Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1

Drafted by pencil on notepad paper. The first three pages, starting with the third paragraph on page one (beginning “Such is..”) have been edited by Alvin Lowi for its physics terminology. Lowi also supplied the subheading for this section (for Heath’s original and transcription with Lowi’s markings, see the Originals envelope). Spencer MacCallum supplied the subheading for the second section. The third section, which would have dealt with the human societal field of organization, was never written.

No date

 

 

 

Generally speaking, every organized object or thing, whether physical or organic, depends for its genesis and for its composition upon what its environment affords and supplies. If it is a non-living, inorganic thing, the elements of its organization are indeed contributed by environment, but these components have taken such definite and persistent interrelations and interactions among themselves that they constitute a specific entity with properties and characteristics peculiar to it and to others of its kind or class alone. Such is an atom, a molecule or a crystal, a cell, plant or animal, a world, a system, even a galaxy.

Every such organized object or thing, having sprung from environment into its separately integrated being or entity, now interacts therewith as such and owes whatever continuity, short or long, that it has, to the degree of its capacity so to act within itself as to resist all that action which is external and disintegrative to it. A period or term of existence, a measure of continuity, the attainment of a degree of duration, is thus a common characteristic and the over-all function of every organized thing.

The Inorganic Realm and Physical Science

Such is obviously the case with inorganic bodies. It is their sole over-all function to exist. They come into and go out of being. They integrate and disintegrate. And their term ranges downward from that of the most stable, simple and ancient atom to the most transient, radioactive and complex, even to the almost negligible period of the most evanescent particle or wave — from the indefinitely long to the almost infinitesimally brief. Herein lies the field of physical science. On its investigational or analytic side, it is the rational examination and study of organization as it exhibits itself palpably in the systems of planets and stars and obscurely (to human perception) in the relations of electrons, electronuclear atomic systems, and of myriad molecules in galactic array.

It is the prime province of physics to ascertain in general terms those common relationships and uniformities of process and action within themselves by which these organ­izations — atomic to cosmic — maintain their specific unities for such periods of continuity or duration as they respectively achieve.

 

In all these phenomena modern science finds a basic fundamental of Reality, a perceptible event. Happen­ing, occurrence, actuality, proceeding and experience (where human action is consciously involved) are the particular terms. Technically, the magnitude of such events is denoted in terms of units of action. ACTION has been found composite in the cosmos precisely as it is also in the human consciousness. Just as the infant human seems to sense first bodies, then movements, then changes (discontinuities), both in and of itself and in things about it, so science reveals that every event is tri-composite of three distinguishable and separately measurable elements or aspects, namely, (1) mass — atomic, molecular, etc. — which always has (2) motion — displacement in space — which two together consti­tute energy, and (3) time — period or discontinuity. These three abstractions taken together constitute action, which characterizes a concrete, perceptible occurrence, the objective side of the interaction with environment that we call experience. Now these three aspects, though capable of being separately attended to by analysis, are wholly abstract. Separately or in any union of less than the three they do not unite as action to denote an actuality or event. Taken subjec­tively, the first and second, mass and motion, constitute the abstraction called energy, and the second and third, motion and time, taken as a ratio constitute the abstraction called velocity, neither of which is directly observable with the senses. The objective actuality or event, capable of being experienced, is always an integration of the three.

Physical science has provided three standard units of measurement in which to take the respective numerical magnitudes or dimensions of any sufficiently simple action or event. These are the three fundamental units of physical science known as the unit of mass (or force), the unit of motion (length, distance, space), and the unit of time (period or frequency of succession or discontinuity). In the metric or international system these are called the gram, the centimeter and the second. Other units also are employed, such as units of energy, of velocity, and chemical and electrical units, but these are all derivative of the fundamental units or dimensions mass, motion and time.

Physical science describes organized entities, with respect to their function of self-continuity, always in terms of the fundamental magnitudes or dimensions that constitute events. Such description is analysis, and, being in terms of dimensions as ratios, is rational and quantita­tive. Such rational description constitutes understanding of the natural order of things, for the conception is in the same pattern and holds the same ratios as the experience. This is the rationale of research and investigation, and the technology of rational knowing. It is motivated by a positive aesthetic inspiration as against negative or at best passive emotional reactions. It is quantitative in method, but its results are qualitative and creative and, thereby, spiritual in its psychological effects and satisfactions as foretaste of a universal rationality, self-consistency and beauty. But, more than all this subjective effect, it lays the grounds for a creative technology that works upon the objective environing world.

The quantitative analysis of observed action in events in terms of the ratios found in their fundamental composition makes it obvious how desirable events can be reproduced by bringing together further quantities of mass, motion and time in like proportions and even to determine and thus create new events by synthesis of mass, motion and time in new or modified proportions to desired ends. This transformation of action by re-synthesis of its elements in new proportions is the basic quantitative method common to all rational technologies and engineering processes, from a simple lever changing the ratios between the mass (force) and the motion (distance) at the point of application and at the point of effect to the changes of frequency, voltage, etc., in the transformation of kilowatt-hours from a spark to an incandescent lamp. All these processes, while quantitative in method, are nonetheless and preeminently qualitative in their effects, for they objectify, in their several ways and degrees, the human aspiration, dream and desire — the creative and thereby spiritual dominion of man over all created (organized) things.

