Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3081

Woodlock Correspondence, chiefly Wall Street Journal exchange and related correspondence. The exchange itself, without related correspondence, follows after, entitled “Woodlock and the ‘Social Scientists.’” FOLDER 3081a has pdf.

1941-1942

 

See envelopes for Vacant item 364 for possibly duplicate material.

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3081

Carbon of letter to Thomas F. Woodlock, Contributing Editor,

Wall Street Journal, 44 Broad Street, New York City

May 19, 1941

 

 

 

Dear Mr. Woodlock:

 

     I certainly enjoyed the conversation and companionship of yourself and Mr. Warren at luncheon Friday and afterwards, and wish to thank you very much for the opportunity of making your acquaintance and learning more concerning the quality of your mind.

 

     I appreciate the interest with which you indicated you would read my “Epistle to My Former Associates of the Henry George Fold.” This emboldens me to enclose, herewith, some printed material of my own which sets out with more detail my understanding of the institution of property in land from the functional point of view. As a practical application of the principle involved, I have also annexed a proposed practical procedure for the organized real estate interests looking to the creation of new demand and, thereby, of new income and values for their properties.

 

     Some time ago, my most excellent Catholic friend, Henry J. Foley, wrote me a series of specific objections to the matter contained in my “Epistle” and other communications. I replied to him at considerable length, taking up his objections in full detail. Thinking this correspondence may be of some interest to you in your leisure moments, I include also a copy of these letters herewith.

 

     It was kind of you to suggest that I might have the pleasure of meeting you again upon some of my future visits

to New York. I am happy to look forward to the opportunity to do this.

Sincerely yours,

 

Spencer Heath

SH:ML

Enc.

 

 

 

________________________________________________________________  

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3081

Wall Street Journal column by Thomas F. Woodlock, “Thinking It Over,” which was responded to by Heath in the Letters to the Editor column, opening an exchange between the two.

December 14, 1941

 

An interesting newcomer in the “quarterly” class is The

American Journal of Eco­nomics and Sociology which has been founded by a group of scholars in the “Sociological” field, many, if not most of whom are inter­ested in the theories of Henry George. Its publication has been made possible by a grant from the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation which has for its main purpose the further­ance of the George ideas. The purpose of the new magazine is a broad one. It is to bring about what the leading article (by Franz Oppenheimer) calls a “scientific synthesis” of all the “social sciences” in order, if possible, to lay bare, the cause or causes of the present crisis and to detect, if possible, the way out of it.” This “synthesis” would include ethics, politics and economics. A short introduction by Doctor John Dewey emphasizes the need for this, and in doing so, he pays a high tribute to George: “For I know of no writer by whom the interdependence of all aspects and phases of human relations, economic, po­litical, cultural, moral, has been so vigorously and so sympathetically set forth.”

      Synthesis — a worthy goal indeed! How shall it be attained? “Our culture,” says Doctor Oppenheimer, “is whirling in the mael­strom of irrational forces; they must be brought under control. There is only one power to attain this goal, the same power that brought under control the elementary forces of Nature, of wind, of falling water, steam, electricity; and is about to unchain the limitless forces of atomic dissociation. The stupendous rise of American technique in agriculture and industry is due exclusively to Science: Nothing is as practical as theory. There is not the least reason to assume that the same general law is not valid for social technique in the organization and government of society, just as well.”

      But that word “Science” must not be too strictly understood. That it connotes some­thing more than mere laboratory results, more than mere “natural philosophy”, is clearly implied in the second article by Doctor George A. Geiger on “Science and Values in a Changing World.” Here we meet the word “moral”, which, as the Doctor uses it, is synonymous with “ethical.”

       The word “moral” (or “ethical”), he tells us, “must mean nothing more or nothing less than a concern with choices and judgments, with values and criteria.” And what are “values”? If we understand “values” to refer to the results of man’s long-time pref­erences — preferences in the central area encompassing his basic attitudes of life, his deep-rooted tastes and interests, his objects and reverence — then the problem of ethics seems to be an attempt (1) to grasp the origin and development of such values; (2) to relate them to their present background; and (3) to compare their promises with their accomplishments. This, then, is what is meant by describing ethics as the “critical evaluation of values already current.” And this job, Doctor Geiger says, is the job of “Science” in the field of sociology. “The scientific enterprise,” he says, “is above all things a critical method of approach to any material whatsoever, and to be critical means necessarily to employ some set of values. It would be, however, only an act of imperti­nence typically philosophical” (!) “to pro­pose to the social scientist what such a set of values might be like.” That gentleman must find his “values” for himself.

   At this point the reader is brought up against a very practical question — How does the “social scientist” go about it?

   It is as a “scientist” that he is to attack “sociology” but “sociology” involves “morals” (or “ethics”); morals involve “values.” Of what order are these “values”? Are they products of the physical order stemming ulti­mately from the processes that belong to the laboratory, or are they metaphysical? On the answer to that question depends the whole matter. If they are the former then the scientist as a scientist is ipso facto a per­fectly good sociologist. If they are the latter, the scientist must enter the domain of meta­physics where his laboratory files will neither qualify nor help him. Moreover, as a scientist only, he cannot even answer that question; to answer it he must make a meta­physical decision. (The Instrumentalists make that decision by denying the existence of the metaphysical, doing it, apparently on “Scien­tific” grounds, which is a logical absurdity, but they do it.) Which seems to raise the question, what has “Science” as science to contribute to sociology? On what theory does it claim to control it?

    In short, on what foundation can the “synthesis” adumbrated by the founders of this excellent magazine be built?

____________________________________________________________

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3081

Carbon of a letter from Heath, The Science of Society Foundation,

Elkridge, Maryland, submitted December 19^th to the Editor of The Wall Street Journal but somewhat edited by the Journal and not published until December 29^th, to coincide with Woodlock’s reply that same date in his column. (From the same notebook as Item 458.)

 

 

 

Editor, The Wall Street Journal:

 

Your always delightful and frequently scintillant Mr. Woodlock, reviewing the leading articles in The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, finds that their authors credit “science” with being the “power” that has given to man all the rational control he has over his natural world and that they invoke this same power to synthesize the “social sciences” and so lay bare the causes of social distress and thus find escape from it. Very properly, but with a tinge of tongue-in-cheek, Mr. Woodlock inquires just how this can be done. But he loads down his inquiry with an “either-or” assump­tion upon two things that he naively assumes to be funda­mentally different and says the whole matter depends on this; namely, whether the “values” involved are physical or metaphysical.

