Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1251

Carbon of a letter from Heath to Paynton Houston, 28 West 85th Street, New York, New York

June 12, 1939

 

 

 

 

Dear Mr. Houston:

I expect to be in New York again and at the Kings Crown Hotel from about the 17th to the 23rd of this month. I look forward to meeting again with a number of interesting people, and you not the least among them.

When I see you again I want to ask you for your father’s address and, perhaps, a card or memorandum for meeting him. I think you said he was in Stamford, Connect­icut, or some other town in that vicinity, and I am expecting to visit in that neighborhood before very long. As you suggested, I am sure it will be a great pleasure to have some talks with him.

By the way, I have received from several people of academic and sociological eminence considerable commend­ation of my Energy Concept of Population. Several have said that it should, by all means, appear in one of the learned quarterlies.  Among them, Professor Crane Brinton, Department of History, Harvard University, writes me at considerable length including as follows:

This is a bad season of year for me, as doctoral examinations and other duties pile up, so that I have had a chance to do little more than read rapidly through the interesting pamphlets which you sent me.  The paper on the Energy Concept of Population seems to me one of the most promising bits of social analysis I have seen, and I hope very much you will have it printed in one of the learned journals where it will be of readier access. I thoroughly appreciated your crack at Spencer on page 19 of your land pamphlet.”

This and similar commendations make me think that I may have made a very significant contribution to fund­amental social analysis. If this is true, I think that the high point in it is in the showing of the smooth transition of the qualitative within the scope of the quantitative aspect of universal energy. The gulf between the physical and the metaphysical, the practical and the esthetic, the material and the spiritual, the com­pulsive and the voluntary seems to be completely bridged in my showing how the qualitative arises when D is made dominant over N in the formula W = ND. Incidentally, the definition of “the qualitative” that arises here is the first definition in objective terms that I have ever known.

I am not at all sure that you have the same specific interest as I in these very prime fundamentals. I suspect that your mind dwells somewhat more in the intricate realm of creative imagery with symbols appealing more directly to emotion than to those that have a high quantitative aspect or content. For my part, I love the higher realms of the imagination, but I always like to feel that and to know just how my feet are on the ground.

Here are my very best wishes and happy anticipa­tions of seeing you again.

Very truly yours,

P.S.

Can you give me a citation for that marvelous definition

of beauty you referred to at our last meeting?

S.H.