Spencer Heath Archive

Item 220

Penciling by Heath on notepad paper

Fall, 1958

     In sum, the physical world is rational. Hence the two elements of its action or events, to be related rationally, must be numerical, and to be numerical must be composed of units, and to be ultimately and altogether rational at all magnitudes it must be constituted of ultimate units of mass, motion and time. And these ultimate units that can combine into an event will be no less than one in each category, as between one event and another, but with multiple units in any or all of them then there could be as many kinds of and proportions of events as the total product of the units could be divided among the three. But

     In sum, for any given number of mass-motion units, as energy or action units, per single unit of time there could be as many kinds and varieties of mass-motion propor­tion in the composition of the energies

     In sum, the physical world is rational. It is composed of ever acting and reacting, of interacting, events in such variety of proportions as the product of the maximum combinable number of mass units times the maximum number of combinable motion units. And if either of these two numbers should be indefinitely large, then the number of possible proportions would be expanded indefinitely.

 

     These differences of proportion are accompanied by many differences in the over-all magnitudes of the events, beginning with the least, in which only one unit of mass is related to but one unit of motion. There are no grounds on which to infer any other minimum in nature as a whole.

     But with human nature it is otherwise. Our capacity and possibility for objective and sensory experience is vastly limited. Just as our physical lives as cycles or events composed of mass, motion and time are far from infinite in any of these constituent elements or aspects, so all our capacities for objective experience are similarly restricted. Our tactile and our olfactory and gustatory senses do not extend below gross magnitudes of mechanical and chemical events; our auditory and visual faculties do not extend beyond narrow ranges of energy and frequency in light and sound. We cannot perceive energy or action in any form except in magnitudes or an order comparable to our own; and the quantum principle discloses a definite limit, a unit of energy or action less than which does not manifest itself in our world of objective experience. But this gives no ground on which to infer the same or any like limitation as affecting the whole physical world. It gives no data on which to conclude that the magnitudes of nature are coterminous with our capacity to experience them.

     Moreover, our conceptual and our rational capacities and powers are under no such limitations as our physical and sensory. We can conceive and mathematically symbolize and describe a wholly unlimited range of quantities and rela­tionships. If there is such a thing as a universal mind having the same intimate relationship to the physical uni­verse that the human mind has to its particular physical counterpart, then the human psyche well may be regarded as a derivative portion of the universal mind and so intimately that but for it the universal would of necessity /be/ less than universal — precisely as the physical aspect of nature would be less than universal did it not include also the physical aspect of man. Indeed the sub-conscious and rational capacities of the human mind, transcending all the physical limitations of mass, motion and time, gives enormous ground for imputing a universal psyche no less than a universal soma to the objective world whence both psyche and soma must of necessity be derived.

(Powers of the human psyche to

explore the sub-quantal realm)

     The notable advances of the sciences, the great breakthrough into the unknown, have come from the operations of the human psyche upon data derived through sense from the objective world. Upon these data as hypotheses the rational faculty extrapolates data that often lie beyond the realm of sense such as the entire electro-magnetic spectrum beyond the range of sight and sound. The whole field of non-mechanical communications — action-at-a-distance — consists in employing means for converting sensory events into sub-sub-sensory and reconverting them — transferring the energy — into magnitudes that are accessible to sense. The intervening energy can be rationally understood and mathematically described. It can be experienced subjectively by the mind but not by the senses until it is suitably transformed into grosser magnitudes. The magnet

                                      /Breaks off/