Spencer Heath Archive

Item 865

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath on the road between New York and Baltimore, reading F.H. Harper’s SEQUOYAH on assumptions.

December 1, 1955

Original is in item 860.

It is a logical assumption that quanta are complex, because otherwise the earlier knowledge and belief is self-contradictory. Quanta cannot be energy, or power, and at the same time not contain the ingredients which have been previously described as composing energy and power. Some assumptions are necessary ones. Then they may be called conclusions, if they are made necessary by other assumptions which have been verified in experience.

I am mighty glad that before publishing this book /Citadel, Market & Altar/, I have identified the quantum with the human indivisible individual.

“Well, hadn’t you done that before — essentially?”

I hadn’t expressed it, hadn’t brought it out in the book I have of it came after the last writing I had done. /sic/ I couldn’t get that conception clear in my head for some days, as you remember. I only had it in a vague fashion, in an intuitive fashion. I made it clear in that “Prefatory Note.” A number of people who had criticized it said that I did not show the connection between the physical things and the social — that I had not bridged the “abyss.”