Spencer Heath Archive

Item 203

Penciling on large notepad paper. The last three paragraphs appear to have been added from somewhere else. They are not included in the penciling and are conversational in tone, as if recorded by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath. Title supplied. Typed version of the last three paragraphs found.

No date

 

/MAN AS ARTIST AND CREATOR/

 

     Just as the human body can perform a greater variety of func­tions with relation to its environment, so the human mind and imagination is probably the most versatile organization into which the cosmos integrates mass, motion, and time or succes­sion. Both are in constant process or activity, for the most part unconscious, yet the over-all activity of either can be either arrested or activated by the intention of the conscious will.

     The body can be arrested or maintained in a given posture for a limited time or directed to a limited amount of over-all motion by the conscious will. In the like manner, the imagination can hold a fixed concept for a limited time or it may in conception fly through space and time to any extent.

     Body and mind interact. This makes them fundamentally one, Neither produces the other; both are the factors of a total product – the human organism. It is through this interfunctioning that the whole organism operates and thereby exists (ex eo). And it is through this interfunctioning that each through a long evolution, has developed its own distinguishable departments and parts. Mind and body thus are integrated functionally in a personality, a subjectivity clearly distin­guishable from environment, an individual unitary organization.

     There is a subjectivity of mind and a subjectivity of the body; each has its own interacting organs and parts, but there is an important difference. The processes of the mind are concep­tual, a succession of concepts or images, fluid and fluent, not bound or limited to the finite magnitudes of any bodily process.

     The organic subjectivity or personality, then, has within itself two kinds of subjective processes: those which are actual and factual, confined within the structure of the body and its magnitudes, commonly called physiological processes, and those which are image-making or representative, not con­fined by any of the limitations of bodily process or experi­ence and commonly referred to as psychological processes.

     It is well known that the subjectivities of bodily process greatly influence the subjective conditions and processes of the mind and that mental states and conditions likewise affect the subjective physiology of the body. But this is not all. If it were, then body and mind would be a closed system of existence without reference to any environment, either human or natural, and thereby excluding all objective experience, even life itself. For the human organism, like all others, is in all its elements begotten and born out of and into the universal environment.

    Man had to discover the rationality of his objective world in order to discover his own rationality. He could weigh and measure objective things but he has had no standards wherewith to weigh and measure his own feelings, sensations, con­ceptions. That is why his first science had to be abstract mathematics, his second concrete but remote – astronomy – etc. etc. The more he finds ratios (quantitative relationships) in his objective environment, the more he acquires standards (units of quantity) for the measurement of his own quantities, relationships – his own ratios, his rationality.

     There’s been so much speculation about matter, space, and time as entities, possible entities or impossible entities apart from man. It doesn’t register with me. There’s only One Reality. Philosophy calls it God. Science calls it energy. We cannot prove that it is universal, absolute, infinite, but we can find no shred of evidence to the contrary. We are warranted in treating it as infinite just as we are warranted in treating a man as a gentleman after knowing him only as such for a whole life long – or even a less time. The character of experience of it shows that it is not amorphous, not homogeneous, but highly differentiate but always compounded as a Unity (Energy or Reality) in three modes which one can conceive and even measure separately but must always experience conjointly, as a unity, never apart.

     Because of its differentiate character, and for this cause alone, we, as parts of the Universal Reality – Cosmos – can have reactions – experi­ence – of other parts of it, and indirectly, with it All, including each other and ourselves. But our only rational experience is in the ratios in which mass, space, and time are compounded in specific experiences. In our empirical experience this compounding is not directed (created) by us. But when we discover its ratios (scientific quantitative description – analysis) we can then synthesize and compound mass, space, and time as we wish, dream, plan, aspire them to be. This is qualitative, creative, spiritual, divine. When this is done rationally, by measurement, it is applied science. When done intuitively, by feeling, positive emotion, inspiration it is creative art. And science, applied science, is rational and repetitional, whereas creative art is intuitive, unique. Science is capable of universalizing (objectively), repeating the forms by which the creative spirit expresses itself in art – and giving objective forms to realities only discovered and expressed in symbols in the arts.