Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3122.

Carbon of a letter from Heath to Adolf Meyer, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland

November 13, 1939

 

 

Dear Dr. Meyer:

I must thank you for letting me have the “Contribu­tion of Mental Hygiene to Education” with your most interesting and constructive article on human nature from the standpoint of its positive functions and capacities and with reference to what you so aptly term its “spon­taneity.”  It delights me to find a person of your great influence and professional authority proceeding in this positive direction.

The negative feelings aroused by painful and compul­sive experience is, I believe, the basis of all negative conceptions and theories.  All activity so proceeding must itself be as negative in character and results as the condition or activity against which it is professedly directed. I am sure your mind can supply abundant illus­tration of this, the wars against wars being perhaps the most notable.

I believe that what we experience (total environment) can and does arouse feelings and awaken concepts of a positive as well as a negative kind — provided we have reached that sufficiency of subsistence which is pre­requisite to the exercise of options and the practice of any selectivity of choice in our general field of experience and as to which of the elements therein our energies shall in chief and most poignantly respond. Under such subsist­ence and security and the relative freedom of will that it brings, the spontaneity of our intrinsic nature is re­leased. UW reach out towards the creative kinships we are thus enabled to perceive. Released from the necessi­tous and compulsive, we respond to the creative and esthetic; our inspiration becomes an indwelling power of sovereignty over a widening spiritual estate.

This necessary emancipation from the compulsions of environment is, as I see it, not a direct gift from a metaphysical or spiritual world but of the social world. It is incident to the functioning of men in the social process of spontaneous division of labor and mutual serv­ice by voluntary and measured exchanges. This alone is all that makes subsistence abundant and existence secure; that emancipates the consciousness to entertain free and clear conceptions and the will to a happy mastery (through creative artistry) and recreation of its environing world.

The endless cycles of time and change have conspired in man a potential sovereignty over all that brought him forth. His free and spontaneous social technique breaks his bondage to external nature and sets his own intrinsic nature free. It reverses the cosmic roles.  The natural world that moulded him can now be moulded to his will and dream.

With respect to the maintenance and advancement of life, there are but two kinds of actions: those necessary to sustain life – individual or collective – at any exist­ing level, and those necessary for its advancing to a higher and more dominant state. The one is compulsive, involving little choice; the other is spontaneous and creative and filled with joy.

I take it that you conceive the educative process as the cultivation and encouragement of spontaneity through constructive activity towards creative artistry. This type of discipline overcomes all that is negative and destructive by unconsciously transcending it. Cultivation of the inspirational state, the esthetic response, is a prerequisite to the dispassionate eye and the objective view. And the energies of men quietly fade out of the compulsive and destructive just in proportion as they are drawn towards the things that inspire and thus into the high rhythm of creative living.

I have no doubt that the yearning, so often expressed, for some kind of religious spirit in education is an un­conscious groping for some technique finer than extraneous rewards and punishments, mere animal conditioning, as the methodology of education. What is earnestly sought is esthetic motivation, spontaneous reactions to esthetic influences, beguilements of the spirit by the fine arts and by religion which, essentially, is the source and origin, as it is also the synthesis, of all the arts,

Your term “spontaneity,” I conceive as the “inspira­tion of beauty,” as that expression is employed in the title and text of the little booklet of my own that I enclose. I think it was the genial Mark Twain who pointed out our liking for “the gold of our own opinion in a fellow heap of dust.”

I truly enjoyed your many courtesies during my visit to you in your professional surroundings, but most of all, I enjoyed your exposure of the working of your mind with respect to fundamental conceptions. I look forward to the possibility of further enjoyable conversations with you.

Sincerely,