Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1690

Carbon of a letter from Heath to Dean Harris, Emerson College, Pacific Grove, California

May 15, 1961

 

 

Dear Dean Harris:

 

     Thank you for your note of the 11^th with supplement proofs. Sorry I could not answer you right away. Plans for the summer after commencement here are not fully settled. I am committed to work with my grandson, already a collaborator with me and now a graduate student in social anthropology at the University of Washington, probably here or somewhere else in California. He says he wants to get another book out of me, and possibly he will. But I am a rather reluctant writer, perhaps in part because it always seems necessary for me to put out original conceptions and understandings orally and to some live intelligences a number of times before I can see them sharply enough to put them down tersely and in well-organized form.

 

     Your course descriptions are attractive indeed, particularly the ones on Plato, The Perception of Art, The Probabilities of the Future, and Historiography. I think I would prefer to sit in on one or more of these as a student before offering anything of my own. But if I should do so, it might well take such form as The Common Laws of Nature Among Men. This would have to do with those customary modes of action, self-enacting and self-enforcing whereby each man prospers others as they prosper him and thus civilization proceeds. Illustrations would be drawn from the natural sciences, from history (seen as growth) and from all (except criminal or political) current affairs. Alternatively, I might propose such a topic as The Philosophic Unity of the Sciences and the Arts. This would have to do with the unique and distinctively human mind, above the limitations of mere animal psychology, in which lies the capacity to conceive and create.

 

     Your father has sent me a very pleasant “thank you” note enclosing a copy of his company newspaper carrying a front-page picture of my Albuquerque grandson (a mathematical physicist) as a champion chess player.

 

                            Cordially,

                           

 

                            Spencer Heath