Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1648

Letter from Heath to John A. Wheeler, Physics Department, Princeton University. Not mailed.

Spring 1958

Dear Dr. Wheeler:

     Since receiving your note of October 16th, I have taken pains to look up the two books, Homer Smith’s Kamongo and Bohr’s Open World, which you refer to. However, Kamongo is the only one I have been able to obtain so far. It is indeed a remarkable dialogue carried out in a unique setting, beautifully described. The optimism of course appears to be almost exclusively on the side of the padre, whose knowledge of natural science in its evolutionary aspect seems to give him at least equal advantage with his materialistic adversary. The padre’s whole discussion brought to my mind through­out, Edmund Sinnott’s Biology of the Spirit /not entirely clear but that a book by Ralph Lillie was intended here/, which I dare say you well know.

     Except for John Tyndall, the nineteenth-century materialists seem to have been singularly devoid of the esthetic element, which I think accounts for their funda­mental pessimism which still hangs over in the person of Bertrand Russell.

    The totalitarian menace is indeed a clear and present danger and makes short-term optimism difficult. But the cyclic nature of all events, structures and systems of events guarantees that only those organizations whose elements are harmoniously composed can ultimately prevail. There is no apparent limit to the durational element (third term in the Christian Trinity) in the changing composition of events. Those systems of relationship in which there is least discord must present or contain also the greatest permanence. Only that which is most rational in its composition, and thereby most beautiful, can enduringly abide. I dare say you will note this principle of enduringness running through my ultimately optimistic analysis of the societal organization as such.

     I must thank you for your kind acknowledgments and express my gratification from being in contact with so artistically and rationally balanced a mind as your Seven Sybils, among other things, so notably reveals.

                        Sincerely yours,