      Mr. Woodlock states no thesis; he only assumes an anti-thesis. As a theologian or as a scientist he would have a real and definite thesis. And if he could describe experience (finite and relative phenomena) in terms of its correspondence with that thesis he could then safely adopt it as a certain guide to worthy ends. To assume an anti-thesis is, in effect to affirm a negative. Such an assumption or affirmation cannot be proved; neither can it be experienced or physically verified. To say or assume that A and B are not alike is to pre­sume a prior affirmation that they are alike, but the presumption is made only to deny it and leaving the respective qualities of A and B wholly undisclosed. Anti-thesis presupposes thesis and the net result is always zero. This is why Mr. Woodlock at the end of his article is still hooked and suspended by his own question mark.

      As a matter of fact, physics and metaphysics are not antithetical, as Mr. Woodlock assumes them to be; they belong both to the one and the same Reality. Physics, stated comprehensively as Mr. Woodlock uses the term, is the part of this one Reality that we have learned to describe objectively and to verify in terms of physical or objective experience. Metaphysics is the part that we apprehend only by an inner experience, that we feel subjectively and have not yet learned how to experience and to verify objectively. Metaphysics simply is that part of Reality that lies beyond and has not been brought within the field of physical description or experience. Scientific discoveries occur at the border between them; all physics was first metaphysics.

      The theologian and the scientist both make one and precisely the same basic affirmation: namely, that there is an ultimate and universal Reality. They agree that this Reality is known only as it manifests itself subjectively in us and objectively in our external and physical world. They further agree that it manifests itself in three aspects which the theologian officially designates as an indivisible trinity of “Substance, Power and Eternality”, while the scientist employs the finite attributes of mass, motion and duration. The only difference is that the scientist expresses in finite terms what is absolute and infinite in the terms of the theologian. Science has resolved the theological conceptions into relative terms with quantitative units of reference and relation­ship, such as the gram, centimeter and second, under which Reality can be objectively experienced and intelli­gibly described. This finite examination, this objective and relative analysis of the infinite and universal is what gives to science its limited knowledge of the in­finite Reality and thus the power to synthesize its three indivisible manifestations, mass, motion and duration, into planned desiderata, realizations of hearts’ desires.

      It is towards such a description of the Reality that is manifested in the social world that our most vital thinkers and writers grope. Such an analysis, in the quantitative terms of science, will give ground for a synthesis yielding qualitative results in the realiza­tion of metaphysical aspirations, spiritual desires. Until the social manifestation of Reality also is analyzed fundamentally as an energy flow in terms of its appropriate units of mass, motion and duration there is nothing on which any re-synthesis can rest, no science of society to be applied, and none but empirical and haphazard results can be obtained. Professor Eddington has foreshadowed this energy approach in his proposal that we should describe population in terms of “man-years” as the social analogue to erg-seconds or kilowatt-hours.

      Mr. Woodlock’s “social scientists,” whether they realize it or not, are in reality moralists seeking to employ the creditable insignia of science as camouflage for their ultimately arbitrary, compulsive and tyrannical technique. He rightly convicts them of carrying concealed weapons, “values and criteria” that they themselves des­cribe as “moral” and that are certainly far from being scientific. That they are not objective but only sub­jective and capricious, without any definitive basis of reference such as the scientific units have, is shown by the insistence that it would be an act of impertinence “to propose to the social scientist what such a set of values might be like.” And here he betrays his perhaps unconscious moral claim to a very independent supervision over other persons’ properties and lives. It smacks too much of the present disorders and derangement of things and not of any newer and diviner dispensation.

      The ‘social scientist’ and the theologian are alike; their concepts are absolute, their values and criteria subjective and arbitrary. The future is calling to the real scientists to describe and explain the social pheno­mena objectively in terms of their version of Reality as manifested in their trinity of so-called physical standards which are not so limited at all. Their analyses will be quantitative but rational and not arbitrary or capricious. Their syntheses, likewise, considered as means, will be quantitative; but the effects and results will be quali­tative, for they will be more creative in the social than in the physical realm, hence more divine.

      Mr. Woodlock has shown us the ineptitude, if not the grave dangers, in the “social scientists’” values and criteria. What other does he propose?

Spencer Heath

_____________________________________________________________

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1397

Letter to Doctor S.A. Schneidman and Miss P.G. Grodman, Henry George School of Social Science, Long Island Extension Headquarters, 207-12 Jamaica Avenue, Bellaire, L.I.

December 21, 1941

Dear Doctor and Miss:

You may not have seen my friend, Mr. Woodlock’s commentary on the philosophy of Oppenheimer and Geiger as appearing in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, so I have clipped Mr. Woodlock’s column from the Wall Street Journal of December 17 for your delecta­tion, and for your further delectation I send also a copy of my somewhat extended comments on it in the form of a letter to the editor. After you have read, marked and inwardly digested all this wisdom and have no further immediate use for it I shall be very glad to have you return it to me either by mail or be sure that I take it from you the next time I am in New York, which probably will not be very long from now.

      Here’s wishing you all the Merry Christmas that you merit, which is a whole lot more than many people in many lands are likely to have for a long time to come. Let us hope that at least a few of us will learn to turn our wishful thinking around into thinkful wishing.

Cherio!

S. H.

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3081

Wall Street Journal column by Thomas F. Woodlock, “Thinking It Over”

December 29, 1941

 

Doctor Spencer Heath’s challenge to this writer (see “Letter to the Editor” in an adjoining column) is as fair as it is courteous, and is therefore acceptable. He wants to know what “values and criteria” this writer proposes as norms for social science, “if they are to be other than can be derived from social phenomena” expressed in terms of mass, motion and duration, that is quantitatively, by a real scientist. He contends that while the real scientist’s analyses will be purely quanti­tative they will be “rational”, but their “effects and results” will be “qualitative,” and more “creative” in the social field than in the realm of physics proper.

