Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1213.

Carbon of letter by Heath from The Poinciana, 434 West 120th Street, New York City, to Miss Gertrude Wylie, Sarah Lawrence School, Bronxville, New York

August 7, 1937

Dear Miss Wylie:

It certainly was nice to hear from you again after so long. But the big news is disconcerting in that it takes you away from New York too far for continuance of those occasional sessions of discussion and entertainment that I have so much enjoyed with you.

You are certainly taking up the excitements and adventures of life in majestic order. I can believe (almost as much as I can wish and hope) that your new departure with “Paul” will be as successful and as admirably carried forward as all your preceding enterprises.

Your beautiful success in the educational field and in that objective world of science whence alone can come creative integration of the life of mankind with its environing universe is almost a guarantee of growth and beauty in the new relation which is at once narrower and yet wider and more universal than anything before. Physically, we live only in a world of narrow particulars, but psychologically we can experience them in terms of ever widening universals. Poetic imagination can universalize our interior worlds, but only by the measured techniques of science can the dream be wrought into the environment and the objective world be molded “nearer to the heart’s desire.”

I can understand how you, as an accurate thinking scientist, must feel hesitant and confused when you contemplate a whole field of phenomena in which there have been no end of poetical generalizations but to which the orderly methods of science have been applied hardly at all. In your familiar sciences, other than the social, as you have studied them you have had deduction and induction, principle and fact, already coordinated for you as you went along. You have been given hypotheses within the configuration of which all the facts in a given field of phenomena could be placed without any pieces being left over and unaccounted for; and in places where there have not been enough facts to fill up the full diagram of the theory, then this diagram has been the chart to their quick discovery. — Vide, Neptune, charted by the diagram of the gravitational theory, and the balance of the ninety-two elements forecasted as to their existence and their properties under the “periodic law.”

In my own thinking and talking I am trying to suggest a broad hypothesis that will account for all the facts of history and of contemporary social phenomena. I hold that as human life has evolved from life precedent and below, then the phenomena in this field must fit into the same (or like) hypotheses. At its broadest conception, science recognizes matter and energy, structure and function, and all of its processes are transference of energy, with transformations in accordance with the structures to and through which the energies are transferred.

Structures are always compounded — associated units. When the energies transferred between the units collide the structure disintegrates to a level of less complexity. This is decay and death. When the energies are exchanged, without collision, then the structure is enhanced, integrated into higher complexities and therefore higher functional capacities. This we call life, growth, organization of energy, evolution. It is like the evolution in mathematics, like the binomial theorem, an indefinite integration of successive terms into greater complexities of structure under one continuing and unvarying process — the unity of the absolute, the process, manifesting itself in the variety of the relative and particular.

At the social level, these transferences of energies between units or groups take place in the same two ways — by collision and by exchange, accompanied by disintegration or by integration, as the case may be. It is only by the greater prevalence of the exchange process and relationship that the social organization can be maintained and enhanced, that it can live and grow.

I am sure it is normal to revel, as you say, confusedly, among the plethoric facts, until some large hypothesis comes into view, consonant with all preceding established theory, and then the light breaks; all of the particulars now fall within the frame of the conception. We are psychologically integrated with external reality, and now we have become veritably creators, for we have the means wherewith to build our aesthetic dreams into our environing world.

The generalizations of natural science have afforded vast means for building the fulfillment of age-old wishes and desires into our physical world. So must the corresponding generalizations of social phenomena open the way and provide the means and technique for men to build into their social organization all the beauty that their poets and artists have dreamed.

In the little universe of intimate relations you are about to enter and build, I trust there will be little of collision and the utmost of mutuality and exchange. I trust that the units involved in this social microcosm will be of the utmost inspiration one to another and that the energies exchanged will give genesis to perfect fruits of the body and perfect flowers of companionship meet to fertilize and fructify the personality as a whole.

Best of all wishes to the “Trudie” who so subscribes herself and to the “Paul” whom I would have liked better to have known.

Spencer