Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1556

Carbon of letter from Heath to Edward McCrady, University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee

August 15, 1955

Dear Dr. McCrady:

     Ever since I first read that manuscript you were so kind as to let me have, I have known that I was going to write you a letter about it. I have read and re-read a number of times but, even so, do not yet feel fully prepared to write. There is so much in it. It seems original and bold yet palpably true — quite a number of things.

     I am thinking for the moment of your discussion of zero and infinity. It is so refreshing. Too little have thinkers realized that whatever significance we attach to these concepts, they nevertheless lie entirely outside the range of possible experience. We may well think of them as two opposite directions towards which experience can move, but never as anything that can themselves be experienced or attained. What greater fallacy could there be than that nothing can be something?

     I sympathize greatly with your dilemma of the dif­ferential. When I first looked into the calculus, I, too, was perplexed by its apparent irrationality in the face of its seeming perfection of operation. I never resolved this until, for my own purposes, I substituted h for dx. Since then, the whole matter has seemed clear. In the same way, the Euclidean point, having position but no dimension, seemed an impossible premise for line, surface or solid until I made the same substitution and thus brought geometry out of the world of mere fantasy and abstraction into the world of action and experience.

     Your Chapter VI, “What Do We Mean by Life?”, brings to my mind a point of view that is perhaps covered by the fifteen characteristics that you list from the text­books: an inorganic structure seems to maintain its identity and internal economy only by resistance of the impact or influence of external energy. In contrast, the organic not only does not resist, but absolutely depends for its continuity upon the recipience and dis­charge of external energy. It has the unique capacity to transform external energy in ways peculiar to itself and thereby to function and to grow and reproduce. But perhaps this is only another way of describing metabolism.

     I certainly like the way you put it at the end of the chapter, “Matter is unconscious energy. Life is conscious energy.” Conscious, of course, means having purpose, just as Dr. Sinnott holds, a purpose that de­termines events, whereas the inorganic is inert, creature-like, without power of determination. I like to think of the parallel between inorganic and organic on the one hand, and the unregenerate and the regenerate man on the other hand — the unregenerate being creature with no will but to exist, the regenerate man becoming a creator with spiritual (creative) power to engage and determine the energy about him and build his dreams into his world.

     I am not quite sure why I am writing this letter to you. My main purpose, I think, is to convey to you again my appreciation of your constructive thinking and the healthy, not to say inspiring, influence you must be having on your classes and will continue to have far and wide. Please communicate to Mrs. McCrady and the boys, and especially to the charming little Miss, some of the happy sentiments that the friendliness of all of you has inspired in me.

Sincerely,

SH/m