Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1196

Carbon copies of a double exchange of letters with Prof. H. H. Williams, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

August 5 — November 5, 1938

Dear Mr. Williams:                     August 5, 1938

I am writing to express again the very great pleasure I had in conversation with you a week ago today through the kind offices and hospitalities of Mrs. Ruth J. Wittmeyer. I am further moved to express my enjoyment and appreciation of The Education of Horace Williams which Mrs. Wittmeyer was so kind as to loan to me for reading on my travels and return here. I have enjoyed this book very much, with its freerunning anecdotal style but wholly constructive in its ideas and always stimulating, not to say inspiring in its effect. I have enjoyed it thoroughly.

Throughout the book there is a trilogy of the Good, the True and the Beautiful. This is what keeps it at the level — the altitude — of creative inspiration. It is so much on the same plane as my own thinking that I find but little, if any, contrast or disparity. However, there does appear to be room for a degree of what, for the sake of distinguishing, I may call comparison.

It seems to me that you take the three creative concepts, entities, processes or what you will — the Good, the True and the Beautiful — as though they were a three-horse team, with the center one a little in the lead. My own conception of these is as terms, steps or stages in a sort of hierarchy of process and progression that constitutes the ultimate character of the Cosmos and the final Reality. To me they are three terms distinguishable by us in a series, doubtless of many or an indefinite number of terms; and each includes and completely transcends the other in the order given. Just as the ascending terms in a mathematical series include and transcend one another as regards their structure, so are these three terms in an ascending relation as to process and function as well. From the standpoint of modern organicism, each, in turn, may be regarded as an emergence upon the other into a new and higher order of process and being. This point of view, with all its profoundly radical implications and applications, is intellectually stimulating and no less emotionally inspiring to me. I am wondering if you may not find a like value in it.

One of the things I most lack and desire is the frequent enjoyment of intercourse at the level of thought and feeling for values that I found in our afternoon tea, not forgetting my kind hostess and her very gracious contribution to it all.

Sincerely,

 

Dear Mr. Heath:                       August 11, 1938

I have read your letter several times and find it more stimulating each time. The important feature is the trilogy, truth, goodness, beauty. To me they are of equal importance and essential in the highest process offered to man, that of the spiritual life. I wonder if you have read Hoffding’s chapter on Feeling in his Psychology. I used the book as a text when I taught Psychology. My favorite sentence was this: “The source of all morality, all religion, all poetry springs where the sympathetic feeling no longer has its object present.” I spent a week on that sentence. That sentence enabled me to define poetry, religion and morality. American Psychologists have devoted themselves to white mice. They know nothing of feeling.

I wish you would come again. Next time I will see to it that you have some water to mix with your tea. I should enjoy showing you how important I consider feeling. It is in feeling that one reaches the heights where Beauty is born.

 

I prize your letter and have filed it among my valuables. With all good wishes I am

 

Cordially yours,

 

(signed) Horace Williams

 

P.S. I am tempted to ask that you consult my The Evolution of Logic.        H.H.W.

 

 

 

 

Dear Mr. Williams:                     September 18, 1938

I certainly appreciated your letter of a month or more ago. I have been hoping before answering it to be able to read your Evolution of Logic but could not find it in any of the Baltimore Libraries, including the one at Johns Hopkins University, so for the present I will have to divine what I would find in it.

I^’m afraid we are not quite eye to eye on the trilogy. To me, as to you, the spiritual life, mode of activity, is the highest, but it is transcendent; it is no more composite and identifiable with the lower processes out of which it arises than man, himself, is identifiable with the lower forms and modes of existence out of which he has evolved. I heartily agree it is in feeling one reaches the heights where Beauty dwells, but it must be inspiration or, as you say, sympathetic feeling, that induces the type and mode of activity that constitutes the spiritual life.

To me, goodness is antipathetic, mere reaction against what we feel as inimical and therefore evil. Morality implies resistance to and salvation from evil and almost always coercion and warfare upon those to whom evil is imputed. Truth may be regarded as apathetic, since its criterion and test is objective and thus outside the realm of feeling. It is the conscious integration of the thinking process with the cosmic processes out of which the thinking process must have been derived. But truth, mathematics, all science, being purely objective, giving light without heat, will illuminate the ways of destruction and death as well as the paths of creation and life, depending on whether the emotional drive is negative or positive, antipathetic or sympathetic.

But Beauty is that which inspires, awakens the positive emotions, reflects itself in the bodily condition, motivates none but creative activity and is therefore spiritual and divine.

Goodness, morality, and all its works leads to a measure of empirical truth, but rational truth is the child of inspiration. The revelations of the rational sciences are but the footprints of those who seek unceasingly for essential beauty. Moral motivation can engage truth in the service of destruction. But the esthetic urge in which rational truth takes its rise can employ it only in the spiritual mode of creation and life. To me Beauty alone is essentially creative and therefore divine. I would paraphrase your sentiment from Hoffding thus: All poetry, all science, springs from religion, from the inspiration or sympathetic feeling that motivates creative effort in pursuit of beauty ever unattained. I believe that Beauty is the soul and spirit of religion; all else is extraneous. All the fine arts, all the muses were born in the temple; their mother was religion. The temple can have but partial glory ere their full return.

It would, indeed, be a delight to visit you again and talk over these and many things, both seriously and in good fun at each other’s expense — this latter just to water down some of our more astringent ideas, as you so considerately suggest about the tea.

Please accept my cordial return of your good wishes and remember me gratefully to Mr. and Mrs. Wittmeyer.

Sincerely,

 

Dear Mr. Heath:                        November 5, 1938

The only course I see is for you to come to Chapel Hill, then have a cup of tea with me and we will clear these dark places. Beauty has little connection with religion. It was discovered by the Greeks. They had no interest in religion. The Hebrews were concerned with religion and had no interest in beauty.

In our seminar we are devoting the winter to Spirit. We began with knowledge. What is knowledge? We found knowledge to begin with one. What is a one? But our interest is in spirit. Our task is to exhibit the process of spirit.

I told the class that if Jesus had been allowed ten more years He would have given the process of spirit. Then Europe would have escaped the stage that identifies Christianity with Dogma. This stage constitutes the ugly chapter in Christianity. It is the result of the Theologians. The first step was taken by St. Paul.

I wish you had read my Evolution of Logic. There you would find Truth to be something quite different from what you say. But I enjoyed your letter so much that I have no wish to be disagreeable. You would enjoy our village now. It is a riot of color. Take a week off and come down.

I saw Mrs. Whitmire yesterday. She is quite happy in her new life. She has married one of our finest men. I have known him two years and admire him highly. It is fine to see Mrs. Whitmire so happy. I am sure you would enjoy seeing them.

 

With all good wishes I am

Cordially yours,

 

(signed)

H. H. WILLIAMS