with what’s wrong with us, and trying to find out so much about our social diseases, and our inadequacies and our dangers and terrors, out of which I don’t think we can get any technology — and I mean that — the anthropologists are beginning not only to gather data and factual material, but they are beginning to interpret it. They’re beginning not only to know, but to understand. And all things to be understood have to be understood in terms of their function, how they act; as in all things, “By their works, shall ye know them.” And until we understand life and all things that science concerns itself with, any science, we must understand how it works. Until we learn the function of the thing, its structure and all its other peculiarities we may observe can have no significance for us, no worthwhile significance — till we know the function.

 

Blaustone:  Mr. Mangum mentioned here a minute ago about how the more study is made of life itself, the more complicated it seems to become. What is the ultimate goal here, though?

 

Mangum:  To answer what is life.

 

SH:  Let’s think in the contrary direction for a moment. The more we understand anything, the less complicated it seems. We only call things complicated when we don’t understand them.

 

Blaustone:  That is true to a certain extent, but..

 

SH:  If we take the Biblical injunction, “With all thy gettings,

get understanding,” then when we understand things, we can

become creative participants in them. As when we understand our

fellow man, we can make contracts with him and do each other mutual good — through understanding and serving him, have a meeting of our minds, as in all ordinary business transactions.

Guliserian:  That’s very true.

 

SH:  The principle applies throughout all nature, I believe.

 

Guliserian:  We found that in the initial stages of any investigation, let’s say of a simple thing like the cell, it all looks very simple. It’s the basic unit of structure and what have you. Now many, many years later after the nineteen-hundreds when they first observed this, we find it is so intricate and that in the last three years, let’s say, they /find/ with the advent of electron microscopy that things are so intricate, so involved, so biochemically involved, we realize that we know a lot about the cell but we haven’t even scratched the surface.

 

 SH: So in the nineteenth century we knew all about the cell and we built upon it. We learned all the higher forms of complexity. We didn’t begin with the cell and go downward into it.

 

 Mangum:  That’s right. Of course at that time they couldn’t too well.

 

 Guliserian:  No, they didn’t have the techniques we have now. Our techniques today may be archaic — well, they will be — in the next ten or fifteen years. Everything has just improved so significantly.

 

SH:  It’s interesting to speculate. And it’s not vain to speculate, because all speculation is hypothesis you know, and without that you can’t proceed at all, in any science. So we have to hypothesize, if that’s the right way to say it, the things about the cell and find its constitution, its ingredients and so on. At the beginning of this century we discovered to our amazement that even the atom itself was a composite affair, made up of the most innumerable subunits within itself.

 

Guliserian:  Yes it’s just not electron and proton anymore!

 

SH:  And then at the very beginning of this century comes that amazing discovery that even these compositional ingredients of atoms were complex, complicated of a still more simple unit, called Planck’s constant, the building blocks of the universe — all quantitatively precisely alike in quantity, but of infinite variety in their composition. The Planckian unit of course is only an almost infinitely small subdivision of an erg second, any quantity of energy or action. And being composed of the same three elements, like the gram, centimeter and the second, it has the same constitution as the erg second, this tiny fraction has. And so it gives us a quantitative unit as a building block, but the shape, composition or quality of these units are in infinite variety, based upon some lesser unit still. Of course there has to be an end to that..

 

Blaustone:  Where is it? (Laughter)

SH:  Well, I think we are getting close to it, but that’s for physicists to tell us more about — finding an absolute unit, less than which will not unite with the other two to form a quantum of action or energy. When we discover those basic units, we will then have the fundamental of the cosmos. — An obscure statement, I know.

 

MacCallum:  Mightn’t it not be the fundamental of that part of the cosmos that comes within the range of our experience?

 

SH:  Thank you for the correction; I approve of it.

 

MacCallum:  As my grandfather has said sometimes, it is an interesting idea that, just as we have a range in the spectrum of light waves that we can perceive with our eye, we being finite beings, we might hypothesize that there is a range to our experience, as finite beings in the totality.

 

Mangum:  This is true.

 

SH:  So we can only expect to understand that which is within our range..

 

Mangum:  That’s right.

 

SH: Our finite range, because we ourselves are finite.

 

MacCallum:  So it’s getting down to the building block of that range.

 

SH:  Of that part of nature. Yes. The smallest brick — although of many kinds and shapes — the smallest brick that can enter into that part of the cosmos which impresses itself upon our sensory system. Or perhaps upon our psychic system as well, all of which are limited. They can’t know anything beyond their own inherent capacities.

 

Mangum:  That’s right.

