Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1663

Carbon of a letter from Heath to Robert Ulrich, Harvard University, Graduate School of Education, Lawrence Hall, Kirkland Street, Cambridge 38, MA.

November 9, 1958

 

 

Dear Dr. Ulrich:

 

     I acknowledge your letter of November 6^th and take great pleasure in sending you an inscribed copy of my Citadel, Market and Altar.

 

     Referring to the modern dream of a public power to restrain and punish crime without perpetrating violence against the general population — an ideal not even entertained by Plato — it is a favorite thought with me that any widely felt and long persisting aspiration of mankind must be founded in the cosmos whence man and all his nature is derived. The aspiration is always towards what is conceived as enduring order and beauty — the Platonic real — and never towards the chaotic as an ideal. The persistent wish is doubtless a first organization of the creative energy requisite for its realization.

     The age-old dream of a wholly creative and thereby spiritual social order is in process of fulfillment almost unconsciously in all the world-wide voluntary, non-political and non-exclusive relationships that characterize the modern world. What draws human interest and attention away from the rational and creative order that has so far evolved in our midst and directs human energy into irrational and arbitrary forms is the naive popular delusion that political (coercive) action can advance our ideals.

         But order cannot spring from disorder, rationality from irrationality. Order is spiritual — creative. It thereby transcends and displaces — supervenes upon — disorder.

Bad means cannot lead to good ends, for, as Emerson phrased it, “the end is implicit in the means.” Plato grounded his idealism on organized irrationality (force) which is transitory, looking to ends and heedless as to the supporting means, like the Irishman who would have his chimney built from the top down. I hope you may find in the first and second parts of my Citadel, Market and Altar some sound and solid ground in support of the ideal ends pictured in the third part — and intimated throughout.¹⁶⁶³

     Please be forbearant towards my pretty extensive moralizing — prompted by some observations in your very kind letter.

                            Sincerely,

Sh/m