Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1400

Carbon of Heath’s Letter to the Editor, Wall Street Journal

January 10, 1942

 

 

Editor, The Wall Street Journal:

Your own erudite and genial columnist so warmly and unreservedly endorses Mr. Lippmann’s Oriental and medieval philosophy of limited desires /that/ it may be not amiss to point out some of the grounds on which the modern “secular image of man” rests.

      Let us not forget that “secular” is an epithet with which
virtually all new discoveries relating even to the physical nature of man have been theologically condemned. But theology itself rests and relies upon objective factual experiences that are held to be special and unique in that, in the order of nature, they are not repeated and hence cannot be tested or proved, but must rest upon divine authority. Matters of fact, unique but in themselves essentially subjective and secular, are thus the very seed bed out of which theologies arise. And since these matters of fact are always limited, finished and complete it follows that the desires and aspirations of those who adhere to them should be similarly circumscribed. In this limitation they are to find, so we are told, “security and serenity in the universe.” If this is “the representative within us of the universal order,” it certainly lacks universality, to say the least.

      The modern mind takes its base not on the exceptional and unique but on experiences that are objectively and independently verifiable, hence more representative of the “universal order.” It may be “secular” but it seeks the universal. It comes into its spiritual inheritance as it takes its form in the image, and thus as the representative, not of a special and particular but of the universal order. This modern mind finds in its own processes a correspondence and reflection, a formulation, of the order of the world. Its logical and mathematical extensions lead to sound inferences beyond, but none the less verifiable by, sensory experience. By a metaphysical process alone, unaided by any instrument or sense, it discloses the existence, motion and mass of the planet Neptune. It examines chemical elements and by a purely mental process discovers and describes the properties of those theretofore unknown. It divines the fact and even the precise degree of magnetic deflection of a beam of light as it passes near a star. The rationale of organized mankind only waits to be re­flected in the restless seeking and the ordered vision of the modern mind.

      The universal order is reflected in the intellect with which the mind of man is so divinely endowed as to “justify the ways of God to man.” This order is intrinsic in the mind that springs from it and thus has the power to form itself into accord with the eternalities of the objective world. It avoids ancient diabolisms by acceptance of the rational divinity with which it is creatively endowed and makes the mystic’s personal dream of unity with the mind of God into a common inheritance of mankind as the divine agency for the continuous and higher creation of the world.

      Animals and primitive men have pain and its surcease, relief and contentment, but little, if any, positive desire. The divine discontent that moved the creation of the world and of man is his inheritance alone — the authentic mark of his divine origin and nature. Life must first be before it can be good. Its needs give imperative but never insatiable desires. Nineteenth century freedom, releasing reason from some of its medieval limitations, gave to the Western World the power it has to achieve material needs and desires. Seeking the unattainable is attainment itself. All spiritual and artistic achievement springs from the persist­ence of creative desire. Let us not be too scornful of the foundations of things. The Divine Spirit wrought first the material world to His desire, and there can be no higher emulation.

      The absence of insatiable desire is the mark of the beast. The medieval mind, confusing insatiable desires with his sati­able propensities and needs, fails to honor or revere the div­inity that was breathed into man. If it must in this day brand him a child of death and hell, let it not be because of his in­satiable desires, for these but certify his kinship with the In­finite and mark him the eternal seeker after like and light. No Golden Mean has ever been adhered to by the servants and saviors of mankind.

Spencer Heath

The Science of Society Foundation

Elkridge, Maryland