Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1398

Carbon of a letter from Heath, The Science of Society Foundation, Elkridge MD, to the Editor of The Wall Street Journal.

December 31, 1941

 

Original is missing.

 

 

 

Editor, The Wall Street Journal:

Gallantly accepting my “challenge” to state what other “values and criteria” he proposes as “norms” for a social science, Mr. Woodlock forthrightly takes ground with his new-found colleagues of The American Journal of Economics and Sociology.

In his Thinking It Over on December 29th he repeat­edly refers to his “values” as being “metaphysical,” but he nowhere tells us what any metaphysical “realities” might be like, more than to say that they “lie beyond sense knowledge” and “lie in the one universal fact revealed by the senses (?) that things are” and that physical or sense knowledge is “an inferior grade of knowledge” because it “is dependent on the intellect operating in a restricted sphere”.

So Mr. Woodlock leaves us as uninformed concerning what his “realities” are really like as do his “social scientists” who, as he quotes them, say it would be an act of impertinence “‘to propose to the social scientist what such a set of values might be like'”..  He seems there­fore, like them, to have a kind of knowledge that does not fall within any “restricted sphere”, as he says “physical” or “sense knowledge” does. I take it that such knowledge must be absolute knowledge, at least to those who possess it, and therefore of superior grade because not “dependent on the intellect operating in a restricted sphere” such as a society or social phenomenon.

Unfortunately, Mr. Woodlock does not let us rest with so simple and naive a conclusion of the matter; for at several points in his column he provokes his readers to further inquiry.  For example, he asserts there is no more antithesis between the physical and the metaphysical than there is between smelting ore and rolling rails. One queries in which one of these the intellect does not operate within a restricted sphere. And if “both physics and metaphysics belong to one and the same reality” why can we not employ one and the same kind of intellect for understanding them? Just why must we rush beyond mind and sense and try to be absolute when we need simply to be intellectual within the restricted sphere of social phenomena in the same way that science, in its restricted “natural” world, now is.

Now as to Mr. Woodlock’s query:  The real scientist seeks to resolve his restricted subject-matter into units (or their multiples) of mass, motion and duration. This is quantitative, but this analysis gives him data for a selective re-synthesis in similar terms, but affording means for attainment of some desire of his heart, — which is not quantitative at all. Moreover, his quantitative synthesis can be varied to realize different kinds of desires and this again, in its results, is a qualita­tive procedure.

Desires, however high, that look only to metaphysical means for their fulfillment are seldom fulfilled; — but the grossest of absolutisms can lay claim to a “moral” or metaphysical base. Those who, in reverence, seek Reality as Divinity can find it objectively, intellectually, in the quantitative world no less than subjectively, qualitatively, in men’s hearts and in their preponderant desires.

Spencer Heath