Spencer Heath Archive

Item 471

Penciled on deteriorating note-pad paper, marked “Random.” Followed by remarks by Alvin Lowi on the outside of the envelope.

May 15, 1949

 

 

 

 

/The Psychological Preeminence of Man/

 

It is probable that man alone has the gift of objectivity, the capacity for detachment, the power of viewing objects and events in terms of their own constant structures and relations. All sentient beings have feelings, sensations, response to immediate stimuli, but most of them lack memory and imagination and therefore mental grasp, conception or understanding. Reflex actions alone, both inherited and conditioned, seem to constitute their principal if not their entire psychic process.

    

     But beyond all these motor or emotional reactions, man possesses in addition a picturing faculty. His mind reflects; it mirrors and thereby remembers his experiences. And out of the separate elements of these remembered experiences, uninhibited as to proportions and magnitudes, he weaves new pictures, composes both his sleeping and his waking dreams, even constructs his ideals, for ideals are but the happy aspects of experience magnified in dreams.

    

     The psychological preeminence of man is in his creative and thereby his spiritual potentialities and powers. Beyond all mere motor or emotional response to stimuli, he dwells also in an inner or subjective world in which he is a weaver of dreams, in which from elements of beauty or joy drawn from pictured and remembered experiences he builds his ideals. In this inner subjective or metaphysical life man advances to and occupies a further plane of existence and action higher than that of mere reflex and motor response. In his thus enlarged field of being he is less limited; he is no longer a mere creature wholly predetermined, for now he aspires beyond the mere tropism of direct or immediate response. To the degree of his native endowment, the unbound psyche (creative spirit) within him chooses and selects con­genial elements from its field of crude experiences and predetermined reactions and by a creative process weaves them into patterns of things that never were but are desired and dreamed. And here a new kind of motivation arises, not a mere necessitous response motivated by desire to survive. It is a self-created motivation, an inspiration to action not for the satisfaction of a need but towards the fulfill­ment of the self-chosen, the self-created dream.

 

     Tropic or reflex reactions are immediate, undelayed and

unrefined through the _________  of imagination and choice. And these reactions, such of them as are favorable to main­tenance of the life are inexorably required and imposed. Yet those which through changed circumstance or environment have become outmoded and no longer serve must give way to new or modified reactions if the life is to prosper or even to pre­vail. In all this the motivation is necessity. The action is prescribed and disobedience is death.

 

But man, the creature who imagines and dreams, builds in himself the motivation not of mere blind continuation upon terms that, as creature, he must obey. He is subject to nature indeed, but there is an ineluctable principle operat­ing throughout all nature that is called divine and under which all life transcends its past. Preeminently endowed with this divine principle the picturing mind of man trans­cends the limitations of its creature state, for it finds therein not thorns alone but blossoms of beauty and sustain­ing joy, and these it weaves into dreams and ideals.

 

It has been said, “All that a man hath will he give to save his life.” And so he will. When life is in the balance he will give all for bread to sustain it. But man is more than creature. He does not live by bread alone, for he is also a creator and as such he lives by every “word” that proceedeth from the divine, by every dream and ideal with which he is inspired.

 

Does creation then consist of dreams alone? Far from it. The spirit of creation is made manifest only in its works. The dream is the non-manifested, the unexecuted picture of works to be made, creation to be thereby performed——formed through the dream. The ideal is far more than the will to exist, to sacrifice for sake of salvation. It is the picture of beauty conceived but unborn, the inspiration, the motivation, the divine urge to create. Under this motivation, this self-impulsion from within there is no seeking of salva­tion, no sacrifice required, yet under it all that a man hath will he give. He will hazard even life itself, not as a creature or from any necessity imposed but from a self-neces­sity, from the creative divinity incarnate in him.

 

                        /The following remarks are by Alvin Lowi                                     on the outside of the envelope:/

 

          Psychological Preeminence of Man

Man alone has the gift of reflection, unbound psyche, creative spirit. He can dream and become self-motivated to act beyond the range of the moment. Besides reflex actions he can not only adapt to changing circumstances for which existing reflexes develop, he can choose his circumstances according to his dream. And his dream can become more important than his physical life——not as a compulsion but as a self-impulsion, a creative divinity.

Remarks: A brilliant piece on creativity with a psychology orientation.