Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1482

Letter to William E. Fort, 1951 Forest Road, Winter Park, Florida

May 20, 1953

Dear Dr. Fort:

     I left Florida in mid-April and came north via Augusta, Chattanooga and the Valley of Virginia. I brought with me many feelings of satisfaction at having renewed my happy acquaintance with you and Mrs. Fort of some five years before. I had always remembered your exceptionally broad outlook and tendency towards philosophic advance into the fertile field of objective events as well as the merely subjective processes of the mind — just as psychology must have an outer subject-matter upon which its inner and subjective processes can react or take effect.

     Upon arrival at Chattanooga I found my path crossing that of Dr. Edward McCrady of the University of the South who was addressing a regional convention of college educators. This resulted for me in a side trip to Sewanee, Tennessee and a very happy visit with Dr. McCrady on his home ground. I had known something of him through his lectures at Princeton and his published essay on religious perspectives in biology. This latter I have found most inspiring in his conception of the organic society as a living body composed of men united by contract and thus interfunctioning in trade and exchange under the Golden Rule of interaction without coercion — a social metabolism in virtue of which this higher being progressively transforms its natural world for the ever higher and thus ever longer living of its constituent mem­bers. He even assimilates this higher organism to the spiritual doctrine of men integrated under the Golden Rule constituting a universal church as “the Mystical Body of Christ” transcending all coercive dominations, all the powers of the “world.”

     Dr. McCrady comes to this vast spiritual conception chiefly on biological grounds. I have found the same con­ception implicit also in purely physical phenomena. In all the organizations of matter energy, from atoms to stars and their systems, those alone endure whose constituents are reciprocally related, as in the formation of double stars from two that do not collide and explode but mutually and enduringly revolve — nature establishing balanced harmonies instead of radioactive and other disintegration or decay. Also in the history of human organization we have the biological pair, the blood-bonded family or tribe, the coer­cive or political state, and the recently evolving contractual or Golden Rule society — only this last being enduring because non-coercive and inclusive of all — the conflicts between partial and lesser integrations of men becoming resolved in the free processes of a single organic society.

     Further, we find this free society progressively evolving in all the inherently free enterprises that persist, little regarded and often disvalued, under the burden of worldwide political domination by force — enterprises that once understood will fast extend themselves under profit motivation to the creative distribution of community services and goods, in lieu of coercive and thus insol­vent and destructive political administration. (Copy of my letter of May 12th to Dr. McCrady is enclosed.)

     I cannot thank you enough for arranging my personal contact with Dean Walker and Dr. Hanna that led to a full evening’s discussion at Dean Walker’s house of the ideal place and function of the liberal arts college in the organic (non-coercive) society. Practical considerations forbid that we should look on these (or any) ideal concep­tions as goals or end conditions completely attainable in themselves. Their vast value lies not in their attain­ment but in their orientation of our energies consistently in the direction of these ultimate ideals.

     It was a great pleasure to me personally to meet you and your associates and to enjoy also the intellectual hospitality with which my conception of ideals and suggestions of method in education (distinguished from pedagogy or any other training) were so kindly received. I would indeed be glad, should opportunity arise, to communicate through talks or seminars somewhat of the inspiration that I have experienced in my researches upon the structures and the functioning of the non-coercive (non-political) organic society that in the Western World during only recent centuries has so wonderfully yet so very incompletely evolved.

     Something of this kind might well become the nucleus around which a college department for study of the volun­tary society in terms of its structures and functions might be established and endowed — such a study as, under the term “Socionomy,” Webster’s New International Dictionary defines as “Theory or formulation of the organic laws exemplified in the organization and development of society.” In this suggestion I would propose none but small-scale and tentative beginnings, being quite mindful of the great potential for growth that is involved in any positive and truly authentic approach. Nor would I suggest any financial commitment or similar obligation on the part of the College being incurred.

     Well, so much for the possible teaching of a positive science of Society. What of your own special field? Doubtless the long traditions of philosophy and their deviant lines and voluminous commentaries are well familiar to you. Yet when I think of their pallid, when not quite sterile, precepts I suspect your mind has not been wholly content with empty yesterdays. For me Philosophy, like Antaeus, to become fertile and strong must plant its feet on the solid ground of events and experience. It was for want of this that the physical sciences abandoned her, even her name, and have gone forward alien to the streams that gave them birth. Philosophy generalized upon her intuitions; Science on her observations of events. Yet men^’s intuitions also have their origins in the vast objective world whence they themselves anciently and in all respects evolved. And the age-old dreams of philosophy and theology and the aspirations of religion are finding their fulfillments, one by one, as the rational sciences dissolve the mysteries out of the objective world. We may “doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs …,” namely, that life shall “ever transcend itself.”

     Empirically, we only drift blindly, like stowaways on the Cosmic Tide. Philosophy, in the main, is subjec­tive; it unfolds the rationale of and within itself — ourselves. It thus gives little knowledge of, hence little power and dominion over, the objective world in which we dwell. In this it gives goals without guidance, heart’s desires but no compass or chart. It thus leaves us limited to and dependent on toilsome empirical advance. Philosophy defines the goals we dream, while Science un­folds the rationale of the objective events in which we move. The two are complementary. Their organic (inter-functioning) synthesis takes man out of his plodding em­piricism into his heritage of a creative, hence spiritual, dominion over his objective world —- into the swift and certain execution of his dreams.

     Bits of your conversation indicate to me that your mind is among those who are developing extensions of philosophic thought in the direction of a wider integration with the objective world. I would like to know more about what you have written and thought.

     My very best and cordial regards to you both.

Sincerely,