Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1328

Carbon of a letter from Heath to Jacques Barzun, Columbia University, New York, New York

January 17, 1941

 

 

 

 

Dear Doctor Barzun:

 

     I am struck by your review of Sidney Hook’s recent volume in the current Saturday Review of Literature. Your remarks as to scientific method are certainly well put and your objections to what has assumed to pass under this name, well taken. I am impressed by your conclusion that the “use of reason in society, and even its formulation in books, with such a use in view, remains an art and not a science.”

     To this conclusion, I am compelled to give my full accord. However, must this continue always to be so? Did not the use of reason in every field of inquiry always remain an art until it became a science? In fact, are not all the natural sciences but the discovery of an objective counterpart to the subjective processes of the mind? It seems to me that science reduces to quantitative terms and operative verifications those fields of experience which are practiced previously only as arts.

     Theologians used to tell us that man was a special order of creation and that the field of man, therefore, could not be examined by science as other fields can. Do you think there is any ground for such a belief that the individual mind of man is foreclosed from understanding the processes and relationships that carry on and exist in organized community life?

It has been my pleasure to discover in the nature of individual man and his social as well as his natural environment such harmonies and uniformities of operation as appeal to the artistic sense and give rise to esthetic reactions. I think that it is under the influence of such reactions that men become dispassionate and objective so that they can discover, weigh and measure by a scientific, as distinguished from a feeling process, the realities with which they are surrounded.

     Proceeding in this manner, I have made an attempt to understand something of the social organization for which there is now so much grave concern and, especially what I take to be its most basic institution, namely, the proprietary or exchange relationship and, particularly, the institution of property in land. I take the liberty of giving you a copy of my functional interpretation of this institution, thinking it may give you pleasure to observe how it contrasts with the static interpretation of Spencer and Mill, for example, and does not carry with it any of their pathological implications.

     I am strongly impressed with the desirability of competent minds giving their attention to the proprietary relationships under which alone it seems possible to make any social, as distinguished from violent or compulsive distribution of property or services among the members of the community.

It will gratify me very much to have your considerate comments.

 

Yours very truly,

 

Spencer Heath