Alfred North Whitehead

“ It is unnecessary for the purposes of science to consider the difficult metaphysical question of this community of nature to all. It is sufficient that, for the awareness of each, it is as though it were common to all, and that science is a body of doctrine true for this quasi-common nature which is the subject for the experience of each percipient; namely, science is true for each percipient.
To recognise an object is to be aware of it in its specific relations to definite events in nature. ”

“ The absence of temporal parts of objects is a commonplace of thought. No one thinks that part of a stone is at one time and another part of the stone is at another time. The same stone is at both times, in the sense in which the stone is existing at those times (if it be existing) . But spatial parts are in a different category, and it is natural to think of various parts of a stone, simultaneously existing. Such a conception confuses the stone as an object with the event which exhibits the actual relations of the stone within nature. ”

“ It is indeed very natural to ascribe spatial parts to a stone, for the reason that a stone is an instance of a perceptual object. These objects are the objects of common life, and it is very difficult precisely to discern such an object in the events with which it has its most obvious relations. The struggle to make precise the concept of these objects either forces us back to the sense-objects or forward to the scientific objects. The difficulty is chiefly one of making thought clear. That there is a perception of an object with self-identity, is shown by the common usage of mankind. ”

“ Nature is ever originating its own development, and the sense of action is the direct knowledge of the percipient event as having its very being in the formation of its natural relations. Knowledge issues from this reciprocal insistence between this event and the rest of nature, namely relations are perceived in the making and because of the making. For this reason perception is always at the utmost point of creation. We cannot put ourselves back to the Crusades and know their events while they were happening. We essentially perceive our relations with nature because they are in the making. ”

“ Instantaneously there is simply a distribution of electricity and Maxwell’s equations to express our expectations. But iron is not an expectation or even a recollection. It is a fact; and this fact, which is iron, is what happens during a period of time. Iron and a biological organism are on a level in requiring time for functioning. There is no such thing as iron at an instant; to be iron is a character of an event. Every physical constant respecting iron which appears in scientific tables is the register of such a character. ”

“ The discussion of the deduction of scientific concepts from the simplest elements of our perceptual knowledge at once brings us to philosophical theory. Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Mill, Huxley, Bertrand Russell and Bergson, among others, have initiated and sustained relevant discussions. But this enquiry is touched by only one side of the philosophical debate. We are concerned only with Nature, that is, with the object of perceptual knowledge, and not with the synthesis of the knower with the known. This distinction is exactly that which separates natural philosophy from meta physics. ”

“ Science then becomes a formula for calculating mental ‘phenomena’ or ‘impressions.’ But where is science? In books? But the castle and the planet took their libraries with them.
No, science is in the minds of men. But men sleep and forget, and at their best in any one moment of insight entertain but scanty thoughts. Science therefore is nothing but a confident expectation that relevant thoughts will occasionally occur. ”

“ It will suffice here to say that it issues in the assertion that all nature can (in many diverse ways) be analysed as a complex of things; thus all nature can be analysed as a complex of events, and all nature can be analysed as a complex of sense-data. The elements which result from such analyses, events, and sense-data, are aspects of nature of fundamentally different types, and the confusions of scientific theory have arisen from the absence of any clear recognition of the distinction between relations proper to one type of element and relations proper to another type of element. ”

“ In our immediate thoughts which follow perception we make a jump from the situation of an object within the short specious present to its location in instantaneous space, and thence by further reflexion to its location in time-less space. Thus location in space is always an ideal of thought and never a fact of perception. An object may be located in a volume, an area, a route, or an event-particle of instantaneous space, and thence derivatively it will be located in a volume, or an area, or a segment, or a point of timeless space. ”

“ If we follow the route of the derivation of knowledge from the intellectual analysis of sensible experience, molecules and electrons are the last stage in a series of abstractions. But a fact in nature has nothing to do with the logical derivation of concepts. The concepts represent our abstract intellectual apprehension of certain permanent characters of events, just as our perception of sense-objects is our awareness of qualities of nature resulting from the shifting relations of these characters. ”

“ A life-bearing object is not an ‘uniform’ object. Life (as known to us) involves the completion of rhythmic parts within the life-bearing event which exhibits that object. We can diminish the time-parts, and, if the rhythms be unbroken, still discover the same object of life in the curtailed event. But if the diminution of the duration be carried to the extent of breaking the rhythm, the life-bearing object is no longer to be found as a quality of the slice of the original event cut off within that duration. ”

