Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1307

Carbon of letter from Heath to Stringfellow Barr, St. John’s College, Annapolis MD

July 1, 1940

Dear Dr. Barr:

As a member of your Adult Seminar that has been carrying on extension summer sessions at the Enoch Pratt library, I wish to thank you for your reported interest in us and to express our appreciation of Mr. and Mrs. James Martin as lead­ers, and our hope that we may continue to have them when regular sessions are resumed in the fall. Personally, I have found much profit and pleasure in the sessions and have been happy to assist in their informal extension which the Library so kindly made possible. It is a great pleasure for me to have even so remote a connection with your work, for your various public reports and expressions of aims have made me feel that you are well set towards finding the path in which men may become “not porters and torch-bearers merely but Children of the light.”

My own special (but rather broad) interest is the examination of Society as a natural phenomenon yielding fully to the same methods of investigation that have been found so fruit­ful in all the natural sciences.

The first necessity of any form of life is its continuance — that it shall survive. This necessity limits all orig­inal action and conduct within narrow and empirical lines, all original (primitive) thinking to narrow and traditional and unfree forms. But not without its ray of beauty does any action serve. These are the rays, this is the light, that liberates. In this light intellect is born, thinking becomes free, science possible, knowledge power. And what power science displays over the world of nature — and how little over the world of man!

Does not beauty stir and shine in the habitual relations and inter-services of men? Is not the sensing of this beauty an act of the untrammeled will? Does it not confer selection and choice and thus liberate the mind into creative thinking, beyond the merely compulsive or traditional. I believe it can and that it does, and that it invites to a voyage of social discovery that must reveal an authentic Science of Society. This is my apology for enclosing in this letter some attempts to reflect a little of the light — the order and beauty that has rewarded my own free wanderings and perceptions — my non-compulsive questings for beauty in the social realm. For it is under the aegis of Beauty that intellect takes command and thinking precedes action. Thus from above comes the power of creation — to rebuild the world to the pattern of the spirit and the dream.

I address this not to any sticky or other sentimental­ity but to your robust and most discriminate thinking.

 

                     Sincerely yours,

                           

Enclosures:

1. Inspiration of Beauty
2. The Energy Concept of Population
3. Private Property in Land Explained
4. Real Estate — How to Raise and Restore its Income and Value