Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1092

September 1935

   NOTES:

PROPOSED INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER

All nature, including man, manifests itself in two aspects — the aspect of Substance and the aspect of Activity — as structures and as the functioning of those structures.

These terms are Relative and probably interconvertible, for mathematical physics teaches that substance and energy are one.

Reality, therefore, lies not in substance nor in energy, but in relationships, and since relationships are constantly changing, the ultimate reality consists in the process or method operating in nature whereby more and more complex relationships are brought into being. This means change in the direction of heterogeneity with functional integration. This process has no necessary limitations and is therefore abiding and real. Any contrary process, change in the direction of homogeneity with functional disintegration, is self-limiting and therefore transitory and unreal.

When the change of relationship is slow or not easily apparent we conceive the reality as substance or structure, and this we call the static conception.

When the ever-present change is rapid or more easily perceived we conceive reality as action or function. This is the dynamic conception.

So, in the development of every science its subject-matter is considered first in its aspect as substance or structure — its static aspect — and then with reference to changes or relationship that take place in the structure, and these processes we call the functions of the substances or structures. That is, we do so when we perceive them as rhythmic or repetitional.

All scientific interpretation is the discovery of repetitional and rhythmic relationships in nature. All the “periodic laws,” repetitions and uniformities of action are the dynamic functionings of what we must first conceive of as nature in its static aspect.

Thus it is that every science must pass through its static or descriptive stage, thence to its dynamic and functional.

The nascent science of Society is only beginning to emerge from its descriptive into its functional phase. The former is necessary in order that there may be any subject-matter for the science to deal with, and the latter is likewise necessary in order that the subject-matter may have any rational significance and that it may for this purpose be dealt with as a functioning whole.

It is in this latter aspect that I shall try to view society and point out some of its most important structures, organs and parts and the manner in which they are adapted to carry out rhythmic and repetitional relationships with each other and with reference to the maintenance of the whole.

I say the manner in which they are adapted to carry out these relationships because it must be recognized that society is a growing and evolving organism the various organs and parts of which necessarily must come into being somewhat in advance of their assuming (under what we may call the autonomic nervous system of society) those repetitional and rhythmic relationships that constitute their authentic functionings.

It is the province of an informed and enlightened statesmanship constantly to lift those political prohibitions and restraints which prevent the growing parts and organs of society from carrying out their harmonious relationships to each other and to the whole and thus pervert into destructive and pathological manifestations the energies with which these structures are endowed.

Before governments can rise to their supreme beauty and virtue as agencies of community service — in fact, before a society can be free to avail itself of the higher and more gracious forms of public service, its public authority must lift those restraints and prohibitions (however benevolently they were devised) which prevent the normal functioning of its essential organs and parts.

I shall try to point out the type of organization exhibited by society as an emergent organization proceeding under a similar mode of action out of the same nature and under laws and processes similar to those manifested in the biological units of which it is composed.