     It seems to this writer that Doctor Heath’s main cause of complaint against him rests on a misconception of his views. About the last thing he would assert is that there is “antithesis” between physics and metaphysics. There is no more antithesis there than there is between the smelting of iron ore and the rolling of a steel rail. It is quite true, as Doctor Heath says, that both physics and metaphysics belong to one and the same reality. The difference between them is merely between the stages of knowledge of that reality respectively reached. Both start from scratch with what the senses tell of things — mass, motion and duration — and the one first thing they tell us is that things exist. It is the one fundamental fact from which all natural human knowledge starts. Man operates on what his senses tell him with his instinctual faculties including reason. As a scientist — what Doctor Heath calls a real scientist — he concentrates upon what his senses report to him of matter in mass, motion and duration, taking matter for granted and not concerning himself with its beginnings or ends. He is solely concerned with the “how” of things, the behavior of things, having learned to extend by scientific appliance the range of his natural senses so as to see, almost, the invisible, hear the inaudible, weigh and measure the intactible, but it is always with sense knowledge, i.e. matter that he is concerned. The metaphysician is concerned with the realities that lie beyond sense knowledge, the realities that lie in the one universal fact revealed by the senses that things are. But metaphysical knowledge pre­supposes and includes physical knowledge for physical knowledge is dependent on the in­tellect operating in a restricted sphere, and is therefore an inferior grade of knowledge.
     What this writer would like to know from Doctor Heath is the nature of the process by which after the “real scientist” has subjected the “social manifestation of Reality” to a
fundamental analysis as “an energy flow in terms of its appropriate units of mass, motion and duration” thus achieving a “quan­titative” synthesis, this synthesis is made to yield real “qualitative” results in the order of “metaphysical aspirations and spiritual desires.” If that is not a “metaphysical” process, what is it? As such, does it or does it not give us knowledge of reality which is nevertheless not possible of verification in terms of mass, motion and duration, because the reality of which it gives us knowledge is independent of matter in any and all manifes­tations? If it does give us such knowledge, how deeply must analysis of mass, motion and duration go beyond the simple and universal “experience” of these “units” common to all men before it can yield that knowledge? In short, does one reach any knowledge of metaphysical reality by mere addition of physical facts, which is not attainable from analysis of the simple single and universal fact that things are?

     This writer thinks not. He believes that metaphysics does yield knowledge of realities beyond and above any knowledge that physical science can reach, and that all the knowledge reached by that science adds nothing essential to the metaphysician beyond that supplied by his own unaided senses. If the knowledge of metaphysical reality thus reached is not real knowledge all the scientific apparatus in the world and all the special knowledge yielded by that apparatus over and above the knowledge furnished by the unaided senses will not make it so. And that is his “thesis” which he hopes he has this time plainly stated.

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3081

Letter to the Editor, Wall Street Journal, submitted by Heath on

December 19^th but held and somewhat edited by the Journal for publication on

December 29, 1941, to coincide with Woodlock’s column reply on that date.

 

Science and the Social Order

Editor, The Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Woodlock, reviewing the leading articles in The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, finds that their au­thors credit “science” with being the “power” that has given to man all the rational con­trol he has over his natural world and that they invoke this same power to synthesize the “social sciences” and so lay bare the causes of social distress and thus find escape from it. Very properly, but with a tinge of tongue-in-cheek, Mr. Woodlock inquires just how this can be done. But he loads down his inquiry with an “either-or” assump­tion upon two things that he naively assumes to be fundamentally different and says the whole matter depends on this: namely, whether the “values” involved are physical or metaphysical.

      Mr. Woodlock states no thesis; he only assumes an anti-thesis. To assume an anti­thesis is, in effect, to affirm a negative. Such an assumption or affirmation cannot be proved; neither can it be experienced or phys­ically verified. Anti-thesis presupposes thesis and the net result is always zero. This is why Mr. Woodlock at the end of his article is still hooked and suspended by his own ques­tion mark.

      As a matter of fact, physics and meta­physics are not antithetical, as Mr. Woodlock assumes them to be; they belong both to the one and the same Reality. Physics, stated comprehensively as Mr. Woodlock uses the term, is the part of this one Reality that we have learned to describe objectively and to verify in terms of physical or objective ex­perience. Metaphysics is the part that we apprehend only by an inner experience, that we feel subjectively and have not yet learned how to experience and to verify objectively. Metaphysics simply is that part of Reality that lies beyond and has not been brought within the field of physical description or experience. Scientific discoveries occur at the border between them; all physics was first metaphysics.

      The theologian and the scientist both make one and precisely the same basic affirmation, namely, that there is an ultimate and universal Reality. They agree that this Reality
is known only as it manifests itself subjectively in us and objectively in our external and physical world. The only difference is that the scientist expresses in finite terms what
is absolute and infinite in the terms of the theologian. This finite examination, this objective and relative analysis of the infinite and universal is what gives to science limited knowledge of the Infinite Reality and thus the power to synthesize its indivisible manifestations, mass, motion and duration, into planned desiderata, realizations of heart’s “desires.

 

      It is towards such a description of the Reality that is manifested in the social world that our most vital thinkers and writers grope. Such an analysis, in the quantitative terms of science, will give ground for synthesis yielding qualitative results in the realization of metaphysical aspirations, spiritual desires. Until the social manifestation of Reality also is analyzed fundamentally as an energy flow in terms of its appropriate units of mass, motion and duration, there is nothing on which any re-synthesis can rest, no science of society to to applied, and none but empirical and haphazard results can be obtained.

       Mr. Woodlock’s “social scientists,” whether they realize it or not, are in reality moralists seeking to employ the creditable insignia of science as camouflage for their ultimate arbitrary, compulsive and tyrannical technique.

      The social scientist and the theologian are alike; their concepts are absolute, their values and criteria subjective and arbitrary. The future is calling to the real scientists to describe and explain the social phenomena objectively in terms of their version of Reality as manifested in their trinity of so-call physical standards which are not so limited at all. Their analyses will be quantitative but rational and not arbitrary or capricious. Their syntheses, likewise, considered as means, will be quantitative; but the effect and results will be qualitative, for they will be more creative in the social than in the physical realm, hence more divine.

      Mr. Woodlock has shown us the ineptitude, if not the grave dangers, in the “social scientists'” values and criteria. What other does he propose?”

                           Spencer Heath

                           The Science of Society Foundation

_______________________________________________________________

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3081

Carbon of letter from Heath, The Science

of Society Foundation, Elkridge, Maryland

December 31, 1941

 

 

 

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

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1399

Letter to Dr. S.A. Schneidman and Miss P.G. Grodman,

Bellaire, Long Island, New York

January 1, 1942

 

Dear Doctor S. and Miss G.:

And so the controversy rages.

      I send you Mr. Woodlock’s rejoinder to “Doctor” Heath and also “Doctor” Heath’s rebuttal in carbon copy.

      You will note the few incisive parts that were ex­cised out of my original letter and you may wonder with me how much of my second letter will appear in print.

      Please return all the clippings to me pretty soon or give them to me before very long. I want to attach them to my carbon copies. You may keep the ones you have if you care to do so.

      I am plodding on my magnum opus, but progress is very slow. Seems as though my unconscious is trying to dodge it. When I team up with or against somebody else it’s more fun.

      Best wishes for a lot of New Years.

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2264

Letter from Pyrrha Gladys Grodman, Henry George School of Social Science, Long Island Extension Headquarters, 207-12 Jamaica Avenue, Bellaire, L.I.

