Alfred North Whitehead

“ Europe endured a hundred years of revolution in order to shake off the system. Men such as Warham, and Tillotson, and Tait struggled for another three centuries to maintain it in a modified form. But they too have failed. With this analogy in mind, we wonder what in a hundred years, or in two hundred years, will be the fate of the modern university system which now is triumphant in its mission of civilization. We should search to remove the seeds of decay. We cannot be more secure now than was the ecclesiastical system at the end of the twelfth century and for a century onward. ”

“ Perhaps men like Warham, Tillotson, and Tait had gone back behind Christianity to the ideals of Pericles. But to-day, when we are blindly groping for some coherent ordering of civilization, we can spare some sympathy for the men who in England tried to give new life to the old vision which for twelve hundred years had served Europe so well. In England the death of the old ideal had a nobility worthy of its services during its long life. ”

“ All these men from Augustine to Tait energetically acted on the policy that the Church was the national organ to foster the intimate, ultimate values which enter into human life. For the earlier men, the Church was more than that; but at least it was that. They refused to conceive the Church as merely one patty within the nation, or merely as one factor within civilization. For them the Church was the nation rising to the height of its civilization. They were men with vision — wide, subtle, magnificent. They failed. Tait was the last Archbishop who effectively sustained the policy. ”

“ I cannot exaggerate my obligation to the University of Cambridge, and in particular to Trinity College, for social and intellectual training.
The education of a human being is a most complex topic, which we have hardly begun to understand. The only point on which I feel certain is that there is no widespread, simple solution. We have to consider the particular problem set to each institution by its type of students, and their future opportunities. ”

“ My wife and I have been overwhelmed with kindness. The shortcomings of my published work, which of course ate many, are due to myself alone. I venture upon one remark which applies to all philosophic work: — Philosophy is an attempt to express the infinity of the universe in terms of the limitations of language.
It is out of the question to deal with Harvard and its many influences at the end of a chapter. Nor is such a topic quite relevant to the purpose of this book. To-day in America, there is a zeal for knowledge which is reminiscent of the great periods of Greece and the Renaissance. ”

“ The tones of their voices, their ways of approach, linger, And yet the generation on the younger side of fifty knows so little of them. The blatant emphasis of current literature has done its worst in distortion. Memories shed a quiet light upon ways of feeling which in literature become distorted for the necessities of a story, or of a comparison. ”

“ On the contrary, we find men of capacious intellect and cautious natures endeavouring, in this way and in that way, to adapt the wealth of inheritance to the oncoming fashions of thought. That is how I characterized some of the outstanding Archbishops of Canterbury, from Warham to Tait. Such men disagree in many ways. For example, Tillotson and Tait stand in sharp antagonism to Laud. But they all agree in that they were endeavouring to adapt some generalization of the old ecclesiastical-feudal organization of mankind to the purposes of the dominant rationalistic-individualistic epoch. ”

“ There were the Oxford and Cambridge type, and the German type. Any other type was viewed with ignorant contempt. The seething mass of artisans seeking intellectual enlightenment, of young people from every social grade craving for adequate knowledge, the variety of problems thus introduced—all this was a new factor in civilization. But the learned world is immersed in the past.
The University of London is a confederation of various institutions of different types for the purpose of meeting this novel problem of modern life. ”

“ The effect of my wife upon my outlook on the world has been so fundamental that it must be mentioned as an essential factor in my philosophic output. So far I have been describing the narrow English education for English professional life. The prevalence of this social grade, influencing the aristocrats above them, and leading the masses below them, is one of the reasons why the England of the nineteenth century exhibited its failures and successes. It is one of the recessive factors of national life which hardly ever enters into historical narrative. ”

“ Their policy prevailed for twelve hundred years. It civilized Europe. Country after country has discarded it as an archaic obstruction. Even to-day, Spain and Mexico ate engaged in casting it away. The interest of men like Warham, Parker, Tillotson, Tait, is that they rescued the final stage of the mediæval vision of civilization from the reproach of decrepit reaction. Its end in Spain at the present moment is that of a backward-looking system, divorced from modern realities. Its supporters in Spain are mediæval, blind and deaf to the modern world. ”

“ The age of a vast subject population, deaf and dumb to the values belonging to civilization, has gone. Also the old civilizing influence of the Church has passed. It has been replaced by secular schools, colleges, universities, and by the activities of the men and women on their faculties. In the age to come, how will these new agencies compare with the ecclesiastics, the monks, the nuns, and the friars, who brought their phase of civilization to Western Europe? ”

“ To turn now to another side of life, during my later years at Cambridge, there was considerable political and academic controversy in which I participated. The great question of the emancipation of women suddenly flared up, after simmering for half a century. I was a member of the University Syndicate which repotted in favour of equality of status in the University. We were defeated, after stormy discussions and riotous behaviour on the part of students. If my memory is correct, the date was about 1898. But later on, until the war in 1914, there were stormy episodes in London and elsewhere. ”

