Heath Archive

Item 1486

Carbon of letter from Heath to Edward McCrady, The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee

July 24, 1953

Dear Mr. McCrady:

     Supplementing my letter of May 12, which I hope was duly received and noted by you, I am sending you herewith, in the form of a letter to Dr. Edmund Sinnott, a little dissertation on his two notable books, Cell and Psyche and Two Roads to Truth. My own dream of a vastly glorious humanity is brightened and enlarged through knowing that men of high eminence in physical and biological science like you and Dr. Sinnott are developing the broad implications of these sciences for human organiza­tion and spiritual ideals.

    Tradition has it that man once had no knowledge of evil, only of life, but when he acquired also “The knowledge of good and evil” death lurked at his door. In his spiri­tual, in his creative endowment the divinity in man seeks to restore his at-one-ment with the creative, with the enduring, with what is good and is true. But in his merely animal nature, as unregenerate man, he gives his worship to demons, seeking not at-one-ment but compromise, appease­ment and escape. May it not be that the humanities, includ­ing philosophy and religion, have been concerned over-much with good and evil, the true and the false instead of with the good and the true? Has not their knowledge, their understanding of the Tree of Life and its glories suffered from their beguilement with death, the fruit of “the tree of knowledge of good and evil?” Can it be that the humani­ties and the human sciences, turning from the Tree of Life, have been too much “barking up” the wrong tree?

     The humanities, as you know, are old. They were cradled anciently in the small but shining light that rose above slaveries and wars. They seem too much of the old dispensation, the coercive and abortive relationships among men, instead of the new. The objective, and thus practical sciences, came under the new dispensation of greater bodily freedom, hence freer thinking, that came with the Renaissance. In them the thinking is derived from observation of events. And so far as objects or events are observed in their positive aspect, in their integrative, developmental or evolutionary manifestation, the thinking that results from such observation is creative thinking – thinking that succeeds, for it is an at-one-ment of the mind of man with the Universal Creative Mind.

     Your beautiful demonstration of the universally pre­vailing process of the simpler and less enduring forms of life ever integrating into greater organic unities and higher functions inspires me again and again. My Citadel, Market and Altar is a serious effort to understand the evolving societal life form in terms of its three-fold behavior as (1) self-defensive, (2) self-sustaining and (3) inspirational and creative. This, it seems to me, is the kind of understanding towards which your mind and Dr. Sinnott’s moves – the knowledge that is power, the truth that makes men free.

    As your larger vision has strengthened and extended mine, I hope that my attempted contribution may be of some like use or value to you. And since my chief reliance has been on what I conceive to be fundamental in the physical sciences, I shall most of all value and be thankful for any amendment or correction you may suggest as regards “The Energy Concept of Population” set out in my Chapter Three. I am hoping eventually and at your convenience to have something from you upon this.

    In any event, it is much to feel myself very deeply in accord with your creative conceptions of the Cosmos from the strictly analytical and scientific point of view no less than in your high esthetic and religious approach.

Sincerely,