Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1477

Carbon of letter from Heath to Crane Brinton, Department of History, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

November 12, 1953

 

 

Dear Dr. Brinton:

 

     Many times through the years I have remembered your pleasant hospitality toward me at the faculty club and other places in Cambridge; so in checking over old corres­pondence I am moved to drop a fresh line or two to you. Moreover, you have been brought to my mind by former students of yours, some of whom had interesting things to say.

     What are you doing about history? Are you leaving it alone, as is, or are you doing something towards put­ting a better, perhaps more useful, shape on it? The young man who is taking this letter asks me what history is. Here is what I am telling him.

     History is more than the recitation of human events; it is the selecting of them in organized relationships. This implies events in a relationship whereby a higher function evolves, a function that results from none other but this particular organization or concatena­tion of events. Without a concept of this function as affecting human life there is no accomplishment towards which organization can point. Unless organized under such a concept the events of history, however chosen or related, can have no rationale, no human significance. /Human/ history must be looked upon as an organic process in which an organism is evolved – a social organism endowed with a function possessed by no other form of organized life, namely, a capa­city for the progressive creation of environment favorable to itself; and the consequent further – the spiritual – function of which is the indefinite lengthening of the human life span towards that ab­solute immortality of which the human spirit dreams. When authentic and significant history is written it will be an orderly arrangement of those human events, and those only, which lead in the direction of this transcendent goal. The contrary side of his­tory can be likened to waste material that an artist must cast off in the shaping of his work, namely, conflicts, slaveries, and wars.

     Can you make any sense out of this?

     You may remember that I had formulated some ideas about social organization (as distinguished from political) in its functional aspects. I am currently engaged, among other things, in holding up to the light some of the con­ceptual waste material which has been mistaken far and wide as being essential to the living image which authentic history must reveal. The enclosed review of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty is one example of this. It is upon your sense of humor and your facile mind for grasping queer relationships, both rational and incongruous, that I presume to press this interrogatively upon you.

     With pleasant recollections and best wishes.

Sincerely yours,

 

  Spencer Heath

SH:sm Encl.