Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2770

Pencil notes by Heath on notepad paper for letters to William Ernest Hocking (moved to Hocking Correspondence, Item 3072), Percy Bridgeman, and a person not identified

No dates

 

Dear Dr. Hocking –

 

Re-reading your _________, I am moved to drop you a line or two of admiration and appreciation.

 

 It is a rare thing to have intellectual communion with a mind so richly furnished with the data of human experience in all its hard-won glories out of long and dark vicissitudes. And this latest book of yours is a joy to peruse, for you have imported what to me are new vital and dynamic conceptions into a field of extreme human interest and experience all too long coarsened under irrelevant /?/ and barren dogmatism or depressed to inaction under a supine fatalism. What is called religion, taken in its broadest sense and including its pervasive sub-conscious role, both west and east, has been the dominant culture-forming influence, on the one hand imposing, however rudely, the human dream of enduring heterogeneous order and beauty upon its “natural” world, and on the other tending towards a static homogeneity without any interrelationships, as does the whole non-living world. As you so truly point out, the vital and universal element in all authentic religion is not any bondage of the spirit of man to any ineluctable common necessity but the freedom and the power of diversity and creative synthesis in the outward forms, the ever “more stately mansions” that the Spirit builds.

 

 This contrast in the unconscious ideology of East and West, pagan and Christian, I believe is what accounts for their respective differences in all that is requisite to the human ideal of individual life abundant in its ever-increasing length of days. This Christian (and Western) realization of its ideal, it seems to me, is what sets the Christian religion apart from being only another or / “a” religion and accounts for the present day Eastern aspiration towards the Western mode of life seems /Words missing? check original./ only a further manifestation of its little recognized yet uniquely pervasive power.

 

 Every defeatist, negative and _______ “religion” sets its glories (if any) in some future nirvannic world to come — denies the unity of life and the continuity of time. The Christian is the affirmative and creative, and its potentialities for a world-civilization have as yet been little realized and even now are but little dreamed. Yet they are all implied in the words (the logos) of the Christ for this and all future worlds.

 

_______________________________

 

 

Dear Dr. Hocking

 

I am afraid I have not until now given you any sign of the pleasure and appreciation with which I received the generous comments concerning my CM&A that were contained in your letter of /July 31, 1957/.

 

 My delay has been occasioned in part by my hope of being able to expose to you somewhat of the gratification I have derived from my frequent preoccupation with your The Coming World Civilization for a number of weeks past.

 

 It was indeed a principal object with me to show something of the religious and aesthetic implications that are indispensable to any great social advance. Your volume is a beautiful exposition of this — far beyond any power of mine to do it justice. For, thanks to such as you (and including Sinnott and Lillie and their kind), philosophy need no longer rest alone in the straitened logic of a barren materialism or take its stand on any superstitious mysticism. The true significance of each is realized in the wholeness in which you have united them. By your warmly compelling presentations I am both illuminated and reassured.

 

 I think you will be happy to note

 

With my best wishes for many happy and fruitful New Years,

 

Sincerely,

___________________________________

 

 

 

Dear Dr. Bridgeman

 

I am as much pleased at your kind letter of ________ as I am disappointed that the gift copy of my CMA never came to your attention. I recall a pleasant luncheon hour with you during my attendance at the International Congress for the Unity of Science in Cambridge some eleven years ago during which our talk ranged from the matter of solid water at 212 degrees to the perhaps tentative incursions of a physicist into the domain of social “science,” so called. The idea seemed to me excellent, especially so if some of “The Logic of Modern Physics” could be imported into that field.

 

___________________________________

 

 

Dear Sir  –

 

In acknowledgement of your letter of November 6, it gives me great pleasure to send you an inscribed copy of my Citadel, Market and Altar.

 

 It is a favorite thought of mine that whatever aspirations are native to and enduring in mankind must be founded in the cosmos whence man and all his nature is derived. The aspiration is always towards the rationality of enduring order and beauty — the Platonic real, — never towards the chaotic as an ideal; the persistent wish is doubtless the first organization of the creative energy requisite for its realization. The age-old dream of a rational, creative social order is in process of fulfillment almost unconsciously in all non-political relationships. The naive popular obsession towards political (coercive) means draws human attention away from the rational and creative order in our midst and human energy into irrational and arbitrary forms. Order cannot spring from disorder; it transcends and then displaces disorder. Bad means cannot lead to good ends for, as Emerson phrased it, the end is implicit in the means. Plato grounded his idealism on organized irrationality (force), which is transitory, looking to ends and heedless as to means, with no grounding in eternal reality — like the Irishman who would build his chimney from the top down. I contemplate you may find in the first and second parts of my Citadel Market and Altar some sound and solid ground in support of the ends and ideals pictured in the third /part/ and intimated throughout.