Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3047

Original is missing.

Apart from human life and hope and destiny, there is no such thing as quality, value or beauty.  The objective world itself contains itself and seeks no ends, or has no aims other than that aim which is expressed through the human consciousness and will. We may impute aim to the cosmos, as the source whence human aims are derived. But for human purposes, there are no other ends to be desired than the maintenance, the advancement and the idealization of human life.  Quality and value and beauty are human concerns, human conceptions.

How dependent upon freedom mankind is!  The whole world of quality, value and beauty depends for its realization upon the freedom of the human will, the freedom to choose.

To choose creatively, to cherish ideally, we must be in a situation involving a large field, a wide range of possible experience of events, qualities, objects. From such a field of quantitative experience will arise the greatest amount of diversity, or variety. Given quantity and diversity, and then given freedom of the individual to exercise choice among this great diversity, there comes about a human realization of quality and of value as distinguished from that which is less to be desired.  There is a discrimination of that which is inspiring, that which lifts the human personality out of its narrow self and gives it a cosmic sense, that which inspires, and for which the common name is beauty.