Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1211

Carbon of a letter to Robert T.K. Murray, Montgomery Road, Elkridge, Maryland

August 16, 1937

Dear Bob:

I have enjoyed many delightful talks with you but none of them quite so much as our discussion of last Friday evening.

You know my conception of ultimate and absolute Reality is that systematic Beauty underlying the phenomenal world which inspires a spark of itself in us to a unity with the divine by creative activity for its own sake alone. To know that you recognize this aesthetic response, this seeking after beauty, as the motivation to all pure discovery in natural science, as of all excellence wherever the muses preside, is a true delight to me. It guarantees your own physical researches to be on a plane of feeling as well as intellect that will give you the highest returns in personal values and satisfactions while lighting lamps to the feet of those very necessary, amiable and practical persons whose material accomplishments modify our physical world and make what we call our material civilization.

It pleases me that you perceive the light-bearers as the original source of all improvement in technical facilities as well as of all inspirational achievement directly embodied in works of creative art. The difference is this, that whereas artists under the inspiration of the muses perform and create their several objective works and compositions, investing them with a beauty that directly elevates and inspires, those persons who sense a beauty in nature that impels them to trace out her secret modes and sequences under the inspiration of Minerva herself to seek knowledge for the sake of its own beauty — these persons give not objective works of art, but, rather, those abstract ideas, principles, generalizations and the like which become like magic formularies to put the materials and forces of nature into the facile hands of the technician and the engineer. The difference, in fact, between the fine arts presided over by the muses and research in pure science is that the one is a direct and physically embodied service whereas the other is an abstract intellectual service that depends upon the labors of artisans and engineers for its objectification into the physical world in the wonders that science has wrought.

When we think of the marvels that pour forth as the fruit of physical science, what wonders must lie waiting in the social realm, ready to come forth and bless the generations of men as soon as the same inspirations are found and the same methods and principles are applied!

I am certainly wishing you a great deal of happiness and success in your new connections at the Brooklyn Institute. I hope you will find ever wider scope and deeper inspirations for growth and exercise of your creative powers.

Cordially,