 

SH:  So with all our study of the life sciences, or the physical, the range of our possible discovery is limited as we are, physically and otherwise, are all less than infinite. We can hardly speculate beyond that. But __________________ to find out about things there. And if what we exhibit there is life, as we agree, then the more we understand about life, the better lives we can live. And the better lives we can live means the longer lives we can live.

 

Guliserian:  That’s true.

 

SH:  Man alone can do that, because he has been endowed with a power to change his environment, make his habitat more and more habitable instead of less so, as other animals have to do. Man’s peculiar in that. He is divine in that sense as a creator. But there’s a curious catch about that; if he’s going to be a creator, he has to do what the biological cells have to do. If they want to have higher potentialities than the single cell, they have to combine with one another. They have a kind of a valence, as we used to call it, by which they make contracts, engagements to benefit, do good to each other — not promises not to harm one another, like treaties, covenants, but positive engagements to do good reciprocally to each other. And so just as the biological cells engage themselves to one another to make the higher, more complex forms of life, with higher powers and potentialities as in us, so.. /Long pause/

 

Guliserian:  Some time ago a noted physiologist, the name passes me at the time, made a statement that the human body is built on a plan to last in the vicinity of 165 years — assuming of course there was no stress involved.

 

SH:  Sometimes they say 120, don’t they?

 

Guliserian:  Well, no, this is more — without stress.

 

SH:  Isn’t this curious. In the sixth chapter of the Bible and I think sixth verse, in that neighborhood, if I can quote it —

“Saith the Lord, my spirit shall not always strive with man, for he also is flesh. Yet the number of his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.” Quite close to biology, isn’t it?

 

Mangum:  That’s right. I had seen this 120 quoted before, and I’ve forgotten how they based it now, but something upon the lives of other animals and the size of bones and so forth, they came out with 120. I’m probably wrong on how they did this.

 

SH:  It’s sometimes given as six times the period from birth to maturity. Now man would be about six times twenty, it would be 120. That’s been suggested, and verified to some extent.

 

Mangum:  Well it’s possible. It’s been well proven for 110 or 115, because there have been actual cases of this. In fact, I read in the paper the other day where some population of mountain people — did you read that?

 

Guliserian:  Yes.

 

Mangum:  ..all live to be about 110. That seems to be the age. I don’t know how true it is, but I read that.

 

Guliserian:  They’re isolated, and they are…

 

SH:  Not forgetting Old Parr, in England, the Shropshire lad who is supposed to have lived to 158 when the physicians and so on examined him in London? The London air wasn’t good for him, and he passed out at 158. (Laughter)

 

Mangum:  From what I’ve heard of that air, I can believe it.

 

Guliserian:  What about, based on the standard from, oh say from the turn of the century till now, how they have prolonged man’s life?

 

SH:  That’s the most remarkable phenomenon of modern times, and the most significant.

 

Guliserian:  It’s true.

 

Blaustone:  During the last fifty years this has happened. What about the sixties? Are there any records in ancient times — Rome, Greece and the Golden Age — where man was living beyond..didn’t Socrates live to be 86 or something like this?

 

SH:  I’ve seen some tabulations about this..

 

Mangum:  Yes, there are examples. When they usually quote ages, it’s always average, and they’ll say that they averaged 40 years or something like that.

 

SH:  I’ve seen some figures lately, and I don’t remember the source, but they tabulate in Roman times, early Empire perhaps, the time of galley slaves and so on, that the population as a whole — not picking out galley slaves or peculiar individuals — that it was way down in the low twenties.

 

Guliserian:  Yes, they had a very high mortality rate.

 

SH:  And the average life span or expectancy has trebled

probably — more than trebled — since those days.

 

Mangum:  Well you still have countries such as India and the Orient and Africa where all the ­­­_______ say that 30 and 35 would be an average.

 

SH:  That figure has been increasing somewhat lately.

 

Mangum:  It has lately, yes.

 

