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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Science and the modern world, by
+Alfred North Whitehead
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Science and the modern world
+       Lowell Lectures 1925
+
+Author: Alfred North Whitehead
+
+Release Date: July 25, 2022 [eBook #68611]
+
+Language: English
+
+Produced by: KD Weeks, Steve Mattern and the Online Distributed
+             Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+             produced from images generously made available by The
+             Internet Archive)
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SCIENCE AND THE MODERN
+WORLD ***
+
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+                          Transcriber’s Note:
+
+This version of the text cannot represent certain typographical effects.
+Italics are delimited with the ‘_’ character as _italic_. Superscripted
+characters are prefixed with ‘^’ and delimited by ‘{ }’.
+
+Footnotes have been moved to follow the paragraphs in which they are
+referenced.
+
+Minor errors, attributable to the printer, have been corrected. Please
+see the transcriber’s note at the end of this text for details regarding
+the handling of any textual issues encountered during its preparation.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
+                      SCIENCE AND THE MODERN WORLD
+
+                         LOWELL LECTURES, 1925
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+[Illustration]
+
+                         THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+                  NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO . DALLAS
+                        ATLANTA . SAN FRANCISCO
+
+                       CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
+                                 LONDON
+
+                         MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
+                       BOMBAY . CALCUTTA . MADRAS
+
+                 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LTD.
+                                TORONTO
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+                                SCIENCE
+                          AND THE MODERN WORLD
+
+
+
+
+                         LOWELL LECTURES, 1925
+
+
+
+
+                                   BY
+                         ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD
+          F.R.S., Sc.D. (Cambridge), Hon. D.Sc. (Manchester),
+                        Hon. LL.D. (St. Andrews)
+
+        FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
+           AND PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                           =New York=
+                         THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+                                  1925
+                         _All rights reserved_
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
+                            COPYRIGHT, 1925.
+                       BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
+
+                                  ---
+
+                          Set up and printed.
+                        Published October, 1925.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+               PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY
+                      THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                                   TO
+                             MY COLLEAGUES,
+                           PAST AND PRESENT,
+                    WHOSE FRIENDSHIP IS INSPIRATION.
+
+
+
+
+                           TABLE OF CONTENTS
+
+
+    CHAPTER                                                     PAGE
+
+         I. THE ORIGINS OF MODERN SCIENCE                          1
+
+        II. MATHEMATICS AS AN ELEMENT IN THE HISTORY OF           28
+            THOUGHT
+
+       III. THE CENTURY OF GENIUS                                 55
+
+        IV. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY                                80
+
+         V. THE ROMANTIC REACTION                                105
+
+        VI. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY                               134
+
+       VII. RELATIVITY                                           160
+
+      VIII. THE QUANTUM THEORY                                   181
+
+        IX. SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY                               193
+
+         X. ABSTRACTION                                          219
+
+        XI. GOD                                                  242
+
+       XII. RELIGION AND SCIENCE                                 252
+
+      XIII. REQUISITES FOR SOCIAL PROGRESS                       270
+
+
+
+
+                                PREFACE
+
+
+The present book embodies a study of some aspects of Western culture
+during the past three centuries, in so far as it has been influenced by
+the development of science. This study has been guided by the conviction
+that the mentality of an epoch springs from the view of the world which
+is, in fact, dominant in the educated sections of the communities in
+question. There may be more than one such scheme, corresponding to
+cultural divisions. The various human interests which suggest
+cosmologies, and also are influenced by them, are science, aesthetics,
+ethics, religion. In every age each of these topics suggests a view of
+the world. In so far as the same set of people are swayed by all, or
+more than one, of these interests, their effective outlook will be the
+joint production from these sources. But each age has it dominant
+preoccupation; and, during the three centuries in question, the
+cosmology derived from science has been asserting itself at the expense
+of older points of view with their origins elsewhere. Men can be
+provincial in time, as well as in place. We may ask ourselves whether
+the scientific mentality of the modern world in the immediate past is
+not a successful example of such provincial limitation.
+
+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 in
+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.
+
+Bearing this in mind, I have avoided the introduction of a variety of
+abstruse detail respecting scientific advance. What is wanted, and what
+I have striven after, is a sympathetic study of main ideas as seen from
+the inside. If my view of the function of philosophy is correct, it is
+the most effective of all the intellectual pursuits. It builds
+cathedrals before the workmen have moved a stone, and it destroys them
+before the elements have worn down their arches. It is the architect of
+the buildings of the spirit, and it is also their solvent:—and the
+spiritual precedes the material. Philosophy works slowly. Thoughts lie
+dormant for ages; and then, almost suddenly as it were, mankind finds
+that they have embodied themselves in institutions.
+
+This book in the main consists of a set of eight Lowell Lectures
+delivered in the February of 1925. These lectures with some slight
+expansion, and the subdivision of one lecture into Chapters VII and
+VIII, are here printed as delivered. But some additional matter has
+been added, so as to complete the thought of the book on a scale which
+could not be included within that lecture course. Of this new matter,
+the second chapter—‘Mathematics as an Element in the History of
+Thought’—was delivered as a lecture before the Mathematical Society of
+Brown University, Providence, R. I.; and the twelfth chapter—‘Religion
+and Science’—formed an address delivered in the Phillips Brooks House
+at Harvard, and is to be published in the August number of the
+_Atlantic Monthly_ of this year (1925). The tenth and eleventh
+chapters—‘Abstraction’ and ‘God’—are additions which now appear for
+the first time. But the book represents one train of thought, and the
+antecedent utilisation of some of its contents is a subsidiary point.
+
+There has been no occasion in the text to make detailed reference to
+Lloyd Morgan’s _Emergent Evolution_ or to Alexander’s _Space, Time and
+Deity_. It will be obvious to readers that I have found them very
+suggestive. I am especially indebted to Alexander’s great work. The wide
+scope of the present book makes it impossible to acknowledge in detail
+the various sources of information or of ideas. The book is the product
+of thought and reading in past years, which were not undertaken with any
+anticipation of utilisation for the present purpose. Accordingly it
+would now be impossible for me to give reference to my sources for
+details, even if it were desirable so to do. But there is no need: the
+facts which are relied upon are simple and well known. On the
+philosophical side, any consideration of epistemology has been entirely
+excluded. It would have been impossible to discuss that topic without
+upsetting the whole balance of the work. The key to the book is the
+sense of the overwhelming importance of a prevalent philosophy.
+
+My most grateful thanks are due to my colleague Mr. Raphael Demos for
+reading the proofs and for the suggestion of many improvements in
+expression.
+
+  Harvard University,
+    June 29, 1925.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+                         SCIENCE AND THE MODERN
+                                 WORLD
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER I
+
+                     THE ORIGINS OF MODERN SCIENCE
+
+
+The progress of civilisation is not wholly a uniform drift towards
+better things. It may perhaps wear this aspect if we map it on a scale
+which is large enough. But such broad views obscure the details on which
+rest our whole understanding of the process. New epochs emerge with
+comparative suddenness, if we have regard to the scores of thousands of
+years throughout which the complete history extends. Secluded races
+suddenly take their places in the main stream of events: technological
+discoveries transform the mechanism of human life: a primitive art
+quickly flowers into full satisfaction of some aesthetic craving: great
+religions in their crusading youth spread through the nations the peace
+of Heaven and the sword of the Lord.
+
+The sixteenth century of our era saw the disruption of Western
+Christianity and the rise of modern science. It was an age of ferment.
+Nothing was settled, though much was opened—new worlds and new ideas. In
+science, Copernicus and Vesalius may be chosen as representative
+figures: they typify the new cosmology and the scientific emphasis on
+direct observation. Giordano Bruno was the martyr; but the cause for
+which he suffered was not that of science, but that of free imaginative
+speculation. His death in the year 1600 ushered in the first century of
+modern science in the strict sense of the term. In his execution there
+was an unconscious symbolism: for the subsequent tone of scientific
+thought has contained distrust of his type of general speculativeness.
+The Reformation, for all its importance, may be considered as a domestic
+affair of the European races. Even the Christianity of the East viewed
+it with profound disengagement. Furthermore, such disruptions are no new
+phenomena in the history of Christianity or of other religions. When we
+project this great revolution upon the whole history of the Christian
+Church, we cannot look upon it as introducing a new principle into human
+life. For good or for evil, it was a great transformation of religion;
+but it was not the coming of religion. It did not itself claim to be so.
+Reformers maintained that they were only restoring what had been
+forgotten.
+
+It is quite otherwise with the rise of modern science. In every way it
+contrasts with the contemporary religious movement. The Reformation was
+a popular uprising, and for a century and a half drenched Europe in
+blood. The beginnings of the scientific movement were confined to a
+minority among the intellectual élite. In a generation which saw the
+Thirty Years’ War and remembered Alva in the Netherlands, the worst that
+happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honourable
+detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed. The
+way in which the persecution of Galileo has been remembered is a tribute
+to the quiet commencement of the most intimate change in outlook which
+the human race had yet encountered. Since a babe was born in a manger,
+it may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened with so little
+stir.
+
+The thesis which these lectures will illustrate is that this quiet
+growth of science has practically recoloured our mentality so that modes
+of thought which in former times were exceptional, are now broadly
+spread through the educated world. This new colouring of ways of thought
+had been proceeding slowly for many ages in the European peoples. At
+last it issued in the rapid development of science; and has thereby
+strengthened itself by its most obvious application. The new mentality
+is more important even than the new science and the new technology. It
+has altered the metaphysical presuppositions and the imaginative
+contents of our minds; so that now the old stimuli provoke a new
+response. Perhaps my metaphor of a new colour is too strong. What I mean
+is just that slightest change of tone which yet makes all the
+difference. This is exactly illustrated by a sentence from a published
+letter of that adorable genius, William James. When he was finishing his
+great treatise on the _Principles of Psychology_, he wrote to his
+brother Henry James, ‘I have to forge every sentence in the teeth of
+irreducible and stubborn facts.’
+
+This new tinge to modern minds is a vehement and passionate interest in
+the relation of general principles to irreducible and stubborn facts.
+All the world over and at all times there have been practical men,
+absorbed in ‘irreducible and stubborn facts’: all the world over and at
+all times there have been men of philosophic temperament who have been
+absorbed in the weaving of general principles. It is this union of
+passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to
+abstract generalisation which forms the novelty in our present society.
+Previously it had appeared sporadically and as if by chance. This
+balance of mind has now become part of the tradition which infects
+cultivated thought. It is the salt which keeps life sweet. The main
+business of universities is to transmit this tradition as a widespread
+inheritance from generation to generation.
+
+Another contrast which singles out science from among the European
+movements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is its
+universality. Modern science was born in Europe, but its home is the
+whole world. In the last two centuries there has been a long and
+confused impact of Western modes upon the civilisation of Asia. The wise
+men of the East have been puzzling, and are puzzling, as to what may be
+the regulative secret of life which can be passed from West to East
+without the wanton destruction of their own inheritance which they so
+rightly prize. 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.
+
+In this course of lectures I shall not discuss the details of scientific
+discovery. My theme is the energising of a state of mind in the modern
+world, its broad generalisations, and its impact upon other spiritual
+forces. There are two ways of reading history, forwards and backwards.
+In the history of thought, we require both methods. A climate of
+opinion—to use the happy phrase of a seventeenth century writer—requires
+for its understanding the consideration of its antecedents and its
+issues. Accordingly in this lecture I shall consider some of the
+antecedents of our modern approach to the investigation of nature.
+
+In the first place, there can be no living science unless there is a
+widespread instinctive conviction in the existence of an _Order of
+Things_, and, in particular, of an _Order of Nature_. I have used the
+word _instinctive_ advisedly. It does not matter what men say in words,
+so long as their activities are controlled by settled instincts. The
+words may ultimately destroy the instincts. But until this has occurred,
+words do not count. This remark is important in respect to the history
+of scientific thought. For we shall find that since the time of Hume,
+the fashionable scientific philosophy has been such as to deny the
+rationality of science. This conclusion lies upon the surface of Hume’s
+philosophy. Take, for example, the following passage from Section IV of
+his _Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding_:
+
+  “In a word, then, every effect is a distinct event from its cause. It
+  could not, therefore, be discovered in the cause; and the first
+  invention or conception of it, _à priori_, must be entirely
+  arbitrary.”
+
+If the cause in itself discloses no information as to the effect, so
+that the first invention of it must be _entirely_ arbitrary, it follows
+at once that science is impossible, except in the sense of establishing
+_entirely arbitrary_ connections which are not warranted by anything
+intrinsic to the natures either of causes or effects. Some variant of
+Hume’s philosophy has generally prevailed among men of science. But
+scientific faith has risen to the occasion, and has tacitly removed the
+philosophic mountain.
+
+In view of this strange contradiction in scientific thought, it is of
+the first importance to consider the antecedents of a faith which is
+impervious to the demand for a consistent rationality. We have therefore
+to trace the rise of the instinctive faith that there is an Order of
+Nature which can be traced in every detailed occurrence.
+
+Of course we all share in this faith, and we therefore believe that the
+reason for the faith is our apprehension of its truth. But the formation
+of a general idea—such as the idea of the Order of Nature—, and the
+grasp of its importance, and the observation of its exemplification in a
+variety of occasions are by no means the necessary consequences of the
+truth of the idea in question. Familiar things happen, and mankind does
+not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the
+analysis of the obvious. Accordingly I wish to consider the stages in
+which this analysis became explicit, and finally became unalterably
+impressed upon the educated minds of Western Europe.
+
+Obviously, the main recurrences of life are too insistent to escape the
+notice of the least rational of humans; and even before the dawn of
+rationality, they have impressed themselves upon the instincts of
+animals. It is unnecessary to labour the point, that in broad outline
+certain general states of nature recur, and that our very natures have
+adapted themselves to such repetitions.
+
+But there is a complementary fact which is equally true and equally
+obvious:—nothing ever really recurs in exact detail. No two days are
+identical, no two winters. What has gone, has gone forever. Accordingly
+the practical philosophy of mankind has been to expect the broad
+recurrences, and to accept the details as emanating from the inscrutable
+womb of things, beyond the ken of rationality. Men expected the sun to
+rise, but the wind bloweth where it listeth.
+
+Certainly from the classical Greek civilisation onwards there have been
+men, and indeed groups of men, who have placed themselves beyond this
+acceptance of an ultimate irrationality. Such men have endeavoured to
+explain all phenomena as the outcome of an order of things which extends
+to every detail. Geniuses such as Aristotle, or Archimedes, or Roger
+Bacon, must have been endowed with the full scientific mentality, which
+instinctively holds that all things great and small are conceivable as
+exemplifications of general principles which reign throughout the
+natural order.
+
+But until the close of the Middle Ages the general educated public did
+not feel that intimate conviction, and that detailed interest, in such
+an idea, so as to lead to an unceasing supply of men, with ability and
+opportunity adequate to maintain a coordinated search for the discovery
+of these hypothetical principles. Either people were doubtful about the
+existence of such principles, or were doubtful about any success in
+finding them, or took no interest in thinking about them, or were
+oblivious to their practical importance when found. For whatever reason,
+search was languid, if we have regard to the opportunities of a high
+civilisation and the length of time concerned. Why did the pace suddenly
+quicken in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? At the close of the
+Middle Ages a new mentality discloses itself. Invention stimulated
+thought, thought quickened physical speculation, Greek manuscripts
+disclosed what the ancients had discovered. Finally although in the year
+1500 Europe knew less than Archimedes who died in the year 212 B. C.,
+yet in the year 1700, Newton’s _Principia_ had been written and the
+world was well started on the modern epoch.
