Spencer Heath Archive

Item 128

Heath began this for an insertion in Loren Eiseley’s book, The Firmament of Time, but did not get into the body of what he had to say.

December 12, 1961

     The physical bodies and nervous organizations of men are composed in the same pattern and of the same basic materials as the higher anthropoids. The difference is in the degree of the organization. However, this higher organization of men, in addition to the similar physical apparatus, has endowed them with powers and potentialities both rational and intuitive far transcending all the powers and limitations of animal life in any of its forms. It is therefore only so far and in the degree that he attains to these additional and distinguishing capacities and powers that he is unique above the animals and only so far as he has in any case developed his human potential is he entitled in any practical sense to be called human or man.

     Man, therefore is a form of life that is progressive, distinguished from all others only in the degree that he manifests trans­cendent powers. All other forms are creatures dependent upon and limited by the bounty of nature which like parasites they deplete and deteriorate as their numbers increase. Thus every other species but man digs its graves with its teeth. For paleontology makes it plain that of all the species that for incalculable ages have lived only some remnants today survive, and they like all their predecessors, even the fittest of them are ultimately and inevitably doomed. And the man species, notwithstanding all his superior merely animal capacities and powers, so far as he depends upon these, must meet the same end.

     But man, not only through his senses directly perceives and reacts; he also, through his imagination conceives and reflects. Through his concepts and imagination he has patterns of thought, memory and rationality that gives him the power to foresee and to produce and create. And through his vast non-political integument of reciprocal relations, through free contracts with his fellow men, he exercises a creative dominion over his environment, makes /making/ him no longer creature but, potentially at least, the spiritual master of the world in which in Christian lands at least he lives his ever more abundant life and length of days. This secular Christian dominion supervened upon the dissolution of the pagan order of Imperial Rome who kept her united nations warless for a thousand years.