Alfred North Whitehead

“ Philosophy, in one of its functions, is the critic of cosmologies. It is its function to harmonise, refashion, and justify divergent intuitions as to the nature of things. It has to insist on the scrutiny of the ultimate ideas, and on the retention of the whole of the evidence xin shaping our cosmological scheme. Its business is to render explicit, and—so far as may be—efficient, a process which otherwise is unconsciously performed without rational tests. ”

“ Indeed, the main use of the Oxford scholar would have been his capability of writing an ode in glorification of the boxer. Nothing does more harm in unnerving men for their duties in the present, than the attention devoted to the points of excellence in the past as compared with the average failure of the present day. ”

“ It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur:—like unto an arrow in the hand of a child. The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. ”

“ There are two principles inherent in the very nature of things, recurring in some particular embodiments whatever field we explore—the spirit of change, and the spirit of conservation. There can be nothing real without both. Mere change without conservation is a passage from nothing to nothing. Its final 282integration yields mere transient non-entity. Mere conservation without change cannot conserve. For after all, there is a flux of circumstance, and the freshness of being evaporates under mere repetition. ”

“ Other nations of different habits are not enemies: they are godsends. Men require of their neighbours something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command 291admiration. We must not expect, however, all the virtues. ”

“ In contrast to the realm of possibility, the inclusion of eternal objects within an actual occasion means that in respect to some of their possible relationships there is a togetherness of their individual essences. This realised togetherness is the achievement of an emergent value defined—or, shaped—by the definite eternal relatedness in respect to which the real togetherness is achieved. Thus the eternal relatedness is the form—the εἶδος—; the emergent actual occasion is the superject of informed value ”

“ To understand A is to understand the how of a general scheme of relationship. This scheme of relationship does not require the individual uniqueness of the other relata for its comprehension. This scheme also discloses itself as being analysable into a multiplicity of limited relationships which have their own individuality and yet at the same time presupposes the total relationship within possibility. In respect to actuality there is first the general limitation of relationships, which reduces this general unlimited scheme to the four dimensional spatio-temporal scheme. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This inclusion has those limited gradations of actuality which characterise every occasion by reason of its essential limitation. It is this realised extension of eternal relatedness beyond the mutual relatedness of the actual occasions, which prebends into each occasion the full sweep of eternal relatedness. I term this abrupt realisation the ‘graded envisagement’ which each occasion prebends into its synthesis. This graded envisagement is how the actual includes what (in one sense) is not-being as a positive factor in its own achievement. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Another view of the same truth is that every actual occasion is a limitation imposed on possibility, and that by virtue of this limitation the particular value of that shaped togetherness of things emerges. In this way we express how a single occasion is to be viewed in terms of possibility, and how possibility is to be viewed in terms of a single actual occasion. But there are no single occasions, in the sense of isolated occasions. Actuality is through and through togetherness—togetherness of otherwise isolated eternal objects, and togetherness of all actual occasions. ”

“ The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, Seek simplicity and distrust it. ”

“ Religion is the direct apprehension that, beyond such happiness and such pleasure, there remains the function of what is actual and passing, that it contributes its quality as an immortal fact to the order which informs the world. ”

“ More and more it is becoming evident that what the West can most readily give to the East is its science and its scientific outlook. This is transferable from country to country, and from race to race, wherever there is a rational society. ”

“ But it is possible that certain species of primates are apt to go to pieces under conditions which lead them to effect changes of space-time systems. Such species would only experience a long range of endurance, if they had succeeded in forming a favourable association among primates of different species, such that in this association the tendency to collapse is neutralised by the environment of the association. ”

“ We are entering upon an age of reconstruction, in religion, in science, and in political thought. Such ages, if they are to avoid mere ignorant oscillation between extremes, must seek truth in its ultimate depths. There can be no vision of this depth of truth apart from a philosophy which takes full account of those ultimate abstractions, whose interconnections it is the business of mathematics to explore. ”

“ Let me here remind you that the essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things. This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is only by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama. This remorseless inevitableness is what pervades scientific thought. The laws of physics are the decrees of fate. ”

“ There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life; and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the quality of the quality. ”

“ Thus nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent: the nightingale for his song: and the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellency of the human mind. ”

“ I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill ”

“ It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilisation. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages. ”

“ Mankind has wandered from the trees to the plains, from the plains to the seacoast, from climate to climate, from continent to continent, and from habit of life to habit of life. When man ceases to wander, he will cease to ascend in the scale of being. Physical wandering is still important, but greater still is the power of man’s spiritual adventures—adventures of thought, adventures of passionate feeling, adventures of aesthetic experience. ”

“ The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience. ”

“ Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life. Language itself is a symbolism. And, as another example, however you reduce the functions of your government to their utmost simplicity, yet symbolism remains. ”

“ Philosophy is the product of wonder. The effort after the general characterization of the world around us is the romance of human thought. ”

“ Now the love of the sheer geographical aspects of one’s country, of its hills, its mountains, and its plains, of its trees, its flowers, its birds, and its whole nature-life, is no small element in that binding force which makes a nation. It is the function of language, working through literature and through the habitual phrases of early life, to foster this diffused feeling of the common possession of a treasure infinitely precious. ”

“ It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties. ”

“ We cannot think in terms of an indefinite multiplicity of detail; our evidence can acquire its proper importance only if it comes before us marshalled by general ideas. These ideas we inherit — they form the tradition of our civilisation. Such traditional ideas are never static. They are either fading into meaningless formulae, or are gaining power by the new lights thrown by a more delicate apprehension. ”

“ So far as survival value is concerned, a piece of rock, with its past history of some eight hundred millions of years, far outstrips the short span attained by any nation. The emergence of life is better conceived as a bid for freedom on the part of organisms, a bid for a certain independence of individuality with self-interests and activities not to be construed purely in terms of environmental obligations. ”

“ The importance of an individual thinker owes something to chance. For it depends upon the fate of his ideas in the minds of his successors. ”

“ He asks what is the force which leads this throng of separate units to coöperate in the maintenance of an organised state, in which each individual has his part to play—political, economic, and æsthetic. He contrasts the complexity of the functionings of a civilised society with the sheer diversities of its individual citizens considered as a mere group or crowd. ”

“ 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 do not think that it is because our tasks are intrinsically too hard, when I remember that the infant’s cycle is the hardest of all. It is because our tasks are set in an unnatural way, without rhythm and without the stimulus of intermediate successes and without concentration.
I have not yet spoken of this character of concentration which so conspicuously attaches to the infant’s progress. The whole being of the infant is absorbed in the practice of its cycle. It has nothing else to divert its mental development. ”

“ In such a trial would the defence plead the doctrine that purpose could aot direct the motions of the body, and that to indict the thief for stealing was analogous to indicting the sun for rising? Again no statesman can conduct international relations without some estimate — implicit ot explicit in his consciousness — of the types of patriotism respectively prevalent in various nations and in the statesmen of these nations. A lost dog can be seen trying to find his master or trying to find his way home. In fact we are directly conscious of our purposes as directive of our actions. ”

“ Dynamite making.—One of the most serious offences committed in Birmingham was discovered when Alfred Whitehead was arrested April 5, 1883, on the charge of manufacturing nitroglycerine, or dynamite, at 128, Ledsam Street. Whitehead was one of the Irish-American or American-Irish party of the Land Leaguers or Home Rulers, who entertain the idea that by committing horrible outrages in England. they will succeed in making Ireland "free from the galling yoke of Saxon tyranny" and every Irishman independent of everybody and everything everywhere. ”