Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2768

Penciling by Heath on notepad for a letter to Edmund Sinnott. A typed transcription from many years ago by Spencer MacCallum, enclosed with the original, contains many small editorial suggestions by him, some of which may also have been by Heath although not in Heath’s hand. Appended also is a typed page-and-a half giving a summary by Heath of some of the thoughts contained here.

No date

 

 

Dear Dr. Sinnott:

 

My grandson (Princeton ‘54) and I, cultural contemporaries, have taken great interest in your book CELL AND PSYCHE and also in your later published TWO ROADS TO TRUTH that you mentioned in your letter of May l4th. We like your free and clear expression, your views and reviews. But there are preferences even among the best of things, and that the best often comes in small packages seems particu­larly well borne out in your earlier CELL AND PSYCHE. That little book we think is even more important for its method than it is for its particular subject-matter.

 

 Unlike CELL AND PSYCHE, TWO ROADS TO TRUTH is a book about ideas, philosophies, beliefs. It does not pertain directly to objects, nor to the events that constitute human life and action. It deals rather with the subjective side of human experience, accumulated psychological reactions of the generations of men to their environment, both non-human and human. Above immediate feelings, it separates these reactions into two kinds: those that are subjective and intuitive, the rationalizing of feelings, and those that are analytical and rational, delayed and considered reactions — the seeking of uniformi­ties in the procession of external events and their formulation in generalized ab­stract and quantitative conceptions. The former tend to fixed systems of dogmas and creeds to give subjective satisfactions. The latter tend to progression from the known to the unknown, to the resolution of metaphysical hypotheses into general laws verifiable in fact and capable of practical application in the industries and arts.

 

 TWO ROADS TO TRUTH presents a high and fine valuation of religion in its posi­tive aspects as it does also of science, both springing, in their separate and un­like ways, from the human aspiration towards understanding, towards at-one-ment with the Universal, the one directly through intuitive feeling, the other indirectly through rational understanding. It thus finds them fundamentally not at all antagonistic but complementary, each supplying what the other lacks. And as a kind of negative digression, the book also, with fine justice and generosity, evaluates, on the side of religion, those “over-beliefs” and intolerances by which its beneficence is circumscribed and confined and, on the part of science, the sys­tem of negative dogmatisms and denials that is called “scientific materialism.” Of these, the one is found rooted in jealousy and fear, the other in skepticism and despair. Both are dismissed, and happily, for lack of positive capacity for the advancement of human life in the direction of its ideals. On their affirmative sides, science and religion are each seen as a mighty agency of faith and of creative power that must walk apart and alone without support of the other until they outgrow their limitations self-imposed. Throughout is the implication that truth is the touchstone whereby all evils can be resolved, all aspirations or ideals attained — that truth can lift our limitations, make our spirits free. Yet truth can hardly be defined as a metaphysical entity but rather as our under­standing of the objective environment of circumstances, events, proceedings, behav­ior within and upon which the human destiny must be fulfilled. Truth must have an object. To know the truth is to know the truth about something, to understand it.

 

 The final chapters plead earnestly “to combine the rational, logical intellec­tual approach to truth with the aesthetic, spiritual and religious one.” But the problem is seen as difficult, the hope seems less fervent than the plea, and only in the “fundamentals” is unity to be found or achieved.

 

 In all this we deal with mankind’s faiths and beliefs as being fundamental to the attainment of their goals. May we not pause and ponder this? May it not be that, as in the cell, behavior goes deeper than belief. Surely they are not in man always in accord. Is there not a Providence in nature under which the behavior that is more durable is more viable and tends most to continue and survive. Perhaps thought must follow behavior before behavior can follow thought; for what else but behavior can thought understand (or misunderstand)? And as some behavior is lifeward and thus endures, so the thought that understands such behavior is right thinking, qualified in turn to direct constructive behavior. Thus such empirical action as is integrative and succeeds, once it is inductively examined and understood, gives way to planned rational action towards hearts’ desires.

 

 In CELL AND PSYCHE the cell is seen to proliferate and develop under a spe­cific pattern or plan that bespeaks a specific purpose. Must we impute this spe­cific purpose to the mind of the cell itself or to an evolutionary methodology, a cosmic purpose, only exemplified in the developmental behavior of the cell. May it not be that intuitive aspirations, inchoate thinking, in the human organ­ism (so far as it becomes conscious) is only a conscious reflex of its develop­mental past, just as any rational understanding of our outer and objective world derives from our reflections on what happens there? It seems to me that to think rightly, even to understand ourselves rightly, comes from understanding not our feelings or our thoughts but from understanding our past and present behavior — through understanding the cosmic purpose as it is manifested in so much of our behavior as is lifeward and thus abides. And in like manner does science read the cosmic mind in the evolutionary phenomenon of creative cosmic behavior — the mind of God as evidenced in the creative works of God. The thinking thus derived by examination of specific areas of the cosmic behavior leads to creative behavior in those areas. It becomes purposive and creative, for it can be reflected back upon the environment and mould it nearer to the heart’s desires. It may well be that empirical achievement, like that of the on-growing embryo, is under the slow but sure guidance of the cosmic purpose and mind, and that all rational technology, on its creative side, is but the action of human minds become creative — specific agents of the cosmic purpose and universal plan. This, however, is not to abandon or even to discount the intuitive, emotional and religious road towards fulfillment. It is here we must find the motivation, the dream of relative beauty and perfection; for all motivation is aesthetic, while rationality, science, gives light and guid­ance straight to the ends desired.

