Spencer Heath Archives

Item 007

Penciled by Heath on large notepad paper. Complete item including a table.

No date

 

 

PROCESS & REALITY

     All human action is fundamentally, primordially, empirical but ultimately — eventually — rational. In this dual aspect, it corresponds with the universal, the cosmic action. Be the action physical or mental, in either there is a groundwork in some kind of units as particles and processes, premises and principles, some starting points, from which all action, all processes and events, whether physical or mental, proceed.

     Physical units are correlate to mental hypotheses, unchanging throughout whatever processes begin with and eventuate out of them.

     And the units are either absolute and incapable of analysis or derivative and composite, with reference to the system or process, physical or psychological, of which they are taken to be the originative base.

     In the physical realm all secondary or derivative and composite units are events; the ultimate units, of which all the derivative are composed, are least units respectively of mass, motion and time — the least quantity of each that is essential to combine with whatever numbers of the other two are requisite to constitute a least unit of action, a cycle or event.

 

These three ultimate physical units are themselves necessary

postulates without which there could /no/ ultimate numbers and thus no accounting for the numerical rationality, the mathematical quality, of events in the physical world.

 

     [The above was crossed out. -Editor]

    Since the mass element in an event is that number of mass units which are related to each unit of time and the motion element is the number of motion units that are related to each single unit of time, the total quantity of work (dimension) /in?/ any elementary event is the product of the numerators, the numbers, in these two ratios. And if the event is multiple, then its over-all dimension is the magnitude of the elementary event multiplied by the number of ultimate time units through which the elementary event, by its repetitions, endures or extends and thus constitutes the multiple event. The multiple event thus owes its character or quality to the proportion in which its elementary events are composed and its magnitude (in that character) to the number of time units through which by their repetitions it acts and endures.

 

    Those are taken as elementary events which are composed of not more than a single ultimate unit in at least one or, at the most, two of its categories of mass, motion and time. It may be composed of single units in one or two of these categories but not in all; for in such case there could be no variety in the composition of ultimate events and none of the heterogeneity that so obviously characterizes the general physical world and is both cause and effect in the phenomenon of evolution.

 

    It must be emphasized that the three basic and ultimate units here referred to and the least units of action into which they can be composed do not necessarily come into the range of human sensory reactions. They are, however, rational deductions from the data of sense experience when analyzed to its quantitative extreme.

    First, why must there be in nature any ultimate units of mass, motion and time? And, second, how can they be identified as such.

     As to the first, and as already suggested, there can be no ratios between quantities except their respective magnitudes be expressed in numbers, and numbers can be expressed only in some specific units. Synthetic multiplicity depends on analytic unity. And as rationality depends on numbers, and numbers depend on units, then ultimate ration­ality must depend on ultimate units. If we question there being ultimate units we must cast doubt on the ultimate rationality of the cosmos; and this our innate sense of rationality (as part of our consciousness, apart from hopes and fears) forbids us to do. And sense of rationality, this mathematical sense, so far as it has developed, is uniform and alike in all men’s minds — a prime datum of consciousness.

 

    As to the second, how can the ultimate units of mass, motion and time, granting the necessity of their existence, be identified as such. The answer lies in the fact that whereas events always present themselves to our senses as unities, they are nevertheless analyzable by our minds into three measurable elements or aspects. This demonstrates to us that events, although they present themselves to us as unities, are themselves composite of mass, motion and time. This last is what proves that action is itself composite. But none of these elements is itself analyzable. The aspect of mass may be identified with weight (gravity) or inertia (momentum) or it may be hypothesized /?/ as “force,” but it always acts in such manner as to induce or counteract motion and does not manifest any property unlike /?/ to this. Mass presents but one aspect of action (as related to motion) and not any other. Motion, likewise, though dependent on mass (genetic), is but another aspect of action (as related to time) and not any other. Time, however, is the absolute aspect of action. Though dependent on motion, it is not related to any fourth or further aspect of action. If there be any fourth aspect, it does not impinge on any mechanism of the senses, and while such may be conceived as a bare abstraction not founded on any matter of sense, it must exist, if at all, without any basis in and, unlike mass, motion and time, wholly outside the realm of objective experience. Time, however, is the element of proceeding without which there could be no irreversible succession of action or events, only a death-like stasis and no evolutionary progression.

 

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Commentary by Alvin Lowi, Jr.

III, IV A-2, 3 & 5

      B-1, 2 & 4

 

SUBJECT:  PROCESS & REALITY (Heath’s title). Units and premises analogy. Absolute and derivative (composite) quantities. Least units defined. Introduction to the combination of units. Rationality as a cosmic “given”—a prime datum of consciousness.

 

REMARKS:  Continuation of development empirical -> rational. Combination of units needs further analysis and concentration. Table of Numbers (products?) Unclear