Spencer Heath Archive

Item 376

Tape fragment from a seminar at Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington, New York, when the discussion seemed in danger of overemphasizing the market as an end in itself and losing sight of its function. Transcript considerably amended by Heath.

June 24, 1957

     In all the operations of our lives, we have two kinds of desires. We have the satiable, the limited, desires which are of body, animal and physical. Of these animal and physical desires we can enjoy only a limited gratification. We only need so much, and beyond that it becomes painful. We also have some insatiable desires, the imponderable things, the things that are immeasurable.

     Now, our limited and satiable desires are best met and most efficiently met by cooperating with one another with respect to tangible things — with respect to the goods of this world that are necessary to keep our bodies in good working order as animals. The Market, under the Golden Rule of exchange, gives us that. Then the Market gives us something else. It gives us freedom from those necessities; it requires the use of the smallest portion of our vital energies to keep ourselves alive and to maintain us in good physical vigor. It releases the human spirit to build in the imponderable world, to become artists and scientists and to practice at the Altar.

     From that practice at the Altar, and in that practice, we become creators. We become free, and our spirits can soar into the empyrean and bring down order and beauty. The arts and the sciences, fruits of the spirit, blossom among us, and we can rebuild the world around us, the tangible, physical world. In so doing, in this freedom of the spirit and inspired by the beauty that is around us, we are practicing the mind of God in the material world. For we know His mind not only in ourselves but also as we discover it in His works and ways. In practicing that mind of God, and in rebuilding our material world, we are carrying on the great Drama of Genesis. We are allying our own spirits with the Divine Spirit, our own rationality with the Divine Rationality, and we are building then ever more and higher order in the environment whence we came, through practicing the divinity with which we were endowed when God breathed His Spirit into the human dust.³⁷⁶