Alfred North Whitehead

“ On the other hand, it is equally true that my immediate occasion of experience, at the present moment, is only one among the stream of occasions which constitutes my soul. Again, the world for me is nothing else than how the functionings of my body present it for my experience. The world is thus wholly to be discerned within those functionings. Knowledge of the world is nothing else than an analysis of the functionings. And yet, on the other hand, the body is merely one society of functionings within the universal society of the world. ”

“ Thus, there is a unity of the bedy with the environment, as well as a unity of body and soul into one person.
But in conceiving our personal identity we are apt to emphasize rather the soul than the body. The one individual is that co-ordinated stream or personal experiences which is my thread of life or your thread of life. It is that succession of self-realization, each occasion with its direct memory of its past and with its anticipation of the future. That claim to enduring self-identity is our self-assertion of personal identity. ”

“ By introducing stresses — in particular the law of gravitation — instead of the welter of detailed transformations of motion, he greatly increased the systematic aspect of Nature. But he left all the factors of the system — more particularly, mass and stress — in the position of detached facts devoid of any season for their compresence. He thus illustrated a great philosophic truth, that a dead Nature can give no reasons. All ultimate reasons are in terms of aim at value. A dead Nature aims at nothing. ”

“ Indeed, even when we confine attention to natural science, no special science ever is grounded upon the conciliation of presuppositions belonging to all the various sciences of Nature. Each science confines itself to a fragment of the evidence and weaves its theories in terms of notions suggested by that fragment. ”

“ The individual enjoyment is what I am in my rôle of a natural activity, as I shape the activities of the environment into a new creation, which is myself at this moment; and yet, as being myself, it is a continuation of the antecedent world. If we stress the rôle of the environment, this process is causation. If we stress the rôle of my immediate pattern of active enjoyment, this process is self-creation. If we stress the rôle of the conceptual anticipation of future whose existence is a necessity in the Nature of the present, this process is the teleological aim at some ideal in the future. ”

“ We are living at fall stretch with a keen observation of external occurrence; then external attention dies away and we are lost in meditation; the meditation gradually weakens in vivid presentation — we doze; we dream; we sleep with a total lapse of the stream of consciousness. These functionings of the soul are diverse, variable, and discontinuous. The claim to the unity of the soul is analogous to the claim to the unity of the body, and is analogous to the claim to the unity of body and soul, and is analogous to the claim to the community of the body with an external Nature. ”

“ In itself, space is conceived as unchanging from eternity to eternity, and as homogeneous from infinity to infinity. Thus, we compose a straightforward characterization of Nature, which is consonant to common sense, and can be verified at each moment of our existence. ”

“ I now pass on to the influence of modern science in, discrediting the remaining items of the primary common-sense notion with which science in the sixteenth century started its career. But in the present-day reconstruction of physics fragments of the Newtonian concepts are stubbornly retained. The result is to reduce modern physics to a sort of mystic chant over an unintelligible universe. ”

“ It can be qualified, and it must be qualified. But qualification is a bare fact, which is just itself. This is the grand doctrine of Nature asa self-sufficient, meaningless complex of facts. It is the doctrine of the autonomy of physical science. ”

“ It is never bare thought or bare existence that we are aware of. I find myself as essentially a unity of emotions, enjoyments, hopes, fears, regrets, valuations of alternatives, decisions — all of them subjective reactions to the environment as active in my nature. ”

“ All sense-perception is merely one outcome of the dependence of our experience upon bodily functionings. Thus, if we wish to understand the relation of our personal experience to the activities of Nature, the proper procedure is to examine the dependence of our personal experiences upon our personal bodies.
Let us ask about out overwhelming persuasions as to our own personal body-mind relation. In the first place, there is the claim to unity. The human individual is one fact, body and mind. This claim to unity is the fundamental fact, always presupposed, rarely cules and gaining molecules. ”

“ And the Newtonian cosmology gives no hint why the bare fact which is the value should be replaced by the reference to other times and places which is the limit.
For the modern view process, activity, and change are the matter of fact. At an instant there is nothing. Each instant is only a way of grouping matters of fact. Thus, since there are no instants, conceived as simple primary entities, there is no Nature at an instant. Thus, all the interrelations of matters of fact must involve transition in their essence. All realization involves implication in the creative advance. ”

“ Civilization would never have developed. Our varied powers of detailed observation of the world would have remained dormant. For the peculiarity of a reason is that the intellectual development of its consequences suggests consequences beyond the topics already observed. The extension of observation waits upon some dim apprebension of reasonable connection. For example, the observation of insects on flowers dimly suggests some congruity between the natures of insects and of flowers, and thus leads to a wealth of observation from which whole branches of science have developed. ”

“ Undoubtedly such enquiries are essential in the initial stage of any science. But every science strives to get beyond it. Unfortunately, owing to the way in which for over two thousand years philosophic thought has been dominated by its background of Aristotelian logic, all attempts to combine the set of special sciences into a philosophic cosmology, giving some understanding of the universe — all these attempts are vitiated by an unconscious relapse into these Aristotelian forms as the sole mode of expression. ”