+
+There have been great civilisations in which the peculiar balance of
+mind required for science has only fitfully appeared and has produced
+the feeblest result. For example, the more we know of Chinese art, of
+Chinese literature, and of the Chinese philosophy of life, the more we
+admire the heights to which that civilization attained. For thousands of
+years, there have been in China acute and learned men patiently devoting
+their lives to study. Having regard to the span of time, and to the
+population concerned, China forms the largest volume of civilisation
+which the world has seen. There is no reason to doubt the intrinsic
+capacity of individual Chinamen for the pursuit of science. And yet
+Chinese science is practically negligible. There is no reason to believe
+that China if left to itself would have ever produced any progress in
+science. The same may be said of India. Furthermore, if the Persians had
+enslaved the Greeks, there is no definite ground for belief that science
+would have flourished in Europe. The Romans showed no particular
+originality in that line. Even as it was, the Greeks, though they
+founded the movement, did not sustain it with the concentrated interest
+which modern Europe has shown. I am not alluding to the last few
+generations of the European peoples on both sides of the ocean; I mean
+the smaller Europe of the Reformation period, distracted as it was with
+wars and religious disputes. Consider the world of the eastern
+Mediterranean, from Sicily to western Asia, during the period of about
+1400 years from the death of Archimedes [in 212 B. C.] to the irruption
+of the Tartars. There were wars and revolutions and large changes of
+religion: but nothing much worse than the wars of the sixteenth and
+seventeenth centuries throughout Europe. There was a great and wealthy
+civilisation, Pagan, Christian, Mahometan. In that period a great deal
+was added to science. But on the whole the progress was slow and
+wavering; and, except in mathematics, the men of the Renaissance
+practically started from the position which Archimedes had reached.
+There had been some progress in medicine and some progress in astronomy.
+But the total advance was very little compared to the marvellous success
+of the seventeenth century. For example, compare the progress of
+scientific knowledge from the year 1560, just before the births of
+Galileo and of Kepler, up to the year 1700, when Newton was in the
+height of his fame, with the progress in the ancient period, already
+mentioned, exactly ten times as long.
+
+Nevertheless, Greece was the mother of Europe; and it is to Greece that
+we must look in order to find the origin of our modern ideas. We all
+know that on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean there was a very
+flourishing school of Ionian philosophers, deeply interested in theories
+concerning nature. Their ideas have been transmitted to us, enriched by
+the genius of Plato and Aristotle. But, with the exception of Aristotle,
+and it is a large exception, this school of thought had not attained to
+the complete scientific mentality. In some ways, it was better. The
+Greek genius was philosophical, lucid and logical. The men of this group
+were primarily asking philosophical questions. What is the substratum of
+nature? Is it fire, or earth, or water, or some combination of any two,
+or of all three? Or is it a mere flux, not reducible to some static
+material? Mathematics interested them mightily. They invented its
+generality, analysed its premises, and made notable discoveries of
+theorems by a rigid adherence to deductive reasoning. Their minds were
+infected with an eager generality. They demanded clear, bold ideas, and
+strict reasoning from them. All this was excellent; it was genius; it
+was ideal preparatory work. But it was not science as we understand it.
+The patience of minute observation was not nearly so prominent. Their
+genius was not so apt for the state of imaginative muddled suspense
+which precedes successful inductive generalisation. They were lucid
+thinkers and bold reasoners.
+
+Of course there were exceptions, and at the very top: for example,
+Aristotle and Archimedes. Also for patient observation, there were the
+astronomers. There was a mathematical lucidity about the stars, and a
+fascination about the small numerable band of run-a-way planets.
+
+Every philosophy is tinged with the colouring of some secret imaginative
+background, which never emerges explicitly into its trains of reasoning.
+The Greek view of nature, at least that cosmology transmitted from them
+to later ages, was essentially dramatic. It is not necessarily wrong for
+this reason: but it was overwhelmingly dramatic. It thus conceived
+nature as articulated in the way of a work of dramatic art, for the
+exemplification of general ideas converging to an end. Nature was
+differentiated so as to provide its proper end for each thing. There was
+the centre of the universe as the end of motion for those things which
+are heavy, and the celestial spheres as the end of motion for those
+things whose natures lead them upwards. The celestial spheres were for
+things which are impassible and ingenerable, the lower regions for
+things impassible and generable. Nature was a drama in which each thing
+played its part.
+
+I do not say that this is a view to which Aristotle would have
+subscribed without severe reservations, in fact without the sort of
+reservations which we ourselves would make. But it was the view which
+subsequent Greek thought extracted from Aristotle and passed on to the
+Middle Ages. The effect of such an imaginative setting for nature was to
+damp down the historical spirit. For it was the end which seemed
+illuminating, so why bother about the beginning? The Reformation and the
+scientific movement were two aspects of the historical revolt which was
+the dominant intellectual movement of the later Renaissance. The appeal
+to the origins of Christianity, and Francis Bacon’s appeal to efficient
+causes as against final causes, were two sides of one movement of
+thought. Also for this reason Galileo and his adversaries were at
+hopeless cross purposes, as can be seen from his _Dialogues on the Two
+Systems of the World_.
+
+Galileo keeps harping on how things happen, whereas his adversaries had
+a complete theory as to why things happen. Unfortunately the two
+theories did not bring out the same results. Galileo insists upon
+‘irreducible and stubborn facts,’ and Simplicius, his opponent, brings
+forward reasons, completely satisfactory, at least to himself. It is a
+great mistake to conceive this historical revolt as an appeal to reason.
+On the contrary, it was through and through an anti-intellectualist
+movement. It was the return to the contemplation of brute fact; and it
+was based on a recoil from the inflexible rationality of medieval
+thought. In making this statement I am merely summarising what at the
+time the adherents of the old régime themselves asserted. For example,
+in the fourth book of Father Paul Sarpi’s _History of the Council of
+Trent_, you will find that in the year 1551 the Papal Legates who
+presided over the Council ordered: ‘That the Divines ought to confirm
+their opinions with the holy Scripture, Traditions of the Apostles,
+sacred and approved Councils, and by the Constitutions and Authorities
+of the holy Fathers; that they ought to use brevity, and avoid
+superfluous and unprofitable questions, and perverse contentions....
+This order did not please the Italian Divines; who said it was a novity,
+and a condemning of School-Divinity, which, in all difficulties, _useth
+reason_, and because it was not lawful [_i.e._, by this decree] to treat
+as St. Thomas [Aquinas], St. Bonaventure, and other famous men did.’
+
+It is impossible not to feel sympathy with these Italian divines,
+maintaining the lost cause of unbridled rationalism. They were deserted
+on all hands. The Protestants were in full revolt against them. The
+Papacy failed to support them, and the Bishops of the Council could not
+even understand them. For a few sentences below the foregoing quotation,
+we read: ‘Though many complained here-of [_i.e._, of the Decree], yet it
+prevailed but little, because generally the Fathers [_i.e._, the
+Bishops] desired to hear men speak with intelligible terms, not
+abstrusely, as in the matter of Justification, and others already
+handled.’
+
+Poor belated medievalists! When they used reason they were not even
+intelligible to the ruling powers of their epoch. It will take centuries
+before stubborn facts are reducible by reason, and meanwhile the
+pendulum swings slowly and heavily to the extreme of the historical
+method.
+
+Forty-three years after the Italian divines had written this memorial,
+Richard Hooker in his famous _Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity_ makes
+exactly the same complaint of his Puritan adversaries.[1] Hooker’s
+balanced thought—from which the appellation ‘The Judicious Hooker’ is
+derived—, and his diffuse style, which is the vehicle of such thought,
+make his writings singularly unfit for the process of summarising by a
+short, pointed quotation. But, in the section referred to, he reproaches
+his opponents with _Their Disparagement of Reason_; and in support of
+his own position definitely refers to ‘The greatest amongst the
+school-divines,’ by which designation I presume that he refers to St.
+Thomas Aquinas.
+
+Footnote 1:
+
+  _Cf._ Book III, Section VIII.
+
+Hooker’s _Ecclesiastical Polity_ was published just before Sarpi’s
+_Council of Trent_. Accordingly there was complete independence between
+the two works. But both the Italian divines of 1551, and Hooker at the
+end of that century testify to the anti-rationalist trend of thought at
+that epoch, and in this respect contrast their own age with the epoch of
+scholasticism.
+
+This reaction was undoubtedly a very necessary corrective to the
+unguarded rationalism of the Middle Ages. But reactions run to extremes.
+Accordingly, although one outcome of this reaction was the birth of
+modern science, yet we must remember that science thereby inherited the
+bias of thought to which it owes its origin.
+
+The effect of Greek dramatic literature was many-sided so far as
+concerns the various ways in which it indirectly affected medieval
+thought. The pilgrim fathers of the scientific imagination as it exists
+today, are the great tragedians of ancient Athens, Aeschylus, Sophocles,
+Euripides. Their vision of fate, remorseless and indifferent, urging a
+tragic incident to its inevitable issue, is the vision possessed by
+science. Fate in Greek Tragedy becomes the order of nature in modern
+thought. The absorbing interest in the particular heroic incidents, as
+an example and a verification of the workings of fate, reappears in our
+epoch as concentration of interest on the crucial experiments. It was my
+good fortune to be present at the meeting of the Royal Society in London
+when the Astronomer Royal for England announced that the photographic
+plates of the famous eclipse, as measured by his colleagues in Greenwich
+Observatory, had verified the prediction of Einstein that rays of light
+are bent as they pass in the neighbourhood of the sun. The whole
+atmosphere of tense interest was exactly that of the Greek drama: we
+were the chorus commenting on the decree of destiny as disclosed in the
+development of a supreme incident. There was dramatic quality in the
+very staging:—the traditional ceremonial, and in the background the
+picture of Newton to remind us that the greatest of scientific
+generalisations was now, after more than two centuries, to receive its
+first modification. Nor was the personal interest wanting: a great
+adventure in thought had at length come safe to shore.
+
+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.
+
+The conception of the moral order in the Greek plays was certainly not a
+discovery of the dramatists. It must have passed into the literary
+tradition from the general serious opinion of the times. But in finding
+this magnificent expression, it thereby deepened the stream of thought
+from which it arose. The spectacle of a moral order was impressed upon
+the imagination of classical civilisation.
+
+The time came when that great society decayed, and Europe passed into
+the Middle Ages. The direct influence of Greek literature vanished. But
+the concept of the moral order and of the order of nature had enshrined
+itself in the Stoic philosophy. For example, Lecky in his _History of
+European Morals_ tells us ‘Seneca maintains that the Divinity has
+determined all things by an inexorable law of destiny, which He has
+decreed, but which He Himself obeys.’ But the most effective way in
+which the Stoics influenced the mentality of the Middle Ages was by the
+diffused sense of order which arose from Roman law. Again to quote
+Lecky, ‘The Roman legislation was in a two-fold manner the child of
+philosophy. It was in the first place formed upon the philosophical
+model, for, instead of being a mere empirical system adjusted to the
+existing requirements of society, it laid down abstract principles of
+right to which it endeavoured to conform; and, in the next place, these
+principles were borrowed directly from Stoicism.’ In spite of the actual
+anarchy throughout large regions in Europe after the collapse of the
+Empire, the sense of legal order always haunted the racial memories of
+the Imperial populations. Also the Western Church was always there as a
+living embodiment of the traditions of Imperial rule.
+
+It is important to notice that this legal impress upon medieval
+civilisation was not in the form of a few wise precepts which should
+permeate conduct. It was the conception of a definite articulated system
+which defines the legality of the detailed structure of social organism,
+and of the detailed way in which it should function. There was nothing
+vague. It was not a question of admirable maxims, but of definite
+procedure to put things right and to keep them there. The Middle Ages
+formed one long training of the intellect of Western Europe in the sense
+of order. There may have been some deficiency in respect to practice.
+But the idea never for a moment lost its grip. It was preëminently an
+epoch of orderly thought, rationalist through and through. The very
+anarchy quickened the sense for coherent system; just as the modern
+anarchy of Europe has stimulated the intellectual vision of a League of
+Nations.
+
+But for science something more is wanted than a general sense of the
+order in things. It needs but a sentence to point out how the habit of
+definite exact thought was implanted in the European mind by the long
+dominance of scholastic logic and scholastic divinity. The habit
+remained after the philosophy had been repudiated, the priceless habit
+of looking for an exact point and of sticking to it when found. Galileo
+owes more to Aristotle than appears on the surface of his _Dialogues_:
+he owes to him his clear head and his analytic mind.
+
+I do not think, however, that I have even yet brought out the greatest
+contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement.
+I mean the inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be
+correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner,
+exemplifying general principles. Without this belief the incredible
+labours of scientists would be without hope. It is this instinctive
+conviction, vividly poised before the imagination, which is the motive
+power of research:—that there is a secret, a secret which can be
+unveiled. How has this conviction been so vividly implanted on the
+European mind?
+
+When we compare this tone of thought in Europe with the attitude of
+other civilisations when left to themselves, there seems but one source
+for its origin. It must come from the medieval insistence on the
+rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and
+with the rationality of a Greek philosopher. Every detail was supervised
+and ordered: the search into nature could only result in the vindication
+of the faith in rationality. Remember that I am not talking of the
+explicit beliefs of a few individuals. What I mean is the impress on the
+European mind arising from the unquestioned faith of centuries. By this
+I mean the instinctive tone of thought and not a mere creed of words.
+
+In Asia, the conceptions of God were of a being who was either too
+arbitrary or too impersonal for such ideas to have much effect on
+instinctive habits of mind. Any definite occurrence might be due to the
+fiat of an irrational despot, or might issue from some impersonal,
+inscrutable origin of things. There was not the same confidence as in
+the intelligible rationality of a personal being. I am not arguing that
+the European trust in the scrutability of nature was logically justified
+even by its own theology. My only point is to understand how it arose.
+My explanation is that the faith in the possibility of science,
+generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory,
+is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.
+
+But science is not merely the outcome of instinctive faith. It also
+requires an active interest in the simple occurrences of life for their
+own sake.
+
+This qualification ‘for their own sake’ is important. The first phase of
+the Middle Ages was an age of symbolism. It was an age of vast ideas,
+and of primitive technique. There was little to be done with nature,
+except to coin a hard living from it. But there were realms of thought
+to be explored, realms of philosophy and realms of theology. Primitive
+art could symbolise those ideas which filled all thoughtful minds. The
+first phase of medieval art has a haunting charm beyond compare: its own
+intrinsic quality is enhanced by the fact that its message, which
+stretched beyond art’s own self-justification of aesthetic achievement,
+was the symbolism of things lying behind nature itself. In this symbolic
+phase, medieval art energised in nature as its medium, but pointed to
+another world.
+
+In order to understand the contrast between these early Middle Ages and
+the atmosphere required by the scientific mentality, we should compare
+the sixth century in Italy with the sixteenth century. In both centuries
+the Italian genius was laying the foundations of a new epoch. The
+history of the three centuries preceding the earlier period, despite the
+promise for the future introduced by the rise of Christianity, is
+overwhelmingly infected by the sense of the decline of civilisation. In
+each generation something has been lost. As we read the records, we are
+haunted by the shadow of the coming barbarism. There are great men, with
+fine achievements in action or in thought. But their total effect is
+merely for some short time to arrest the general decline. In the sixth
+century we are, so far as Italy is concerned, at the lowest point of the
+curve. But in that century every action is laying the foundation for the
+tremendous rise of the new European civilisation. In the background the
+Byzantine Empire, under Justinian, in three ways determined the
+character of the early Middle Ages in Western Europe. In the first
+place, its armies, under Belisarius and Narses, cleared Italy from the
+Gothic domination. In this way, the stage was freed for the exercise of
+the old Italian genius for creating organisations which shall be
+protective of ideals of cultural activity. It is impossible not to
+sympathise with the Goths: yet there can be no doubt but that a thousand
+years of the Papacy were infinitely more valuable for Europe than any
+effects derivable from a well-established Gothic kingdom of Italy.
+
+In the second place, the codification of the Roman law established the
+ideal of legality which dominated the sociological thought of Europe in
+the succeeding centuries. Law is both an engine for government, and a
+condition restraining government. The canon law of the Church, and the
+civil law of the State, owe to Justinian’s lawyers their influence on
+the development of Europe. They established in the Western mind the
+ideal that an authority should be at once lawful, and law-enforcing, and
+should in itself exhibit a rationally adjusted system of organisation.
+The sixth century in Italy gave the initial exhibition of the way in
+which the impress of these ideas was fostered by contact with the
+Byzantine Empire.
