Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1512

Typed copy of letter by Heath at 1295 Richmond Road, Winter Park, Florida to Edwin R. Walker, Dean of the College, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida.

March 13, 1954

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Dr. Walker:

 

This is just a note to remind you that in coming south for a season I am here in Winter Park mainly because of your letter of January seventh, the possibilities it suggested and discussions it proposed. But, anent your letter, let me set out, as they occur to me, some general considerations:

Your College, Rollins, originally endowed with understanding, high purpose and ideals, and with but little more, has grown in grace and beauty and in the material gifts and possessions that graciously and so fittingly have been added unto her.  And, import­ant as these are, yet there are gifts of the spirit that are no less essential to the growth and preservation of the spiritual en­dowment in which she was born — new yieldings to inspiration, new understandings of the divinity, of the creative power and beauty, that lies latent not in the individual human nature alone but no less in the pervasive free (Golden-Rule) relationships at which we often look askance but do richly bless us and must at last wholly prevail in human affairs.

In Dr. Fort^’s seminar more than two weeks ago, I offered hom­age to Philosophy as Queen of the Sciences and of the Arts whose touch awakens to the Dominating Principle under rule of which the world is a Cosmos (not chaos) out of whose order all forward forms and processes have grown and even now unceasingly evolve. I de­scribed this process of organization and of life — the creative and

thereby the spiritual process — as the one true reality, far domi­nant above all disintegrative trends, and especially above that nar­row and limited physical entropy to which “Scientific Materialism” keeps many narrow minds enchained. In this Creative Principle is generalized the all-enduring rational order in which all organiza­tional forms, despite their outward diversities, emerge and evolve. It gives large meaning to the whole creation. For it finds the mind of God in all the growing works of God, and, above all, in the creative alternatives against disorder with which He has endowed mankind, placed at the disposal of their minds and will. Evil, as dis-order, cannot be destroyed; only by participation in the divine alternative, the creation of order, can love and beauty be achieved.

And the alternatives to evil are far-flung, not limited to individual and particular affairs. For there is a divine alter­native to the imperial dominion of arbitrary and coercive power, the power that is at once the terror and, strangely, the wavering hope of many unawakened minds. This divine alternative is to be found in the world-wide system of freedom through the Golden-Rule-wise contractual processes among men in the little time since the generality of mankind have been permitted to own even their bodies and thus to have property in themselves and in many other forms wherewith to practice free contract and thereby in freedom many serve and be by many served in turn.

Proprietary administration of property, peaceable and profit­able, is the coming divine alternative to political coercion and seizures in matters of public concern no less than it has supplanted piracy and robbery in the administration of private property and affairs. And the customary proprietary administration that dis­tributes sites and resources by the Golden Rule of contract without coercion, including every benefit or service afforded by or to the land, may be taken as the leaven of the Kingdom of Heaven in our midst, so far as public services are concerned. For an awareness of it and of the mighty profit it will yield is all that is requis­ite to cause community owners to unite and convert the values of their separate holdings into undivided interests in a proprietary organization competent to protect and serve without violence, and for none but voluntary recompense, all those who occupy or use the community sites and lands.

The potentialities here are too vast for a paragraph or a page. Yet this peace-practicing, value-building, Golden-Rule administra­tion nascent in our midst is the resounding answer to the Macedon­ian cry of Dr. Harold Dodds, namely, “How can we conduct our public and community affairs without resort to violence and war?” In all the prophetic past, history has foregleamed this practical advance towards an adult human society; and a high spiritual philosophy finds in it the humble instrument for execution of its long-cherished dreams. This objective technology in the field of public and community affairs cannot fail to break the bonds and bounds of the creative human spirit in all its cultural realms, including that of education, which, potentially is the divinest of all the creative arts.

In the vain quest for salvation through “principalities and powers,” proprietorship, Proprium versus Imperium, seems remote and unreal. Yet it is wholly consonant with the Golden Rule and its Ideal Kingdom in the earth and all else that holy writ enjoins.

So central to all that is divine and thus creative in human affairs is this Golden Rule procedure, this proprietary mode of public or community administration, my one remaining aim in life is to find for it a “habitation and a name,” as center from which the beneficence and beauty of Society, defined and distinguished as the contractual organization of men, may go out to the minds and hearts of men and prove itself in the high prospering of their prac­tical affairs. In this context I hope to obtain such moral and spiritual support as to warrant expenditure of the major portion if not all of my modest but substantial estate in the pursuit and continuity of this aim. I seek for myself no honor or distinction, but only to promote such objective understanding of the contractual Free Society as shows forth the kind of practical organization of public and community services and affairs, profit-making for all, that will implement the unpracticed precepts of past wisdom and highest present hopes and dreams.

All too well known are the evils inseparable from political administration of the common services essential to the community form of life. There must be more knowledge and thereby more rev­erence for the divine alternative to the rule of force — an alternative with which the spirit of man and of man alone is divinely endowed. Rollins College has attracted me in many ways, the more so for its spirit of adventure towards the future and the new, — while cherishing and conserving all the values of the old.

I would propose an unhurried general talk with you, followed by seminars, preferably at faculty and administrative levels, taking a wide view of such topics as: The Laws — Natural and Polit­ical; The Sciences — Natural and Social; The Arts — Practical and Esthetic; Philosophy — Queen of the Sciences; Religion — Its Unity in Diversity. These topics and others, however specific, are to be treated as interdependent and thus as background and setting for an objective view and understanding of the Free Society in its struc­tural, functional and cultural aspects and as a form of life. This should give a reasonably clear view of the desirability and the practicability of further or permanent arrangements.

 

                                         Very sincerely,

 

 

 

As to qualifications:  In law, I have the customary profession­al degrees and standing before the Bar. In engineering, I have been recognized professionally and worked successfully for many years, without benefit of degrees. In other fields, I am a constructive critic and discoverer and, in their general principles, more than usually well read. All in all, my competence had best speak for itself. For the growing order that evolves among men, as it has among the stars, speaks its own credential, once its ways are seen and loved — whatever finger traces or whose the voice that calls.