“ In fact the content of the awareness derived from a given percipient event is merely the associated duration as extending over a complex of events which are situations of sense-objects of perception and also as extending over the percipient event itself. For example, an astronomer looks through a telescope and sees a new red star burst into existence. He sees redness situated in some event which is happening now and whose spatial relations to other events, though fairly determinate as to direction from him, are very vague as to distance. ”

“ But if we adopt the principle of relativity, these investigations do not solve the question of the foundations of geometry. An investigation into the foundations of geometry has to explain space as a complex of relations between things. It has to describe what a point is, and has to show how the geometric relations between points issue from the ultimate relations between the ultimate things which are the immediate objects of knowledge. Thus the starting point of a discussion on the foundations of geometry is a discussion of the character of the immediate data of perception. ”

“ We may not lightly abandon the castle, the planet, and the crimson cloud, and hope to retain the eye, its retina, and the brain. Such a philosophy is too simple-minded — or at least might be thought so, except for its wide diffusion. ”

“ At some stage in our account of stress we are driven to the concept of any extended quantity of material as a single unity whose nature is partly explicable in terms of its surface stress.
1.4 In biology the concept of an organism cannot be expressed in terms of a material distribution at an instant. The essence of an organism is that it is one thing which functions and is spread through space. Now functioning takes time. Thus a biological organism is a unity with a spatio-temporal extension which is of the essence of its being. ”

“ Thus nature, as we know it, is a continuous stream of happening immediately present and partly dissected by our perceptual awareness into separated events with diverse qualities. Within this present stream the perceived is not sharply differentiated from the unperceived; there is always an indefinite 'beyond' of which we feel the presence although we do not discriminate the qualities of the parts. This knowledge of what is beyond discriminating perception is the basis of the scientific doctrine of externality. ”

“ The object which is both the sock at the end and the sock at the beginning is a very attenuated complex type of permanence, which would not be what we meant by the sock merely at the beginning of its career or as perceived merely at the end of its career. By insisting on the continued identity of the sock, we are in fact continually juggling with what we mean by the sock, always retaining the most complete associations which we can trace through the whole continuous series of events forming the successive situations of the sock. ”

“ To say that significance is experience, is to affirm that perceptual knowledge is nothing else than an apprehension of the relatedness of things, namely of things in their relations and as related. Certainly if we commence with a knowledge of things, and then look around for their relations we shall not find them. 'Causal connection' is merely one typical instance of the universal ruin of relatedness. ”

“ Perceptions are in the mind and universal nature is out of the mind, and thus the conception of universal nature can have no relevance to our perceptual life. This is not how Berkeley stated his criticism of materialism; he was thinking of substance and matter. But this variation is a detail and his criticism is fatal to any of the traditional types of 'mind-watching-things' philosophy, even if those things be events and not substance or material. His criticisms range through every type of sense-perception, though in particular he concentrates on Vision. ”

“ But this is merely to say that the ultimate facts contemplated by Maxwell’s equations are certain events which are occurring throughout all space. The material called ether is merely the outcome of a metaphysical craving. The continuity of nature is the continuity of events ”

“ Our perception of time is as a duration, and these instants have only been introduced by reason of a supposed necessity of thought. In fact absolute time is just as much a metaphysical monstrosity as absolute space. The way out of the perplexities, as to the ultimate data of science in terms of which physical explanation is ultimately to be expressed, is to express the essential scientific concepts of time, space and material as issuing from fundamental relations between events and from recognitions of the characters of events. ”

“ A perceptual object is the association in one situation of a set of sense-objects, in general ‘conveyed’ by the normal perception of one of them. The high perceptive capacity of sense-figures leads to their association in a generalised figure, which is the geometrical figure of the object. Indeed, the insistent obviousness of the geometrical figure is one reason for the perception of perceptual objects. The object is not the figure, but our awareness of it is derived from our awareness of the figure. ”

“ A change in the object almost imperceptible from the physical point of view destroys the life in the succeeding situations of the object. The physical object, as apparent, is a material object and as such is uniform; but when we turn to the causal components of such an object, the apparent character of the whole situation is thereby superseded by the rhythmic quasi-periodic characters of a multitude of parts which are the situations of molecules. ”

“ It has led the theory of space to be annexed to objects and not to events, and thus created the fatal divorce between space and time. A figure, being an object, is not in space or time, except in a derivative sense.
This perceptive power of figures carries us to the direct recognition of sorts of objects which otherwise would remain in the region of abstract logical concepts. For example, our perception of sight-figures leads to the recognition of colour as being what is common to all particular colours. ”