+
+Thirdly, in the non-political spheres of art and learning Constantinople
+exhibited a standard of realised achievement which, partly by the
+impulse to direct imitation, and partly by the indirect inspiration
+arising from the mere knowledge that such things existed, acted as a
+perpetual spur to Western culture. The wisdom of the Byzantines, as it
+stood in the imagination of the first phase of medieval mentality, and
+the wisdom of the Egyptians as it stood in the imagination of the early
+Greeks, played analogous rôles. Probably the actual knowledge of these
+respective wisdoms was, in either case, about as much as was good for
+the recipients. They knew enough to know the sort of standards which are
+attainable, and not enough to be fettered by static and traditional ways
+of thought. Accordingly, in both cases men went ahead on their own and
+did better. No account of the rise of the European scientific mentality
+can omit some notice of this influence of the Byzantine civilisation in
+the background. In the sixth century there is a crisis in the history of
+the relations between the Byzantines and the West; and this crisis is to
+be contrasted with the influence of Greek literature on European thought
+in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The two outstanding men, who
+in the Italy of the sixth century laid the foundations of the future,
+were St. Benedict and Gregory the Great. By reference to them, we can at
+once see how absolutely in ruins was the approach to the scientific
+mentality which had been attained by the Greeks. We are at the zero
+point of scientific temperature. But the life-work of Gregory and of
+Benedict contributed elements to the reconstruction of Europe which
+secured that this reconstruction, when it arrived, should include a more
+effective scientific mentality than that of the ancient world. The
+Greeks were over-theoretical. For them science was an offshoot of
+philosophy. Gregory and Benedict were practical men, with an eye for the
+importance of ordinary things; and they combined this practical
+temperament with their religious and cultural activities. In particular,
+we owe it to St. Benedict that the monasteries were the homes of
+practical agriculturalists, as well as of saints and of artists and of
+men of learning. The alliance of science with technology, by which
+learning is kept in contact with irreducible and stubborn facts, owes
+much to the practical bent of the early Benedictines. Modern science
+derives from Rome as well as from Greece, and this Roman strain explains
+its gain in an energy of thought kept closely in contact with the world
+of facts.
+
+But the influence of this contact between the monasteries and the facts
+of nature showed itself first in art. The rise of Naturalism in the
+later Middle Ages was the entry into the European mind of the final
+ingredient necessary for the rise of science. It was the rise of
+interest in natural objects, and in natural occurrences, for their own
+sakes. The natural foliage of a district was sculptured in
+out-of-the-way spots of the later buildings, merely as exhibiting
+delight in those familiar objects. The whole atmosphere of every art
+exhibited a direct joy in the apprehension of the things which lie
+around us. The craftsmen who executed the late medieval decorative
+sculpture, Giotto, Chaucer, Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, and, at the
+present day, the New England poet Robert Frost, are all akin to each
+other in this respect. The simple immediate facts are the topics of
+interest, and these reappear in the thought of science as the
+‘irreducible stubborn facts.’
+
+The mind of Europe was now prepared for its new venture of thought. It
+is unnecessary to tell in detail the various incidents which marked the
+rise of science: the growth of wealth and leisure; the expansion of
+universities; the invention of printing; the taking of Constantinople;
+Copernicus; Vasco da Gama; Columbus; the telescope. The soil, the
+climate, the seeds, were there, and the forest grew. Science has never
+shaken off the impress of its origin in the historical revolt of the
+later Renaissance. It has remained predominantly an anti-rationalistic
+movement, based upon a naïve faith. What reasoning it has wanted, has
+been borrowed from mathematics which is a surviving relic of Greek
+rationalism, following the deductive method. Science repudiates
+philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its faith or
+to explain its meanings; and has remained blandly indifferent to its
+refutation by Hume.
+
+Of course the historical revolt was fully justified. It was wanted. It
+was more than wanted: it was an absolute necessity for healthy progress.
+The world required centuries of contemplation of irreducible and
+stubborn facts. It is difficult for men to do more than one thing at a
+time, and that was the sort of thing they had to do after the
+rationalistic orgy of the Middle Ages. It was a very sensible reaction;
+but it was not a protest on behalf of reason.
+
+There is, however, a Nemesis which waits upon those who deliberately
+avoid avenues of knowledge. Oliver Cromwell’s cry echoes down the ages,
+‘My brethren, by the bowels of Christ I beseech you, bethink you that
+you may be mistaken.’
+
+The progress of science has now reached a turning point. The stable
+foundations of physics have broken up: also for the first time
+physiology is asserting itself as an effective body of knowledge, as
+distinct from a scrap-heap. The old foundations of scientific thought
+are becoming unintelligible. Time, space, matter, material, ether,
+electricity, mechanism, organism, configuration, structure, pattern,
+function, all require reinterpretation. What is the sense of talking
+about a mechanical explanation when you do not know what you mean by
+mechanics?
+
+The truth is that science started its modern career by taking over ideas
+derived from the weakest side of the philosophies of Aristotle’s
+successors. In some respects it was a happy choice. It enabled the
+knowledge of the seventeenth century to be formularised so far as
+physics and chemistry were concerned, with a completeness which has
+lasted to the present time. But the progress of biology and psychology
+has probably been checked by the uncritical assumption of half-truths.
+If science is not to degenerate into a medley of _ad hoc_ hypotheses, it
+must become philosophical and must enter upon a thorough criticism of
+its own foundations.
+
+In the succeeding lectures of this course, I shall trace the successes
+and the failures of the particular conceptions of cosmology with which
+the European intellect has clothed itself in the last three centuries.
+General climates of opinion persist for periods of about two to three
+generations, that is to say, for periods of sixty to a hundred years.
+There are also shorter waves of thought, which play on the surface of
+the tidal movement. We shall find, therefore, transformations in the
+European outlook, slowly modifying the successive centuries. There
+persists, however, throughout the whole period the fixed scientific
+cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute
+matter, or material, spread throughout space in a flux of
+configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless,
+purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine
+imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its
+being. It is this assumption that I call ‘scientific materialism.’ Also
+it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited
+to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived. It is not
+wrong, if properly construed. If we confine ourselves to certain types
+of facts, abstracted from the complete circumstances in which they
+occur, the materialistic assumption expresses these facts to perfection.
+But when we pass beyond the abstraction, either by more subtle
+employment of our senses, or by the request for meanings and for
+coherence of thoughts, the scheme breaks down at once. The narrow
+efficiency of the scheme was the very cause of its supreme
+methodological success. For it directed attention to just those groups
+of facts which, in the state of knowledge then existing, required
+investigation.
+
+The success of the scheme has adversely affected the various currents of
+European thought. The historical revolt was anti-rationalistic, because
+the rationalism of the scholastics required a sharp correction by
+contact with brute fact. But the revival of philosophy in the hands of
+Descartes and his successors was entirely coloured in its development by
+the acceptance of the scientific cosmology at its face value. The
+success of their ultimate ideas confirmed scientists in their refusal to
+modify them as the result of an enquiry into their rationality. Every
+philosophy was bound in some way or other to swallow them whole. Also
+the example of science affected other regions of thought. The historical
+revolt has thus been exaggerated into the exclusion of philosophy from
+its proper rôle of harmonising the various abstractions of
+methodological thought. Thought is abstract; and the intolerant use of
+abstractions is the major vice of the intellect. This vice is not wholly
+corrected by the recurrence to concrete experience. For after all, you
+need only attend to those aspects of your concrete experience which lie
+within some limited scheme. There are two methods for the purification
+of ideas. One of them is dispassionate observation by means of the
+bodily senses. But observation is selection. Accordingly, it is
+difficult to transcend a scheme of abstraction whose success is
+sufficiently wide. The other method is by comparing the various schemes
+of abstraction which are well founded in our various types of
+experience. This comparison takes the form of satisfying the demands of
+the Italian scholastic divines whom Paul Sarpi mentioned. They asked
+that _reason_ should be used. Faith in reason is the trust that the
+ultimate natures of things lie together in a harmony which excludes mere
+arbitrariness. It is the faith that at the base of things we shall not
+find mere arbitrary mystery. The faith in the order of nature which has
+made possible the growth of science is a particular example of a deeper
+faith. This faith cannot be justified by any inductive generalisation.
+It springs from direct inspection of the nature of things as disclosed
+in our own immediate present experience. There is no parting from your
+own shadow. To experience this faith is to know that in being ourselves
+we are more than ourselves: to know that our experience, dim and
+fragmentary as it is, yet sounds the utmost depths of reality: to know
+that detached details merely in order to be themselves demand that they
+should find themselves in a system of things: to know that this system
+includes the harmony of logical rationality, and the harmony of
+aesthetic achievement: to know that, while the harmony of logic lies
+upon the universe as an iron necessity, the aesthetic harmony stands
+before it as a living ideal moulding the general flux in its broken
+progress towards finer, subtler issues.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER II
+
+                      MATHEMATICS AS AN ELEMENT IN
+                         THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT
+
+
+The science of Pure Mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim
+to be the most original creation of the human spirit. Another claimant
+for this position is music. But we will put aside all rivals, and
+consider the ground on which such a claim can be made for mathematics.
+The originality of mathematics consists in the fact that in mathematical
+science connections between things are exhibited which, apart from the
+agency of human reason, are extremely unobvious. Thus the ideas, now in
+the minds of contemporary mathematicians, lie very remote from any
+notions which can be immediately derived by perception through the
+senses; unless indeed it be perception stimulated and guided by
+antecedent mathematical knowledge. This is the thesis which I proceed to
+exemplify.
+
+Suppose we project our imaginations backwards through many thousands of
+years, and endeavour to realise the simple-mindedness of even the
+greatest intellects in those early societies. Abstract ideas which to us
+are immediately obvious must have been, for them, matters only of the
+most dim apprehension. For example take the question of number. We think
+of the number ‘five’ as applying to appropriate groups of any entities
+whatsoever—to five fishes, five children, five apples, five days. Thus
+in considering the relations of the number ‘five’ to the number ‘three,’
+we are thinking of two groups of things, one with five members and the
+other with three members. But we are entirely abstracting from any
+consideration of any particular entities, or even of any particular
+sorts of entities, which go to make up the membership of either of the
+two groups. We are merely thinking of those relationships between those
+two groups which are entirely independent of the individual essences of
+any of the members of either group. This is a very remarkable feat of
+abstraction; and it must have taken ages for the human race to rise to
+it. During a long period, groups of fishes will have been compared to
+each other in respect to their multiplicity, and groups of days to each
+other. But the first man who noticed the analogy between a group of
+seven fishes and a group of seven days made a notable advance in the
+history of thought. He was the first man who entertained a concept
+belonging to the science of pure mathematics. At that moment it must
+have been impossible for him to divine the complexity and subtlety of
+these abstract mathematical ideas which were waiting for discovery. Nor
+could he have guessed that these notions would exert a widespread
+fascination in each succeeding generation. There is an erroneous
+literary tradition which represents the love of mathematics as a
+monomania confined to a few eccentrics in each generation. But be this
+as it may, it would have been impossible to anticipate the pleasure
+derivable from a type of abstract thinking which had no counterpart in
+the then-existing society. Thirdly, the tremendous future effect of
+mathematical knowledge on the lives of men, on their daily avocations,
+on their habitual thoughts, on the organization of society, must have
+been even more completely shrouded from the foresight of those early
+thinkers. Even now there is a very wavering grasp of the true position
+of mathematics as an element in the history of thought. I will not go so
+far as to say that to construct a history of thought without profound
+study of the mathematical ideas of successive epochs is like omitting
+Hamlet from the play which is named after him. That would be claiming
+too much. But it is certainly analogous to cutting out the part of
+Ophelia. This simile is singularly exact. For Ophelia is quite essential
+to the play, she is very charming,—and a little mad. Let us grant that
+the pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit, a
+refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings.
+
+When we think of mathematics, we have in our mind a science devoted to
+the exploration of number, quantity, geometry, and in modern times also
+including investigation into yet more abstract concepts of order, and
+into analogous types of purely logical relations. The point of
+mathematics is that in it we have always got rid of the particular
+instance, and even of any particular sorts of entities. So that for
+example, no mathematical truths apply merely to fish, or merely to
+stones, or merely to colours. So long as you are dealing with pure
+mathematics, you are in the realm of complete and absolute abstraction.
+All you assert is, that reason insists on the admission that, if any
+entities whatever have any relations which satisfy such-and-such purely
+abstract conditions, then they must have other relations which satisfy
+other purely abstract conditions.
+
+Mathematics is thought moving in the sphere of complete abstraction from
+any particular instance of what it is talking about. So far is this view
+of mathematics from being obvious, that we can easily assure ourselves
+that it is not, even now, generally understood. For example, it is
+habitually thought that the certainty of mathematics is a reason for the
+certainty of our geometrical knowledge of the space of the physical
+universe. This is a delusion which has vitiated much philosophy in the
+past, and some philosophy in the present. This question of geometry is a
+test case of some urgency. There are certain alternative sets of purely
+abstract conditions possible for the relationships of groups of
+unspecified entities, which I will call _geometrical conditions_. I give
+them this name because of their general analogy to those conditions,
+which we believe to hold respecting the particular geometrical relations
+of things observed by us in our direct perception of nature. So far as
+our observations are concerned, we are not quite accurate enough to be
+certain of the exact conditions regulating the things we come across in
+nature. But we can by a slight stretch of hypothesis identify these
+observed conditions with some one set of the purely abstract geometrical
+conditions. In doing so, we make a particular determination of the group
+of unspecified entities which are the _relata_ in the abstract science.
+In the pure mathematics of geometrical relationships, we say that, if
+_any_ group of entities enjoy _any_ relationships among its members
+satisfying _this_ set of abstract geometrical conditions, then
+such-and-such additional abstract conditions must also hold for such
+relationships. But when we come to physical space, we say that some
+definitely observed group of physical entities enjoys some definitely
+observed relationships among its members which do satisfy this
+above-mentioned set of abstract geometrical conditions. We thence
+conclude that the additional relationships which we concluded to hold in
+_any_ such case, must therefore hold in _this particular_ case.
+
+The certainty of mathematics depends upon its complete abstract
+generality. But we can have no _à priori_ certainty that we are right in
+believing that the observed entities in the concrete universe form a
+particular instance of what falls under our general reasoning. To take
+another example from arithmetic. It is a general abstract truth of pure
+mathematics that any group of forty entities can be subdivided into two
+groups of twenty entities. We are therefore justified in concluding that
+a particular group of apples which we believe to contain forty members
+can be subdivided into two groups of apples of which each contains
+twenty members. But there always remains the possibility that we have
+miscounted the big group; so that, when we come in practice to subdivide
+it, we shall find that one of the two heaps has an apple too few or an
+apple too many.
+
+Accordingly, in criticising an argument based upon the application of
+mathematics to particular matters of fact, there are always three
+processes to be kept perfectly distinct in our minds. We must first scan
+the purely mathematical reasoning to make sure that there are no mere
+slips in it—no casual illogicalities due to mental failure. Any
+mathematician knows from bitter experience that, in first elaborating a
+train of reasoning, it is very easy to commit a slight error which yet
+makes all the difference. But when a piece of mathematics has been
+revised, and has been before the expert world for some time, the chance
+of a casual error is almost negligible. The next process is to make
+quite certain of all the abstract conditions which have been presupposed
+to hold. This is the determination of the abstract premises from which
+the mathematical reasoning proceeds. This is a matter of considerable
+difficulty. In the past quite remarkable oversights have been made, and
+have been accepted by generations of the greatest mathematicians. The
+chief danger is that of oversight, namely, tacitly to introduce some
+condition, which it is natural for us to presuppose, but which in fact
+need not always be holding. There is another opposite oversight in this
+connection which does not lead to error, but only to lack of
+simplification. It is very easy to think that more postulated conditions
+are required than is in fact the case. In other words, we may think that
+some abstract postulate is necessary which is in fact capable of being
+proved from the other postulates that we have already on hand. The only
+effects of this excess of abstract postulates are to diminish our
+aesthetic pleasure in the mathematical reasoning, and to give us more
+trouble when we come to the third process of criticism.
