Spencer Heath Archive

Item 16

Penciled by Heath on 3-ring notebook pages in Winchester, Virginia

September 4, 1951

     All sensate creatures are subjective. Their reactions to environment are with feeling — sensory. Nerve processes, afferent and efferent, are united either directly or by reflexes, simple or complex, established by repetitions.

     This is characteristic of all creatures subject to and under domination of their environment. Behavior, both physical and physiological, is conditioned by circumstance. Even structural and anatomical modifications are enforced by environment when it so changes as to become less friendly or even hostile to its existing inhabitants and favorable only to modified and thus surviving or wholly new forms. Even those seemingly fortuitous departures of form called mutations must arise from gene-modifications that environment alone, directly or indirectly, can induce.

     Thus every created thing, including man himself, is a product of the creative environment, the realm of Nature whence he springs. The environment itself, in all its range and extent, manifests a creative principle — an absolute and abstract, an immanent principle, of which the realm of Nature is itself the creature — the whole creation — and in virtue of which all lesser things, including man, are evolved and thereby created out of it. The universal environment thus is more than merely existent. It is not only created; it is also creative. For the whole realm of Nature is informed with the Spirit of its own creation. Hence its own power to evolve out of its own “substance” all the lesser worlds and their lesser creatures up to and including man. The universal environment, by the creative principle immanent in it, elaborates and evolves out of itself particular finite, even infinitesimal, creations. From these it organizes and reorganizes and thus in an ascending series of complexity creates all of Nature’s lesser and her living things up to and including man.

     Thus Nature, as a whole, is creative. The creative spirit in her substance and atoms, molecules, crystals, stars and world and their living inhabitants are evolved..