Alfred North Whitehead

“ But when we press the question so as to determine without ambiguity the procedure of science, we become involved in the metaphysical formulations of the speculative Reason.
The modern doctrine, popular among scientists, is that science is the mere description of things observed, As such it assumes nothing, neither an objective world, nor causation, nor induction. A simple formula which describes the universals common to many occurrences is scientifically preferable to the complexity of many descriptions of many occurrences. Thus the quest of science is simplicity of description. ”

“ Newton himself was one of the early scientists who most emphatically repudiated the intrusion of metaphysics into science. There is plenty of evidence that, like many another man of genius, his nerves were delicately balanced. For such men the intrusion of alien considerations into the narrow way of a secure technology produces mere bewildered irritation, by reason of its disturbance of the sense of supreme mastery within the methods of their technique. Of course it would be foolish to believe that any man should dissipate his energies by straying beyond his awn best lines of activity. ”

“ For thought is a factor in the fact of experience. Thus the immediate fact is what it is, partly by reason of the thought involved in it. The quality of an act of experience is largely determined by the factor of the thinking which it contains. But the thought involved in any one such act involves an analytic survey of experience beyond itself. The supremacy of fact over thought means that even the utmost flight of speculative thought should have its measure of truth. It may be the truth of art. But thought irrelevant to the wide world of experience, is unproductive. ”

“ The world’s experience of professed seers has on the whole been very unfortunate. In the main, they are a shady lot with a bad reputation. Even if we put aside those with some tinge of insincerity, there still remain the presumptuous, ignorant, incompetent, unbalanced band of false prophets who deceive the people. On the whole, the odds are so heavily against any particular prophet that, apart from some method of testing, perhaps it is safer to stone them, in some merciful way. The Greeks invented logic in the broadest sense of that term — the logic of discovery. ”

“ One main law which underlies modern progress is that, except for the rarest accidents of chance, thought precedes observation. It may not decide the details, but it suggests the type. Nobody would count, whose mind was vacant of the idea of number. Nobody directs attention when there is nothing that he expects to see. The novel observation which comes by chance is a rare accident, and is usually wasted. For if there be no scheme to fit it into, its significance is lost. The way of thoughtless nature is by waste — a million seeds, and one tree ”

“ A scheme which, for a time at least, is useless methodologically, is one which fails to yield these observable contacts with fact.
An abstract scheme which is merely developed by the abstract methodology of logic, and which fails to achieve contact with fact by means of a correlate practical methodology of experiment, may yet be of the utmost importance. The history of modern civilization shows that such schemes fulfil the promise of the dream of Solomon. They first amplify life by satisfying the peculiar claim of the speculative Reason, which is understanding for its own sake. ”

“ It is obvious that pragmatism is nonsense apart from final causation. For a doctrine can never be tested unless it is acted upon. Apart from this primary function the very existence of Reason is purposeless and its origination is inexplicable. In the course of evolution why should the trend have arrived at mankind, if his activities of Reason remain without influence on his bodily actions? It is well to be quite clear on the point that Reason is inexplicable if purpose be ineffective. ”

“ The operations of Fatigue constitute the defeat of Reason in its primitive character of reaching after the upward trend. Fatigue means the operation of excluding the impulse towards novelty. It excludes the opportunities of the immediate stage at which life finds itself. That stage has been reached by seizing opportunity. The meridian triumph of a method is when it facilitates opportunity without any transcending of itself. Mere repetition is the baffling of opportunity. The inertia weighing upon Reason is generation of a mere recurrent round of change, unrelieved by novelty. ”

“ We all know that abstract political economy has in recent years been somewhat under a cloud. It deals with men under an abstraction; It limits its view to the “economic man.” It also makes assumptions as to markets and competition which neglect many important factors. We have here an example of the necessity of transcending a given morphological scheme. Up to a point the scheme is invaluable. It clarifies thought, it suggests observation, it explains fact. But there is a strict limit to the utility of any finite scheme. If the scheme be pressed beyond its proper scope, definite error results. ”

“ But if we discard the notion of vacuous existence, we must conceive each actuality as attaining an end for itself. Its very existence is the presentation of its many components to itself, for the sake of its own ends. In other words, an actuality is a complex unity, which can be analysed as a process of feeling its own components. This is the doctrine that each actuality is an occasion of experience, the outcome of its own purposes. ”

