Spencer Heath Archive

Item 312

Penned by Heath on a large folded sheet of paper.

Spring 1958

 

 

 

     Every living thing has a structure and form specific to its genus or class. Every living thing develops from a single cell into a specific structure and form peculiar to its genus, species or class. It is determined to this by something inherent in and peculiar to that original cell.

 

Every living thing springs from a single cell or pair of cells handed down from the precedent generation of the species to which it belongs. This original cell, in common with all others of its specific class or kind, possesses all the specific properties and potentials for the adult that identify it with every member of its own type or kind and distinguish it from every other type or kind. Once the original cell is stimu­lated to take on energy from a suitable environment it divides and multiplies into two lines of descendent cells — genetic and somatic. The first reduplicate their original with all the properties and potentialities of one of their prototypes, male or female, substantially unchanged. They are not substantially differentiated one from another, hence cannot act reciprocally. Thus their life span is short (?) and their numbers few at any one time. The second, the somatic cells, differentiate one from another into specific classes and kinds in such manner that each can be reciprocal and symbiotic with the whole — that is, each so acts as to contribute to the growth and action of others and thereby of the whole. These somatic cells therefore are not in a merely linear succession but in a more or less permanent organi­zation in which the cycle of the individual is long and the life cycle of the organization itself is longer still.

 

     Like all else in nature, life is a succession of specific units and classes of cyclic units or events ranging from simple to complex and each having a quantity of structure, a rate of

activity and a length of term. And life so observed /?/ is hierarchal; for at each level of organization greater numbers of units are involved and, according to the degree or extent of their recipro­cal interfunctioning, the frequency of their succession is less and their life cycle long. And whatever be the level of the organization, its capacities and powers are determined by those of the lesser and numerous constituents of which it is composed. Thus there is a quality in the single genetic cell that determines in advance the specific pattern, kind and qualities of the higher unit, organization into which it grows. This determination, how­ever, has reference only to the specific pattern or kind of higher organization towards which the basic unit shall grow. It does not govern how far or how perfectly towards maturity the growth shall extend

 

     This advance determination in the cell is a quality that cannot be sensibly experienced. Its action is wholly beyond the range of objective experience, perceived by its obviously determined effects    a subjective process of the mind reacting to  /Lines marked out in the pencil notes/ Its action as cause is perceived only through a necessary psychological process of consciousness reacting to the objective event

                                  /Breaks off/