Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2028

Rough pencil notes by Spencer MacCallum during a conversation with Heath on questions of intellectual antecedents.

Fall 1956?

 

 

 

MacCallum: Was there ever any particular ’Bible’ that influenced you in the development of your ideas?

 

I took my observations right out of the working of society around me.

 

But you did get from Henry George the notion of freedom of contractual relations in trade in general, and the suggestion of rent as the natural revenue of society. Did the emphasis on beauty come largely from Emerson?”

Santayana even more than Emerson; Emerson always put it in terms of  .”

I have an inevitable proposition too . . . based on

the theory that that is the way that gives men permanence to their lives — the Golden Rule methodology applied to public services. That Golden Rule principle has given us a high standard of living over, say, India.

Who are some of the figures in history who, if put together today, might hit on this social discovery?

Jesus Christ (one above all others), Plato, Spinoza, Emerson, Santayana, Herbert Spencer, Turgot, Adam Smith. Probably Fustel de Coulanges, if I knew more about him. Probably Croce, but I don’t know enough about him to be sure. How many you got? About nine now? That’s enough to make a full team.

That Hegelian dialectic certainly is the dumb stuff.

Tyndall and Huxley? No, because of their environment. They had seen abuses of church administration and had not seen any virtue in landed aristocracy. Tyndall would be a mighty lively candidate, much more than Huxley. Tyndall could analyze things. Huxley could, too, but he was more of a sledge hammer. Tyndall, so far as I know, hadn’t turned his mind in that direction (rational social organization).

The emergent evolutionists? Some of them were ruined by their totalitarianism. Lester Ward, when it came to the social level, proposed that Government take over. Lloyd Morgan .. not sure of his social proposals. Jan Smutz… All saw the emergence of new form, but didn’t realize that the form emerging in society is characterized by its voluntarism, its spontaneity. They recognized that spon­taneity characterizes the associations of cells and that forcing them would ruin it — that they join because of symbiotic relations. Contract is a tremendous achievement: where men adopt a creative relationship with one another.