Spencer Heath Archive

Item 30

Verbatim notes by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath.

No date

     That free will business has stumped everybody who has come /in contact with it/, and I think the reason has been that it is essentially, even though unconsciously, an anthropomorphic idea. Determinism, causation, free will, all these terms imply something that is determining, causing, willing. Take man out of the picture, there’s little evidence of any causative will except the evidence that man himself supplies, to wit, that there is a cosmic will from which the human will, like every other human attribute, is derived. However, man can only know the cosmic will through its manifestation in the human will. The uniformities that science formulates, he must take as executions of the cosmic will. But the only will he knows, or can know, must be a finite, not the absolute, will; namely, his own. Don’t you think that clears up the idea of causation?

/Do you?/

 

     Some would say, I’m working on both sides of the street, and I am. But I’m not mixing or confusing them. The absolute belongs to pure form, pure logic, pure reason. It transcends not the imagination, the conceptual powers of man, but all his experience or possible experience. For all his powers and capacities are derived and limited — except his capacity to imagine or conceive.

 

/And with some people that seems

to be pretty limited./

 

     Imagination? Yes, it is. — Causation, so far as finite experience is concerned, must postulate a finite, causative will. Now I think that sets it off and clears it up.

     I told you that causation was a human conception, postulated a human will, just as I began in these remarks. The mind of God operating around me is the cause of my thinking as I do when I understand it. My thought becomes a part of the divine or cosmic thoughts. Entertain­ing this divine thought, I can re-impress it upon my world of experience, thereby creating events. Or, re-composing the rational elements, I can re-impress it in new patterns and forms differing from those in which it came to me. By this reverse process, I can both reduplicate what nature has done or I can recreate in a form that my own nature decrees. The whole proceeding is a part of the cosmic will. I, myself, am a part of the cosmos, and my will is a part of the cosmic will, but it is nevertheless my will. I am the cause.

 

     That kind of thinking is only made possible by giving up zeros and infinities, both of which lie outside the realm of objective human experience. See, the subjective, imaginative part of us can /run/ to zeros and infinities and back and forth.

 

/I don’t see the sequitur./

    

     There is only one thing left unproved there, Spencer, and that is that our imagination is capable of infinitudes whereas our experience is not. Do you see it that way?

/Not very clearly, I mean I don’t see how zero and infinity ties into will and causation./

     The division between the cosmic and the merely human is the division between the infinite and the finite. Without this division, the paradox of causation and of freedom is not resolved. It may be argued that the conceptual faculties themselves are finite. If this be granted, it still remains that the materials which experience confers upon conception are so vastly multifarious that their permutations and combinations, when recomposed in human thought, provide a virtually endless field. (That’s some­thing of a concession, theoretically, but it’s sort of a sop for those who have an allergy against the imagination being infinite, having infinite capacity.)