Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3142

Typed page of transcription by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath in Indiana on driving trip to Sewanee

July 1954

 

 

But I am not sold on the idea that an average should always be taken as a standard or criterion of excellence in behavior or elsewhere. In a developing organism any fixed standard is bound to become obsolete, and a moveable average must always be based upon past experience or achievement.

 

                                 “As anything we have to go on                                      is.”

 

(Amused) Yes. So that the ideal is rather behind than before us. The fault in taking averages as standards may be that it is necessarily numerical and quantita­tive. A higher criterion would suggest not levels of experience but movement in the direction of some trans­cendent ideal at whatever level taking place. For liv­ing creatures the ideal is life in its aspect of increasing abundance both in quality and quantity and the direction of its ultimate yet never absolutely attainable ideal — immortality. Let us then measure and appraise all things in terms of their trend, or direction towards an always approachable yet never absolute norm. Q.E.D. — Which was not, however; I did not state at the beginning what I was going to prove.

 

You set yourself up as a partisan of a creed or a doctrine of some sort when you state in advance a con­clusion that you propose to prove. It was not my pur­pose to state a conclusion which I proposed to prove but rather to discover and disclose so that he who runs may read — expository rather than contentionary. I like what it was I said to Francis Richardson DuPont when he said to me about CMA that I should state at the very beginning what it was that I was going to prove.

 

This does not mean that a teacher should be ignorant of the ends or understanding to which his discourse leads but rather that he is a delineator of the path along which his mind has moved to the discovery of new things or conclusions which he did not originally pre-suppose. However, once he has arrived at new knowledge or con­clusions it may be useful at times to give others the advantage of a pre-view so they will know in advance the direction in which their minds are being led and thus follow with closer interest and attention. I’m giving my case away at the end.

                                               “Why?”

 

Why? Because it is not an exclusive position to take that one should lead persons always towards an un­known position or conclusion.

 

                                      “And that’s the position                                       you tended to take?”

 

     My first proposition was what I told Mr. DuPont, that I should not state at the beginning where I was going to arrive. Yet I do believe that in my general premises in two initial chapters on method there are very general hints of what is to be expected at the end of the road. One advantage of not stating conclusions in advance is that the minds receiving the discourse do not have so much opportunity of being stubborn and thus incapable of going along with the exposition. This resistance usually expresses itself as, ⁿI can’t see it,” with a strong emotional inference that what the particular person cannot see, cannot or should not be seen by anyone else. I think if I had begun my dis­course with a statement of my miraculous conclusions it may easily have aroused initial opposition.

 

The more abstract a discourse is the more the words lag behind, because they must be used in a broader and more abstract sense. Thus abstract thinking is sometimes impeded by the necessity of finding or creat­ing words in which to diagram or express it.

 

                                    “Our neighbor is snoring,                                          Popdaddy.”

 

Competition, I take it. Well I’ve got to get busy myself. My eyelids are sticking together. — Remember what I said last night about our having separate rooms? One of us is too loud in the head, the other is too loud in the feet. Or as Dr. Johnson said to the young lady who accused him of smelling badly, “Young lady, it is you who smell; I only stink.”