Spencer Heath Archive

Item 97

Pencil by Heath in a small Memo pad folded into an envelope marked “Article,” the start of a letter to Percy W. Bridgman, evidently something he wanted to continue writing and so carried with him.

No date

ARTICLE

Dear Dr. Bridgman —

     In all sentient beings there is but one impulse to action. That impulse is feeling — emotion; and there are two kinds of feelings, positive and negative, a craving to understand and thereby to create, and an instinct to preserve ourselves or our accustomed condition, under which negative emotion we seek either to flee and escape whatever we feel cause to fear or to attack and destroy whatever, rightly or wrongly, we feel cause to hate.

     The positive emotion arises upon a sense and contemplation of those aspects of our condition that are favorable to the accomplishment of our dreams and ideals, and of the cosmic beauty and beneficence whereby despite all trials we have so far risen from primordial dust. In this inspired state we seek the ravishments of abstract understanding, seek the order and beauty of the heavens and earth and thus find the power, as artists and engineers, to realize our dreams and ideals — whether they be under inspiration to create or, under negative emotion, to destroy.

     The negative emotions possess us in degree as we are blind to the prepotent order and beauty in nature and are prepossessed with pious hate or morbid fear. In the rude upward climb from the animal to the partly social-ized man these negative emotions at best have served only to preserve — only as means to escape or to destroy and thus only to survive. Hence necessary and not inimical to man in his pre-social state.

     But with the slow emergence of the widespread exchange relationships, reciprocal services without duress or coercion, rational because measured, impersonal because indiscriminate, upon which all we enjoy of a non-violent social order rests, the negative emotions are not useful in this new field. Only in a negative way and through injury to others have they served the individual, the particular tribe, the dominating, enslaving or governing group. Hence all human relations springing not from inspiration but from negative emotions have long kept the tribes and nations of man chronically at war, always in a motion of defense or offense or preparations therefor. But as things are, inspiration is not for the many, nor can inspiration alone and of itself change the energies of destruction into creation and peace, even if most men were inspired. Not inspiration itself but its fruits in beauty and use are what liberate men from the necessitous and crude into the spontaneous, creative and free.

     The inspired works of creative art which mirror in particular forms the hidden beauty and beneficence towards which men inveterately aspire, these awaken positive emotions and thus stimulate the search for beauty in its abstract as

well as concrete forms. Thus the rational mind seeks the counterpart of its processes in the universal whence it has evolved. The result is pure or esthetic science — knowledge for its own and for its beauty’s sake. And from this esthetic knowledge beauty springs into use and by its applications, its technologies, endows the hand of man with mighty power, power to create or, in fields of beauty still unexplored, to destroy.

     Science formulates the uniformities observed in the procession of events. Its formulations are rational in that they rest upon measurements and upon the ratios in which the measured elements of events combine.