January 3, 1942

 

Dear Mr. Heath:

For the past few days I had hoped to find time to write you, but we have been short-handed in the hospital and working over-time. On Wednesday, Decem­ber 31st, Mr. Lissner dropped in for a visit. He was interested “editorially” in your reply to Mr Woodlock and asked me to make copies of your letter for himself and Dr Geiger for possible publication in the April issue of The American Journal of Economics and Socio­logy. Dr. Geiger advises on materials submitted for the Journal that are of a philosophic nature. You may wish to get in touch with Dr. Geiger to follow up this opportunity to have your ideas published in the Journal. I am taking it upon myself to make further copies of your letter of December 31st, and sending them on to Mr. Lissner. Mr. Lissner’s address, for your reference, is 250-20 Thornhill Avenue, Douglaston, Long Island.

      The clumsy surgical operation on your letter of the 19th is deplorable, especially so because the most vital germs of your thesis – the very foundation of the Science of Society – have been excised. It would seem that they entirely missed the point of your acknowledgment of Professor Eddington’s realization of the need for an appropriate durational factor in demography.

      I am returning to you at this time Mr Woodlock’s article of December 17th and your first letter, but am reserving the second round for a few days. I have been meeting with Cecil Tucker and discussing your magnum opus with him. He is enthusiastic about it, and is making a copy of it for himself so that he may the better mull over it. Mr Tucker recognizes the significance of the institution of property and looks forward to seeing you when you are again in the city. His present address is 137-20 Franklin Avenue, Flushing.

      In case you do not have a subscription to Mr Walker’s Cause and Effect, I am sending you pages 5 and 6 which seem to me to have two articles that par­ticularly require your comments. Mr Walker is prob­ably not informed as to the correlation between fre­quency of reproduction and longevity, and might be interested on the new light it gives to mother Nature’s provisions in the social field.

      I wonder whether you have seen the first volume of Mr Beckwith’s “The Answer”. I think that his fight to eliminate the “evil heart” from the field of the social sciences is probably one of the most necessary and difficult tasks with which the sound Georgist propa­gandist is confronted.

     Doctor joins me in wishing you inspiration, enlightenment and success in your magnum opus and an ever-increasing and appreciative audience for the new Science of Society throughout the coming year.

Cordially yours,

/s/ P. Grodman

________________________________________________________________

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2267

Letter from Pyrrha Gladys Grodman, Henry George School of Social Science, Long Island Extension Headquarters, 207-12 Jamaica Avenue, Bellaire, L.I.

January 7, 1942

 

 

Dear Mr. Heath:

Last night Cecil Tucker visited with us and we discussed Mr. Woodlock’s column of the 29th and your reply. Since I have made copies or your letter of the 31st and sent them to Mr. Lissner, and feel I have studied and digested the materials on the “contro­versy” adequately, I am returning the columns and carbon copy of your letter of the 31st. On careful reflection, I have not found any flaw in your state­ments; furthermore, for coherence, directness, lu­cidity and terseness, these letters rank with the most-significant and well-phrased of your writings with which I am acquainted. Mr. Tucker and I spent several hours on the new material. I think you will be pleased with his reasoned acceptance of your statements herein pre­sented, and his adherence and increasing understanding to your general and particular ideas; he is as enthusiastic about your “magnum opus” as I am.

      We are “in suspense” as to the subsequent events of the controversy, and are looking forward to the new developments.

      It will soon be common knowledge that Miss Bateman has been made Director of the School, Mr. Chodorov having been given new title and function of “Director of Research”. Mr. Peach is the new editor of “The Freeman”. From what Mr. Lissner has told us, the Trustees have considered and acted upon many of the recommendations made by the “dissidents”. Mr. Smith of “Land and Freedom” and Mr. Lissner have both spoken with us concerning the difficulty the Trustees experienced in finding suitable and available candidates for directorship of the school. Miss Bateman is selected temporarily.

      As always, we are looking forward to visiting with you.       Yours for enlightenment in the Science of Society,

/s/ P G Grodman

_______________________________________________________________

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3081

Letter to the Editor, Wall Street Journal

31 December 1941

 

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 newfound 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

The Science of Society Foundation

Elkridge, Maryland

_______________________________________________________________

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3081

Wall Street Journal column by Thomas F. Woodlock, “Thinking It Over,”

January 5, 1942

 

 

One of the most constantly worked clichés of modern economists when they turn their eyes to the future is that men’s desires have no assignable limits and that science provides the means for satisfying them as they increase, so why doubt the future? Addressing one of those philosophic gatherings which are so numerous during the Christmas holidays, Walter Lippman delivered a devastating attack on this dogma and charged that not only was it not the hope of the future but that “it was in fact the very cause of the present difficulties.” His indictment is well worth considering. It is simple and direct.

 

      Modern man, said Mr. Lippman, has misconceived his own nature and “has allowed himself to become the kind of man who cannot be happy, who cannot operate the institutions of the Western World, who cannot find security and serenity in the universe.” The reason is that he has rejected “the classic and traditional conceptions of human nature.” The modern view is that reason is not “the representative within us of the universal order — and therefore the ruler of our appetites” but rather it is the “instrument” of those appetites. “Desire is sovereign and reason is the instrument for serving and satisfying desire.” Our education, our social philosophy and our personal codes all base on this conception, and “our world today is in the hands of masses of people who are formed in this image, and regard it as indubitably the true and scientifically correct conception of human nature. Yet the cultural tradition and the great central institutions of the Western World come down to us as from men who would have regarded what is now the fashionable image of a man as the image of an uncivilized barbarian.”

 

      Here rises up the image of that old friend of our youth, the “economic man” of the brave days of the last century, “whose desires are limited . . . only by the difficulty of getting more and more satisfaction . . . It follows that the desires of the modern man can never be satisfied, and it is the anguish of unlimited and therefore insatiable desire which is the characteristic misery of our age . . . Yet in our age — because we have accepted the secular image of man — the social criterion of progress has been that we must encourage and incite ourselves to be forever unsatisfied, to think nothing is enough, and thus to seek the satisfaction of insatiable needs. Thus we have made social problems insoluble.” Neither nineteenth century capitalism, nor twentieth century social democracy can solve them for neither provides any mans for putting limits to what “men shall desire and then seek to acquire.” There is no objective difficulty in providing an adequate material subsistence for man; the difficulty is to satisfy his unlimited subjective expectations, “which cause violence, inequality, hatred and frustration.”

 

      We all agree that the Golden Rule should govern man in the society of his fellows. Mr. Lippman points out that to live by this rule man must practice in his appetites Aristotle’s Golden Mean, and thus discipline them “to the reality of things.” This is the way to the Good Life and the Good Life in the Western tradition “is an imitation of God — that is to say, the cultivation of the reason, which is an imitation of His omniscience and of the only true freedom — the freedom to follow the dictates of reason — which is an intimation of His omnipotence. Men who live in this tradition are capable of brotherhood in a civilized society. They can prefer to do unto others what they would have others do unto them. . . . Without these two elemental laws of human existence — that of the Golden Mean and the Golden Rule the good society is impossible.” The “secular conception of man” rejects the Golden Mean and therefore renders the Golden Rule “unworkable.” Which is why society exhibits “an interminable struggle for domination and survival.”

