Spencer Heath Archive

Item 884

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum of conversation with Heath in Winchester, Virginia

July 6, 1957

It is an interesting thought I have been toying with there — that the rational order in nature came into being out of some relative disorder contrary to the entropy that is supposed to be reversing it, so far as the non-living world is concerned. I am thinking of a parallel in the organic world — that there is a building up from lower to higher and more enduring organization. Then, a further similarity in the organization of the human units. These have to be brought from a state of relative disorder among themselves into a kind of rationality similar to that of the non-human world — this through a positive element in human nature tending towards organization that we may call ethical. If we disregard this element, as materialistic science disregards organic processes, then societal organization may be thought of as coming under a moral entropy. This can be done only by disregarding the ethical element which reverses the moral entropy at the social level precisely as the life process reverses the physical entropy that operates in the exclusively physical realm.

Inorganic materials must have gotten into their present form — mechanical, physical laws — and entropy in them is a tendency to revert to disorder. This means that to hold to this entropy idea, we must not disregard living processes. When we come into the living world, we find /development up to man/ and now the human unit begins a new kind of organization because it has something in it that lesser life forms do not — a capacity for a societal organization that is creative and without which society would disintegrate. This thing in society may correspond to that which keeps the living world from running down, which in turn is what keeps the inorganic world from running down. The ethical element in human nature may well correspond with the organic element acting upon the physical world.

Trying to find an analogue.

Doing for the individual human what the organic tendency does for the inorganic material.

Notice in this a three-part nature, inorganic, organic and social. And it is not until we come to the third that the organization possesses the attributes of the divinity — the creative element.

Sunlight prompting organic out of inorganic.