“ The higher forms of intellectual experience only arise when there are complex integrations, and reintegrations, of mental and physical experience. Reason then appears as a criticism of appetitions. It is a second-order type of mentality. It is the appetition of appetitions.
Mental experience is the organ of novelty, the urge beyond. It seeks to vivify the massive physical fact, which is repetitive, with the novelties which beckon. Thus mental experience contains in itself a factor of anarchy. ”

“ The most important effect on the relations of philosophy to natural science was, however, produced neither by Hobbes nor by Berkeley, but by Kant. The effect of his Critique of Pure Reason was to reduce the system of nature to mere appearance — or, to use the Greek word, the order of nature is phenomenal. But whether we prefer the word “appearance,” or the word “phenomenon,” the effect is the same. There can be no metaphysics of nature, and no approach to metaphysics by scanning the order of nature. For nature is a mere derivative appearance ”

“ The doctrine that science starts from clear and distinct elements in experience, and that it develops by a clear and distinct process of elaboration, dies hard. There is a constant endeavor to explain the methodology of science in terms which, by reason of their clarity and distinctness, require no metaphysical elucidation. Undoubtedly it is possible to express the procedure of science with a happy ambiguity which can receive interpretation from a variety of metaphysical schools. ”

“ Also sciences, such as psychology and physiology, are hovering on the edge of the crevasse separating science from philosophy.
The obscurantist attitude of science is likely to be disastrous in retarding progress. It may be that we are not yet ready to effect a closer union between speculative thought and scientific method. One thing is certain: scientific opinion can have no possible justification for coming to this conclusion. The rejection of any source of evidence is always treason to that ultimate rationalism, which urges forward science and philosophy alike. ”

“ Reason civilizes the brute force of anarchic appetition. Apart from anarchic appetition, nature is doomed to slow descent towards nothingness. Mere repetitive experience gradually eliminates element after element and fades towards vacuity. Mere anarchic appetition accomplishes quickly the same end, reached slowly by repetition. Reason is the special embodiment in us of the disciplined counter-agency which saves the world. ”

“ It had provided a capital of fundamental ideas and it had wearied mankind in its efforts to provide a final dogmatic system by the method of meditating on those ideas. New interests crept in, slowly at first and finally like an avalanche — Greek literature, Greek art, Greek mathematics, Greek science. The men of the Renaissance wore their learning more lightly than did the scholastics. ”

“ Each methodology has its own life history. It starts as a dodge facilitating the accomplishment of some nascent urge of life. In its prime, it represents some wide coordination of thought and action whereby this urge expresses itself as a major satisfaction of existence. Finally it enters upon the lassitude of old age, its second childhood. The larger contrasts attainable within the scope of the method have been explored and familiarized. The satisfaction from repetition has faded away. Life then faces the last alternatives in which its fate depends. ”

“ But until the last hundred and fifty years, the speculative Reason produced singularly little effect upon technology and upon art. It is arguable that on the whole within the modern period art made no progress, and in some respects declined. Having regard to the rise of modern music, we may reject the theory of a general decline in art. But, on the whole, as artists we certainly have not surpassed the men of a thousand years before Christ, and it is doubtful whether we reach their level. We seem to care less about art. ”

“ But the claim of science that it can produce an understanding of its procedures within the limits of its own categories, or that those categories themselves are understandable without reference to their status within the wider categories under exploration by the speculative Reason — that claim is entirely unfounded. Insofar as philosophers have failed, scientists do not know what they are talking about when they pursue their own methods; and insofar as philosophers have succeeded, to that extent scientists can attain an understanding of science. ”

“ We have introduced the notion of the external world with its spatio-temporal occurrences, speculatively described by science. We have introduced the notion of potentiality, by substituting the word “observable” for the word “observed.” Also hundreds of millions of dollars have been risked in reliance upon inductive generalization. If we ask what we mean by all this apparatus of vague notions, our only appeal must be to the speculative Reason.
It is quite true that exactly at this point we can damp down any further speculative Reason, and can relapse into the routine of successful methodology. ”

“ Then, as if a door had suddenly opened, Kepler produced the first important utilization of conic sections, the first among hundreds, Descartes and Desargues revolutionized the methods of the science, Newton wrote his Principia, and the modern period of civilzation commenced, Apart from the capital of abstract ideas which had accumulated slowly during two thousand years, our modern life would have been impossible. There is nothing magical about mathematics as such. It is simply the greatest example of a science of abstract forms. ”