SH:  You know, they’ve been importing something from us that the

headlines don’t tell us about. Slowly, and almost imperceptibly,

they have been doing what /Sir Henry Sumner/ Maine called emerging from status into contract. And so far as they have been emulating us — and I don’t mean living on us by our charity — so far as they have been following in our footsteps, without realizing it perhaps, they have been practicing more of the free enterprise technique and making contracts with one another. Contracts, of course, benefit both parties — that’s why they keep on making them — and that gives them the power of division of labor and all that, which gives us our physical technology, and this physical technology is then employed in the technology of relating ourselves contractually to one another — without which we couldn’t make any use of our physical technology. And so I think that the glory of man today is in his practice of the reciprocal interfunctioning, to mutual benefit, one with another, which characterizes all of our economic system as distinguished from our political system. The political system I think could be fairly said to be precisely the opposite, in which the public authority and its officers are constantly and characteristically doing to others exactly what they wouldn’t wish others to do unto them (laughter), including taxation and war and all such things. Whereas our economic system, which has been getting less attention, perhaps frightening us less, and being less frightening goes on without any headlines supplying the power for all the good that we do — and for all the evil that we do. I would like to see our allegiance concentrating more upon our creative side of life, rather than upon the political side which is so terribly destructive, generally — and especially at certain times, called war. Chronically destructive when it prevents men practicing the creative relationship, which was prescribed for them in certain, more or less revered, legends, that they should do unto each other as they would have the other do unto them — and in a manner that satisfies both parties and lifts both to a higher and more secure level. So all the security we have, it seems to me, certainly is not political security. We don’t feel much political security. But what we have is really social security. And by that I mean the security we get by social as distinguished from political relationships — social relationships being reciprocal. And in all biological success, the elements involved practice reciprocal relationships. When the relationships are other than reciprocal like our contracts, even the uranium atom, by reason of the particles contained within it colliding with one another, is disintegrating, disappearing into the lesser order of things, in fact by the process called entropy — falling back into the homogeneity, the lesser differentiated, the reverse of evolution, the reverse of growth and development. So we have a vast opportunity now, and we are practicing it so far, that it is becoming more and more signifi­cant every day how important it is that we should preserve our social organization, and not concentrate too much of our attention, and especially our fears — and even our resistance — to evil.

 

But rather we should try to overcome the evil in our lives by the practice of the good. And so if we can cultivate and expand our economic system, our voluntary system and our creative system or side of life, as we expand that side of life, necessarily that draws the energy away from politics and war. Because we can’t use the same horsepower for two purposes. Our vital powers have to go into creation or into destruction, we can’t extirpate or annihilate it. So what we do not use creatively necessarily remains in the primitive form, of the animal limitations — disintegration.

 

I’m happy to see that our economic system today is expanding in the direction of great organizations of vast wealth in the form of real estate, concentrating in corporate forms much as other forms of capital have concentrated with so much fruitful results, as you know. And this now, this new concentration, has been in the womb of time of course forever; but it is combining real estate into great communities, administered by the owners, related to the inhabitants only through the contract relationship. Nothing like taxation or violence. The administration of a volun­tary community — like a hotel, or a shopping center, or any large or small area under one dominion, one ownership, corporate or otherwise..

 

MacCallum:  The new industrial parks and real estate complexes are..

 

SH:  Great varieties. It’s burgeoning now. It’s the great phenomenon of the present time. Not too many perhaps realize that when we extend these communities, far and wide, and they all make money — otherwise they pass out; they have to make money to survive. Political communities don’t have to make any money except to counterfeit money, or print what they call money, to survive.

 

These new communities are making money by giving services, through the contractual process. And they are bringing us into a new order of public life. Because as they become more and more widespread, these self-sustaining communities, operating under the golden rule instead of the iron rule, they will gradually — through the profit motive, if we must say it — will gradually be introducing the golden rule into our public affairs. So we can envision the day, and it may not be far away — as aviation wasn’t far away when I was crazy for dreaming of it even. It may not be many decades away. It is rising on all sides. These profit-making communities are performing municipal services successfully — in the way that the inhabitants enjoy them and value them so much so that they give, in the form of rent, the equivalent of what they are getting. And this provides, as in all such communities, it provides a natural fund for performing these services which are in this manner requited.

 

Mangum:  It is certainly true. I had never thought of that.

 

SH:  In my view, we are getting into a new biological age. I might almost dare to call it Utopian. Because if we consider its basic principle, the rationale of it, it has the potential capacity to eliminate violence from all our public affairs — because it will eliminate the violent seizing of property in order to maintain the services. The hotel corporation doesn’t seize anybody’s property in order to maintain the hotel services. Nor does the shopping center seize anybody’s property or infringe anybody’s liberty in order to maintain the services of the shopping center. Those services are so good that more and more people are being attracted there, giving us a self-sustaining type of community. And these run out, as my grandson says, into industrial parks, and oh, I think warehousing, even the humble places where mobile homes stop are supplied with municipal services — police and fire protection, water and electricity and all that sort of thing — and I’m told that, I think it’s tens, or possibly scores of billions of dollars have gone to be invested just in those places — which are communities because they have a common defense. You know your Latin? Com–munito, which means, a common defense, and a common protection. That protection that these temporary-home people get is so invaluable to them that what they pay for it capitalizes into many billions of dollars at the present day. Well that little humble example, not mentioning these hundreds and even thousands of acres in some shopping centers and general communities and housing communities operated by the life insurance companies providing streets and water and all those things — not counting these more elaborate things, just this little humble thing of a safe place for a mobile home to spend a day or a night, or a year, and I think they average between one and two years, the principle is so all-pervading, and it’s rising around us as I see it, and I’m trying to be a prophet now as I was in aviation, seeing things in terms of their function, no matter how humble they may be. When they function in a creative manner, then we know we have potentiality there. So I’m really envisioning a growing brand-new civilization which will not be a house divided against itself, one side of it creating wealth and the other side, certainly not creating any because it does not practice the contract relationship, and destroying a great deal of the wealth that is created.

