Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1360

Carbon of a letter from Heath to Frank Aydelotte, Institute for Advanced study, Princeton NJ.

February 26, 1941

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Doctor Aydelotte:-

 

     I wish to thank you for your letter of the 20th and your consent that I call to see you even though your activities are highly specialized and, apparently, not directly concerned with communal affairs.

 

     In a few days I will be returning to my home in Maryland, but without opportunity of stopping over at Princeton. However, I expect to return to New York about the 14th of March and remain here for about ten days. I should, therefore, appreciate the opportunity of calling on you enroute northward in the afternoon or evening of the 14th, or returning on or about March 24th. In case of the latter date, I could be in Princeton conveniently at any time of the day or evening from 11 A.M.

 

     Doctor Aydelotte, a Light shines in the minds of men. It shows itself divinely, creatively in their lives. It gives them all they have that its withholding denies the brute. To this we owe every amenity of the arts and the graces of life, and by this we build, consciously or not, every thought and thing in which value lies and beauty shines.

This Light coming to us as feeling creates deep sympathies and high desires. When ordered, measured and consciously arranged in the mind, it becomes science, the open sesame to a divine rebuilding of the world, and to the consummation of spiritual desire.

In the natural sciences, the divine Light has been ordered and arranged, and it has given the minds of men a vast potential mastery over physical and material things. By it the relation between men and the earth has been wholly transformed. From creatures into creators men have been born. But in their relations to one another, their social relations, the Light which has brought them thus far into the kingdom has not been ordered and arranged.

It is the high mission of men’s minds to open their eyes to the divine Light which has subtly, silently and almost unknown guided them into the relationships of service and exchange whence comes physical abundance and all the strength and beauty of their lives. In all our non-political affairs this has been true, but the public, the communal business, has not been so enlightened and endowed. We perceive the creative relationships of our general lives as through a glass darkly, but in the political and governmental field, we hardly find or perceive them at all.

It is my delight and desire to aid in the ordering and arranging in our minds of the divine Light that is dimly but still truly serving us now. It is my vision that when we awake to the creative relationships of service through contract and consent, as they serve us now in the non-public field, then we can and we will, with the utmost ease, extend them into public and political affairs.

 

     I know that to you there is no greater and grander, no more joyous thing than the spreading of the Light. I hope we may take each other by the hand.

 

In all sincerity,

 

  

   Spencer Heath

 

SH:ML