Spencer Heath Archive

Item 623

Taping by Spencer MacCallum of remarks by Heath at the closing session of the June Seminar, Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York

June 28, 1957

…free enterprisers are in considerable need of something to stir us to the depths — what the Good Book called, in an earlier day, “a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.”

/The first third of this talk was lost because of mechanical failure of the recorder. The ideas developed were that the collectivists are not lacking in emotional appeal; they are always ready to stand up on their feet and talk. But their appeal and their ideals are for the animal man, the necessi­tous life, the lower nature of man. Lower nature is not a good term because there is not higher and lower, but there is a polarity, a direction. We don’t know of any better life by experience, but we know it by our intuitions, our subjec­tive selves, in which there is a spirit which is not bonded and bound to the sense impressions we receive. The remaining part of this talk was transcribed with difficulty and with gaps so that the transcript is not altogether reliable./

I think that the difference between the will to live, and the will to live ever more and more abundantly, depends upon what we call our imagination — our power of conception. We get sense impressions, and if we are just animals we re­spond by what we call tropism — automatic response — and we repeat the round _____________ without making any progress. But if we have this imaginative faculty, we take these messages from the universe into our senses and we recombine and re­arrange them, and we find patterns there that tell us some­thing about the objective world. And we find that it is reasonable. We could imagine that it would have to be reasonable, because we have reason in us. That is no acci­dent, because the reason in us, like every atom and every molecule in us, came from our environment. We can’t be anything but what was so derived if we are the children of the Universal. So when we discover and recognize the kind of rationality, what we call rationality without ____________ that is reported to us in our senses, /and/ we find something in us with which it corresponds, we are attuning our minds with the Universal Mind. And now we have a universal power ___/found/___ only in humans, which can create, because we can conceive patterns and then we can bring the objective experience into the patterns in which we dream.

The line between the animal nature and the human nature is the line between creature and creator, the line between the animal nature and the human, which may be corre­lated with the divine. And I am happy to see us consciously discovering something of that attribute in our objective world, and especially in that part of our objective world which does not consist merely of atoms and molecules, and biological cells, but consists of human beings. We find that, through the contractual relationship, human beings can put themselves in such patterns and relationship that they can dream things and they can objectify those dreams. And that is the true self-realization, when we can dream, aspire, and think things that never were on land and sea, and then perceive — even intuitionally at first is very good, as the mystics ________ proved — and then we can also perceive them rationally, and then we can build not only “more stately mansions, o my soul,” within my soul; we can build more stately mansions in the outer, objective realm, in the whole universe in which we are only a tiny speck, but through our faculties of creation, we are part and parcel with the whole thing, and realize ourselves at one with the universe.

So I think the significance of our allegiance to the free enterprise principle is that it takes us out of our creaturehood in the direction of our ultimate divinity of creative capacities and powers. And the more we sense that, the more we feel that we have a tremendous value, a tremendous agency. We are no longer left to the inner light and so on, but we shed outer light; we can illuminate with the intrinsic nature of our spirits and our ideas; we can incorporate them in the surrounding world, in the environment, in the form of mechanism and any of the things which are the product of the creative, that is to say the spiritual, mind of man. So we are not just dealing in machines and products and all that, we are building beauty and order into everything that is around us. /Every one of us?/ in our highly special­ized way, we are building new beauty, new order, new powers of creation for the human spirit to build itself into the world around us.

I hope we can carry away with a greater sense and a greater awareness than we ever had before, that we have something more precious, more beautiful, more universal and more divine than has ever been dreamed by any of the persons who think only of the life of the body, of the life of necessities, of the life of the animal — which is the life of staving off death and staying alive as long as you can. We have a higher mission and a greater glory, and in this libertarian philosophy with its specific techno­logy of free enterprise we have the key to the coming King­dom and the full glory of man.