“ For if scientific materialism be the last word, metaphysics must be useless for physical science. The ultimate truths about nature are then not capable of any explanatory interpretation. On this theory, all that there is to be known is that inexplicable bits of matter are hurrying about with their motions correlated by inexplicable laws expressible in terms of their spatial relations to each other. If this be the final dogmatic truth, philosophy can have nothing to say to natural science. ”

“ But when mentality is working at a high level, it brings novelty into the appetitions of mental experience. In this function, there is a sheer element of anarchy. But mentality now becomes self-regulative. It canalizes its own operations by its own judgments. It introduces a higher appetition which discriminates among its own anarchic productions. Reason appears. It is Reason, thus conceived, which is the subject-matter of this discussion. We have to consider the introduction of anarchy, the revolt from anarchy, the use of anarchy, and the regulation of anarchy. ”

“ The organ of vividness, which is also the organ of novelty and the organ of fatigue, has been atrophied.
The Way of Transience means the substitution of short-lived individuals by way of protecting the species from the fatigue of the individual. Transience is really a way of blindness: it procures novel individuals to face blindly the old round of experience.
The Way of Rhythm pervades all life, and indeed all physical existence. ”

“ The proper satisfaction to be derived from speculative thought is elucidation. It is for this reason that fact is supreme over thought. This supremacy is the basis of authority. We scan the world to find evidence for this elucidatory power. ”

“ A special scheme should either fit in with the general cosmology, or should by its conformity to fact present reasons why the cosmology should be modified. In the case of such a misfit, the more probable result is some modification of the cosmology and some modification of the scheme in question. Thus the cosmology and the schemes of the sciences are mutually critics of each other. The limited morphology of a special science is confessedly incapable of expressing in its own categoreal notions all forms which are illustrated in the world. But it is the business of a cosmology to be adequate. ”

“ It is surprising that a scheme of such abstract ideas should have proved to be of such importance. We can imagine that an Egyptian country gentleman at the beginning of the Greek period might have tolerated the technical devices of his land surveyors, but would have felt that the airy generalizations of the speculative Greeks were tenuous, unpractical, waste of time. The obscurantists of all ages exhibit the same principles. All common sense is with them. Their only serious antagonist is History, and the history of Europe is dead against them. ”

“ In the first place the equating of experience with clarity of knowledge is against the evidence. In our own lives, and at any one moment, there is a focus of attention, a few items in clarity of awareness, but interconnected vaguely and yet insistently with other items in dim apprehension, and this dimness shading off imperceptibly into undiscriminated feeling. ”

“ In its essence, mentality is the urge towards some vacuous definiteness, to include it in matter-of-fact which is non-vacuous enjoyment. This urge is appetition. It is emotional purpose: it is agency. Mentality is no more vacuous thanis physical enjoyment. But it brings the sheer vacuity of the form into the realization of experience. In physical experience, the forms are the defining factors: in mental experience the forms connect the immediate occasions with occasions which lie beyond. The connection of immediate fact with the future resides in its appetitions. ”

“ The aggregations of energy in the form of protons, electrons, molecules, cosmic dust, stars, and planets, are there. However vast may be the scale of the physical order, it appears to be finite, and it is wasting at a finite rate. However long the periods of time may have been, there must have been a beginning of the mere waste, and there must be an end to it. From nothing, there can come nothing.
The universe, as construed solely in terms of the efficient causation of purely physical interconnections, presents a sheer, insoluble contradiction. ”

“ Thus the orthodox physiological doctrine has the weakness that it rests its explanations exclusively upon the physical system, which is internally inconsistent.
In the animal body there is, as we have already seen, clear evidence of activities directed by purpose. It is therefore natural to reverse the analogy, and to argue that some lowly, diffused form of the operations of Reason constitute the vast diffused counter-agency by which the material cosmos comes into being. This conclusion amounts to the repudiation of the radical extrusion of final causation from our cosmological theory. ”

“ Its sole satisfaction is that experience has been understood, It presupposes life, and seeks life rendered good with the goodness of understanding. Also so long as understanding is incomplete, it remains to that extent unsatisfied. It thus constitutes itself the urge from the good life to the better life. But the progress which it seeks is always the progress of a better understanding. ”

“ The urge of Reason, clogged with such inertia, is fatigue. When the baffled urge has finally vanished, life preserves its stage so far as concerns its formal operations. But it has lost the impulse by which the stage was reached, an impulse which constituted an original element in the stage itself. There has been a relapse into mere repetitive life, concerned with mere living and divested of any factor involving effort towards living well, and still less of any effort toward living better. This stage of static life never truly attains stability. ”