 

      The present writer commends Mr. Lippman’s paper to the attention of the “economist” fraternity, to all who still believe that the road to “peace and prosperity” is one to be discovered by charts and statistics of “production and distribution,” and to all who still believe in the “economic man.” The all-important word in that paper is “secular;” in its full meaning it is the secret of what Professor Sorokin calls “the crisis of our age.”

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3081

Carbon of Heath’s Letter to the Editor,

Wall Street Journal

January 10, 1942

 

Editor, The Wall Street Journal:

Your own erudite and genial columnist so warmly and unreservedly endorses Mr. Lippmann’s Oriental and medieval philosophy of limited desires /that/ it may be not amiss to point out some of the grounds on which the modern “secular image of man” rests.

      Let us not forget that “secular” is an epithet with which
virtually all new discoveries relating even to the physical nature of man have been theologically condemned. But theology itself rests and relies upon objective factual experiences that are held to be special and unique in that, in the order of nature, they are not repeated and hence cannot be tested or proved, but must rest upon divine authority. Matters of fact, unique but in themselves essentially subjective and secular, are thus the very seed bed out of which theologies arise. And since these matters of fact are always limited, finished and complete it follows that the desires and aspirations of those who adhere to them should be similarly circumscribed. In this limitation they are to find, so we are told, “security and serenity in the universe.” If this is “the representative within us of the universal order,” it certainly lacks universality, to say the least.

      The modern mind takes its base not on the exceptional and unique but on experiences that are objectively and independently verifiable, hence more representative of the “universal order.” It may be “secular” but it seeks the universal. It comes into its spiritual inheritance as it takes its form in the image, and thus as the representative, not of a special and particular but of the universal order. This modern mind finds in its own processes a correspondence and reflection, a formulation, of the order of the world. Its logical and mathematical extensions lead to sound inferences beyond, but none the less verifiable by, sensory experience. By a metaphysical process alone, unaided by any instrument or sense, it discloses the existence, motion and mass of the planet Neptune. It examines chemical elements and by a purely mental process discovers and describes the properties of those theretofore unknown. It divines the fact and even the precise degree of magnetic deflection of a beam of light as it passes near a star. The rationale of organized mankind only waits to be re­flected in the restless seeking and the ordered vision of the modern mind.

      The universal order is reflected in the intellect with which the mind of man is so divinely endowed as to “justify the ways of God to man.” This order is intrinsic in the mind that springs from it and thus has the power to form itself into accord with the eternalities of the objective world. It avoids ancient diabolisms by acceptance of the rational divinity with which it is creatively endowed and makes the mystic’s personal dream of unity with the mind of God into a common inheritance of mankind as the divine agency for the continuous and higher creation of the world.

      Animals and primitive men have pain and its surcease, relief and contentment, but little, if any, positive desire. The divine discontent that moved the creation of the world and of man is his inheritance alone — the authentic mark of his divine origin and nature. Life must first be before it can be good. Its needs give imperative but never insatiable desires. Nineteenth century freedom, releasing reason from some of its medieval limitations, gave to the Western World the power it has to achieve material needs and desires. Seeking the unattainable is attainment itself. All spiritual and artistic achievement springs from the persist­ence of creative desire. Let us not be too scornful of the foundations of things. The Divine Spirit wrought first the material world to His desire, and there can be no higher emulation.

      The absence of insatiable desire is the mark of the beast. The medieval mind, confusing insatiable desires with his sati­able propensities and needs, fails to honor or revere the div­inity that was breathed into man. If it must in this day brand him a child of death and hell, let it not be because of his in­satiable desires, for these but certify his kinship with the In­finite and mark him the eternal seeker after like and light. No Golden Mean has ever been adhered to by the servants and saviors of mankind.

Spencer Heath

The Science of Society Foundation

Elkridge, Maryland

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2268

Letter (second page missing) to Heath from Pyrrha Gladys Grodman,

Henry George School of Social Science, Long Island Extension

Headquarters, 207-12 Jamaica Avenue, Bellaire, L.I.

January 13, 1942

 

Dear Mr. Heath:

As I informed you in a previous letter, I sent Mr. Lissner two copies of your reply to Mr. Woodlock of December 31st. I assumed Mr. Lissner was a reader of The Wall Street Journal or if not, would see the issue of the 29th particularly because of the appearance of Mr Chodorov’s letter printed below yours. But it seems I was mistaken. I know you will be inter­ested in the following excerpt from Mr. Lissner’s letter to me of January 10th:

“Please accept my thanks for the copies of Mr. Heath’s letter of Dec. 31 to The Wall Street Journal. No, I haven’t read The Wall Street Journal of Dec. 29. All I have read is Mr. Woodlock’s column of Dec. 17. I’d like very much to have a copy of the page in the issue for Dec. 29. I’d like also to compare the published version with the original text. I believe the controversy is still running; if it is, I wish you’d let me know about any other letters that are printed in connection with it…  I’m anxious to get a full picture of the course of the controversy; public philosophical discussions, you know, are rather rare these days…  You know, you ought to encourage Mr. Heath to work out his new ideas in philosophy in a formal way and pub­lish it in the weekly ‘Journal of Philosophy.’ In that way he would bring them before an audi­ence trained to pick every flaw in the development of his ideas and he would obtain criticism which, if he has avoided fundamental error, would enable him to complete his work.”

     Insofar as I did not make copies of the print­ed version of your first letter, and that of Mr. Woodlock’s column of the 29th, two solutions present themselves: (1) if you mail me the clipping of the 29th, I will make the necessary copies and send them to Mr. Lissner, returning the clipping to you for your files; (2) you may commu­nicate directly with Mr. Lissner in this matter and the recommendation concerning publication of your ideas in the “Journal of Philosophy”. If you have not seen the letterhead of The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, I believe their “byline” will interest you; “Published Quarterly under grant from the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation in the interest of constructive syn­thesis in the social sciences”. The last ten words ..  /Breaks off here/

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3081

Penned letter from Thomas F. Woodlock, Contributing Editor,

The Wall Street Journal

January 14, 1942

 

Dear Dr. Heath:

 

The editor tells me he can’t make more space in his

Correspondence Column and has asked me to “make it all right”

with you — if I can, by private letter! This I now attempt to

do.

