Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1305

Carbon copy of a letter to Miss Mildred Jensen, The School of Living, Suffern, New York

June 18, 1940

Dear Miss Jensen:

The School of Living permits but does not command or compel community of action or of thought. Its philosophy, therefore, is individualistic. It views society as man’s instrument for the liberation of his essential spirit and not for its enslavement. It recognizes man as the most versatile and the least specialized of all the myriad forms of living things. As compared with theirs, his powers are infinite and universal in their variety and scope. His versatility alone gives him all his right and all his power to be free. Without this, freedom could be of no avail, for options and alternatives could not be determined or performed. There would be little or no selectivity of action or appreciation and all sense of quality, value or beauty would be foreclosed.

     This high diversity of man is a psychological and not a physiological fact. It rests upon the extreme specialization of his animal parts, permitting a higher functional efficiency at this level and thus liberating energy to his guidance in fulfillment of his versatile will. That man is most free whose physical necessities and functions are met and performed with least consciousness and most economy, leaving the greater portion of his vital energy to issue selectively in the fulfillment of his essential nature and intrinsic will. The same is true of the economic necessities; the men who are most bound to them must be, as Aristotle held, the most base; those who are most free from them (and only they) can be the most noble. The best form of economy, then, must be that in which the necessitous is performed with least effort and least consciousness; that which most subordinates the maintenance of life to its advancement; that which leaves the creative will the widest options and alternatives of quality and value as determined by the inspiration and the persuasions of beauty.

     By this emancipation from the necessitous and the compulsive, man enters into the free kingdom of the spirit not as creature but as creator. The key to this emancipation lies in the use of wealth as capital for the conveyance of services and satisfactions to others and the receiving of services in return by exchange at rates socially determined by contract and consent. This calls for much division of labor and high specialization with full freedom of exchange in the economic field. This is the one freedom that includes all the lesser ones — the freedom to love one another by serving one another, the freedom to serve and to be served by exchange.

     Many thanks for your letter.