Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1243

Handwritten letter, apparently never mailed, from Heath at 434 West 120th Street, New York City, to Ger­trude Wylie

August 7, 1937.

 

 

 

Dear Miss Wylie:

 

It 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 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 personality (psyche) with its environing universe is almost a guarantee of growth and beauty in the new relation which is at once more universal and more specific, narrower and yet wider, 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 practical 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. You have been given hypotheses within the configuration of which all the facts in the given field of phenomena could be placed without any pieces being left over and unaccounted for, and in cases 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 properties under the periodic law.

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 conceptions, science recognizes matter and energy, structure and function and all of its processes are trans­ferences of energy, with transformation in accordance with the structures to and through which the energy is transferred. Structures are always compound-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 is life, growth, organization of energy, evolution. It is like evolution in mathematics — binomial theorem — indefinite integration of successive terms into greater complexities of structure under one continuing and unvarying process — the unity of the absolute expressing itself in the variety of the relative and particular.)

 

At the societal level these transferences of energies between units or groups takes 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 greater prevalence of the exchange process and relationship that the societal organization is maintained and enhanced — lives and grows.

 

I am sure it is normal to revel, as you say, confusedly among the facts until some large hypothesis comes into view consonant with all preceding established theory, and then the light breaks; all the particulars now fall within the frame of the conception. We are psychologically integrated

with external reality and now we 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 our wishes and desires into our physical world. So must the corresponding generalizations of social phenomena open the way and provide the means for men to build into their social organization and environ­ment all the beauty of their finest dreams.

 

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 will be of the utmost enhancing one to another and that the energies exchanged will give genesis to perfect fruits of the body and perfect flower of companionship, meet to fertilize and fructify the personality as a whole — the soul.

 

     Best of all wishes to the “Trudie” who so ______________

and to him, whom I would like better to have known.