Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1591

Letter to Heath from F.A. Harper, The Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York.

December 10, 1956

 

 

Dear Mr. Heath:

     Thank you for sending a copy of Schroedinger’s “What is Life?”, which I await in anticipation because of your recommendation.

     In your letter about the Hazlitt item, I like your reference to the obligation aspect of human relation­ships. In all exchange, and all other contractual arrangements such as credit and the like, one should wonder how they can be carried out in the absence of quantitative expression. And if they are expressible quantitatively, they are for sure reducible to measure­ment.

     And your comment that “no negative statement about anything can be positively proved” brings to mind an observation made one day by my economics professor — himself quite a fine logician. He said that the only way to prove that water babies do not exist is to find some water babies nonexisting.

     The best,

  Cordially,