Spencer Heath Archive

Item 232

Penciling on notepad paper referring to Franklin Matchette’s Absolute-Relative philosophy

About 1959

     The Absolute being antecedent and first cause of the Relative

     Since the Absolute is antecedent of and first cause of the Relative, then the Relative must be like the Absolute.

     If the Absolute is the Infinite Perfect and Unlimited (p 18) and is also the antecedent and First Cause of the Relative, then the Relative must ever be some part of and included in the Infinite Absolute. Else the Infinite, by so much as it became finite, would cease to be Infinite.

     If the Absolute is the Infinite (p 18) and antecedent first cause of the Relative then the Relative and finite must ever be included in and like unto its antecedent Infinite. The finite part therefore must be like unto the infinite Whole in all respects except that, considered separately, it is finite and incomplete instead of infinite and absolute. The distinction thus must be one of scale, of quantity and not quality — microcosm in macrocosm.

     Taking man and his finite physical world — that portion of the Infinite Cosmos, the system of events, to which his physical senses react and respond — as the Relative World, then man including his World must constitute a microcosm within the Absolute macrocosm and must possess in its finite degree all the properties, potentialities and powers of the absolute macrocosm of which he is a finite and relative part. The opposition, then, between the Relative and the Absolute is not opposition in kind but a difference in scale or degree.

     What characterizes the Absolute is not its magnitude alone. It has also a qualitative characteristic. It is not a homogeneous mass, but alive; it has a quality of transcendence, of creativeness, of ever organizing and reorganizing its diverse elements and parts, manifesting itself in ever more and more stable processes and enduring forms, lower and lower frequencies of change. Highly diverse in all its properties and parts, its one constant and absolute property, that of ever organizing and reorganizing its elements and parts into more enduring forms, its lesser and simpler unities into greater, more complex and enduring ones — from amoeba to mammal, mammal to man, man to a universal organic society of interfunctioning men no longer hovering on the edge of extinction under the hazards of an imposed environment but, through the creative power of its interfunc­tioning minds, reorganizing its objective world in the pattern of its subjective dreams towards ever more enduring and abundant life. Thus man, through society, becomes a con­scious participant in the transcendent function of the Cosmic Whole, a knowing co-worker with the Absolute in an ever-growing creative communion with God.