Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1485

Letter to Edmund W. Sinnott, Dean of the Graduate School, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Related material in item 2768

July 15, 1953

 

 

 

Dear Dr. Sinnott:

     My grandson (Princeton ‘54) and I, cultural contemp­oraries, have taken great interest in your book, Cell and Psyche, and also in your later published, Two Roads to Truth, that you mentioned in your letter of May 14th. We like your free and clear expression, your views and reviews. But there are preferences even among the best of things, and that the best often comes in small packages seems particularly well borne out in the earlier book, Cell and Psyche. That little book we think is even more important for its method than for what it accomplishes, important as that is.

     Unlike Cell and Psyche, Two Roads to Truth is all about ideas, philosophies, beliefs. It does not pertain directly to any objects, nor to the events that constitute Human life and action. It deals rather with the subjective side of human experience, accumulated psychological reactions of the generations of men to their environment, human and non-human. The immediate reactions, with their secondary results, it separates into two kinds: those that are wholly subjective and intuitive — leading to the rationalizing of feelings, and those that are analytical and rational, de­layed and considered reactions — the seeking of uniformities in the procession of external events and their formulation in generalized abstract and quantitative conceptions. The former tend to fixed systems of dogmas and creeds to give subjective satisfactions. The latter tend to progression from the known to the unknown, to the resolution of meta­physical hypotheses into general laws verifiable in fact and capable of practical application in the industries and arts.

     Two Roads to Truth presents a high and fine valuation of religion in its positive aspects as it does also of science, both springing, in their separate and unlike ways, from the human aspiration towards understanding, towards at-one-ment with the Universal, the one directly through intuitive feeling, the other indirectly through rational understanding. It thus finds them fundamentally not at all antagonistic but harmonious and complementary, each affording what the other lacks.

     The book also, as a kind of negative digression, but with fine justice and generosity, evaluates, on the side of religion, those “over-beliefs” and intolerances by which its beneficence is circumscribed and confined and, on the part of science, the system of negative dogmatisms and denials that is called “scientific materialism.” Of these, the one is found rooted in jealousy and fear, the other in skepticism and grim despair. Both are dismissed, and happily, for lack of positive capacity for the advancement of human life in the direction of its ideals. On their affirmative sides, science and religion are seen, both as mighty agencies of faith and of creative power that must walk apart and alone, each without support of the other, until they outgrow their limitations self-imposed. Throughout is the implica­tion that truth is the touchstone whereby all evils can be resolved, all aspirations attained — that truth can lift our limitations, make our spirits free. Yet truth can hardly be defined as a metaphysical entity, but rather as our understanding of the objective environment of circum­stances, events, proceedings, behavior within and upon which human destiny must be fulfilled. Truth must have an object. To know the truth is to know the truth about something, to understand it.

     The final chapters plead earnestly “to combine the rational, logical intellectual approach to truth with the aesthetic, spiritual and religious one.” But the prob­lem is seen as difficult; the hope seems less fervent than the plea, and only in the “fundamentals” is unity to be found or achieved.

     In all this we deal with mankind’s faiths and beliefs as being fundamental to the attainment of their goals. May we not pause and ponder this? May it not be that, as in the cell, behavior goes deeper than belief? Surely they are not in man always in accord. Is there not a providence in nature under which the behavior that is more durable is more viable and tends most to continue and survive? Perhaps thought must follow behavior before behavior can follow thought; for what else but behavior can thought understand (or misunderstand)? And as some behavior is life-ward and thus endures, so the thought that understands such behavior is right thinking, constructive, qualified in turn to direct behavior. Thus such empirical action as is integrative and succeeds, once it is inductively exam­ined and understood, gives way to rational creative action towards hearts’ desires.

     In Cell and Psyche the cell is seen to proliferate and develop under a specific pattern or plan that bespeaks a specific purpose. Must we impute this specific purpose to the mind of the cell itself or to an evolutionary method­ology, a cosmic purpose, that is exemplified in the develop­ment behavior of the cell? May it not be that intuitive aspirations, inchoate thinking, in the human organism (so far as it becomes conscious) is only a conscious reflex of its developmental past, just as any rational understanding of our outer and objective world derives from our reflec­tions on what happens there? It seems to me that to think rightly, even to understand ourselves rightly, comes from understanding not our feelings or our thoughts but from understanding our past and present behavior — through understanding the cosmic purpose as it is manifested in so much of our behavior as is life-ward and thus abides. And in like manner does science read the cosmic mind in the evolutionary phenomenon of creative cosmic behavior — the mind of God as evidenced in the works of God. The thinking thus derived by inductive examination of specific areas of the cosmic behavior leads to creative behavior in those areas. It  becomes purposive and creative, for it can be reflected back upon the environment and mould it nearer to the heart’s desires. It may well be that empirical achievement, like that of the on-growing embryo, is under the slow but sure guidance of the cosmic purpose and mind, and that all rational technology, on its creative side, is but the action of human minds become creative — specific agents of the cosmic purpose and universal plan. This, however, is not to abandon or even to discount the intuitive, emotional and religious road towards fulfillment. It is here we must find the motivation, the dream of rela­tive beauty and perfection; for all motivation is aesthetic, while rationality, science, gives light and guidance straight to the ends desires.

     This kind of thinking, this understanding of the be­havior of their non-human environment in its organizational aspect, has given man, through science, enormous creative power over it. But the free organizational relationships among men, with respect to their successful behavior as interfunctioning units in a greater whole, gets scant atten­tion and even less understanding. Shall we say there is no cosmic purpose or plan that, despite all governments, all violences and wars, has guided this organic free association among Western men into far higher abundance of life and length of days than their forebears for ages enjoyed and Eastern and less free men have yet attained? In Cell and Psyche the thinking and understanding was the reflex of the behavior observed, not that of just any cell relationships, but only of their integrative relation­ships as exhibited in the specific pattern that evolves. Here the understanding seems derived from the behavior observed, the thinking from that thought about. And this thinking is creative, for /in/ the understanding so derived lies power to direct the process towards human goals — the cosmic process now moving through the human will. In like manner, when we derive our social thinking not from the disintegrative behavior among men but from that which, albeit empirically, raises them into a higher organic unity that separately or in collision they do not attain, may not the understanding so derived give light and direc­tion for the fulfillment of the human purpose as at one with the cosmic will?

     My thesis is that to achieve the human dream we must derive our system of understanding, of feeling and thought, of religion and science, exclusively from these phenomena that, as in the developing embryo, exemplify the cosmic trend. Not by attempt to reconcile the various ways of thinking that are largely otherwise derived, but by letting nature teach our minds her forward ways, shall we find rational light and guidance towards our cherished goals.

     My dear Dr. Sinnott, I am greatly inspired by your Cell and Psyche. For this little book takes no account of the negative and abortive relationships known to be current among cells, hence none of any irreconcilable beliefs inspired by these negative and abortive modes of cell behavior. It discovers only in the normal and success­ful organization of embryonic cells their predetermination towards specific structure similar to the conscious deter­minations towards specific ends or aims in the developed human organism. It discovers purpose much as Erwin Schrödinger in his What is Life? discovers, within known physical conditions, relationships that exhibit the characteristics of life. In all the relationships among men should we not first learn to distinguish the positive from the nega­tive and abortive and thus derive exclusively from the functional and creative behavior of men the conscious right thinking by which the human purpose can execute, in part at least, the cosmic dream? How I’d like to see another book from your hand like Cell and Psyche in methodology and plan and dealing with the developmental free behavior of men into a divinely predetermined structure of Society, in fulfillment at once of the universal cosmic and of the individual human will.

Sincerely,