Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1638

Carbon of a letter from Heath to Charles C. Gillispie, c/o American Scientist, P. 0. Box 703, Princeton, New Jersey.

August 22, 1957

 

 

Dear Mr. Gillispie:

     I have been much interested in reading — and re­reading — your “Perspective” of Volume II of Mr. Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China appearing in the March, 1957 number of the American Scientist.

     Your warmly laudatory opening remarks on the typography and design of Mr. Needham’s book, and especially “the sheer magnitude of the undertaking,” are in such good keeping with the author’s unique qualifications for his task — as so ably stated by him and quoted at length in your second paragraph — that one must admire the well calculated objectivity and modest restraint with which you follow his logical gyrations upon factual materials very largely invented by and proprietary to him.

     Mr. Needham, I believe, is quite an old hand at historical and scientific obfuscation by way of disingenuous and deceptive ground work for the implanting of his totalitarian ideology, especially among the unwary and largely adolescent literati of the colleges and schools, all from the vantage point of his presumably well-earned eminence in physical science.

     Quite fitly does he hold up for mass-emulation the submissive, routine-loving, uncreative, futile and fatalistic Chinese, whose worship is ancestry in place of divinity and who had no political history for some thousands of years apart from their conquest and domination by foreign powers. He would have us admire and thus come to emulate them until we could all lose the greater part of our lives in recession from an average longevity of seventy to perhaps less than thirty years, under subjection to a Mandarin Marxism that appears to be his inveterate ideal.

     In the communist jurisprudence, all law is but the dictate of power demanding submission and shadowed by death, not the rationality of nature nor the reciprocal, free practices among men wherein they find ever more abundant life. Where, in all of Mr. Needham’s writings, shall be found any deference to the inviolability of the individual, any acknowledgement of the spiritual nature of man?

     But it is never sufficient merely to identify the ideology of tyranny and death. There must be understanding of its contrary and thereby a growing rationality in lieu of the almost blind empiricism that dominates all the free interrelationships among men. What must evolve is a rational philosophy of free enterprise and productive capitalism.

 

     Knowledge of the way of life in which we walk, this alone can set us above and beyond the mingling of good and evil, of force and freedom, that ends in darkness and in death. And in this, science can be the redeemer. For it can discover the relationships of balanced har­mony among men as organizational units just as it has discovered them among the units of which stable atoms are composed, among the units that are combined in mole­cules, the cells that constitute the higher living forms, and even the stellar bodies of which galaxies are composed.

     Feeling that a rational beginning has been made in my own recently published Citadel, Market & Altar, I am venturing to send to you, with my compliments, a copy of this volume in the hope that you will evaluate or at least constructively criticize what I have taken as fundamental to all science — thus the sound basis for an authentic science of society. I will be glad indeed if this mode of approach shall commend itself to your widely informed and obviously philosophic mind.

                        Very sincerely yours,

SH/m

Citadel, Market and Altar under separate cover