      It is plain to me that we have been more or less

unsuccessful in joining issues by reason of lack of common

terminology. For example, in the matter of discovery of the

planet Neptune you call the method by which it was accomplished

“metaphysical.” I call it “physico-mathematical” which is a

Fundamentally different process. It is physics because it is

started with a physical phenomenon and it is mathematical

because mathematics furnished the means of observing another

phenomenon. The fact that intellect and reason entered largely

into the work does not make it metaphysics. Neither natural

philosophy nor mathematics are metaphysics, yet both employ the

intellect and its powers in a high degree.

 

      It is open to you to deny there is any such thing as

metaphysics — if you care to do so — but not on scientific grounds. For example, take the question of the existence of God — the highest of all metaphysical truths: natural philosophy as such has nothing to tell us of its own knowledge on that, and neither has mathematics. Neither, in fact, as such can even entertain the question. Both by their own postulates exclude it from their possible fields of knowledge.

      It is the delimitation of the fields of knowledge belonging to the various “sciences” that I am interested in seeing observed. It is the trespassing by one science on the ground of another that darkens counsel so greatly in dealing with these matters. All have done it to some extent — theologians, metaphysicians and scientists. I want to see it stopped and the respective frontiers established and recognized.

      Let me say that I greatly appreciate your kindness in taking the pains to write as you have done and believe me

 

Sincerely yours,

/s/ Thomas F. Woodlock

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3081

Carbon of a letter to Mr. Woodlock

September 11, 1942

 

Dear Mr. Woodlock:

A very kind mutual friend has sent me at different times clippings from your very interesting column in the Wall Street Journal. Most of these have had to do with your spirit of inquiry concerning what the Henry George People (with whom I was for many years in good standing) are really driving at and how they would put it in effect.

      It seems fairly evident that your direct reading of the Single Tax propaganda has been almost as limited as you claim that it has. Nevertheless, you raise very much the same questions that your present correspondent has long entertained.

      Like so many others Henry George was a seeker after Social Justice. His and their ideal was the same. As to its desirability no question could arise; it is only concerning the practical means proposed that any questions can be raised, and then the basic question is this: Will the proposed means really lead in the direction of the end desired or will they lead really in the opposite direction? Will it not be necessary to discover more potent (I may say, more spiritual means) before success can be hoped.

      Henry George proposed a “‘Philosophy of Freedom;” he apostrophized Liberty but he did not “wholly trust her.” He decried the proposal of the socialists to achieve liberty by the employment of physical force against the owners of private capital but still proposed precisely the same technique against the owners of the land, including all the public capital wherewith it is improved. He insisted that right thinking would lead to right action; but “right action” in this case turns out not to be right action at all, in the sense of behavior, but “right” (?) compulsions on the liberties of others, namely, land owners and those who enter into voluntary engagements with them.

      I have not been one to suppose that the usually inflexible Single Tax propagandists could clear up these matters and have accordingly taken upon myself this not inconsiderable task. I enclose two small samples of my findings for your possible entertainment.

 

      With best compliments and cordiality,

 

 

Enc:

Why the Henry George Idea Does not Prevail

Private Property in Land Explained.

 

 

================================================================================================================================  

 

 

WOODLOCK AND THE “SOCIAL SCIENTISTS”

 

 

Thomas F. Woodlock was was a Contributing Editor with the Wall Street Journal in the early 1940s and wrote a regular column, “Thinking It Over.” Spencer Heath, Director of the Science of Society Foundation, Elkridge, Maryland, replied to one of his columns in a Letter to the Editor, leading to several exchanges between the two:

 

Thomas F. Woodlock

December 14, 1941

“Thinking It Over”

An interesting newcomer in the “quarterly” class is The American Journal of Eco­nomics and Sociology which has been founded by a group of scholars in the “Sociological” field, many, if not most of whom are inter­ested in the theories of Henry George. Its publication has been made possible by a grant from the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation which has for its main purpose the further­ance of the George ideas. The purpose of the new magazine is a broad one. It is to bring about what the leading article (by Franz Oppenheimer) calls a “scientific synthesis” of all the “social sciences” in order, if possible, to lay bare, the cause or causes of the present crisis and to detect, if possible, the way out of it.” This “synthesis” would include ethics, politics and economics. A short introduction by Mr. John Dewey emphasizes the need for this, and in doing so, he pays a high tribute to George: “For I know of no writer by whom the interdependence of all aspects and phases of human relations, economic, po­litical, cultural, moral, has been so vigorously and so sympathetically set forth.”

      Synthesis — a worthy goal indeed! How shall it be attained? “Our culture,” says Mr. Oppenheimer, “is whirling in the mael­strom of irrational forces; they must be brought under control. There is only one power to attain this goal, the same power that brought under control the elementary forces of Nature, of wind, of falling water, steam, electricity; and is about to unchain the limitless forces of atomic dissociation. The stupendous rise of American technique in agriculture and industry is due exclusively to Science: Nothing is as practical as theory. There is not the least reason to assume that the same general law is not valid for social technique in the organization and government of society, just as well.”

      But that word “Science” must not be too strictly understood. That it connotes some­thing more than mere laboratory results, more than mere “natural philosophy”, is clearly implied in the second article by Mr. George A. Geiger on “Science and Values in a Changing World.” Here we meet the word “moral”, which, as the Mr. uses it, is synonymous with “ethical.”

       The word “moral” (or “ethical”), he tells us, “must mean nothing more or nothing less than a concern with choices and judgments, with values and criteria.” And what are “values”? If we understand “values” to refer to the results of man’s long-time pref­erences — preferences in the central area encompassing his basic attitudes of life, his deep-rooted tastes and interests, his objects and reverence — then the problem of ethics seems to be an attempt (1) to grasp the origin and development of such values; (2) to relate them to their present background; and (3) to compare their promises with their accomplishments. This, then, is what is meant by describing ethics as the “critical evaluation of values already current.” And this job, Mr. Geiger says, is the job of “Science” in the field of sociology. “The scientific enterprise,” he says, “is above all things a critical method of approach to any material whatsoever, and to be critical means necessarily to employ some set of values. It would be, however, only an act of imperti­nence typically philosophical” (!) “to pro­pose to the social scientist what such a set of values might be like.” That gentleman must find his “values” for himself.

   At this point the reader is brought up against a very practical question — How does the “social scientist” go about it?

   It is as a “scientist” that he is to attack “sociology” but “sociology” involves “morals” (or “ethics”); morals involve “values.” Of what order are these “values”? Are they products of the physical order stemming ulti­mately from the processes that belong to the laboratory, or are they metaphysical? On the answer to that question depends the whole matter. If they are the former then the scientist as a scientist is ipso facto a per­fectly good sociologist. If they are the latter, the scientist must enter the domain of meta­physics where his laboratory files will neither qualify nor help him. Moreover, as a scientist only, he cannot even answer that question; to answer it he must make a meta­physical decision. (The Instrumentalists make that decision by denying the existence of the metaphysical, doing it, apparently on “Scien­tific” grounds, which is a logical absurdity, but they do it.) Which seems to raise the question, what has “Science” as science to contribute to sociology? On what theory does it claim to control it?