+
+This third process of criticism is that of verifying that our abstract
+postulates hold for the particular case in question. It is in respect to
+this process of verification for the particular case that all the
+trouble arises. In some simple instances, such as the counting of forty
+apples, we can with a little care arrive at practical certainty. But in
+general, with more complex instances, complete certainty is
+unattainable. Volumes, libraries of volumes, have been written on the
+subject. It is the battle ground of rival philosophers. There are two
+distinct questions involved. There are particular definite things
+observed, and we have to make sure that the relations between these
+things really do obey certain definite exact abstract conditions. There
+is great room for error here. The exact observational methods of science
+are all contrivances for limiting these erroneous conclusions as to
+direct matters of fact. But another question arises. The things directly
+observed are, almost always, only samples. We want to conclude that the
+abstract conditions, which hold for the samples, also hold for all other
+entities which, for some reason or other, appear to us to be of the same
+sort. This process of reasoning from the sample to the whole species is
+Induction. The theory of Induction is the despair of philosophy—and yet
+all our activities are based upon it. Anyhow, in criticising a
+mathematical conclusion as to a particular matter of fact, the real
+difficulties consist in finding out the abstract assumptions involved,
+and in estimating the evidence for their applicability to the particular
+case in hand.
+
+It often happens, therefore, that in criticising a learned book of
+applied mathematics, or a memoir, one’s whole trouble is with the first
+chapter, or even with the first page. For it is there, at the very
+outset, where the author will probably be found to slip in his
+assumptions. Farther, the trouble is not with what the author does say,
+but with what he does not say. Also it is not with what he knows he has
+assumed, but with what he has unconsciously assumed. We do not doubt the
+author’s honesty. It is his perspicacity which we are criticising. Each
+generation criticises the unconscious assumptions made by its parents.
+It may assent to them, but it brings them out in the open.
+
+The history of the development of language illustrates this point. It is
+a history of the progressive analysis of ideas. Latin and Greek were
+inflected languages. This means that they express an unanalyzed complex
+of ideas by the mere modification of a word; whereas in English, for
+example, we use prepositions and auxiliary verbs to drag into the open
+the whole bundle of ideas involved. For certain forms of literary
+art,—though not always—the compact absorption of auxiliary ideas into
+the main word may be an advantage. But in a language such as English
+there is the overwhelming gain in explicitness. This increased
+explicitness is a more complete exhibition of the various abstractions
+involved in the complex idea which is the meaning of the sentence.
+
+By comparison with language, we can now see what is the function in
+thought which is performed by pure mathematics. It is a resolute attempt
+to go the whole way in the direction of complete analysis, so as to
+separate the elements of mere matter of fact from the purely abstract
+conditions which they exemplify.
+
+The habit of such analysis enlightens every act of the functioning of
+the human mind. It first (by isolating it) emphasizes the direct
+aesthetic appreciation of the content of experience. This direct
+appreciation means an apprehension of what this experience is in itself
+in its own particular essence, including its immediate concrete values.
+This is a question of direct experience, dependent upon sensitive
+subtlety. There is then the abstraction of the particular entities
+involved, viewed in themselves, and as apart from that particular
+occasion of experience in which we are then apprehending them. Lastly
+there is the further apprehension of the absolutely general conditions
+satisfied by the particular relations of those entities as in that
+experience. These conditions gain their generality from the fact that
+they are expressible without reference to those particular relations or
+to those particular relata which occur in that particular occasion of
+experience. They are conditions which might hold for an indefinite
+variety of other occasions, involving other entities and other relations
+between them. Thus these conditions are perfectly general because they
+refer to no particular occasion, and to no particular entities (such as
+green, or blue, or trees) which enter into a variety of occasions, and
+to no particular relationships between such entities.
+
+There is, however, a limitation to be made to the generality of
+mathematics; it is a qualification which applies equally to all general
+statements. No statement, except one, can be made respecting any remote
+occasion which enters into no relationship with the immediate occasion
+so as to form a constitutive element of the essence of that immediate
+occasion. By the ‘immediate occasion’ I mean that occasion which
+involves as an ingredient the individual act of judgment in question.
+The one excepted statement is,—If anything out of relationship, then
+complete ignorance as to it. Here by ‘ignorance,’ I mean _ignorance_;
+accordingly no advice can be given as to how to expect it, or to treat
+it, in ‘practice’ or in any other way. Either we know something of the
+remote occasion by the cognition which is itself an element of the
+immediate occasion, or we know nothing. Accordingly the full universe,
+disclosed for every variety of experience, is a universe in which every
+detail enters into its proper relationship with the immediate occasion.
+The generality of mathematics is the most complete generality consistent
+with the community of occasions which constitutes our metaphysical
+situation.
+
+It is further to be noticed that the particular entities require these
+general conditions for their ingression into any occasions; but the same
+general conditions may be required by many types of particular entities.
+This fact, that the general conditions transcend any one set of
+particular entities, is the ground for the entry into mathematics, and
+into mathematical logic, of the notion of the ‘variable.’ It is by the
+employment of this notion that general conditions are investigated
+without any specification of particular entities. This irrelevance of
+the particular entities has not been generally understood: for example,
+the shape-iness of shapes, _e.g._, circularity and sphericity and
+cubicality as in actual experience, do not enter into the geometrical
+reasoning.
+
+The exercise of logical reason is always concerned with these absolutely
+general conditions. In its broadest sense, the discovery of mathematics
+is the discovery that the totality of these general abstract conditions,
+which are concurrently applicable to the relationships among the
+entities of any one concrete occasion, are themselves inter-connected in
+the manner of a pattern with a key to it. This pattern of relationships
+among general abstract conditions is imposed alike on external reality,
+and on our abstract representations of it, by the general necessity that
+every thing must be just its own individual self, with its own
+individual way of differing from everything else. This is nothing else
+than the necessity of abstract logic, which is the presupposition
+involved in the very fact of interrelated existence as disclosed in each
+immediate occasion of experience.
+
+The key to the pattern means this fact:—that from a select set of those
+general conditions, exemplified in any one and the same occasion, a
+pattern involving an infinite variety of other such conditions, also
+exemplified in the same occasion, can be developed by the pure exercise
+of abstract logic. Any such select set is called the set of postulates,
+or premises, from which the reasoning proceeds. The reasoning is nothing
+else than the exhibition of the whole pattern of general conditions
+involved in the pattern derived from the selected postulates.
+
+The harmony of the logical reason, which divines the complete pattern as
+involved in the postulates, is the most general aesthetic property
+arising from the mere fact of concurrent existence in the unity of one
+occasion. Wherever there is a unity of occasion there is thereby
+established an aesthetic relationship between the general conditions
+involved in that occasion. This aesthetic relationship is that which is
+divined in the exercise of rationality. Whatever falls within that
+relationship is thereby exemplified in that occasion; whatever falls
+without that relationship is thereby excluded from exemplification in
+that occasion. The complete pattern of general conditions, thus
+exemplified, is determined by any one of many select sets of these
+conditions. These key sets are sets of equivalent postulates. This
+reasonable harmony of being, which is required for the unity of a
+complex occasion, together with the completeness of the realisation (in
+that occasion) of all that is involved in its logical harmony, is the
+primary article of metaphysical doctrine. It means that for things to be
+together involves that they are reasonably together. This means that
+thought can penetrate into every occasion of fact, so that by
+comprehending its key conditions, the whole complex of its pattern of
+conditions lies open before it. It comes to this:—provided we know
+something which is perfectly general about the elements in any occasion,
+we can then know an indefinite number of other equally general concepts
+which must also be exemplified in that same occasion. The logical
+harmony involved in the unity of an occasion is both exclusive and
+inclusive. The occasion must exclude the inharmonious, and it must
+include the harmonious.
+
+Pythagoras was the first man who had any grasp of the full sweep of this
+general principle. He lived in the sixth century before Christ. Our
+knowledge of him is fragmentary. But we know some points which establish
+his greatness in the history of thought. He insisted on the importance
+of the utmost generality in reasoning, and he divined the importance of
+number as an aid to the construction of any representation of the
+conditions involved in the order of nature. We know also that he studied
+geometry, and discovered the general proof of the remarkable theorem
+about right-angled triangles. The formation of the Pythagorean
+Brotherhood, and the mysterious rumours as to its rites and its
+influence, afford some evidence that Pythagoras divined, however dimly,
+the possible importance of mathematics in the formation of science. On
+the side of philosophy he started a discussion which has agitated
+thinkers ever since. He asked, ‘What is the status of mathematical
+entities, such as numbers for example, in the realm of things?’ The
+number ‘two,’ for example, is in some sense exempt from the flux of time
+and the necessity of position in space. Yet it is involved in the real
+world. The same considerations apply to geometrical notions—to circular
+shape, for example. Pythagoras is said to have taught that the
+mathematical entities, such as numbers and shapes, were the ultimate
+stuff out of which the real entities of our perceptual experience are
+constructed. As thus boldly stated, the idea seems crude, and indeed
+silly. But undoubtedly, he had hit upon a philosophical notion of
+considerable importance; a notion which has a long history, and which
+has moved the minds of men, and has even entered into Christian
+theology. About a thousand years separate the Athanasian Creed from
+Pythagoras, and about two thousand four hundred years separate
+Pythagoras from Hegel. Yet for all these distances in time, the
+importance of definite number in the constitution of the Divine Nature,
+and the concept of the real world as exhibiting the evolution of an
+idea, can both be traced back to the train of thought set going by
+Pythagoras.
+
+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. In
+this respect Pythagoras was fortunate. His philosophical speculations
+reach us through the mind of Plato. The Platonic world of ideas is the
+refined, revised form of the Pythagorean doctrine that number lies at
+the base of the real world. Owing to the Greek mode of representing
+numbers by patterns of dots, the notions of number and of geometrical
+configuration are less separated than with us. Also Pythagoras, without
+doubt, included the shape-iness of shape, which is an impure
+mathematical entity. So to-day, when Einstein and his followers proclaim
+that physical facts, such as gravitation, are to be construed as
+exhibitions of local peculiarities of spatio-temporal properties, they
+are following the pure Pythagorean tradition. In a sense, Plato and
+Pythagoras stand nearer to modern physical science than does Aristotle.
+The two former were mathematicians, whereas Aristotle was the son of a
+doctor, though of course he was not thereby ignorant of mathematics. The
+practical counsel to be derived from Pythagoras, is to measure, and thus
+to express quality in terms of numerically determined quantity. But the
+biological sciences, then and till our own time, have been
+overwhelmingly classificatory. Accordingly, Aristotle by his Logic
+throws the emphasis on classification. The popularity of Aristotelian
+Logic retarded the advance of physical science throughout the Middle
+Ages. If only the schoolmen had measured instead of classifying, how
+much they might have learnt!
+
+Classification is a halfway house between the immediate concreteness of
+the individual thing and the complete abstraction of mathematical
+notions. The species take account of the specific character, and the
+genera of the generic character. But in the procedure of relating
+mathematical notions to the facts of nature, by counting, by
+measurement, and by geometrical relations, and by types of order, the
+rational contemplation is lifted from the incomplete abstractions
+involved in definite species and genera, to the complete, abstractions
+of mathematics. Classification is necessary. But unless you can progress
+from classification to mathematics, your reasoning will not take you
+very far.
+
+Between the epoch which stretches from Pythagoras to Plato and the epoch
+comprised in the seventeenth century of the modern world nearly two
+thousand years elapsed. In this long interval mathematics had made
+immense strides. Geometry had gained the study of conic sections and
+trigonometry; the method of exhaustion had almost anticipated the
+integral calculus; and above all the Arabic arithmetical notation and
+algebra had been contributed by Asiatic thought. But the progress was on
+technical lines. Mathematics, as a formative element in the development
+of philosophy, never, during this long period, recovered from its
+deposition at the hands of Aristotle. Some of the old ideas derived from
+the Pythagorean-Platonic epoch lingered on, and can be traced among the
+Platonic influences which shaped the first period of evolution of
+Christian theology. But philosophy received no fresh inspiration from
+the steady advance of mathematical science. In the seventeenth century
+the influence of Aristotle was at its lowest, and mathematics recovered
+the importance of its earlier period. It was an age of great physicists
+and great philosophers; and the physicists and philosophers were alike
+mathematicians. The exception of John Locke should be made; although he
+was greatly influenced by the Newtonian circle of the Royal Society. In
+the age of Galileo, Descartes, Spinoza, Newton, and Leibniz, mathematics
+was an influence of the first magnitude in the formation of philosophic
+ideas. But the mathematics, which now emerged into prominence, was a
+very different science from the mathematics of the earlier epoch. It had
+gained in generality, and had started upon its almost incredible modern
+career of piling subtlety of generalization upon subtlety of
+generalization; and of finding, with each growth of complexity, some new
+application, either to physical science, or to philosophic thought. The
+Arabic notation had equipped the science with almost perfect technical
+efficiency in the manipulation of numbers. This relief from a struggle
+with arithmetical details (as instanced, for example, in the Egyptian
+arithmetic of B. C. 1600) gave room for a development which had already
+been faintly anticipated in later Greek mathematics. Algebra now came
+upon the scene, and algebra is a generalisation of arithmetic. In the
+same way as the notion of number abstracted from reference to any one
+particular set of entities, so in algebra abstraction is made from the
+notion of any particular numbers. Just as the number ‘5’ refers
+impartially to any group of five entities, so in algebra the letters are
+used to refer impartially to any number, with the proviso that each
+letter is to refer to the same number throughout the same context of its
+employment.
+
+This usage was first employed in equations, which are methods of asking
+complicated arithmetical questions. In this connection, the letters
+representing numbers were termed ‘unknowns.’ But equations soon
+suggested a new idea, that, namely, of a function of one or more general
+symbols, these symbols being letters representing any numbers. In this
+employment the algebraic letters are called the ‘arguments’ of the
+function, or sometimes they are called the ‘variables.’ Then, for
+instance, if an angle is represented by an algebraical letter, as
+standing for its numerical measure in terms of a given unit,
+Trigonometry is absorbed into this new algebra. Algebra thus develops
+into the general science of analysis in which we consider the properties
+of various functions of undetermined arguments. Finally the particular
+functions, such as the trigonometrical functions, and the logarithmic
+functions, and the algebraic functions, are generalised into the idea of
+‘any function.’ Too large a generalisation leads to mere barrenness. It
+is the large generalisation, limited by a happy particularity, which is
+the fruitful conception. For instance the idea of any _continuous_
+function, whereby the limitation of continuity is introduced, is the
+fruitful idea which has led to most of the important applications. This
+rise of algebraic analysis was concurrent with Descartes’ discovery of
+analytical geometry, and then with the invention of the infinitesimal
+calculus by Newton and Leibniz. Truly, Pythagoras, if he could have
+foreseen the issue of the train of thought which he had set going would
+have felt himself fully justified in his brotherhood with its excitement
+of mysterious rites.
+
+The point which I now want to make is that this dominance of the idea of
+functionality in the abstract sphere of mathematics found itself
+reflected in the order of nature under the guise of mathematically
+expressed laws of nature. Apart from this progress of mathematics, the
+seventeenth century developments of science would have been impossible.
+Mathematics supplied the background of imaginative thought with which
+the men of science approached the observation of nature. Galileo
+produced formulae, Descartes produced formulae, Huyghens produced
+formulae, Newton produced formulae.
+
+As a particular example of the effect of the abstract development of
+mathematics upon the science of those times, consider the notion of
+periodicity. The general recurrences of things are very obvious in our
+ordinary experience. Days recur, lunar phases recur, the seasons of the
+year recur, rotating bodies recur to their old positions, beats of the
+heart recur, breathing recurs. On every side, we are met by recurrence.
+Apart from recurrence, knowledge would be impossible; for nothing could
+be referred to our past experience. Also, apart from some regularity of
+recurrence, measurement would be impossible. In our experience, as we
+gain the idea of exactness, recurrence is fundamental.
+
+In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the theory of periodicity
+took a fundamental place in science. Kepler divined a law connecting the
+major axes of the planetary orbits with the periods in which the planets
+respectively described their orbits: Galileo observed the periodic
+vibrations of pendulums: Newton explained sound as being due to the
+disturbance of air by the passage through it of periodic waves of
+condensation and rarefaction: Huyghens explained light as being due to
+the transverse waves of vibration of a subtle ether: Mersenne connected
+the period of the vibration of a violin string with its density,
+tension, and length. The birth of modern physics depended upon the
+application of the abstract idea of periodicity to a variety of concrete
+instances. But this would have been impossible, unless mathematicians
+had already worked out in the abstract the various abstract ideas which
+cluster round the notions of periodicity. The science of trigonometry
+arose from that of the relations of the angles of a right-angled
+triangle, to the ratios between the sides and hypotenuse of the
+triangle. Then, under the influence of the newly discovered mathematical
+science of the analysis of functions, it broadened out into the study of
+the simple abstract periodic functions which these ratios exemplify.
