Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1868

Pencil notes inserted, perhaps as a bookmark, between pages 82-83 of Charles Coulston Gillispie, Genesis and Geology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951)

     The transition from ancient and European tyranny to American freedom was not qualitative. It was a quantitative change from a maximum of governmental coercion and control to a minimum of political restrictions and regulations upon the spontaneous, non-coercive and creative inter-activities among men. The Jeffersonian ideal merely of least government, even among the most pronounced libertarians of today, naively prevails. It visions no alternative to coercion in the conduct of public affairs but to minimize it and no means or mode of counteracting the infection is conceived or proposed, and even among the most thoughtful there is tendency towards despair,

     Yet all the mighty conquests of the scientific spirit and the marvelous modern advances in wealth and values by the practice of free enterprise, so sadly limited as it is, these two, hand in hand, are a mighty example of what can be accomplished in freedom without any coercion against or dominion by force of man over man. How strange to think that the spirit of man /which?/ could work all this wonder in its non-political realms should have no deep /?/ potential for comparable or even greater achievement in the world of common and public affairs.

     Modern science was never planned, it evolved, it grew. And it grew out of the free spirit of individual men with a passion for Beauty that they themselves but little realize, exploring the unknown. The system of free enterprise likewise has grown. It springs from the impulses of individual men that they but little understand that impel them in the free relationships of contract with one another to create unitedly a world in which they longer live and their spirits thrive.

     Only so far as men have abandoned their animal ways, seeking only to keep themselves comfortably alive, can they have any science or make any creative transformation of their world. And so far as they continue in their animal and unregenerate ways they are hard put to maintain even their animal lives, for the more they seek to save themselves through the practice of force one upon another or collectively through government the more surely do they lose even the little that they have.