“ Now these simplest things are those widespread habits of Nature that dominate the whole stretch of the universe within our remotest, vaguest observation. None of these laws of Nature gives the slightest evidence of necessity. They are the modes or procedure which within the scale of out observations do in fact prevail. I mean the fact that the extensiveness of the universe is dimensional, the fact that the number of spatial dimensions is three, the spatial laws of geometry, the ultimate formulae for physical occurrences. ”

“ It is the essence of life that it exists for its own sake, as the intrinsic reaping of value.
Thus, for Newtonians, Nature yielded no reasons: it could yield no seasons. Combining Newton and Hume we obtain a barren concept, namely, a field of perception devoid of any date forits own interpretation, and a system of interpretation devoid of any reason for the concurrence of its factors. It is this situation that modern philosophy from Kant onward has in its vatiows ways sought to render intelligible. ”

“ In order to understand this sporadic interweaving of old and new in modern thought, I will recur to the main principles of the old common-sense doctrine, which even to-day is the common doctrine of ordinary life because in some sense it is true. There are bits of matter, enduring self-identically in space which is otherwise empty. Each bit of matter ccupies a definite |imited region. Each such particle of matter has its own private qualifications — such as its shape, its motion, its mass, its colour, its scent. ”

“ You cannot talk vaguely about Nature in general. We must fix upon details within Nature and discuss their essences and their types of interconnection, The world around is complex, composed of details. We have to settle upon the primary types of detail in terms of which we endeavour to express our understanding of Nature. We have to analyse and to abstract, and to understand the natural status of out abstractions. At first sight there are sharp-cut classes within which we can sort the various types of things and characters of things which we find in Nature. ”

“ In this survey of the observational data in terms of which our philosophic cosmology must be founded, we have brought together the conclusions of physical science, and those habitual persuasions dominating the sociological functionings of mankind. These persuasions also guide the humanism of literature, of art, and of religion. Mere existence has never entered into the consciousness of man, except as the remote terminus of an abstraction in thought. ”

“ The second conclusion is the failure of science to endow its formulae for activity with any meaning. The divergence of the formulae about Nature from the appearance of Nature has sobbed the formulae of any explanatory chatacter. It has even robbed us of reason for believing that the past gives any ground for expectation of the future. In fact, sclence conceived as resting on mere sense-perception, with no other source of observation, is bankrupt, so far as concerns its claim to self-sufficiency.
Science can find no individual enjoyment in Nature; science can find so aim in Nature ”

“ The reason for this blindness of physical science lies in the fact that such science only deals with half the evidence provided by human experience. It divides the seamless coat — or, to change the metaphor into a happier form, it examines the coat, which is superficial, and neglects the body, which is fundamental. ”

“ Any local agitation shakes the whele universe. The distant effects are minute, but they are there. The concept of matter presupposed simple location. Each bit of matter was self-contained, localized in a region with a passive, static network of spatial relations, entwined in a uniform relational system from infinity to infinity and from eternity to eternity. But in the modern concept the group of agitations which we term matter is fused into its environment. There is no possibility of a detached, self-contained local existence. The environment enters into the nature of each thing. ”

“ For example, pragmatically a paving stone is a hard, solid, static, irremovable fact. This is what sense-perception, on its sharp-cut side, discloses. But if physical science be correct, this is a very superficial account of that portion of the universe which we call the paving stone. Modern physical science is the issue of a co-ordinated effort, sustained for more than three centuries, to understand those activities of Nature by reason of which the transitions of sense-perception occur. ”

“ There is no Nature apart from transition, and there is no transition apart from temporal duration. This is the reason why the notion of an instant of time, conceived as a primary simple fact, is nonsense. ”

“ They ate right as far as they go. But they omit these aspects of the universe as experienced, and of our modes of experiencing, which jointly lead to the more penetrating ways of understanding. In the recent situations at Washington, D.C., the Hume-Newton modes of thought can only discern a complex transition of sensa, and an entangled locomotion of molecules, while the deepest intuition of the whole world discerns the President of the United States inaugurating a new chapter in the history of mankind. In such ways the Hume-Newton interpretation omits our intuitive modes of understanding. ”

“ The qualities entertained as objects in conceptual activity are of the nature of catalytic agents, in the sense in which that phrase is used in chemistry. They modify the aesthetic process by which the occasion constitutes itself out of the many streams of feeling received from the past. It is not necessary to assume that conceptions introduce additional sources of measurable energy. They may do so; for the doctrine of the conservation of energy is not based upon exhaustive measurements. But the operation of mentality is primarily to be conceived as a diversion of the flow of energy. ”

“ Philosophy is the search for its solution.
Fox example, we can conceive Nature as composed of permanent things — namely, bits of matter, moving about in space which otherwise is empty. This way of thinking about Nature has an obvious consonance with common-sense observation. There are chairs, tables, bits of rock, oceans, animal bodies, vegetable bodies, planets, and suns. The enduring self-identity of a house, of a farm, of an animal body, is a presupposition of social intercourse. ”

“ Philosophy is the product of wonder. The effort after the general characterization of the world around us is the romance of human thought. The correct statement seems so easy, so obvious, and yet it is always eluding us. We inherit the traditional doctrine ”