+Thus trigonometry became completely abstract; and in thus becoming
+abstract, it became useful. It illuminated the underlying analogy
+between sets of utterly diverse physical phenomena; and at the same time
+it supplied the weapons by which any one such set could have its various
+features analysed and related to each other.[2]
+
+Nothing is more impressive than the fact that, as mathematics withdrew
+increasingly into the upper regions of ever greater extremes of abstract
+thought, it returned back to earth with a corresponding growth of
+importance for the analysis of concrete fact. The history of the
+seventeenth century science reads as though it were some vivid dream of
+Plato or Pythagoras. In this characteristic the seventeenth century was
+only the forerunner of its successors.
+
+Footnote 2:
+
+  For a more detailed consideration of the nature and function of pure
+  mathematics _cf._ my _Introduction to Mathematics_, Home University
+  Library, Williams and Norgate, London.
+
+The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are
+the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact. As
+the result of the prominence of mathematicians in the seventeenth
+century, the eighteenth century was mathematically minded, more
+especially where French influence predominated. An exception must be
+made of the English empiricism derived from Locke. Outside France,
+Newton’s direct influence on philosophy is best seen in Kant, and not in
+Hume.
+
+In the nineteenth century, the general influence of mathematics waned.
+The romantic movement in literature, and the idealistic movement in
+philosophy were not the products of mathematical minds. Also, even in
+science, the growth of geology, of zoology, and of the biological
+sciences generally, was in each case entirely disconnected from any
+reference to mathematics. The chief scientific excitement of the century
+was the Darwinian theory of evolution. Accordingly, mathematicians were
+in the background, so far as the general thought of that age was
+concerned. But this does not mean that mathematics was being neglected,
+or even that it was uninfluential. During the nineteenth century pure
+mathematics made almost as much progress as during all the preceding
+centuries from Pythagoras onwards. Of course progress was easier,
+because the technique had been perfected. But allowing for that, the
+change in mathematics between the years 1800 and 1900 is very
+remarkable. If we add in the previous hundred years, and take the two
+centuries preceding the present time, one is almost tempted to date the
+foundation of mathematics somewhere in the last quarter of the
+seventeenth century. The period of the discovery of the elements
+stretches from Pythagoras to Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz, and the
+developed science has been created during the last two hundred and fifty
+years. This is not a boast as to the superior genius of the modern
+world; for it is harder to discover the elements than to develop the
+science.
+
+Throughout the nineteenth century, the influence of the science was its
+influence on dynamics and physics, and thence derivatively on
+engineering and chemistry. It is difficult to overrate its indirect
+influence on human life through the medium of these sciences. But there
+was no direct influence of mathematics upon the general thought of the
+age.
+
+In reviewing this rapid sketch of the influence of mathematics
+throughout European history, we see that it had two great periods of
+direct influence upon general thought, both periods lasting for about
+two hundred years. The first period was that stretching from Pythagoras
+to Plato, when the possibility of the science, and its general
+character, first dawned upon the Grecian thinkers. The second period
+comprised the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of our modern epoch.
+Both periods had certain common characteristics. In the earlier, as in
+the later period, the general categories of thought in many spheres of
+human interest, were in a state of disintegration. In the age of
+Pythagoras, the unconscious Paganism, with its traditional clothing of
+beautiful ritual and of magical rites, was passing into a new phase
+under two influences. There were waves of religious enthusiasm, seeking
+direct enlightenment into the secret depths of being; and at the
+opposite pole, there was the awakening of critical analytical thought,
+probing with cool dispassionateness into ultimate meanings. In both
+influences, so diverse in their outcome, there was one common element—an
+awakened curiosity, and a movement towards the reconstruction of
+traditional ways. The pagan mysteries may be compared to the Puritan
+reaction and to the Catholic reaction; critical scientific interest was
+alike in both epochs, though with minor differences of substantial
+importance.
+
+In each age, the earlier stages were placed in periods of rising
+prosperity, and of new opportunities. In this respect, they differed
+from the period of gradual declension in the second and third centuries
+when Christianity was advancing to the conquest of the Roman world. It
+is only in a period, fortunate both in its opportunities for
+disengagement from the immediate pressure of circumstances, and in its
+eager curiosity, that the Age-Spirit can undertake any direct revision
+of those final abstractions which lie hidden in the more concrete
+concepts from which the serious thought of an age takes its start. In
+the rare periods when this task can be undertaken, mathematics becomes
+relevant to philosophy. For mathematics is the science of the most
+complete abstractions to which the human mind can attain.
+
+The parallel between the two epochs must not be pressed too far. The
+modern world is larger and more complex than the ancient civilization
+round the shores of the Mediterranean, or even than that of the Europe
+which sent Columbus and the Pilgrim Fathers across the ocean. We cannot
+now explain our age by some simple formula which becomes dominant and
+will then be laid to rest for a thousand years. Thus the temporary
+submergence of the mathematical mentality from the time of Rousseau
+onwards appears already to be at an end. 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.
+
+In order to explain exactly how mathematics is gaining in general
+importance at the present time, let us start from a particular
+scientific perplexity and consider the notions to which we are naturally
+led by some attempt to unravel its difficulties. At present physics is
+troubled by the quantum theory. I need not now explain[3] what this
+theory is, to those who are not already familiar with it. But the point
+is that one of the most hopeful lines of explanation is to assume that
+an electron does not continuously traverse its path in space. The
+alternative notion as to its mode of existence is that it appears at a
+series of discrete positions in space which it occupies for successive
+durations of time. It is as though an automobile moving at the average
+rate of thirty miles an hour along a road, did not traverse the road
+continuously; but appeared successively at the successive milestones,
+remaining for two minutes at each milestone.
+
+Footnote 3:
+
+  _Cf._ Chapter VIII.
+
+In the first place there is required the purely technical use of
+mathematics to determine whether this conception does in fact explain
+the many perplexing characteristics of the quantum theory. If the notion
+survives this test, undoubtedly physics will adopt it. So far the
+question is purely one for mathematics and physical science to settle
+between them, on the basis of mathematical calculations and physical
+observations.
+
+But now a problem is handed over to the philosophers. This discontinuous
+existence in space, thus assigned to electrons, is very unlike the
+continuous existence of material entities which we habitually assume as
+obvious. The electron seems to be borrowing the character which some
+people have assigned to the Mahatmas of Tibet. These electrons, with the
+correlative protons, are now conceived as being the fundamental entities
+out of which the material bodies of ordinary experience are composed.
+Accordingly, if this explanation is allowed, we have to revise all our
+notions of the ultimate character of material existence. For when we
+penetrate to these final entities, this startling discontinuity of
+spatial existence discloses itself.
+
+There is no difficulty in explaining the paradox, if we consent to apply
+to the apparently steady undifferentiated endurance of matter the same
+principles as those now accepted for sound and light. A steadily
+sounding note is explained as the outcome of vibrations in the air: a
+steady colour is explained as the outcome of vibrations in ether. If we
+explain the steady endurance of matter on the same principle, we shall
+conceive each primordial element as a vibratory ebb and flow of an
+underlying energy, or activity. Suppose we keep to the physical idea of
+energy: then each primordial element will be an organized system of
+vibratory streaming of energy. Accordingly there will be a definite
+period associated with each element; and within that period the
+stream-system will sway from one stationary maximum to another
+stationary maximum,—or, taking a metaphor from the ocean tides, the
+system will sway from one high tide to another high tide. This system,
+forming the primordial element, is nothing at any instant. It requires
+its whole period in which to manifest itself. In an analogous way, a
+note of music is nothing at an instant, but it also requires its whole
+period in which to manifest itself.
+
+Accordingly, in asking where the primordial element is, we must settle
+on its average position at the centre of each period. If we divide time
+into smaller elements, the vibratory system as one electronic entity has
+no existence. The path in space of such a vibratory entity—where the
+entity is _constituted by_ the vibrations—must be represented by a
+series of detached positions in space, analogously to the automobile
+which is found at successive milestones and at nowhere between.
+
+We first must ask whether there is any evidence to associate the quantum
+theory with vibration. This question is immediately answered in the
+affirmative. The whole theory centres round the radiant energy from an
+atom, and is intimately associated with the periods of the radiant
+wave-systems. It seems, therefore, that the hypothesis of essentially
+vibratory existence is the most hopeful way of explaining the paradox of
+the discontinuous orbit.
+
+In the second place, a new problem is now placed before philosophers and
+physicists, if we entertain the hypothesis that the ultimate elements of
+matter are in their essence vibratory. By this I mean that apart from
+being a periodic system, such an element would have no existence. With
+this hypothesis we have to ask, what are the ingredients which form the
+vibratory organism. We have already got rid of the matter with its
+appearance of undifferentiated endurance. Apart from some metaphysical
+compulsion, there is no reason to provide another more subtle stuff to
+take the place of the matter which has just been explained away. The
+field is now open for the introduction of some new doctrine of organism
+which may take the place of the materialism with which, since the
+seventeenth century, science has saddled philosophy. It must be
+remembered that the physicists’ energy is obviously an abstraction. The
+concrete fact, which is the organism, must be a complete expression of
+the character of a real occurrence. Such a displacement of scientific
+materialism, if it ever takes place, cannot fail to have important
+consequences in every field of thought.
+
+Finally, our last reflection must be, that we have in the end come back
+to a version of the doctrine of old Pythagoras, from whom mathematics,
+and mathematical physics, took their rise. He discovered the importance
+of dealing with abstractions; and in particular directed attention to
+number as characterizing the periodicities of notes of music. The
+importance of the abstract idea of periodicity was thus present at the
+very beginning both of mathematics and of European philosophy.
+
+In the seventeenth century, the birth of modern science required a new
+mathematics, more fully equipped for the purpose of analysing the
+characteristics of vibratory existence. And now in the twentieth century
+we find physicists largely engaged in analysing the periodicities of
+atoms. Truly, Pythagoras in founding European philosophy and European
+mathematics, endowed them with the luckiest of lucky guesses—or, was it
+a flash of divine genius, penetrating to the inmost nature of things?
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER III
+
+                         THE CENTURY OF GENIUS
+
+
+The previous chapters were devoted to the antecedent conditions which
+prepared the soil for the scientific outburst of the seventeenth
+century. They traced the various elements of thought and instinctive
+belief, from their first efflorescence in the classical civilisation of
+the ancient world, through the transformations which they underwent in
+the Middle Ages, up to the historical revolt of the sixteenth century.
+Three main factors arrested attention,—the rise of mathematics, the
+instinctive belief in a detailed order of nature, and the unbridled
+rationalism of the thought of the later Middle Ages. By this rationalism
+I mean the belief that the avenue to truth was predominantly through a
+metaphysical analysis of the nature of things, which would thereby
+determine how things acted and functioned. The historical revolt was the
+definite abandonment of this method in favour of the study of the
+empirical facts of antecedents and consequences. In religion, it meant
+the appeal to the origins of Christianity; and in science it meant the
+appeal to experiment and the inductive method of reasoning.
+
+A brief, and sufficiently accurate, description of the intellectual life
+of the European races during the succeeding two centuries and a quarter
+up to our own times is that they have been living upon the accumulated
+capital of ideas provided for them by the genius of the seventeenth
+century. The men of this epoch inherited a ferment of ideas attendant
+upon the historical revolt of the sixteenth century, and they bequeathed
+formed systems of thought touching every aspect of human life. It is the
+one century which consistently, and throughout the whole range of human
+activities, provided intellectual genius adequate for the greatness of
+its occasions. The crowded stage of this hundred years is indicated by
+the coincidences which mark its literary annals. At its dawn Bacon’s
+_Advancement of Learning_ and Cervantes’ _Don Quixote_ were published in
+the same year (1605), as though the epoch would introduce itself with a
+forward and a backward glance. The first quarto edition of _Hamlet_
+appeared in the preceding year, and a slightly variant edition in the
+same year. Finally Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same day, April
+23, 1616. In the spring of this same year Harvey is believed to have
+first expounded his theory of the circulation of the blood in a course
+of lectures before the College of Physicians in London. Newton was born
+in the year that Galileo died (1642), exactly one hundred years after
+the publication of Copernicus’ _De Revolutionibus_. One year earlier
+Descartes published his _Meditationes_ and two years later his
+_Principia Philosophiae_. There simply was not time for the century to
+space out nicely its notable events concerning men of genius.
+
+I cannot now enter upon a chronicle of the various stages of
+intellectual advance included within this epoch. It is too large a topic
+for one lecture, and would obscure the ideas which it is my purpose to
+develop. A mere rough catalogue of some names will be sufficient, names
+of men who published to the world important work within these limits of
+time: Francis Bacon, Harvey, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Pascal,
+Huyghens, Boyle, Newton, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz. I have limited the
+list to the sacred number of twelve, a number much too small to be
+properly representative. For example, there is only one Italian there,
+whereas Italy could have filled the list from its own ranks. Again
+Harvey is the only biologist, and also there are too many Englishmen.
+This latter defect is partly due to the fact that the lecturer is
+English, and that he is lecturing to an audience which, equally with
+him, owns this English century. If he had been Dutch, there would have
+been too many Dutchmen; if Italian, too many Italians; and if French,
+too many Frenchmen. The unhappy Thirty Years’ War was devastating
+Germany; but every other country looks back to this century as an epoch
+which witnessed some culmination of its genius. Certainly this was a
+great period of English thought; as at a later time Voltaire impressed
+upon France.
+
+The omission of physiologists, other than Harvey, also requires
+explanation. There were, of course, great advances in biology within the
+century, chiefly associated with Italy and the University of Padua. But
+my purpose is to trace the philosophic outlook, derived from science and
+presupposed by science, and to estimate some of its effects on the
+general climate of each age. Now the scientific philosophy of this age
+was dominated by physics; so as to be the most obvious rendering, in
+terms of general ideas, of the state of physical knowledge of that age
+and of the two succeeding centuries. As a matter of fact, these concepts
+are very unsuited to biology; and set for it an insoluble problem of
+matter and life and organism, with which biologists are now wrestling.
+But the science of living organisms is only now coming to a growth
+adequate to impress its conceptions upon philosophy. The last half
+century before the present time has witnessed unsuccessful attempts to
+impress biological notions upon the materialism of the seventeenth
+century. However this success be estimated, it is certain that the root
+ideas of the seventeenth century were derived from the school of thought
+which produced Galileo, Huyghens and Newton, and not from the
+physiologists of Padua. One unsolved problem of thought, so far as it
+derives from this period, is to be formulated thus: Given configurations
+of matter with locomotion in space as assigned by physical laws, to
+account for living organisms.
+
+My discussion of the epoch will be best introduced by a quotation from
+Francis Bacon, which forms the opening of Section (or ‘Century’) IX of
+his _Natural History_, I mean his _Silva Silvarum_. We are told in the
+contemporary memoir by his chaplain, Dr. Rawley, that this work was
+composed in the last five years of his life, so it must be dated between
+1620 and 1626. The quotation runs thus:
+
+“It is certain that all bodies whatsoever, though they have no sense,
+yet they have perception; for when one body is applied to another, there
+is a kind of election to embrace that which is agreeable, and to exclude
+or expel that which is ingrate; and whether the body be alterant or
+altered, evermore a perception precedeth operation; for else all bodies
+would be like one to another. And sometimes this perception, in some
+kind of bodies, is far more subtile than sense; so that sense is but a
+dull thing in comparison of it: we see a weatherglass will find the
+least difference of the weather in heat or cold, when we find it not.
+And this perception is sometimes at a distance, as well as upon the
+touch; as when the loadstone draweth iron; or flame naphtha of Babylon,
+a great distance off. It is therefore a subject of a very noble enquiry,
+to enquire of the more subtile perceptions; for it is another key to
+open nature, as well as the sense; and sometimes better. And besides, it
+is a principal means of natural divination; for that which in these
+perceptions appeareth early, in the great effects cometh long after.”
