Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1986     

Pencil notes in a notebook containing dates between December and July 1933-1934

 

Original is in item 1978.

 

 

 

 

 

     The genius of mankind is in its life-force, in that which was in the primordial germ and stamped its nature with the necessity of growth, implanted in it a creative nature, the creative spirit. This is Life. This is the living Cosmos. We know and understand it not by what it is but by what it does.

 

“Spake life: Behold, I am that

which Must ever surpass itself.”^:

     The creative must ever contend against the uncreate, the highly organized and potential against the lesser evolved and resistant, the more conscious against the less conscious, the living and growing against the dead and disintegrating, against that which passes away. But this contention of life against the less living is not to destroy but to transform; it is to evolve the higher syntheses, to surpass itself eternally.

     What are the higher syntheses? The atom to the cell, the cell to the organism, the simpler organism of plants to the higher organism of animal and human life, and the higher organisms into communities, a form of organic life destined to surpass all of its components while they too surpass themselves and none are destroyed. Thus do all things enter into the kingdom of the divine.

 

     But life in its concrete forms is precious to itself. Hence the product fears the process, the old distrusts the new. That which is fears that which is to be. The less recoils from the greater, the achieved from the unachieved. Yet every concrete form of life has its polarity. While it slumbers it must guard and protect, it must resist, but when it awakes refreshed its visions must ever lead it gladly on, for life is that which must ever surpass itself.

    Now the life of an organism, a plant, an animal or a society is more than the aggregate of the lives of its units or cells yet it does not diminish them but rather fulfills. The unit is both genetic and somatic. It must, above all, project itself in the continuity of life and then seek its own best development and individual self-realization — and in the society, such is the nature of its units that, as Julian Huxley says, “The progress of the indi­vidual is entangled with the progress of the race.”

    What, then, are the resistances to life? By what is it opposed? We have seen that in the growth of the concrete form resistance to acceptance of life in the large, of that which surpasses and transcends. Thus we have the apparent opposites between that which resists and that which transcends.