Spencer Heath Archive

Item 901

Notes for promotion of Citadel, Market & Altar. Prefatory material.

October 1955

There is in men’s minds a natural world and a human world, and these are thought to be worlds apart. The natural world they seek to know and to understand, and here they have gained knowledge that is power — for good or for ill. But the human world they hold to be separate and apart, a special creation injected into and not developed out of its natural environment. Hence all the knowledge gathered, all the power gained in the natural world must stop at the boundary they have assumed between the natural and the human world. It is not strange that mankind, even the most enlightened among them, should be in the human world so helpless, so lacking in the knowledge that is power in their /non-/human affairs.

It takes a long time to break well established tradition, and the tradition that his natural world is alien instead of native to man, that his origin is elsewhere and his nature foreign to his physical source is no exception.

Yet eventually a thinker arrives, usually unrecognized by authority, who is too bold or too naive to be confined. He takes a fresh viewpoint and so discovers parallelisms extending from the known into the unknowns where all was confusion and frustration before.

This seems to have happened in the present volume. The author takes the relationship exhibited by units of energy in physical /phenomena/ and finds parallels to them in the relationships among men. In this he may or may not be technically correct or precise. It is sufficient that it affords at least a pattern of thinking that, because it has been successful elsewhere, may be fruitful where successful thinking has not yet prevailed.