+
+There are a great many points of interest about this quotation, some of
+which will emerge into importance in succeeding lectures. In the first
+place, note the careful way in which Bacon discriminates between
+_perception_, or _taking account of_, on the one hand, and _sense_, or
+_cognitive experience_, on the other hand. In this respect Bacon is
+outside the physical line of thought which finally dominated the
+century. Later on, people thought of passive matter which was operated
+on externally by forces. I believe Bacon’s line of thought to have
+expressed a more fundamental truth than do the materialistic concepts
+which were then being shaped as adequate for physics. We are now so used
+to the materialistic way of looking at things, which has been rooted in
+our literature by the genius of the seventeenth century, that it is with
+some difficulty that we understand the possibility of another mode of
+approach to the problems of nature.
+
+In the particular instance of the quotation which I have just made, the
+whole passage and the context in which it is embedded, are permeated
+through and through by the experimental method, that is to say, by
+attention to ‘irreducible and stubborn facts’, and by the inductive
+method of eliciting general laws. Another unsolved problem which has
+been bequeathed to us by the seventeenth century is the rational
+justification of this method of Induction. The explicit realisation of
+the antithesis between the deductive rationalism of the scholastics and
+the inductive observational methods of the moderns must chiefly be
+ascribed to Bacon; though, of course, it was implicit in the mind of
+Galileo and of all the men of science of those times. But Bacon was one
+of the earliest of the whole group, and also had the most direct
+apprehension of the full extent of the intellectual revolution which was
+in progress. Perhaps the man who most completely anticipated both Bacon
+and the whole modern point of view was the artist Leonardo Da Vinci, who
+lived almost exactly a century before Bacon. Leonardo also illustrates
+the theory which I was advancing in my last lecture, that the rise of
+naturalistic art was an important ingredient in the formation of our
+scientific mentality. Indeed, Leonardo was more completely a man of
+science than was Bacon. The practice of naturalistic art is more akin to
+the practice of physics, chemistry and biology than is the practice of
+law. We all remember the saying of Bacon’s contemporary, Harvey, the
+discoverer of the circulation of the blood, that Bacon ‘wrote of science
+like a Lord Chancellor.’ But at the beginning of the modern period Da
+Vinci and Bacon stand together as illustrating the various strains which
+have combined to form the modern world, namely, legal mentality and the
+patient observational habits of the naturalistic artists.
+
+In the passage which I have quoted from Bacon’s writings there is no
+explicit mention of the method of inductive reasoning. It is unnecessary
+for me to prove to you by any quotations that the enforcement of the
+importance of this method, and of the importance, to the welfare of
+mankind, of the secrets of nature to be thus discovered, was one of the
+main themes to which Bacon devoted himself in his writings. Induction
+has proved to be a somewhat more complex process than Bacon anticipated.
+He had in his mind the belief that with a sufficient care in the
+collection of instances the general law would stand out of itself. We
+know now, and probably Harvey knew then, that this is a very inadequate
+account of the processes which issue in scientific generalisations. But
+when you have made all the requisite deductions, Bacon remains as one of
+the great builders who constructed the mind of the modern world.
+
+The special difficulties raised by induction emerged in the eighteenth
+century, as the result of Hume’s criticism. But Bacon was one of the
+prophets of the historical revolt, which deserted the method of
+unrelieved rationalism, and rushed into the other extreme of basing all
+fruitful knowledge upon inference from particular occasions in the past
+to particular occasions in the future. I do not wish to throw any doubt
+upon the validity of induction, when it has been properly guarded. My
+point is, that the very baffling task of applying reason to elicit the
+general characteristics of the immediate occasion, as set before us in
+direct cognition, is a necessary preliminary, if we are to justify
+induction; unless indeed we are content to base it upon our vague
+instinct that of course it is all right. Either there is something about
+the immediate occasion which affords knowledge of the past and the
+future, or we are reduced to utter scepticism as to memory and
+induction. It is impossible to over-emphasise the point that the key to
+the process of induction, as used either in science or in our ordinary
+life, is to be found in the right understanding of the immediate
+occasion of knowledge in its full concreteness. It is in respect to our
+grasp of the character of these occasions in their concreteness that the
+modern developments of physiology and of psychology are of critical
+importance. I shall illustrate this point in my subsequent lectures. We
+find ourselves amid insoluble difficulties when we substitute for this
+concrete occasion a mere abstract in which we only consider material
+objects in a flux of configurations in time and space. It is quite
+obvious that such objects can tell us only that they are where they are.
+
+Accordingly, we must recur to the method of the school-divinity as
+explained by the Italian medievalists whom I quoted in the first
+lecture. We must observe the immediate occasion, and _use reason_ to
+elicit a general description of its nature. Induction presupposes
+metaphysics. In other words, it rests upon an antecedent rationalism.
+You cannot have a rational justification for your appeal to history till
+your metaphysics has assured you that there _is_ a history to appeal to;
+and likewise your conjectures as to the future presuppose some basis of
+knowledge that there _is_ a future already subjected to some
+determinations. The difficulty is to make sense of either of these
+ideas. But unless you have done so, you have made nonsense of induction.
+
+You will observe that I do not hold Induction to be in its essence the
+derivation of general laws. It is the divination of some characteristics
+of a particular future from the known characteristics of a particular
+past. The wider assumption of general laws holding for all cognisable
+occasions appears a very unsafe addendum to attach to this limited
+knowledge. All we can ask of the present occasion is that it shall
+determine a particular community of occasions, which are in some
+respects mutually qualified by reason of their inclusion within that
+same community. That community of occasions considered in physical
+science is the set of happenings which fit on to each other—as we say—in
+a common space-time, so that we can trace the transitions from one to
+the other. Accordingly, we refer to _the_ common space-time indicated in
+our immediate occasion of knowledge. Inductive reasoning proceeds from
+the particular occasion to the particular community of occasions, and
+from the particular community to relations between particular occasions
+within that community. Until we have taken into account other scientific
+concepts, it is impossible to carry the discussion of induction further
+than this preliminary conclusion.
+
+The third point to notice about this quotation from Bacon is the purely
+qualitative character of the statements made in it. In this respect
+Bacon completely missed the tonality which lay behind the success of
+seventeenth century science. Science was becoming, and has remained,
+primarily quantitative. Search for measurable elements among your
+phenomena, and then search for relations between these measures of
+physical quantities. Bacon ignores this rule of science. For example, in
+the quotation given he speaks of action at a distance; but he is
+thinking qualitatively and not quantitatively. We cannot ask that he
+should anticipate his younger contemporary Galileo, or his distant
+successor Newton. But he gives no hint that there should be a search for
+quantities. Perhaps he was misled by the current logical doctrines which
+had come down from Aristotle. For, in effect, these doctrines said to
+the physicist ‘_classify_’ when they should have said ‘_measure_.’
+
+By the end of the century physics had been founded on a satisfactory
+basis of measurement. The final and adequate exposition was given by
+Newton. The common measurable element of _mass_ was discerned as
+characterising all bodies in different amounts. Bodies which are
+apparently identical in substance, shape, and size have very
+approximately the same mass: the closer the identity, the nearer the
+equality. The force acting on a body, whether by touch or by action at a
+distance, was [in effect] defined as being equal to the mass of the body
+multiplied by the rate of change of the body’s velocity, so far as this
+rate of change is produced by that force. In this way the force is
+discerned by its effect on the motion of the body. The question now
+arises whether this conception of the magnitude of a force leads to the
+discovery of simple quantitative laws involving the alternative
+determination of forces by circumstances of the configuration of
+substances and of their physical characters. The Newtonian conception
+has been brilliantly successful in surviving this test throughout the
+whole modern period. Its first triumph was the law of gravitation. Its
+cumulative triumph has been the whole development of dynamical
+astronomy, of engineering, and of physics.
+
+This subject of the formation of the three laws of motion and of the law
+of gravitation deserves critical attention. The whole development of
+thought occupied exactly two generations. It commenced with Galileo and
+ended with Newton’s _Principia_; and Newton was born in the year that
+Galileo died. Also the lives of Descartes and Huyghens fall within the
+period occupied by these great terminal figures. The issue of the
+combined labours of these four men has some right to be considered as
+the greatest single intellectual success which mankind has achieved. In
+estimating its size, we must consider the completeness of its range. It
+constructs for us a vision of the material universe, and it enables us
+to calculate the minutest detail of a particular occurrence. Galileo
+took the first step in hitting on the right line of thought. He noted
+that the critical point to attend to was not the motion of bodies but
+the changes of their motions. Galileo’s discovery is formularised by
+Newton in his first law of motion:—“Every body continues in its state of
+rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line, except so far as it may
+be compelled by force to change that state.”
+
+This formula contains the repudiation of a belief which had blocked the
+progress of physics for two thousand years. It also deals with a
+fundamental concept which is essential to scientific theory; I mean, the
+concept of an ideally isolated system. This conception embodies a
+fundamental character of things, without which science, or indeed any
+knowledge on the part of finite intellects, would be impossible. The
+‘isolated’ system is not a solipsist system, apart from which there
+would be nonentity. It is isolated as within the universe. This means
+that there are truths respecting this system which require reference
+only to the remainder of things by way of a uniform systematic scheme of
+relationships. Thus the conception of an isolated system is not the
+conception of substantial independence from the remainder of things, but
+of freedom from casual contingent dependence upon detailed items within
+the rest of the universe. Further, this freedom from casual dependence
+is required only in respect to certain abstract characteristics which
+attach to the isolated system, and not in respect to the system in its
+full concreteness.
+
+The first law of motion asks what is to be said of a dynamically
+isolated system so far as concerns its motion as a whole, abstracting
+from its orientation and its internal arrangement of parts. Aristotle
+said that you must conceive such a system to be at rest. Galileo added
+that the state of rest is only a particular case, and that the general
+statement is ‘either in a state of rest, or of uniform motion in a
+straight line.’ Accordingly, an Aristotelean would conceive the forces
+arising from the reaction of alien bodies as being quantitatively
+measurable in terms of the velocity they sustain, and as directively
+determined by the direction of that velocity; while the Galilean would
+direct attention to the magnitude of the acceleration and to its
+direction. This difference is illustrated by contrasting Kepler and
+Newton. They both speculated as to the forces sustaining the planets in
+their orbits. Kepler looked for tangential forces pushing the planets
+along, whereas Newton looked for radial forces diverting the directions
+of the planets’ motions.
+
+Instead of dwelling upon the mistake which Aristotle made, it is more
+profitable to emphasise the justification which he had for it, if we
+consider the obvious facts of our experience. All the motions which
+enter into our normal everyday experience cease unless they are
+evidently sustained from the outside. Apparently, therefore, the sound
+empiricist must devote his attention to this question of the sustenance
+of motion. We here hit upon one of the dangers of unimaginative
+empiricism. The seventeenth century exhibits another example of this
+same danger; and, of all people in the world, Newton fell into it.
+Huyghens had produced the wave theory of light. But this theory failed
+to account for the most obvious facts about light as in our ordinary
+experience, namely, that shadows cast by obstructing objects are defined
+by rectilinear rays. Accordingly, Newton rejected this theory and
+adopted the corpuscular theory which completely explained shadows. Since
+then both theories have had their periods of triumph. At the present
+moment the scientific world is seeking for a combination of the two.
+These examples illustrate the danger of refusing to entertain an idea
+because of its failure to explain one of the most obvious facts in the
+subject matter in question. If you have had your attention directed to
+the novelties in thought in your own lifetime, you will have observed
+that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness
+when they are first produced.
+
+Returning to the laws of motion, it is noticeable that no reason was
+produced in the seventeenth century for the Galilean as distinct from
+the Aristotelian position. It was an ultimate fact. When in the course
+of these lectures we come to the modern period, we shall see that the
+theory of relativity throws complete light on this question; but only by
+rearranging our whole ideas as to space and time.
+
+It remained for Newton to direct attention to _mass_ as a physical
+quantity inherent in the nature of a material body. Mass remained
+permanent during all changes of motion. But the proof of the permanence
+of mass amid chemical transformations had to wait for Lavoisier, a
+century later. Newton’s next task was to find some estimate of the
+magnitude of the alien force in terms of the mass of the body and of its
+acceleration. He here had a stroke of luck. For, from the point of view
+of a mathematician, the simplest possible law, namely the product of the
+two, proved to be the successful one. Again the modern relativity theory
+modifies this extreme simplicity. But luckily for science the delicate
+experiments of the physicists of to-day were not then known, or even
+possible. Accordingly, the world was given the two centuries which it
+required in order to digest Newton’s laws of motion.
+
+Having regard to this triumph, can we wonder that scientists placed
+their ultimate principles upon a materialistic basis, and thereafter
+ceased to worry about philosophy? We shall grasp the course of thought,
+if we understand exactly what this basis is, and what difficulties it
+finally involves. When you are criticising the philosophy of an epoch,
+do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions
+which its exponents feel it necessary explicitly to defend. There will
+be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant
+systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions
+appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because
+no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these
+assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are
+possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the
+epoch.
+
+One such assumption underlies the whole philosophy of nature during the
+modern period. It is embodied in the conception which is supposed to
+express the most concrete aspect of nature. The Ionian philosophers
+asked, What is nature made of? The answer is couched in terms of stuff,
+or matter, or material,—the particular name chosen is indifferent—which
+has the property of simple location in space and time, or, if you adopt
+the more modern ideas, in space-time. What I mean by matter, or
+material, is anything which has this property of _simple location_. By
+simple location I mean one major characteristic which refers equally
+both to space and to time, and other minor characteristics which are
+diverse as between space and time.
+
+The characteristic common both to space and time is that material can be
+said to be _here_ in space and _here_ in time, or _here_ in space-time,
+in a perfectly definite sense which does not require for its explanation
+any reference to other regions of space-time. Curiously enough this
+character of simple location holds whether we look on a region of
+space-time as determined absolutely or relatively. For if a region is
+merely a way of indicating a certain set of relations to other entities,
+then this characteristic, which I call simple location, is that material
+can be said to have just these relations of position to the other
+entities without requiring for its explanation any reference to other
+regions constituted by analogous relations of position to the same
+entities. In fact, as soon as you have settled, however you do settle,
+what you mean by a definite place in space-time, you can adequately
+state the relation of a particular material body to space-time by saying
+that it is just there, in that place; and, so far as simple location is
+concerned, there is nothing more to be said on the subject.
+
+There are, however, some subordinate explanations to be made which bring
+in the minor characteristics which I have already mentioned. First, as
+regards time, if material has existed during any period, it has equally
+been in existence during any portion of that period. In other words,
+dividing the time does not divide the material. Secondly, in respect to
+space, dividing the volume does divide the material. Accordingly, if
+material exists throughout a volume, there will be less of that material
+distributed through any definite half of that volume. It is from this
+property that there arises our notion of density at a point of space.
+Anyone who talks about density is not assimilating time and space to the
+extent that some extremists of the modern school of relativists very
+rashly desire. For the division of time functions, in respect to
+material, quite differently from the division of space.
+
+Furthermore, this fact that the material is indifferent to the division
+of time leads to the conclusion that the lapse of time is an accident,
+rather than of the essence, of the material. The material is fully
+itself in any sub-period however short. Thus the transition of time has
+nothing to do with the character of the material. The material is
+equally itself at an instant of time. Here an instant of time is
+conceived as in itself without transition, since the temporal transition
+is the succession of instants.
+
+The answer, therefore, which the seventeenth century gave to the ancient
+question of the Ionian thinkers, ‘What is the world made of?’ was that
+the world is a succession of instantaneous configurations of matter,—or
+of material, if you wish to include stuff more subtle than ordinary
+matter, the ether for example.
+
+We cannot wonder that science rested content with this assumption as to
+the fundamental elements of nature. The great forces of nature, such as
+gravitation, were entirely determined by the configurations of masses.
+Thus the configurations determined their own changes, so that the circle
+of scientific thought was completely closed. This is the famous
+mechanistic theory of nature, which has reigned supreme ever since the
+seventeenth century. It is the orthodox creed of physical science.