 

 This kind of thinking, this understanding of the behavior of their non-human environment in its organizational aspect has given man, through science, enormous creative power over it. But the organizational relationships among men with respect to their successful behavior as interfunctioning units in a greater whole gets scant attention and even less understanding. Shall we say there is no cos­mic purpose or plan that, despite all governments, all violences and wars, has guided this organic free association among Western men into far higher abundance of life and length of days than their forebears for ages enjoyed and Eastern and less free men have so little yet attained. In CELL AND PSYCHE the thinking and understanding was the reflex of the observed behavior, not of just any cell rela­tionships, but only of their integrative relationships as exhibited in the specific pattern that evolves. Here the understanding seems derived from the behavior ob­served, the thinking from the thought about. And this thinking is creative, for in understanding so derived lies the power to direct the process towards human goals — the cosmic process now moving through the human will. In like manner, when we derive our social thinking not from the disintegrative behavior among men but from that which, albeit empirically, raises them into a higher organic unity that separately or in collision they do not attain, may not the understanding so derived give light and direction for the fulfillment of human purpose as at one with the cosmic will?

 

 My thesis is that to achieve the human dream we must derive our system of under­standing, of feeling and thought, religion and science exclusively from those phe­nomena that, as in the developing embryo, exemplify the creative cosmic trend. Not by attempt to reconcile the various ways of thinking that are otherwise derived, but by letting nature teach our minds her forward ways, shall we find the rational light and guidance towards our cherished goals.

 

 My dear Dr. Sinnott, I am greatly inspired by your CELL AND PSYCHE. This lit­tle book takes no account of the negative and abortive relationships known to be cur­rent among cells, hence none of any irreconcilable beliefs inspired by these negative and abortive modes of cell behavior. It discovers only in the normal and successful organization of embryonic cells predetermination towards specific structure similar to the conscious determinations towards specific ends or aims in the developed or adult organism. It discovers purpose much as Erwin Schroedinger in his WHAT IS LIFE discovers within known physical conditions relationships that exhibit the characteristics of life. In all the relationships among men, should we not first learn to distinguish the positive from the negative and abortive and thus derive exclusively from the functional and creative behavior of men the conscious right thinking by which the human purpose can execute the cosmic dream? How I’d like to see another book from your hand like CELL AND PSYCHE in its methodology and plan and dealing with the developmental free behavior of men into a divinely pre­determined structure of Society in fulfillment at once of the universal cosmic and of the individual human will.

 

                                 Sincerely

 

 

_______________________________

 

 

The subject-matter of TWO ROADS TO TRUTH is psychological formulations: those called religious, based on confidence and faith, and those called the philosophy of materialism, based on skepticism and despair. The one is the affirmation, the other the negation of life. These two are contrasted, the one with the other, as to quality and content but not as to method, for neither is rational. The two together are contrasted with the formulations of science that are based not on direct and immediate reactions to events but on the objectively ascertained properties of the events themselves. Religion and science both seem to rest upon affirmations. Religion trusts first that there is escape from annihilation and then, in its higher forms, the perpetual enhancement of life. The one is salvation; the other is conse­cration to beauty. But science is not concerned with salvation or escape. Its fun­damental even though unstated premise is that there is vast beauty which it were worth all else continuously to discover and attain. Thus religion and science are compatible and to be reconciled only in their higher forms. It may be that to serve life well religion must rise above its primitive “over-beliefs” in sin and salvation just as science had to be cleansed of the negative superstitions out of which it emerged into light and understanding of the latent beauty and beneficence of its physical world. Religion at its lower levels claims a universal dominion. Science explores specific regions of the universal wherein men may achieve what they desire, not merely sigh for the ends they seek. Science is more than aspiration. It is concerned first with understanding things as they are, not with making them otherwise; more with means than with ends. In disclosing method only it makes no quarrel with ends or ideals, and its method is at bottom quantitative. It seeks to understand events in

terms of dimensions, of numerical magnitudes and their relations, their ratios one to another as regards mass, motion and time. (Substance, Power and Eternity, infinite and immeasurable, are the religious equivalents). May it not be that such an approach would be similarly fruitful in the field of societal structure and events?

 

 Man in any large numbers is a succession of generations, a series of events, each composed of the measurable elements or aspects of mass, motion and time. In this view may not a sound social technology consist, as all physical technologies do, in the re-proportioning in each generation of the elements of which the event is composed?