Spencer Heath Archive

Item 852

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath

December 1955

/There is a great deal of/ significance in the system of land titles. Some people do not distinguish between ‘owning’ the land and owning the title. In English law there is a very sharp distinction there. Possession and ownership are two different things, and the title will be in one person and the possession in another. The title can be divided up into lesser ownerships, lesser estates, from the full fee simple estate to life estates and estates for years, and different degrees like that. But what makes the institution of property in land what it is, is the fact that the institution of titles is devised, and by reason of a title, which is a public acknowledgement and a spontaneous acquiescence in this person’s jurisdiction over the land -— when this is brought about, so that there is such a spontaneous acquiescence, then and then only, it becomes possible for persons to hold the land otherwise than by force and arms.

I have usually stated that it was because of the contractual technology that took it out of the class of coercion and force. But it is because the contract is made perhaps not so strictly with respect to the land as it is with respect to the title. Where a title can be conveyed, then it carries “quiet possession,” because the “quiet possession” inheres in the fact that the population in general recognize and respect the title. And so wherever the title goes, goes the use of the land with quiet possession.

“The quietness is the acquiescence.”

Yes. The public in general acquiesce. And whatever I say about land and land title is true about personal property and its titles too. We don^’t commonly think of them as the same, but the title to your watch or to your automobile is the same — or to your fountain pen.

It is coming around to this, I think, that we find that the market doesn’t deal with tangible things at all. . . The more you think about it, the more the science of society gets to be psychological and the less it has to do directly with material things. It tends to get further and further away from the physical sciences and to become a science of psychology. We can change our relationships one to another only by psychological processes of some kind, whereas our relationship to the material world requires the intervention of some material things — to move dirt or to move mountains or to cut a path, or whatever you do to your environment. That is a different category from men ganging up and cooperating by aiding each other mutually. All that sort of thing is a psychological process.

                                  “It’s agreement.”

Yes. It comes about through a psychological process, and by this psychological activity among men, they gain tremendous power jointly to do things to the physical world.