    In short, on what foundation can the “synthesis” adumbrated by the founders of this excellent magazine be built?

_________________

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Spencer Heath

Science of Society Foundation

December 19. 1941

 

Editor, The Wall Street Journal:

 

Your always delightful and frequently scintillant Mr. Woodlock, reviewing the leading articles in The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, finds that their authors credit “science” with being the “power” that has given to man all the rational control he has over his natural world and that they invoke this same power to synthesize the “social sciences” and so lay bare the causes of social distress and thus find escape from it. Very properly, but with a tinge of tongue-in-cheek, Mr. Woodlock inquires just how this can be done. But he loads down his inquiry with an “either-or” assump­tion upon two things that he naively assumes to be funda­mentally different and says the whole matter depends on this; namely, whether the “values” involved are physical or metaphysical.

      Mr. Woodlock states no thesis; he only assumes an anti-thesis. As a theologian or as a scientist he would have a real and definite thesis. And if he could describe experience (finite and relative phenomena) in terms of its correspondence with that thesis he could then safely adopt it as a certain guide to worthy ends. To assume an anti-thesis is, in effect to affirm a negative. Such an assumption or affirmation cannot be proved; neither can it be experienced or physically verified. To say or assume that A and B are not alike is to pre­sume a prior affirmation that they are alike, but the presumption is made only to deny it and leaving the respective qualities of A and B wholly undisclosed. Anti-thesis presupposes thesis and the net result is always zero. This is why Mr. Woodlock at the end of his article is still hooked and suspended by his own question mark.

      As a matter of fact, physics and metaphysics are not antithetical, as Mr. Woodlock assumes them to be; they belong both to the one and the same Reality. Physics, stated comprehensively as Mr. Woodlock uses the term, is the part of this one Reality that we have learned to describe objectively and to verify in terms of physical or objective experience. Metaphysics is the part that we apprehend only by an inner experience, that we feel subjectively and have not yet learned how to experience and to verify objectively. Metaphysics simply is that part of Reality that lies beyond and has not been brought within the field of physical description or experience. Scientific discoveries occur at the border between them; all physics was first metaphysics.

      The theologian and the scientist both make one and precisely the same basic affirmation: namely, that there is an ultimate and universal Reality. They agree that this Reality is known only as it manifests itself subjectively in us and objectively in our external and physical world. They further agree that it manifests itself in three aspects which the theologian officially designates as an indivisible trinity of “Substance, Power and Eternality”, while the scientist employs the finite attributes of mass, motion and duration. The only difference is that the scientist expresses in finite terms what is absolute and infinite in the terms of the theologian. Science has resolved the theological conceptions into relative terms with quantitative units of reference and relation­ship, such as the gram, centimeter and second, under which Reality can be objectively experienced and intelli­gibly described. This finite examination, this objective and relative analysis of the infinite and universal is what gives to science its limited knowledge of the in­finite Reality and thus the power to synthesize its three indivisible manifestations, mass, motion and duration, into planned desiderata, realizations of hearts’ desires.

      It is towards such a description of the Reality that is manifested in the social world that our most vital thinkers and writers grope. Such an analysis, in the quantitative terms of science, will give ground for a synthesis yielding qualitative results in the realiza­tion of metaphysical aspirations, spiritual desires. Until the social manifestation of Reality also is analyzed fundamentally as an energy flow in terms of its appropriate units of mass, motion and duration there is nothing on which any re-synthesis can rest, no science of society to be applied, and none but empirical and haphazard results can be obtained. Professor Eddington has foreshadowed this energy approach in his proposal that we should describe population in terms of “man-years” as the social analogue to erg-seconds or kilowatt-hours.

      Mr. Woodlock’s “social scientists,” whether they realize it or not, are in reality moralists seeking to employ the creditable insignia of science as camouflage for their ultimately arbitrary, compulsive and tyrannical technique. He rightly convicts them of carrying concealed weapons, “values and criteria” that they themselves des­cribe as “moral” and that are certainly far from being scientific. That they are not objective but only sub­jective and capricious, without any definitive basis of reference such as the scientific units have, is shown by the insistence that it would be an act of impertinence “to propose to the social scientist what such a set of values might be like.” And here he betrays his perhaps unconscious moral claim to a very independent supervision over other persons’ properties and lives. It smacks too much of the present disorders and derangement of things and not of any newer and diviner dispensation.

      The social scientist and the theologian are alike; their concepts are absolute, their values and criteria subjective and arbitrary. The future is calling to the real scientists to describe and explain the social pheno­mena objectively in terms of their version of Reality as manifested in their trinity of so-called physical standards which are not so limited at all. Their analyses will be quantitative but rational and not arbitrary or capricious. Their syntheses, likewise, considered as means, will be quantitative; but the effects and results will be quali­tative, for they will be more creative in the social than in the physical realm, hence more divine.

      Mr. Woodlock has shown us the ineptitude, if not the grave dangers, in the “social scientists’” values and criteria. What other does he propose?

_____________________________________________________________

 

Thomas F. Woodlock

December 29, 1941

Spencer Heath’s challenge to this writer is as fair as it is courteous, and is therefore acceptable. He wants to know what “values and criteria” this writer proposes as norms for social science, “if they are to be other than can be derived from social phenomena” expressed in terms of mass, motion and duration, that is quantitatively, by a real scientist. He contends that while the real scientist’s analyses will be purely quanti­tative they will be “rational”, but their “effects and results” will be “qualitative,” and more “creative” in the social field than in the realm of physics proper.

     It seems to this writer that Mr. Heath’s main cause of complaint against him rests on a misconception of his views. About the last thing he would assert is that there is “antithesis” between physics and metaphysics. There is no more antithesis there than there is between the smelting of iron ore and the rolling of a steel rail. It is quite true as Mr. Heath says, that both physics and metaphysics belong to one and the same reality. The difference between them is merely between the stages of knowledge of that reality respectively reached. Both start from scratch with what the senses tell of things — mass, motion and duration — and the one first thing they tell us is that things exist. It is the one fundamental fact from which all natural human knowledge starts. Man operates on what his senses tell him with his instinctual faculties including reason. As a scientist — what Mr. Heath calls a real scientist — he concentrates upon what his senses report to him of matter in mass, motion and duration, taking matter for granted and not concerning himself with its beginning or ends. He is solely concerned with the “how” of things, the behavior of things, having learned to extend by scientific appliance the range of his natural senses so as to see, almost, the invisible, hear the inaudible, weigh and measure the intactible, but it is always with sense knowledge, i.e. matter that he is concerned. The metaphysician is concerned with the realities that lie beyond sense knowledge, the realities that lie in the one universal fact revealed by the senses that things are. But metaphysical knowledge pre­supposes and includes physical knowledge for physical knowledge is dependent on the in­tellect operating in a restricted sphere, and is therefore an inferior grade of knowledge.