 

Guliserian:  This being true, Mr. Heath, in a material sense how do you suppose this could be brought about in a quicker fashion?

 

SH:  The mills of the gods are said to grind slowly. But the only reason I ever saw them grinding slowly was because we didn’t understand how they were grinding.

 

Mangum:  Yes, that’s true.

 

Blaustone:  That’s true.

 

SH:  As fast as we understand such matters as I have just been

adverting to, they’ll grind faster and faster, of course. We proceed empirically, feeling our way, not understanding until after we’ve done it. We don’t act as we think, altogether. We have to act successfully and understand that, and then we can think successfully. But if we try to think out an economic system or any kind of a machine or anything de novo, I might say, why, we haven’t anything to base it on. The inductive approach is: “What’s already working? Let’s get its rationale.” And then we can take that rationale in hand and become creators and then we can really speed things up. Aviation and the automobile got speeded up that way. Chemistry got that way after Dalton and Mendeleev. They got the rationale and the arithmetic of it. And when they got this rationale, why then we could go ahead and practice those things which nature had been doing on her own, under our eyes unseeingly. When we opened our eyes to the rationale, then we could become creators. Take the hand; now we can synthesize anything that nature..

 

Blaustone:  I was pointing, sir. Creation. As you know in our last discus­sion, with physics, we entered into a realm of differences of opinion. I really don’t think it was so much that as it was defining of terms again. How do you feel about this element of creation? Is there nothing new on earth, or do you feel there is? [Addressing M or G?]

 

SH:  May I answer that question?

 

Blaustone:  Sure! Anybody. I just threw it out for…

 

SH:  _________ is the basis of our cosmos, be it Planck’s quantum or any subdivision of that, it is susceptible of probably limitless different kinds and forms of composition, organization. It is the new relationship between things. That is the new thing under the sun, always more and more, newer and newer. The basic physical ingre­dient, as you might say, or objective ingredient, just considered as something in being, and not as process..

 

Blaustone:  Then it’s a case of organization.

 

SH:  It’s a case of organization. Life is organization.

 

Blaustone:  Then creation, not in the sense that we are creating a new chemical element so much as taking this chemical element in relation to something more..

 

SH:  The wood in this table, and the elements in it and all, are absolutely old, probably as Fred Hoyle says, with no beginning and no end, ________. But the composition in this table is unique, and susceptible of infinite variation. So the new things in the world are the new types in which things are organized. And so the new thing among men is the new types in which they are organized. Primitive man is organized on the basis of violence, cannibalism, or war, principally, outside of the kinship bond; and modern man has learned the contractual relationship, the golden rule relationship. And he has to a large extent outgrown the primitive iron-rule relationship.

 

Guliserian:  so.

 

SH:  And so the relationship of contract was a new thing under the sun. But the men, the ingredients, the capital that was employed — physical things — were as old as nature herself. But nature is always, as Nietzsche said, “Saith Life, I am that which must always transcend itself.” So by higher and higher organization, cells transcend themselves by associating themselves with other cells. You have a new composition. All this composition, all this organiza­tion into higher functioning, that is new under the sun. And what characterizes that is that one of the ingredients of the events which we are talking about — and of course all organization /is?/ of events. It seems to me that ontology has to recede and give way to process, as according to Whitehead, which is events. And the, I was going to say, “prime,” but the ultimate ingredient in any event is the time element — how long does it continue. Plato and Saint Paul said that is most real which is most enduring. And so with all this change in organization, those organizational forms which most endure are the most real. And nature is always giving us novelty in that way. And modern biologists are characterizing life now as that which is not under absolute physical determinism. It always has variety; no two cells are exactly alike. And in this variety, we have opportunity to choose. If we didn’t have any variety in nature, there would be no choice — by us or anybody else. But by reason of living things, as distinguished from the non-living things, and especially man, the variety in life gives scope for the free will in man to exercise itself creatively and to approach the same potentialities and powers of his Creator, and himself become a creator.

/Breaks off here/