Spencer Heath Archive

Item 279

Penciling by Heath on page 28 of a pocket notepad (originals envelope of Item 274) containing many names of people met and notes from classes probably at Teachers’ College, Columbia University.

December 17, 1933?

TO STUDENTS

     I cannot instruct. Facts, information, are abundant. We collide with them constantly. You have knowledge as much or more than I. Knowledge is not creative; it is the subject-matter in which creation moves. Creation is organi­zation, process, the putting of things in order, the prac­tice of heaven’s first law.

     When I perceive your minds keen to adjust facts in orderly relations (thinking), then I am inspired to assist and encourage you in this divine (creative) facility.

     I do this by associating facts according to their resemblances and congruities and discerning in them patterns of order and function of which patterns my own mind becomes a reflection or perhaps an obverse expression. In presenting these relations to you I cause you to partici­pate in the enjoyment that you have first prompted in me.

     I don’t like to talk to you too soon about government, about industrial organization, about society and its manifold ills. There is groundwork first to be laid, a sound method of approach in our minds if we are to see things truly as they are. Only then are we ready to discern what is poten­tial, creative and permanent in the world and only by these can we draw ever nearer to the heart’s true desires.

     Every industry must rest on its science, every science upon the discernment of relations, quantitative and func­tional, static and dynamic. Long was the dream of dominion over land and sea and sky in concrete terms of desire. Achievement answers no call, nor did answer, but from the deeps where science and its authentic methods find their rise.

     So it must be with social organic advance. Not in desire alone, however fervent, can it be achieved. Yes, desire is power; the wish is the first expression of the potentiality. But it is undifferentiated power; it must be intellectualized, and this by the method of science alone — the orderly conception of facts and forces in patterns of quantity and function. And so, as science lies at the root of achievement so does mathematics, with its symbols of quantity and its diagrams of quantity-change, lie at the base of science.

     So, what must we do? First in any field of phenomena grasp a few essential facts as they are commonly recognized. Note their resemblances and differences, likeness and unlikeness, and discern functional relations. This done, we are seeing things as they are. We are in touch with reality. The pattern formed in our mind superposes on the pattern of the world. We have pleasure and we also find here the key to our desire, the desire that motivated this excursion into method.                                                                           /Breaks off/