+Furthermore, the creed justified itself by the pragmatic test. It
+worked. Physicists took no more interest in philosophy. They emphasized
+the anti-rationalism of the Historical Revolt. But the difficulties of
+this theory of materialistic mechanism very soon became apparent. The
+history of thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is
+governed by the fact that the world had got hold of a general idea which
+it could neither live with nor live without.
+
+This simple location of instantaneous material configurations is what
+Bergson has protested against, so far as it concerns time and so far as
+it is taken to be the fundamental fact of concrete nature. He calls it a
+distortion of nature due to the intellectual ‘spatialisation’ of things.
+I agree with Bergson in his protest: but I do not agree that such
+distortion is a vice necessary to the intellectual apprehension of
+nature. I shall in subsequent lectures endeavour to show that this
+spatialisation is the expression of more concrete facts under the guise
+of very abstract logical constructions. There is an error; but it is
+merely the accidental error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete.
+It is an example of what I will call the ‘Fallacy of Misplaced
+Concreteness.’ This fallacy is the occasion of great confusion in
+philosophy. It is not necessary for the intellect to fall into the trap,
+though in this example there has been a very general tendency to do so.
+
+It is at once evident that the concept of simple location is going to
+make great difficulties for induction. For, if in the location of
+configurations of matter throughout a stretch of time there is no
+inherent reference to any other times, past or future, it immediately
+follows that nature within any period does not refer to nature at any
+other period. Accordingly, induction is not based on anything which can
+be observed as inherent in nature. Thus we cannot look to nature for the
+justification of our belief in any law such as the law of gravitation.
+In other words, the order of nature cannot be justified by the mere
+observation of nature. For there is nothing in the present fact which
+inherently refers either to the past or to the future. It looks,
+therefore, as though memory, as well as induction, would fail to find
+any justification within nature itself.
+
+I have been anticipating the course of future thought, and have been
+repeating Hume’s argument. This train of thought follows so immediately
+from the consideration of simple location, that we cannot wait for the
+eighteenth century before considering it. The only wonder is that the
+world did in fact wait for Hume before noting the difficulty. Also it
+illustrates the anti-rationalism of the scientific public that, when
+Hume did appear, it was only the religious implications of his
+philosophy which attracted attention. This was because the clergy were
+in principle rationalists, whereas the men of science were content with
+a simple faith in the order of nature. Hume himself remarks, no doubt
+scoffingly, ‘Our holy religion is founded on faith.’ This attitude
+satisfied the Royal Society but not the Church. It also satisfied Hume
+and has satisfied subsequent empiricists.
+
+There is another presupposition of thought which must be put beside the
+theory of simple location. I mean the two correlative categories of
+Substance and quality. There is, however this difference. There were
+different theories as to the adequate description of the status of
+space. But whatever its status, no one had any doubt but that the
+connection with space enjoyed by entities, which are said to be in
+space, is that of simple location. We may put this shortly by saying
+that it was tacitly assumed that space is the locus of simple locations.
+Whatever is in space is _simpliciter_ in some definite portion of space.
+But in respect to substance and quality the leading minds of the
+seventeenth century were definitely perplexed; though, with their usual
+genius, they at once constructed a theory which was adequate for their
+immediate purposes.
+
+Of course, substance and quality, as well as simple location, are the
+most natural ideas for the human mind. It is the way in which we think
+of things, and without these ways of thinking we could not get our ideas
+straight for daily use. There is no doubt about this. The only question
+is, How concretely are we thinking when we consider nature under these
+conceptions? My point will be, that we are presenting ourselves with
+simplified editions of immediate matters of fact. When we examine the
+primary elements of these simplified editions, we shall find that they
+are in truth only to be justified as being elaborate logical
+constructions of a high degree of abstraction. Of course, as a point of
+individual psychology, we get at the ideas by the rough and ready method
+of suppressing what appear to be irrelevant details. But when we attempt
+to justify this suppression of irrelevance, we find that, though there
+are entities left corresponding to the entities we talk about, yet these
+entities are of a high degree of abstraction.
+
+Thus I hold that substance and quality afford another instance of the
+fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Let us consider how the notions of
+substance and quality arise. We observe an object as an entity with
+certain characteristics. Furthermore, each individual entity is
+apprehended through its characteristics. For example, we observe a body;
+there is something about it which we note. Perhaps, it is hard, and
+blue, and round, and noisy. We observe something which possesses these
+qualities: apart from these qualities we do not observe anything at all.
+Accordingly, the entity is the substratum, or substance, of which we
+predicate qualities. Some of the qualities are essential, so that apart
+from them the entity would not be itself; while other qualities are
+accidental and changeable. In respect to material bodies, the qualities
+of having a quantitative mass, and of simple location somewhere, were
+held by John Locke at the close of the seventeenth century to be
+essential qualities. Of course, the location was changeable, and the
+unchangeability of mass was merely an experimental fact except for some
+extremists.
+
+So far, so good. But when we pass to blueness and noisiness a new
+situation has to be faced. In the first place, the body may not be
+always blue, or noisy. We have already allowed for this by our theory of
+accidental qualities, which for the moment we may accept as adequate.
+But in the second place, the seventeenth century exposed a real
+difficulty. The great physicists elaborated transmission theories of
+light and sound, based upon their materialistic views of nature. There
+were two hypotheses as to light: either it was transmitted by the
+vibratory waves of a materialistic ether, or—according to Newton—it was
+transmitted by the motion of incredibly small corpuscles of some subtle
+matter. We all know that the wave theory of Huyghens held the field
+during the nineteenth century, and that at present physicists are
+endeavouring to explain some obscure circumstances attending radiation
+by a combination of both theories. But whatever theory you choose, there
+is no light or colour as a fact in external nature. There is merely
+motion of material. Again, when the light enters your eyes and falls on
+the retina, there is merely motion of material. Then your nerves are
+affected and your brain is affected, and again this is merely motion of
+material. The same line of argument holds for sound, substituting waves
+in the air for waves in the ether, and ears for eyes.
+
+We then ask in what sense are blueness and noisiness qualities of the
+body. By analogous reasoning, we also ask in what sense is its scent a
+quality of the rose.
+
+Galileo considered this question, and at once pointed out that, apart
+from eyes, ears, or noses, there would be no colours, sounds, or smells.
+Descartes and Locke elaborated a theory of primary and secondary
+qualities. For example, Descartes in his ‘Sixth Meditation’ says:[4]
+“And indeed, as I perceive different sorts of colours, sounds, odours,
+tastes, heat, hardness, etc., I safely conclude that there are in the
+bodies from which the diverse perceptions of the senses proceed, certain
+varieties corresponding to them, although, perhaps, not in reality like
+them;....”
+
+Footnote 4:
+
+  Translation by Professor John Veitch.
+
+Also in his _Principles of Philosophy_, he says: “That by our senses we
+know nothing of external objects beyond their figure [or situation],
+magnitude, and motion.”
+
+Locke, writing with a knowledge of Newtonian dynamics, places mass among
+the primary qualities of bodies. In short, he elaborates a theory of
+primary and secondary qualities in accordance with the state of physical
+science at the close of the seventeenth century. The primary qualities
+are the essential qualities of substances whose spatio-temporal
+relationships constitute nature. The orderliness of these relationships
+constitutes nature. The orderliness of these relationships constitutes
+the order of nature. The occurrences of nature are in some way
+apprehended by minds, which are associated with living bodies.
+Primarily, the mental apprehension is aroused by the occurrences in
+certain parts of the correlated body, the occurrences in the brain, for
+instance. But the mind in apprehending also experiences sensations
+which, properly speaking, are qualities of the mind alone. These
+sensations are projected by the mind so as to clothe appropriate bodies
+in external nature. Thus the bodies are perceived as with qualities
+which in reality do not belong to them, qualities which in fact are
+purely the offspring of the mind. 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. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless,
+colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly.
+
+However you disguise it, this is the practical outcome of the
+characteristic scientific philosophy which closed the seventeenth
+century.
+
+In the first place, we must note its astounding efficiency as a system
+of concepts for the organisation of scientific research. In this
+respect, it is fully worthy of the genius of the century which produced
+it. It has held its own as the guiding principle of scientific studies
+ever since. It is still reigning. Every university in the world
+organises itself in accordance with it. No alternative system of
+organising the pursuit of scientific truth has been suggested. It is not
+only reigning, but it is without a rival.
+
+And yet—it is quite unbelievable. This conception of the universe is
+surely framed in terms of high abstractions, and the paradox only arises
+because we have mistaken our abstractions for concrete realities.
+
+No picture, however generalised, of the achievements of scientific
+thought in this century can omit the advance in mathematics. Here as
+elsewhere the genius of the epoch made itself evident. Three great
+Frenchmen, Descartes, Desargues, Pascal, initiated the modern period in
+geometry. Another Frenchman, Fermat, laid the foundations of modern
+analysis, and all but perfected the methods of the differential
+calculus. Newton and Leibniz, between them, actually did create the
+differential calculus as a practical method of mathematical reasoning.
+When the century ended, mathematics as an instrument for application to
+physical problems was well established in something of its modern
+proficiency. Modern pure mathematics, if we except geometry, was in its
+infancy, and had given no signs of the astonishing growth it was to make
+in the nineteenth century. But the mathematical physicist had appeared,
+bringing with him the type of mind which was to rule the scientific
+world in the next century. It was to be the age of ‘Victorious
+Analysis.’
+
+The seventeenth century had finally produced a scheme of scientific
+thought framed by mathematicians, for the use of mathematicians. The
+great characteristic of the mathematical mind is its capacity for
+dealing with abstractions; and for eliciting from them clear-cut
+demonstrative trains of reasoning, entirely satisfactory so long as it
+is those abstractions which you want to think about. The enormous
+success of the scientific abstractions, yielding on the one hand
+_matter_ with its _simple location_ in space and time, and on the other
+hand _mind_, perceiving, suffering, reasoning, but not interfering, has
+foisted onto philosophy the task of accepting them as the most concrete
+rendering of fact.
+
+Thereby, modern philosophy has been ruined. It has oscillated in a
+complex manner between three extremes. There are the dualists, who
+accept matter and mind as on equal basis, and the two varieties of
+monists, those who put mind inside matter, and those who put matter
+inside mind. But this juggling with abstractions can never overcome the
+inherent confusion introduced by the ascription of _misplaced
+concreteness_ to the scientific scheme of the seventeenth century.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER IV
+
+                         THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
+
+
+In so far as the intellectual climates of different epochs can be
+contrasted, the eighteenth century in Europe was the complete antithesis
+to the Middle Ages. The contrast is symbolised by the difference between
+the cathedral of Chartres and the Parisian salons, where D’Alembert
+conversed with Voltaire. The Middle Ages were haunted with the desire to
+rationalise the infinite: the men of the eighteenth century rationalised
+the social life of modern communities, and based their sociological
+theories on an appeal to the facts of nature. The earlier period was the
+age of faith, based upon reason. In the later period, they let sleeping
+dogs lie: it was the age of reason, based upon faith. To illustrate my
+meaning:—St. Anselm would have been distressed if he had failed to find
+a convincing argument for the existence of God, and on this argument he
+based his edifice of faith, whereas Hume based his _Dissertation on the
+Natural History of Religion_ upon his faith in the order of nature. In
+comparing these epochs it is well to remember that reason can err, and
+that faith may be misplaced.
+
+In my previous lecture I traced the evolution, during the seventeenth
+century, of the scheme of scientific ideas which has dominated thought
+ever since. It involves a fundamental duality, with _material_ on the
+one hand, and on the other hand _mind_. In between there lie the
+concepts of life, organism, function, instantaneous reality,
+interaction, order of nature, which collectively form the Achilles heel
+of the whole system.
+
+I also expressed my conviction that if we desired to obtain a more
+fundamental expression of the concrete character of natural fact, the
+element in this scheme which we should first criticise is the concept of
+_simple location_. In view therefore of the importance which this idea
+will assume in these lectures, I will repeat the meaning which I have
+attached to this phrase. To say that a bit of matter has _simple
+location_ means that, in expressing its spatio-temporal relations, it is
+adequate to state that it is where it is, in a definite finite region of
+space, and throughout a definite finite duration of time, apart from any
+essential reference of the relations of that bit of matter to other
+regions of space and to other durations of time. Again, this concept of
+simple location is independent of the controversy between the absolutist
+and the relativist views of space or of time. So long as any theory of
+space, or of time, can give a meaning, either absolute or relative, to
+the idea of a definite region of space, and of a definite duration of
+time, the idea of simple location has a perfectly definite meaning. This
+idea is the very foundation of the seventeenth century scheme of nature.
+Apart from it, the scheme is incapable of expression. I shall argue that
+among the primary elements of nature as apprehended in our immediate
+experience, there is no element whatever which possesses this character
+of simple location. It does not follow, however, that the science of the
+seventeenth century was simply wrong. I hold that by a process of
+constructive abstraction we can arrive at abstractions which are the
+simply-located bits of material, and at other abstractions which are the
+minds included in the scientific scheme. Accordingly, the real error is
+an example of what I have termed: The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.
+
+The advantage of confining attention to a definite group of
+abstractions, is that you confine your thoughts to clear-cut definite
+things, with clear-cut definite relations. Accordingly, if you have a
+logical head, you can deduce a variety of conclusions respecting the
+relationships between these abstract entities. Furthermore, if the
+abstractions are well-founded, that is to say, if they do not abstract
+from everything that is important in experience, the scientific thought
+which confines itself to these abstractions will arrive at a variety of
+important truths relating to our experience of nature. We all know those
+clear-cut trenchant intellects, immovably encased in a hard shell of
+abstractions. They hold you to their abstractions by the sheer grip of
+personality.
+
+The disadvantage of exclusive attention to a group of abstractions,
+however well-founded, is that, by the nature of the case, you have
+abstracted from the remainder of things. In so far as the excluded
+things are important in your experience, your modes of thought are not
+fitted to deal with them. You cannot think without abstractions;
+accordingly, it is of the utmost importance to be vigilant in critically
+revising your _modes_ of abstraction. It is here that philosophy finds
+its niche as essential to the healthy progress of society. It is the
+critic of abstractions. A civilisation which cannot burst through its
+current abstractions is doomed to sterility after a very limited period
+of progress. An active school of philosophy is quite as important for
+the locomotion of ideas, as is an active school of railway engineers for
+the locomotion of fuel.
+
+Sometimes it happens that the service rendered by philosophy is entirely
+obscured by the astonishing success of a scheme of abstractions in
+expressing the dominant interests of an epoch. This is exactly what
+happened during the eighteenth century. _Les philosophes_ were not
+philosophers. They were men of genius, clear-headed and acute, who
+applied the seventeenth century group of scientific abstractions to the
+analysis of the unbounded universe. Their triumph, in respect to the
+circle of ideas mainly interesting to their contemporaries, was
+overwhelming. Whatever did not fit into their scheme was ignored,
+derided, disbelieved. Their hatred of Gothic architecture symbolises
+their lack of sympathy with dim perspectives. It was the age of reason,
+healthy, manly, upstanding reason; but, of one-eyed reason, deficient in
+its vision of depth. We cannot overrate the debt of gratitude which we
+owe to these men. For a thousand years Europe had been a prey to
+intolerant, intolerable visionaries. The common sense of the eighteenth
+century, its grasp of the obvious facts of human suffering, and of the
+obvious demands of human nature, acted on the world like a bath of moral
+cleansing. Voltaire must have the credit, that he hated injustice, he
+hated cruelty, he hated senseless repression, and he hated hocus-pocus.
+Furthermore, when he saw them, he knew them. In these supreme virtues,
+he was typical of his century, on its better side. But if men cannot
+live on bread alone, still less can they do so on disinfectants. The age
+had its limitations; yet we cannot understand the passion with which
+some of its main positions are still defended, especially in the schools
+of science, unless we do full justice to its positive achievements. The
+seventeenth century scheme of concepts was proving a perfect instrument
+for research.
