Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2665.

Letter from William Ernest Hocking, Alford Professor Emeritus, Harvard University, Madison, New Hampshire

July 31, 1957

 

 

Dear Mr. Heath:

 

For two months I have been enjoying your letter and your book, and a sense of fellowship in a common cause, which is on my part rather undeserved. Undeserved, for I cannot command the width of well-ordered experience and research that has gone into CITADEL MARKET AND ALTAR. But fellowship, after all, because we have come through experience, not pure speculation, on some of the same ingredients of any durable civilization for the future.

 

 My type of experience – for my metaphysics is founded on experience, and conversely I consider experience metaphysical in the sense that day-by-day facts inhere in a “real” – is partly that of getting into scrapes and having to get out of them. I get angry about some public abuse, ferret out the principle of my wrath, and find a place for that principle in my theory of state, or history, or civilization, or law – my next job. Pugnacity keeps me fairly young at 84, but also gets me into “coronary” upsets, so I face the sad alternative of early demise or acquired serenity. I hope you do better.

 

                              

With cordial thanks,

 

/s/ Ernest Hocking