Alfred North Whitehead

“ The three books — Science and the Modern World, Process and Reality, Adventures of Ideas — are an endeavour to express a way of understanding the nature of things, and to point out how that way of understanding is illustrated by a survey of the mutations of human experience. ”

“ One meaning is the effect of certain ideas in promoting the slow drift of mankind towards civilization. This is the Adventure of Ideas in the history of mankind. The other meaning is the author’s adventure in framing a speculative scheme of ideas which shall be explanatory of the historical adventure.
The book is in fact a study of the concept of civilization, and an endeavour to understand how it is that civilized beings arise. One point, emphasized throughout, is the im- portance of Adventure for the promotion and preservation of civilization. ”

“ While on the subject of literature, I venture to commend to the notice of those interested in an earlier development of English Thought, and also in good literature, the sermons of the Elizabethan and Jacobean divines. Also H. O. Taylor’s Thought and Expression in the Sixteenth Century presents the currents and cross-currents of thought in those times. The twentieth century, so far as it has yet advanced, bears some analogy to that predecessor in European history, both in clash of thought and in clash of political interest. ”