Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1316

Carbon of a letter from Heath to The Atlantic Monthly, 8 Arlington Street, Boston MA

May 22, 1939

 

Original is missing.

 

 

Dear Atlantic:

Since my retirement from engineering and professional work nearly ten years ago, I have been indulging a serious amateur interest (in the best and proper sense of that word) in the social organization itself as a special form of life. I have tried to study society objectively as a natural phenomenon, and have approached it from the standpoint of the beauty that is to be found always where there is a nice adaptation of parts functioning together.

Prom time to time, my observations have led to what appear to me as interesting and significant discoveries. For my own satisfaction, I have committed a number of these to writing and thus communicated them to a few friends and correspondents. For further convenience, I have had one or two of them printed. The enclosed monograph on Property and Land is one of them.

I have been finding more and more that my analyses of social institution have all rested upon the concept of energy existing in structures and being constantly transferred and transformed through them. Recently I have tried to formulate this conception with specific application to the phenomena of populations. For my own thinking, I have found this a very fruitful foundation. Dr. Raymond Pearl has expressed a good deal of interest in it and regards my idea of a coefficient and social efficiency as a suggestive one.

A letter just received from Professor Crane Brinton, of your own Harvard, History Department, contains the following reference: “The paper on the ‘Energy Concept of Population’ seems to me one of the most promising bits of social analysis I have seen recently, and I hope very much you will have it printed in one of the learned journals where it will be of readier access.”

Acting upon the suggestion of Professor Brinton and several others, I am enclosing, herewith, a typed copy of my fundamental monograph, “The Energy Concept of Population.” You will recognize this as a very meager outline of the principles involved, but it may be that in its present or in some improved or extended form, you would regard it as material suitable for your pages. It has not been offered to any periodical heretofore.

 

Very truly yours,

 

 

 

Enc.