Spencer Heath Archive

Item 745

Taping by Spencer MacCallum during conversation with Heath.

May 14, 1956

Original is in item 744.

/IDEALS, OTHER WORLDS/

Human nature is finite and not absolute. Everything tells us this. Human experience, therefore, must be confined to some zone or octave, as it were, between zero and infinity, albeit ever a growing octave. While the objective life of man is so limited, his subjective or conceptual life is under no such bounds. He can imagine less and less of any aspect of life indefinitely, or as nothing at all. Similarly, he can imagine more and more to an indefinite or infinite and absolute degree. But his imagination must work upon the raw data of objective experience. It will not entertain anything fundamentally different in kind.

     Yet the service of imagination is transcendent. For it is the source of ideals — for these are wrought always out of happy experiences magnified to the nth or absolute degree. So our ideals can never be fully experienced as such, but they give us direction — light and leading towards life and life more abundant and always in higher yet never in absolute degree. Ideals are pole stars, never to be obtained, yet forever guiding to the haven of our dreams.

     The objective world is the only world we can experience, and our experience must be finite, however extended. The world of our dreams is the same kind of world, but free from quantitative limitations. Whether there are octaves or zones entirely above or below that in which we live, we cannot know. Yet we cannot resist a conviction that if such worlds there be, they must possess the same Rationality as the world in which we live and move.

     Nor need we suppose that other zones of objective reality are qualitatively the same as ours. They may be different not only in magnitude but also in kind, and if there be such other worlds, the probability is a probability not of there being one or a few others but of an infinitude of others, infinite not only in quantities but infinite also in kinds. We see only as through a glass darkly. But what light we do have gives earnest not only of other lives but of infinitudes of them.