Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1404

Carbon of a letter from Heath to Harold W. Dodds, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey.

April 1942

 

White envelope has items 1404 & 1406.

 

 

Dear Dr. Dodds:

A few years ago you posed to a graduating class substantially this: “How can we conduct our public business and affairs without resort to violence and war?”

I relate this to the present announcement (New York Times 4-12-42) of a two-day student conference (April 24-25) some of whose group discussions you are scheduled to lead.

In a republic so expressly molded after its classic model, the maxim, “Old men for counsel, young men for war.” might be thought to prevail. But with the Romans practi­cally all counsel was for war. They knew not nor cared that every guerdon of victory must at last adorn Apollo’s tomb. Perhaps that is why we who trust less in Mars are turning to the young for counsels of peace. For in them we find dreams, aspirations, ideals — but not exper­ience, and no sure methodology of means to reach and realize those happy ends.

Shall we elders, we of many triumphs and defeats, ask those who have not yet garnered even the years to give us the wisdom of the years? Theirs is to dream, and theirs it shall be to do; if they be not wise, then how shall they be harmless as doves? With souls aflame for beauty, eyes filled with vision, they have no lamp for their feet. They look to us for counsel again as of old — not counsel of war but for counsel of peace. The responsibility is on us, the burden is ours. Have we buried in formalism, in vain repetitions of tradition’s dust, the talents of our hearts and minds? Shall we give them but worn and graven stones?

The seeds of new wisdom must be sown in the spring­time of life, but they must come from the harvest of the years, and they must not be withheld. The elders needs must counsel together what they shall give back when life comes to them again in the guise of new sons.

We have seen life grow. With all its pains and toils, we know that the gains have outweighed the loss. The earth becomes more organic with every day the sun shines. Life is ever on the march and death keeps no equal pace. We know that in this second Christian millennium the stream of human life has flowed wider and deeper than in any former age and, taken whole, has risen higher towards its Source.

Shall we who have seen it, who have been in it and of it, have no tale to tell of HOW it rose? — what things men did, both wittingly and not, that brought them to the high estate they now so fear to lose? For this is what the old generation must disclose to the new when it cries, “What shall we do to be saved?”

We elders have cherished and inculcated much tra­dition, both living and dead, beaten much straw, some new and germinal with life, much that was empty and old. None of us have labored wholly in vain. And this must be our gift to the life that stands on the threshold: we must set the board of knowledge with all the new and sure wisdom that we have for those who must build mansions nobler far than ours.

Seeing your high seeking and sensing your profound concern, I am leaving with you for a time a manuscript, well typed and in convenient reference form, in which I have placed in orderly arrangement what I, for one, con­ceive to be a portion of the new knowledge — the new and surer kind of thinking — that must lead mankind into the glory of its age-long cherished dreams. If it is not epochal it is at least original; for, beyond the factual matters, notorious and undisputed, with which it deals, the significances disclosed and relationships and pro­cesses discovered, although of commonplace use in the natural sciences, are believed to be entirely novel and new as conscious knowledge concerning the processes of mankind. Moreover, they are relationships and processes constantly in beneficent operation in the social realm, waiting only a rational apprehension of them for open sesame to their rational development and extension into realizations of hearts’ high desires. They appear to be high counterparts of those known relationships in the natural world that enable men to realize in minutest detail the complex plans and specifications that are their pictured images and written dreams.

The original of this material is now in a publisher’s hands and plans are projected to bring it widely into notice of the academic and thence of the journalistic world so that men of affairs may vision the vast profits and unprecedented fortunes to them that await only their peaceable and practical application of these social ana­logues of the basic principles that obtain so widely in the natural world and have served them there so well.

Any inspiring, encouraging or admonitory comment you may care to make without any sense of obligation or demand upon you will be highly valued and most gladly received.

Very sincerely yours,