Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1244

Carbon on badly deteriorating paper, with pencil amendments by Heath, of a letter from Heath at Arvia Residence Club, 605 /695?/ West 112th Street, New York City, to a Mr. Walser

April 1, 1935

 

 

Dear Mr. Walser:

 

I am afraid I am as yet a member of New America only so far as a contribution of one dollar may have made me so. Dr. Watson has sent to me certain doctrinal forms to which I am asked to subscribe, but I doubt if I am sufficiently crowd-minded to meet these tests of eligibility without a liberality of interpretation much broader than the spirit in which the officers and membership of the organization seem to accept them.

 

     A mode of thinking that regards the very structure of society as a wicked or vicious contrivance put together and maintained by the malevolence of nature or the wickedness of selfish men and fails to take into account the long development of society leading to its present organic structure cannot be expected to discover the nature of its present maladjustments or to promote effective means for the setting right of its present functional derangements.

    

     I believe that our social organization, like our individual bodies, is endowed by its long inheritance with a marvelous and beautiful organic structure that is fully capable, so far as structure is concerned, of performing every function of which the organism as a whole has need, and again, like the individual body, it is subject to functional disorders which put its various parts in great need of readjustment one to another and to the whole, rather than any destruction or general reconstruction. With readjustment the evolution and organic growth of society will continue, but this can be only by the method which Nature employs in all those forms which survive, and that is not by discarding existing structures and forms but by combining them into ever higher and more complex relationships out of which new functions and new attainments emerge. This is known as Emergent Evolution, which is probably the deepest conception and the most significant intellectual development of the present age.

                                

                            Very sincerely,

 

I will be glad to pass the folders on.

 

 

 

/Sentence penciled on copy but not indicated for insertion:/

It is a conception of universal phenomena that is most significant and probably destined to be the most fruitful intellectual development of the present age.