The Organic Field of Organization

 

From this survey of action or events in the inorganic department of nature and the world we pass to that field of more complex organization that is called organic. Since the organic evolves out of the inorganic, it rests on the same basis of action and organization. Its fundamental structures and processes and its over-all function — continuity — are the same and it is distinguished from the inorganic and is in truth organic only in those respects wherein it transcends. From simplest monad cell to highest Metazoa, the prime function of every living thing is to continue to exist. Like the

inorganic forms, but in far less degree, it has capacity so to act within itself as to resist that action which is external and disintegrative to it. But unlike the non-living, its more complex structure has two higher capacities upon which its continuity depends. The range of physical condi­tions under which it can exist, temperature, pressure, etc., is narrow indeed, but within that range it alone has power to ingest and assimilate and thereby achieve a functional maturity in which it has a still higher unique and distinguishing capacity, that of self-reproduction. The organic organizations thus parallel the inorganic but narrowly in their small capacity to shield themselves from influences and conditions adverse, yet they vastly transcend them by their capacity to maintain themselves by selective appropria­tion from environment. In this they achieve their individual continuity by drawing heavily upon the influences of environ­ment to more than compensate their lesser power to resist them. The inorganic power of simple resistance has been exchanged for power to appropriate from environment with corresponding new functions, among which are growth and replacement of structure within the individual, self-locomotion giving wider range of appropriation, and above all, a higher continuity not of the individual but of the type in its self-reproduction and genetic succession.

The science of living things assumes its physical basis in the inorganic and all the modes and processes of its con­tinuities. From this forward it examines the modes of action and organization wherein the organic forms achieve their peculiar functions and continuities, not by resistance to but almost wholly by interaction with the external resources that their environment selectively affords. The character and continuity of non-living things is determined by their internal organization in exclusion and resistance to external influence and change; that of living things by inclusion and appropriation, by continuous inter-action with their external world. Therein lies their individual continuity and their race or type continuity in genetic succession.

Living things far transcend the non-living in the higher complexity of their differentiation not alone from the inorganic but also among themselves and among the elements and differentiated parts of which they are themselves composed. And out of these higher differentiations of struc­ture and process spring the transcendent functions that living things perform.

Yet notwithstanding all this great transcendence, the limitations on living things in general are still severe. The resources of environment from which they draw their powers are not without limits. Hence as, under rich abundance, the numbers of a living form increase, the ratio between need and resource must decline. It is inevitable therefore that most living things by their appropriate and necessary relation to environment must render their habitat progressively less habitable by them. Thus the various forms of life and even individuals of like kind become eventually even if not immediately inimical one to another. Hence conflict and struggle to survive. Among the most simple and least differ­entiated such as the bacterial and other primitive forms, this struggle is least mitigated and most severe. As numbers rise, subsistence falls and rivalry ensues. Among the higher forms partial mitigation is found in the formation of limited symbiotic groups such as hives, colonies, flocks, packs, herds, tribes and other familial groupings in which the members are united in fact or belief by a common ancestry.

But within this grouping in familial or blood-bonded organizational form, a new type of living organization is formed, a biological life-form in which the members as elements constituting it are functionally interrelated without being structurally united — the individual elements being combined organically into this higher life-form by what in biologic science is called disjunctive

symbiosis. This type of organism which may be called the familial by the interaction of its parts within itself achieved such increase of continuity for itself and its members that all the later and more highly evolved forms have come to exist in familial or similarly differentiated organic groups. In all antiquity it was thus and thus alone the human animal, like all others, lived. But no integrated family or tribe had organic relations with any other, nor indeed any relations but violations and war.

 

Now the /human/ familial or tribal organism cannot unite a larger number of functioning members than can be identified as such. Hence its numbers are never large, and in rugged lands of harsh conditions and meagre yield its members must interfunction in freedom in order to exist. War and destruc­tion is a luxury it cannot afford. But in the lush and easy-living lands nature is so kind to men they can afford to be harsh among themselves. Hence tribe wars against tribe, man enslaves man, and for thousands of years the leaders of freer and fiercer tribes from rugged lands conquer the masters and slaves of the warm and flat and fertile ones, adopt their slave systems, degenerate, and are themselves in turn overthrown.[1]

within such groupings there are degrees of mutuality and reciprocal amenities that lessen conflict, but as between group and group, tribe and tribe, if there are any relation­ships there are none habitually but those of conflict, attack and defense, conquest or alliance, all leading if not to extermination then to rulership and slavery in some of its forms or to other parasitical relationships detrimental at once to victims and at last to dependent and decaying masters. Yet in all the Classical antique world it was thus that organized human animals like all others lived. Wherever there was organized slavery all authority was coercive, political, governmental. It rested in the gens, the family group who held all power, who alone had rights, properties, ancestral gods, altars, temples, magic powers and whose head was supreme. The gens, few in numbers, held ownership and absolute dominion over great populations of slaves — slaves who had no other tradition and slaves taken by stealth or violence and captured in wars.

