Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2133

Extract from a long letter to Laura Jean McAdams, Due West, South Carolina

December 23, 1942

Original is missing.

My early adolescence (which was somewhat mentally and emotionally starved) was enamored of the abstractions. Religious speculation came first and then I devoured all the philosophic articles in Britannica, some of the Ancients, especially Plato, a desultory reading (with much raising of the brow) of Hegel and Kant and their contemporaries, and, with great delight, Emerson and finally and with much dissent such later writers as Spencer and over against him, McCosh, Royce and James. Strangely, the two high-standing philosophers whom, perhaps, I have least read I am most disposed, with almost no qualifications, to accept. I feel that I have caught their spirit, or am born of the same, and that the method of their thinking opens the way to the human exercise of creative and thus of divine powers. They are Spinoza and Santayana. And Santayana, the poet, I hope sometime, in good company, to explore.²¹³³