Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1256

Carbon of a letter from Heath at Kings Crown Hotel, New York City, to a person who had responded to an ad he had placed in the Saturday Review of Literature seeking intellectual collaboration.

July 25, 1939

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Miss Graduate Student:

I wonder if you would be interested in the preparation of a book on Society as a natural phenomenon and giving this phenomenon the same objective examination and analysis as is given to physical, chemical, electrical and biological phenomena by the same method and upon the same foundation as is common to these respective sciences.

     You have been taught, of course, both directly and by constant implication, that this is impossible, that besides being vastly complex and unpredictable (as all phenomena are until interpreted by an objective science), it is impossible to deal with the qualitative or esthetic aspects of any phenomenon by the mere quantitative methods of the natural sciences. Well, I am doing just that. And once we take the foundation premise of energy flowing through structures and changing and being changed in the process, the natural science methods are not only easy to apply and follow but it is a thrilling and delightful experience to do so.

     The mimeographed outline of the “Energy Concept” which I enclose sets forth the foundation premises (grounded in experience, induction, which includes change, usually referred to as time, as the necessary fourth dimension. From this it appears that quality, i.e., power to transform (create), has always been present in the natural sciences and that it is only a special aspect of or relation between the two variables which must always constitute any flow of energy, the relation in which the time or change element called duration is most extensive in proportion to the three-dimensional structural element called numbers.

     In printed form, I also send you an example of a social institution being analyzed and explained in terms of its qualitative function — in terms of its being a societal structure constituted by a kind of relationship among all the units or members (the exchange relationship) which promotes extension of the time or duration element in the units. The application of this principle in the analysis of the institution of property in land you will see to be implicit in the method although it has not been made explicit in the text.

     The printed monograph on “Private Property in Land” is taken from a considerable manuscript (one of the chapters) in which I am interpreting social institutions from the functional point of view (fourth-dimensional) which means as to their operation to extend the duration or average life span of the associated social units or members.

     When you have carefully read this letter and the enclosures referred to you will either make a great deal or just nothing at all out of it. In the former case you may desire further correspondence looking to an interview and some possible association between us.

     You will note that I am not accumulating (or rehashing) vast quantities of sociological data, but, rather, trying to make some analytical or interpretative use of such social data as is obvious to all intelligent persons and abundantly at hand. When both general and specific functions are ignored or unsought and attention given to structures alone there is almost no limit to the amount of variant data that can be unearthed and recorded for whatever it may be worth, but when things are examined with reference to their functions an essential unity almost immediately appears. The natural sciences are at the present time synthesizing themselves in this way, by development of the functional in addition to the merely structural (static, three-dimensional) aspects of things.

     I am writing this from my New York City address, Kings Crown Hotel, where I will be for the remainder of this week.

                           

                            Very truly yours,

                                 Spencer Heath