“ The group of men and women — business men, lawyers, doctors, scientists, literary scholars, administrative heads of departments — who gave their time, wholly or in part, to this new problem of education were achieving a much needed transformation. They were not unique in this enterprise: in the U.S.A. under different circumstances analogous groups were solving analogous problems. It is not too much to say that this novel adaptation of education is one of the factors which may save civilization. ”

“ In such ways the universities, with their scheme of orthodoxies, will stifle the progress of the race, unless by some fortunate stirring of humanity they are in time remodelled or swept away. These are our dangers, as yet only to be seen on the distant horizon, clouds small as the hand of a man. ”

“ Those of us who have lived for seventy years, more or less, have seen first the culmination of an epoch, and then its disruption and decay. What is happening when an epoch approaches its culmination? What is happening as it passes towards its decay? Historical writing is cursed with simple characterizations of great events. Historians should study zoology. Naturalists tell us that in the background of our animal natures we harbour the traces of the earlier stages of our animal race. Theologians tell us that we ate nerved to effort by the distant vision of ideals, claiming realization. ”

“ Her vivid life has taught me that beauty, moral and æsthetic, is the aim of existence; and that kindness, and love, and artistic satisfaction are among its modes of attainment. Logic and Science are the disclosure of relevant patterns, and also procure the avoidance of irrelevancies. ”

“ The England of the eighteenth century and of the main part of the nineteenth century consisted of a highly educated upper class composed of landowners, leaders in business and commetce, and professional men. But the great mass of manual labourets, of artisans, and of the lower end of the traders, were very deficiently educated, if at all. After the middle of the century, and more especially after the first move toward democracy in 1868, the education of the whole nation was seriously initiated. ”

“ But these superior persons are engrossed in reading literature and often have scanty knowledge of the immediate facts around them. One of my most precious memories is that I have, within the space of my lifetime, witnessed the education of England, and the change in English lives that that education has meant.
V
The old bobbin man, as he journeyed with his horse and wagon slowly from the woods near Canterbury to the North Foreland at the tip of Kent, passed through scenes of English History unthinkingly and unknowingly. There still remain in England individuals of his mental grade. ”

“ My Cambridge education with its emphasis on mathematics and on free discussion among friends would have gained Plato’s approval. As times changed, Cambridge University has reformed its methods. Its success in the nineteenth century was a happy accident dependent on social circumstances which have passed away — fortunately. The Platonic education was very limited in its application to life. ”

“ He magnificently closed the line of great ecclesiastics who organized the intimate cultural life of England, round monasteries, village churches, dioceses, cathedrals, parishes — in New England called “townships” — parish meetings, schools, colleges, universities. The line stretches from Augustine of Canterbury, through Theodore of Tarsus, Lanfranc, Anselm, Becket, Warham, Cranmer, Parker, Laud, Sancroft, Tillotson, Tait. The national activities that cluster round the archbishops as representative leaders are as much worth dwelling on as those that centre round kings and parliaments. ”

“ At the present time, the system of modern universities has reached its triumphant culmination. They cover all civilized lands, and the members of their faculties control knowledge and its sources. The old system also enjoyed its triumph. From the seventh to the thirteenth century, it also decisively altered the mentalities of the surrounding populations. Men could not endow monasteries or build cathedrals quickly enough. ”

“ A way of life is something more than the shifting relations of bits of matter in space and in time. Life depends upon such external facts. The all-important sesthetic arises out of them, and is deflected by them. ”

“ Then, when we pass over another two centuries, and watch the men about the year fifteen hundred, we find an ominous fact. These foundations, which started with such hope and had performed such services, were in full decay. Men like Erasmus could not speak of them without an expression of contempt. ”

“ It was exciting work, as the whole village attended and expressed itself vigorously. English villages have no use for regular party agents. They require local residents to address them. I always found that a party agent was a nuisance. Rotten eggs and oranges were effective party weapons, and I have often been covered by them. But they were indications of vigour, rather than of bad feeling. Our worst experience was at a meeting in the Guildhall at Cambridge, addressed by Keir Hardie who was then the leading member of the new Labour Party. ”

“ But, in abstraction from the atmosphere of feeling, one behaviour pattern is as good as another; and they ate all equally uninteresting. The chief value of memories of infancy and young childhood is that with unconscious naiveté they convey the tonality of the society amid which that childhood was passed. ”

“ The practical was always there — the hard routine by which the folk of the medieval times barely sustained life. The difference is that nature controlled them, while we now see out way to the control of nature. That is why the topic of production, distribution, and the organization of labour is now in the foreground. ”

“ In like manner every active epoch harbours within itself the ideals and the ways of its immediate predecessors. An epoch is a complex fact; and in many of its departments these inherited modes of thought and custom survive, unshaken and dominant. ”

“ About 1860 my father was ordained as a clergyman of the Anglican Church; and about 1866 or 1867 he gave up his school for clerical duty, first in Ramsgate, and later in 1871 he was appointed Vicar of St. Peters Parish, a large district mostly rural, with its church about two or three miles from Ramsgate. The North Foreland belongs to the parish. ”