Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1016

Two typed pages by Heath drafting a “letter to university men”

No date

 

Dear _________ :

 

Dr. Harold W. Dodds, President of Princeton University, pleads with the younger generation to solve this problem: How shall we learn to arrange our public and community business and affairs peaceably and without resort to violence and war? You, too, are a learned man in the academic sense. You are also a man of practical wisdom, at least wise enough to know that just as in electricity there are only two relationships — positive and negative — so, in the relations of men, there are only two conditions, integrative and disintegrative; there cannot be a third condition in any relationship. When two or more men or groups of men take any account of each other^’s presence or action, the net result at any moment is that it draws them together in higher well-being, or it tends, either immediately or eventually, to cast them asunder and to a lower level and shorter duration of life. The first of these is cooperation by contract, consent and exchange; the second is compulsion by coercion and force. The one is social, the other anti-social.

 

     All experience must be empirical before it is rational. Reason approves and repeats, and with conscious precision expands what experience without guide has found good. Life must somehow live before it can know how it lives, or even that it does live.

     Social (pro-social) conduct, in its positive aspects, is as susceptible of formulation and rationalization as is the conduct of masses in motion, fluids and gases, atoms and cells. The integrative motions of men are, indeed, more observable than the motions of molecules into crystalline beauty of design or the marching of cosmic materials into galaxies of stars and suns. In these remoter fields, we attend only to positive results, the things that abide and not those that dissolve. Here it is the reality, the beauty, that inspires and leads us on. There is no less beauty of pattern and process in the integrative relations of men, in the ways and things that lift them to every high estate and by which alone they there abide. By the integrative relations among men, societies grow and are maintained. By all the contrary they are dissolved and destroyed. Men are social-ized only so far as they serve one another in their public as well as their private relations by voluntary engagement and exchange.

     I am submitting for your examination and critical comment an interpretation of the institution of property in land from the functional and operative point of view and as an essential structure, perhaps the one essential structure by which the integrative, or exchange, social relationships are initiated and maintained. I anticipate your commendation of my efforts to search out and define the essential basis upon which rests all that exists in the way of social order and beneficence. If I seem coldly academic, please remember that it was only the theoretical, and even mathematical, investigations of heat, chemical reactions, electricity, etc., that gave any basis for their rational and practical application.

     Should your philosophic interest incline towards those wide generalizations that are giving unity to all the natural sciences, you may be interested in my adoption of the energy concept of population as the basis for an authentic Science of Society — a basis in common with that upon which the whole body of natural sciences rests. I invite your attention and reflection upon an outline of this energy conception which I enclose and particularly to that portion which seems successfully to differentiate the qualitative out of the merely quantitative in terms of quantity alone. It is possible that by such a differentiation the quantitative sciences may be accepted as the legitimate offspring of philosophy mated to religion and the esthetic arts — thought fertilizing inspiration. Thus in the household of philosophy, we may synthesize not only the practical and objective sciences but also of the subjective and esthetic arts themselves.

     I hope you will not think me presumptuous or that I wish to be other than complimentary in offering these matters for your consideration. With anticipation of your kind response,

                        Very sincerely yours,