Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1277

Carbon of a letter to James K. Senior, Department of Chemistry, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

October 23, 1939

Dear Doctor Senior:

Thanks for your letter of the 11th. It’s a pippin.

Such fun to see how scientific a scientist can be, just as soon as he sniffs any intellectual air outside of his laboratories and the pages of his trusty text books. Inside there he has to weigh and measure and use the multiplication table with its tiresome uniformity. The mental strait jacket is too much for him; he must get outside where he can dogmatize his prejudices and read his own personal limitations into any subject with which he is unfamiliar.

 

But, really, Professor, must we leave the “concepts of physics and chemistry” behind when we step into another field of phenomena? Must every separate science start entirely de novo? How long since it once was, by authority, “impossible” to import the concepts of mathematics into the chemical “sciences?” And if we must have brand new conceptions, shall we spin them out of the thin air of a metaphysic or a meta-chemistry? I must confess to a prejudice in favor of the arithmetic and other fundamental conceptions — in favor of taking such authentic intellectual tools and material as we have and using them either outright or as a guide for constructing new ones.

 

As to analogy, how shall we tell where one thing begins to differ from another unless it be at the point where the analogy between them is exhausted and breaks down? Are all the sciences mutually exclusive and with no overlapping boundaries and analogical fields? And how shall we accept new knowledge as authentic except as we can conceive it in terms of what we have conceived before? Shades of Auguste Compte?

 

I am eye to eye with you as to there being no social advantage in “doddering senility” being added “to the life of any individual who reaches the age of sixty.” I would even go further and deny the social advantage of doddering senility at any age. Science grows by learning new generalizations on the basis of deduction — observed and measured data of experience — and not upon facts or conditions that are imaginary and even impossible. The observed fact as to longevity is that when improved social conditions raise the standard of living, the lengthening of the life span is confined almost entirely to the very young and those of moderate age and almost not at all to those who have reached either senility or sixty. There certainly has been great social advantage in lengthening the span. Should we shrink from discovering how rising subsistence has lengthened the life span in the past lest we should discover how to lengthen it into senility?

But, doubtless, I take you too seriously. Quite likely your observations are only intended as vagaries, since you make it clear at the outset that “sociology and questions of population” are a subject in which you have no fixed views. I have no doubt that in the field of physics and chemistry you have views of considerable stability, even if they do involve the importation of concepts from the older sciences of mathematics and astronomy.

It was good of you to write to me. New ideas, however valuable, are like newly discovered musical or artistic talent; they need to be talked about — publicised. Thanks for your stimulating contribution.

Sincerely,