      What this writer would like to know from Mr. Heath is the nature of the process by which after the “real scientist” has subjected the “social manifestation of Reality” to a fundamental analysis as “an energy flow in terms of its appropriate units of mass, motion and duration” thus achieving a “quan­titative” synthesis, this synthesis is made to yield real “qualitative” results in the order of “metaphysical aspirations and spiritual desires.” If that is not a “metaphysical” process, what is it? As such, does it or does it not give us knowledge of reality which is nevertheless not possible of verification in terms of mass, motion and duration, because the reality of which it gives us knowledge is independent of matter in any and all manifes­tations? If it does give us such knowledge, how deeply must analysis of mass, motion and duration go beyond the simple and universal “experience” of these “units” common to all men before it can yield that knowledge? In short, does one reach any knowledge of metaphysical reality by mere addition of physical facts, which is not attainable from analysis of the simple single and universal fact that things are?

     This writer thinks not. He believes that metaphysics does yield knowledge of realities beyond and above any knowledge that physical science can reach, and that all the knowledge reached by that science adds nothing essential to the metaphysician beyond that supplied by his own unaided senses. If the knowledge of metaphysical reality thus reached is not real knowledge all the scientific apparatus in the world and all the special knowledge yielded by that apparatus over and above the knowledge furnished by the unaided senses will not make it so. And that is his “thesis” which he hopes he has this time plainly stated.

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Spencer Heath

December 31, 1941

 

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

January 10, 1942

Editor, The Wall Street Journal:

Your own erudite and genial columnist so warmly and unreservedly endorses Mr. Lippmann’s Oriental and medieval philosophy of limited desires /that/ it may be not amiss to point out some of the grounds on which the modern “secular image of man” rests.

      Let us not forget that “secular” is an epithet with which
virtually all new discoveries relating even to the physical nature of man have been theologically condemned. But theology itself rests and relies upon objective factual experiences that are held to be special and unique in that, in the order of nature, they are not repeated and hence cannot be tested or proved, but must rest upon divine authority. Matters of fact, unique but in themselves essentially subjective and secular, are thus the very seed bed out of which theologies arise. And since these matters of fact are always limited, finished and complete it follows that the desires and aspirations of those who adhere to them should be similarly circumscribed. In this limitation they are to find, so we are told, “security and serenity in the universe.” If this is “the representative within us of the universal order,” it certainly lacks universality, to say the least.

      The modern mind takes its base not on the exceptional and unique but on experiences that are objectively and independently verifiable, hence more representative of the “universal order.” It may be “secular” but it seeks the universal. It comes into its spiritual inheritance as it takes its form in the image, and thus as the representative, not of a special and particular but of the universal order. This modern mind finds in its own processes a correspondence and reflection, a formulation, of the order of the world. Its logical and mathematical extensions lead to sound inferences beyond, but none the less verifiable by, sensory experience. By a metaphysical process alone, unaided by any instrument or sense, it discloses the existence, motion and mass of the planet Neptune. It examines chemical elements and by a purely mental process discovers and describes the properties of those theretofore unknown. It divines the fact and even the precise degree of magnetic deflection of a beam of light as it passes near a star. The rationale of organized mankind only waits to be re­flected in the restless seeking and the ordered vision of the modern mind.

      The universal order is reflected in the intellect with which the mind of man is so divinely endowed as to “justify the ways of God to man.” This order is intrinsic in the mind that springs from it and thus has the power to form itself into accord with the eternalities of the objective world. It avoids ancient diabolisms by acceptance of the rational divinity with which it is creatively endowed and makes the mystic’s personal dream of unity with the mind of God into a common inheritance of mankind as the divine agency for the continuous and higher creation of the world.

      Animals and primitive men have pain and its surcease, relief and contentment, but little, if any, positive desire. The divine discontent that moved the creation of the world and of man is his inheritance alone — the authentic mark of his divine origin and nature. Life must first be before it can be good. Its needs give imperative but never insatiable desires. Nineteenth century freedom, releasing reason from some of its medieval limitations, gave to the Western World the power it has to achieve material needs and desires. Seeking the unattainable is attainment itself. All spiritual and artistic achievement springs from the persist­ence of creative desire. Let us not be too scornful of the foundations of things. The Divine Spirit wrought first the material world to His desire, and there can be no higher emulation.

      The absence of insatiable desire is the mark of the beast. The medieval mind, confusing insatiable desires with his sati­able propensities and needs, fails to honor or revere the div­inity that was breathed into man. If it must in this day brand him a child of death and hell, let it not be because of his in­satiable desires, for these but certify his kinship with the In­finite and mark him the eternal seeker after like and light. No Golden Mean has ever been adhered to by the servants and saviors of mankind.

 

_______________________________________________________________  

 

Thomas F. Woodlock

Penned note

January 14, 1942

 

Dear Dr. Heath:

 

The editor tells me he can’t make more space in his

Correspondence Column and has asked me to “make it all right”

with you — if I can, by private letter! This I now attempt to

do.

      It is plain to me that we have been more or less

unsuccessful in joining issues by reason of lack of common

terminology. For example, in the matter of discovery of the

planet Neptune you call the method by which it was accomplished

“metaphysical.” I call it “physico-mathematical” which is a

Fundamentally different process. It is physics because it is

started with a physical phenomenon and it is mathematical

because mathematics furnished the means of observing another

phenomenon. The fact that intellect and reason entered largely

into the work does not make it metaphysics. Neither natural

philosophy nor mathematics are metaphysics, yet both employ the

intellect and its powers in a high degree.

 

      It is open to you to deny there is any such thing as

metaphysics — if you care to do so — but not on scientific grounds. For example, take the question of the existence of God — the highest of all metaphysical truths: natural philosophy as such has nothing to tell us of its own knowledge on that, and neither has mathematics. Neither, in fact, as such can even entertain the question. Both by their own postulates exclude it from their possible fields of knowledge.

      It is the delimitation of the fields of knowledge belonging to the various “sciences” that I am interested in seeing observed. It is the trespassing by one science on the ground of another that darkens counsel so greatly in dealing with these matters. All have done it to some extent — theologians, metaphysicians and scientists. I want to see it stopped and the respective frontiers established and recognized.

       Let me say that I greatly appreciate your kindness in taking the pains to write as you have done and believe me

Sincerely yours,

/s/ Thomas F. Woodlock