Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1424

Carbon of a letter to Mildred Jensen Loomis, Lane’s End Homestead, Brookville, Ohio

February 6, 1944

Dear Mildred Loomis:

I owe you many thanks for your kind and interesting letter of January 31. I appreciate your kind references to my printed essay on The Inspiration of Beauty and your comment on the Good, the True and the Beautiful.

I note you do not seem to regard these three as a progression. I do. In the progression of nature, the higher transcends the lower; the greater always includes the less, but the less can never equal the greater. Beauty cannot be created at all, much less “without goodness” as you suggest. It is the absolute, the in­spirational, the creative and therefore spiritual element of the Cosmos that motivates men to creation. It does not pre-suppose an opposite. It is divine in its own right. It does not depend on any contrast with an oppo­site to make it manifest, to high-light it, so to speak. It is the on-going, the ever leading and inspiring prin­ciple of existence.

But truth is always relative and dependent. It does not create or inspire to create; it only distinguishes or, at best, enables us to distinguish. And its supposed opposite, error or falsity, on which it depends does not even exist. For no part of the Cosmos is without actuality — false in itself. Even a mistaken belief is an actuality. True beliefs relate (are relative) to experience; something in the Cosmos corresponds to them. False beliefs are such only in that they are not related to experience — cannot be objectified. Not the subjective belief nor the objective reality is, in itself, false; there is only a lack of relatedness between them. When belief and experience are related, then the belief is relative, and our calling it truth only proclaims its relatedness or relativity.

Goodness also is secondary and derivative. But it refers not to thought or belief but to action and exper­ience. It is a negative reaction to action that is dis­integrative — that limits the durational element in any organism or organization — that shortens life. Such action evokes negative emotion — a biological urge to escape or attack. And this counter-action — evil against evil — we glorify as “good,” calling this fugitive or destructive urge a “moral sense” and (quite wisely) not a spiritual or creative response.

Freedom in unity — co-operation — is spiritual because it is integrative, creative. Social-ized men, i.e. men united in contractual relationships (the social and impersonal love relationship under the Golden Rule of Exchange), are creative. These relationships are not compulsory; they may be practiced or not; but so far as men accept and practice their divine inheritance they become creators; they rebuild and create their environing world. Contractual (free) co-operation lessens man’s bondage to environment, makes them masters over it. It emancipates their energies and extends the duration of their lives.

This new energy and life answers not to necessity but to inspiration. What is merely useful to man only meets his necessities and needs. What is inspirational — evoked by Beauty — leads him into the joy and freedom of creation. Not the relative and dependent (truth) nor the re-actionary, destructive and customary (moral), but only the inspirational — the breath-taking — raises man from creature to Creator — makes him divine.

At the level of need and necessity men’s energies are enslaved and their needs are great; but they differ from the non-necessitous and free in that they are limited and not insatiable. They are not to be glorified or in­creased but to be satisfied and met, and this with least preoccupation and power, as all the humbler functions should be performed.

Needs are imposed by nature. By their satisfaction, men only exist. At the level of the merely useful, man has little choice or effective will. Under this necessity his “responsibility” is his response to what exists. Under the inspiration of Beauty nature responds to him. He creates. This is his divinity. Only as men become artists, — dreamers, conceivers, creators — does their divinity arise.

I cannot better close than in some of the same words with which your letter ends: to wit. I hope this isn’t too abstruse. It is very real and meaningful to me.

Cordially yours,

 

Encouraged by your interest, I enclose a functional explanation of private property in land — the dark con­tinent of economic science; also an explanation of how the Henry George “Philosophy of Freedom” through the wholly unnecessary technique of taxation (compulsion) has, so far, defeated its own ends.

If, for purposes of discussion or the like you should like to have any more of these I shall be glad to send you gratis all you desire.