Spencer Heath Archive

Item 682

Taping by Spencer MacCallum during conversation with Heath.

April 25, 1956

     Every science is built upon the progressive generalization of phenomena as empirical, measurable events within its particular field or domain. Philosophy does for the sciences precisely what the sciences do by way of rationality for the particular events that take place with each in its particular field. Philosophy generalizes scientific knowledge precisely as the separate sciences generalize empirical events.

     The value of science to empiricism, and the value of philosophy to science, is that each discovers the common threads of identity running through all the pheno­mena in each particular field. It gives men insight into the uniform ways and procedure of nature towards more real, more enduring ends. Adoption of this procedure by man, this insight into the mind of nature, gives the human mind power to predicate its own aims and ends, and the means whereby to bring them to pass. This is the unique, creative and thereby spiritual power of the human mind. But this power cannot be exercised but by the cooperation of human purposes and will. It is practiced only by those who have been born into the new relationship called contract, in which there is a meeting of minds and wills without coercion on either side, and a united progress towards the aims and ends desired and dreamed.