In the Classical city slave states the gens multiplied into a small body of free citizens, /and/ the absolute patriarch became king by descent or tyrant by violence within the tribe or by conquest from without.

The Societal Field of Organization

/Not written/

_______________________________

/The following is a portion of the above Item No. 1, edited by Lowi to make a separate short essay, “The Inorganic Realm and Physical Science”, by Heath and Lowi:/

THE INORGANIC REALM

AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE

Spencer Heath and Alvin Lowi

It is obviously the case with inorganic bodies that it is their sole over-all function to exist; they come into and go out of being, they integrate and disintegrate, and their term ranges downward from that of the most stable, simple and ancient atom

to the most transient, radioactive and complex—even to the almost negligible period of the most evanescent particle or wave. Their term ranges from the indefinitely long to the almost infinitesimally brief. Herein lies the field of physical science.

     On its investigational or analytic side, science is the rational examination and study of organization as it exhibits itself palpably in the systems of planets and stars and obscurely (to human perception) in the relations of electrons, electro-nuclear atomic systems, and of myriad molecules in galactic array. It is the prime province of physics to ascertain in general terms those common relationships and uniformities of process and action within themselves by which these organizations—atomic to cosmic—maintain their specific unities for such periods of continuity or duration as they respectively achieve.

      In all these phenomena modern science finds a basic fundamental of Reality, a perceptible event. Happen­ing, occurrence, actuality, proceeding, and experience (where human action is consciously involved) are the particular terms. Technically, the magnitude of such events is denoted in terms of units of action. ACTION has been found composite in the cosmos precisely as it is also in the human consciousness. Just as the infant human seems to sense first bodies, then movements, then changes (discontinuities), both in and of itself and in things about it, so science reveals that every event is tricomposite of three distinguishable and separately measurable elements or aspects, namely, (1) mass—molar, molecular, etc. —which always has (2) motion—displacement in space—which two together constitute energy, and (3) time, period or discontinuity, which three abstractions taken together constitute action, which characterizes a con­crete perceptible occurrence, the objective side of the interaction with environment that we call experience.

      Now these three aspects, though capable of being separately attended to by analysis, are wholly abstract. Separately or in any union of less than the three they do not unite as action to denote an actuality or event. Taken subjectively, the first and second, mass and motion, constitute the abstraction called energy, and the second and third, motion and time, taken as a ratio, constitute the abstraction called velocity, neither of which is directly observable with the senses. The objective actuality or event, capable of being experienced, is always an integra­tion of the three.

      Physical science has provided three standard units of measurement in which to take the respective numerical magnitudes or dimensions of any sufficiently simple action or event. These are the three fundamental units of physical science known as the unit of mass (or force), the unit of motion (length, distance, space), and the unit of time (period or frequency of succession or discontinuity). In the metric or international system, these are called the gram, the centimeter and the second. Other units also are employed, such as units of energy, of velocity, and chemical, electrical units, but these are all derivative of the fundamental units or dimensions mass, motion and time.

      Physical science describes organized entities, with respect to their function of self-continuity, always in terms of the fundamental magnitudes or dimensions that constitute events. Such description is analysis and, being in terms of dimensions as ratios, is rational and quantita­tive. Such rational description constitutes understanding of the natural order of things, for the conception is in the same pattern and holds the same ratios as the experience.  

     This is the rationale of research and investigation, and technology of rational knowing. It is motivated by a positive aesthetic inspiration as against negative or at best passive emotional reactions. It is quantitative in method, but its results are qualitative and creative and, thereby, spiritual in its psychological effects and satisfac­tions as foretaste of a universal rationality, self-consistency and beauty. But more than all this subjective effect, it lays the ground for a creative technology that works upon the objective environing world.

      The quantitative analysis of observed action in events in terms of the ratios found in their fundamental composition makes it obvious how desirable events can be reproduced by bringing together further quantities of mass, motion and time in like proportions and even to determine and thus create new events by synthesis of mass, motion and time in new or modified proportions to desired ends. This transformation of action by re-synthesis of its elements in new proportions is the basic quantitative method common to all rational technologies and engineering processes, from a simple lever changing the ratios between the mass (force) and the motion (distance) at the point of application and at the point of effect, to the changes of frequency, voltage, etc., in the transformation of kilowatt-hours from a spark to an incandescent lamp. All these processes, while quantitative in method, are nonetheless and preeminently qualitative in their effects, for they objectify, in their several ways and degrees, the human aspiration, dream and desire—the creative and thereby spiritual dominion of man over all created (organized) things.²⁰¹⁶