Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1324

Carbon of letter to W.P. Albright, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

January 15, 1941

 

 

Dear Dr. Albright:

 

I write to express to you my thanks and appreciation of the enjoyment afforded by your kind hospitalities and conversation of yesterday afternoon. I also appreciate the references to your own and other books which you indicated as marking out kindred paths to those in which my own mind has been moving. I expect to examine these references within the next two or three days. I am especially eager to see what you have developed in history under the organismic point of view.

 

     For all my enjoyment of your conversation, I am still quite regretful at having at so much length interrupted your routine for the afternoon. I would like you to extend this apology also to the very attractive young man who was enjoying the quite enviable advantages of your influence and instruction.

 

     I would certainly take much pleasure in any opportunity of being a listener or observer even if not a contributor, to some of your informal conversations or discussions.

 

     From the leading article in The Saturday Review of Literature written ninety-seven years ago by Ralph Waldo Emerson, I lift the following significant and, I believe, prophetic quotation:

 

“We must not imagine that all things are lapsing into confusion, nor doubt that roads can be built, letters carried, and the fruit of labor secured, when the government of force is at an end. We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star. … Only they who build on ideas, build for eternity.”

     It is my profound conviction that we achieve our ideals and dreams only through the enlightenment of our minds as to the constitution of the field and forces within which we exist and in which we can only thus play any creative or determining part. I am more than ever convinced that by objective examination of organized community life in the same manner that the constitution of the atom, the cell and the organism at the biological level is being examined, we shall find ourselves endowed with a heritage of potentialities and social harmonies surpassing all our yearning dreams. I trust I am not over bold in hoping that my own attempts to understand the nature and operation of organized community life may, in collaboration with others such as you, contribute to this end.

                        Very sincerely yours,

                           

                                 Spencer Heath

SH:ML

(Note: Above recommended to S.H. by Mr. Wright,

YMCA Secretary at Levering Hall, Johns Hopkins.)