Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1656

Carbon of a letter from Heath to John J. Grebe, Department of Nuclear and Basic Research, The Dow Chemical Company, Midland, Michigan. Concerns Grebe’s Periodic Table of Particles. Note that following this letter is a paragraph which Spencer MacCallum took in dictation but which for reason unknown was not included in the letter as sent. Pencil dictation notes are in Originals envelope.

September 18, 1958

 

 

Dear Dr. Grebe: 

 

     Returning from considerable absence in New York, almost the first thing that strikes my eye on the wall of the principal workroom of my little Foundation is a beautifully framed copy of your periodic table of particles. Some time ago, I expressed a desire to have this framing done, and now I am delighted that my grandson has carried this out as a very pleasant surprise for me on my return.

 

     My first thought on beholding it went back to old Dr. Holmes’ poem, “THE NAUTILUS,” the physical to which in the diagram is so obvious that I was struck by it, notwithstanding that mechanically it is inverse. Yet in both cases the process is integrative. The Cosmic Order proceeding centripetally from high to low frequency of integration and disintegration, transforming frequency into duration, and Life evolving from the less enduring to the more enduring forms.

I hope Dr. Ralph D. Lillie, the author of General Biology and Philosophy of Organism, is familiar with your point of view. This book is a powerful correlation of the existing data concerning the unique and integrative and the invariant and entropic — the metaphysical and the physical — in the whole cosmic realm.

I am just dropping you this line to express again our high appreciation of the value of your own generalization, the influence of which we hope is being widely extended.

                   Sincerely yours,

SH/m

We should be very happy indeed to obtain a copy of your address before the New York Academy of Sciences, if reprints are available now.

______________________________

/For reasons unknown, the following paragraph was deleted

from the letter as sent.  -Spencer MacCallum, 12/11/2018./ 

 

     This caused me to reflect that in most cases, perhaps all, when the cosmic power comes under dominion of the human will, the technology, being rational, is equally operative for good or for evil — either in the service of life-diminishing (into higher frequencies, diminishing cycles) or in the service of life-advancing toward the vertical depth-dimension of immortality at the center of your diagram, in all the divinity thus implied. This leads us both to reflect that not rationality alone, but the source of motivation is the essential determinant as between good and evil — reality and unreality. When the inspiration is from that which we conceive as beautiful, then the energies, whether intuitively or rationally directed, become creative and thereby spiritual and divine.