+
+This triumph of materialism was chiefly in the sciences of rational
+dynamics, physics, and chemistry. So far as dynamics and physics were
+concerned, progress was in the form of direct developments of the main
+ideas of the previous epoch. Nothing fundamentally new was introduced,
+but there was an immense detailed development. Special case after
+special case was unravelled. It was as though the very Heavens were
+being opened, on a set plan. In the second half of the century,
+Lavoisier practically founded chemistry on its present basis. He
+introduced into it the principle that no material is lost or gained in
+any chemical transformations. This was the last success of materialistic
+thought, which has not ultimately proved to be double-edged. Chemical
+science now only waited for the atomic theory, in the next century.
+
+In this century the notion of the mechanical explanation of all the
+processes of nature finally hardened into a dogma of science. The notion
+won through on its merits by reason of an almost miraculous series of
+triumphs achieved by the mathematical physicists, culminating in the
+_Méchanique Analytique_ of Lagrange, which was published in 1787.
+Newton’s _Principia_ was published in 1687, so that exactly one hundred
+years separates the two great books. This century contains the first
+period of mathematical physics of the modern type. The publication of
+Clerk Maxwell’s _Electricity and Magnetism_ in 1873 marks the close of
+the second period. Each of these three books introduces new horizons of
+thought affecting everything which comes after them.
+
+In considering the various topics to which mankind has bent its
+systematic thought, it is impossible not to be struck with the unequal
+distribution of ability among the different fields. In almost all
+subjects there are a few outstanding names. For it requires genius to
+create a subject as a distinct topic for thought. But in the case of
+many topics, after a good beginning very relevant to its immediate
+occasion, the subsequent development appears as a weak series of
+flounderings, so that the whole subject gradually loses its grip on the
+evolution of thought. It was far otherwise with mathematical physics.
+The more you study this subject, the more you will find yourself
+astonished by the almost incredible triumphs of intellect which it
+exhibits. The great mathematical physicists of the eighteenth and first
+few years of the nineteenth century, most of them French, are a case in
+point: Maupertuis, Clairaut, D’Alembert, Lagrange, Laplace, Fourier,
+form a series of names, such that each recalls to mind some achievement
+of the first rank. When Carlyle, as the mouthpiece of the subsequent
+Romantic Age, scoffingly terms the period the Age of Victorious
+Analysis, and mocks at Maupertuis as a ‘sublimish gentleman in a white
+periwig,’ he only exhibits the narrow side of the Romanticists whom he
+is then voicing.
+
+It is impossible to explain intelligently, in a short time and without
+technicalities, the details of the progress made by this school. I will,
+however, endeavour to explain the main point of a joint achievement of
+Maupertuis and Lagrange. Their results, in conjunction with some
+subsequent mathematical methods due to two great German mathematicians
+of the first half of the nineteenth century, Gauss and Riemann, have
+recently proved themselves to be the preparatory work necessary for the
+new ideas which Herz and Einstein have introduced into mathematical
+physics. Also they inspired some of the best ideas in Clerk Maxwell’s
+treatise, already mentioned in this lecture.
+
+They aimed at discovering something more fundamental and more general
+than Newton’s laws of motion which were discussed in the previous
+lecture. They wanted to find some wider ideas, and in the case of
+Lagrange some more general means of mathematical exposition. It was an
+ambitious enterprise, and they were completely successful. Maupertuis
+lived in the first half of the eighteenth century, and Lagrange’s active
+life lay in its second half. We find in Maupertuis a tinge of the
+theologic age which preceded his birth. He started with the idea that
+the whole path of a material particle between any limits of time must
+achieve some perfection worthy of the providence of God. There are two
+points of interest in this motive principle. In the first place, it
+illustrates the thesis which I was urging in my first lecture that the
+way in which the medieval church had impressed on Europe the notion of
+the detailed providence of a rational personal God was one of the
+factors by which the trust in the order of nature had been generated. In
+the second place, though we are now all convinced that such modes of
+thought are of no direct use in detailed scientific enquiry, Maupertuis’
+success in this particular case shows that almost any idea which jogs
+you out of your current abstractions may be better than nothing. In the
+present case what the idea in question did for Maupertuis was to lead
+him to enquire what general property of the path as a whole could be
+deduced from Newton’s laws of motion. Undoubtedly this was a very
+sensible procedure whatever one’s theological notions. Also his general
+idea led him to conceive that the property found would be a quantitative
+sum, such that any slight deviation from the path would increase it. In
+this supposition he was generalising Newton’s first law of motion. For
+an isolated particle takes the shortest route with uniform velocity. So
+Maupertuis conjectured that a particle travelling through a field of
+force would realise the least possible amount of some quantity. He
+discovered such a quantity and called it the integral action between the
+time limits considered. In modern phraseology it is the sum through
+successive small lapses of time of the difference between the kinetic
+and potential energies of the particle at each successive instant. This
+action, therefore, has to do with the interchange between the energy
+arising from motion and the energy arising from position. Maupertuis had
+discovered the famous theorem of least action. Maupertuis was not quite
+of the first rank in comparison with such a man as Lagrange. In his
+hands and in those of his immediate successors, his principle did not
+assume any dominating importance. Lagrange put the same question on a
+wider basis so as to make its answer relevant to actual procedure in the
+development of dynamics. His Principle of Virtual Work as applied to
+systems in motion is in effect Maupertuis’ principle conceived as
+applying at each instant of the path of the system. But Lagrange saw
+further than Maupertuis. He grasped that he had gained a method of
+stating dynamical truths in a way which is perfectly indifferent to the
+particular methods of measurement employed in fixing the positions of
+the various parts of the system. Accordingly, he went on to deduce
+equations of motion which are equally applicable whatever quantitative
+measurements have been made, provided that they are adequate to fix
+positions. The beauty and almost divine simplicity of these equations is
+such that these formulae are worthy to rank with those mysterious
+symbols which in ancient times were held directly to indicate the
+Supreme Reason at the base of all things. Later Herz—inventor of
+electromagnetic waves—based mechanics on the idea of every particle
+traversing the shortest path open to it under the circumstances
+constraining its motion; and finally Einstein, by the use of the
+geometrical theories of Gauss and Riemann, showed that these
+circumstances could be construed as being inherent in the character of
+space-time itself. Such, in barest outline, is the story of dynamics
+from Galileo to Einstein.
+
+Meanwhile Galvani and Volta lived and made their electric discoveries;
+and the biological sciences slowly gathered their material, but still
+waited for dominating ideas. Psychology, also, was beginning to
+disengage itself from its dependence on general philosophy. This
+independent growth of psychology was the ultimate result of its
+invocation by John Locke as a critic of metaphysical licence. All the
+sciences dealing with life were still in an elementary observational
+stage, in which classification and direct description were dominant. So
+far the scheme of abstractions was adequate to the occasion.
+
+In the realm of practice, the age which produced enlightened rulers,
+such as the Emperor Joseph of the House of Hapsburg, Frederick the
+Great, Walpole, the great Lord Chatham, George Washington, cannot be
+said to have failed. Especially when to these rulers, it adds the
+invention of parliamentary cabinet government in England, of federal
+presidential government in the United States, and of the humanitarian
+principles of the French Revolution. Also in technology it produced the
+steam-engine, and thereby ushered in a new era of civilisation.
+Undoubtedly, as a practical age the eighteenth century was a success. If
+you had asked one of the wisest and most typical of its ancestors, who
+just saw its commencement, I mean John Locke, what he expected from it,
+he would hardly have pitched his hopes higher than its actual
+achievements.
+
+In developing a criticism of the scientific scheme of the eighteenth
+century, I must first give my main reason for ignoring nineteenth
+century idealism—I am speaking of the philosophic idealism which finds
+the ultimate meaning of reality in mentality that is fully cognitive.
+This idealistic school, as hitherto developed, has been too much
+divorced from the scientific outlook. It has swallowed the scientific
+scheme in its entirety as being the only rendering of the facts of
+nature, and has then explained it as being an idea in the ultimate
+mentality. In the case of absolute idealism, the world of nature is just
+one of the ideas, somehow differentiating the unity of the Absolute: in
+the case of pluralistic idealism involving monadic mentalities, this
+world is the greatest common measure of the various ideas which
+differentiate the various mental unities of the various monads. But,
+however you take it, these idealistic schools have conspicuously failed
+to connect, in any organic fashion, the fact of nature with their
+idealistic philosophies. So far as concerns what will be said in these
+lectures, your ultimate outlook may be realistic or idealistic. My point
+is that a further stage of provisional realism is required in which the
+scientific scheme is recast, and founded upon the ultimate concept of
+_organism_.
+
+In outline, my procedure is to start from the analysis of the status of
+space and of time, or in modern phraseology, the status of space-time.
+There are two characters of either. Things are separated by space, and
+are separated by time: but they are also together in space, and together
+in time, even if they be not contemporaneous. I will call these
+characters the ‘_separative_’ and the ‘_prehensive_’ characters of
+space-time. There is yet a third character of space-time. Everything
+which is in space receives a definite limitation of some sort, so that
+in a sense it has just that shape which it does have and no other, also
+in some sense it is just in this place and in no other. Analogously for
+time, a thing endures during a certain period, and through no other
+period. I will call this the ‘_modal_’ character of space-time. It is
+evident that the modal character taken by itself gives rise to the idea
+of simple location. But it must be conjoined with the separative and
+prehensive characters.
+
+For simplicity of thought, I will first speak of space only, and will
+afterwards extend the same treatment to time.
+
+The volume is the most concrete element of space. But the separative
+character of space, analyses a volume into sub-volumes, and so on
+indefinitely. Accordingly, taking the separative character in isolation,
+we should infer that a volume is a mere multiplicity of non-voluminous
+elements, of points in fact. But it is the unity of volume which is the
+ultimate fact of experience, for example, the voluminous space of this
+hall. This hall as a mere multiplicity of points is a construction of
+the logical imagination.
+
+Accordingly, the prime fact is the prehensive unity of volume, and this
+unity is mitigated or limited by the separated unities of the
+innumerable contained parts. We have a prehensive unity, which is yet
+held apart as an aggregate of contained parts. But the prehensive unity
+of the volume is not the unity of a mere logical aggregate of parts. The
+parts form an ordered aggregate, in the sense that each part is
+something from the standpoint of every other part, and also from the
+same standpoint every other part is something in relation to it. Thus if
+A and B and C are volumes of space, B has an aspect from the standpoint
+of A, and so has C, and so has the relationship of B and C. This aspect
+of B from A is of the essence of A. The volumes of space have no
+independent existence. They are only entities as within the totality;
+you cannot extract them from their environment without destruction of
+their very essence. Accordingly, I will say that the aspect of B from A
+is the _mode_ in which B enters into the composition of A. This is the
+modal character of space, that the prehensive unity of A is the
+prehension into unity of the aspects of all other volumes from the
+standpoint of A. The shape of a volume is the formula from which the
+totality of its aspects can be derived. Thus the shape of a volume is
+more abstract than its aspects. It is evident that I can use Leibniz’s
+language, and say that every volume mirrors in itself every other volume
+in space.
+
+Exactly analogous considerations hold with respect to durations in time.
+An instant of time, without duration, is an imaginative logical
+construction. Also each duration of time mirrors in itself all temporal
+durations.
+
+But in two ways I have introduced a false simplicity. In the first
+place, I should have conjoined space and time, and conducted my
+explanation in respect to four-dimensional regions of space-time. I have
+nothing to add in the way of explanation. In your minds, substitute such
+four-dimensional regions for the spatial volumes of the previous
+explanations.
+
+Secondly, my explanation has involved itself in a vicious circle. For I
+have made the prehensive unity of the region A to consist of the
+prehensive unification of the modal presences in A of other regions.
+This difficulty arises because space-time cannot in reality be
+considered as a self-subsistent entity. It is an abstraction, and its
+explanation requires reference to that from which it has been extracted.
+Space-time is the specification of certain general characters of events
+and of their mutual ordering. This recurrence to concrete fact brings me
+back to the eighteenth century, and indeed to Francis Bacon in the
+seventeenth century. We have to consider the development in those
+epochs, of the criticism of the reigning scientific scheme.
+
+No epoch is homogeneous; whatever you may have assigned as the dominant
+note of a considerable period, it will always be possible to produce
+men, and great men, belonging to the same time, who exhibit themselves
+as antagonistic to the tone of their age. This is certainly the case
+with the eighteenth century. For example, the names of John Wesley and
+of Rousseau must have occurred to you while I was drawing the character
+of that time. But I do not want to speak of them, or of others. The man,
+whose ideas I must consider at some length, is Bishop Berkeley. Quite at
+the commencement of the epoch, he made all the right criticisms, at
+least in principle. It would be untrue to say that he produced no
+effect. He was a famous man. The wife of George II was one of the few
+queens who, in any country, have been clever enough, and wise enough, to
+patronise learning judiciously; accordingly, Berkeley was made a bishop,
+in days when bishops in Great Britain were relatively far greater men
+than they are now. Also, what was more important than his bishopric,
+Hume studied him, and developed one side of his philosophy in a way
+which might have disturbed the ghost of the great ecclesiastic. Then
+Kant studied Hume. So, to say that Berkeley was uninfluential during the
+century, would certainly be absurd. But all the same, he failed to
+affect the main stream of scientific thought. It flowed on as if he had
+never written. Its general success made it impervious to criticism, then
+and since. The world of science has always remained perfectly satisfied
+with its peculiar abstractions. They work, and that is sufficient for
+it.
+
+The point before us is that this scientific field of thought is now, in
+the twentieth century, too narrow for the concrete facts which are
+before it for analysis. This is true even in physics, and is more
+especially urgent in the biological sciences. Thus, in order to
+understand the difficulties of modern scientific thought and also its
+reactions on the modern world, we should have in our minds some
+conception of a wider field of abstraction, a more concrete analysis,
+which shall stand nearer to the complete concreteness of our intuitive
+experience. Such an analysis should find in itself a niche for the
+concepts of matter and spirit, as abstractions in terms of which much of
+our physical experience can be interpreted. It is in the search for this
+wider basis for scientific thought that Berkeley is so important. He
+launched his criticism shortly after the schools of Newton and Locke had
+completed their work, and laid his finger exactly on the weak spots
+which they had left. I do not propose to consider either the subjective
+idealism which has been derived from him, or the schools of development
+which trace their descent from Hume and Kant respectively. My point will
+be that—whatever the final metaphysics you may adopt—there is another
+line of development embedded in Berkeley, pointing to the analysis which
+we are in search of. Berkeley overlooked it, partly by reason of the
+over-intellectualism of philosophers, and partly by his haste to have
+recourse to an idealism with its objectivity grounded in the mind of
+God. You will remember that I have already stated that the key of the
+problem lies in the notion of simple location. Berkeley, in effect,
+criticises this notion. He also raises the question, What do we mean by
+things being realised in the world of nature?
+
+In Sections 23 and 24 of his _Principles of Human Knowledge_, Berkeley
+gives his answer to this latter question. I will quote some detached
+sentences from those Sections:
+
+“23. But, say you, surely there is nothing easier than for me to imagine
+trees, for instance, in a park, or books existing in a closet, and
+nobody by to perceive them. I answer, you may so, there is no difficulty
+in it; but what is all this, I beseech you, more than framing in your
+mind certain ideas which you call books and trees, and at the same time
+omitting to frame the idea of any one that may perceive them?...”
+
+“When we do our utmost to conceive the existence of external bodies, we
+are all the while only contemplating our own ideas. But the mind _taking
+no notice of itself_, is deluded to think it can and does conceive
+bodies existing unthought of or without the mind, though at the same
+time they are apprehended by or exist in itself....”
+
+“24. It is very obvious, upon the least inquiry into our thoughts, to
+know whether it be possible for us to understand what is meant by the
+_absolute existence of sensible objects in themselves, or without the
+mind_. To me it is evident those words mark out either a direct
+contradiction, or else nothing at all....”
+
+Again there is a very remarkable passage in Section 10, of the fourth
+Dialogue of Berkeley’s _Alciphron_. I have already quoted it, at greater
+length, in my _Principles of Natural Knowledge_:
+
+“_Euphranor._ Tell me, Alciphron, can you discern the doors, window and
+battlements of that same castle?
+
+_Alciphron._ I cannot. At this distance it seems only a small round
+tower.
+
+_Euph._ But I, who have been at it, know that it is no small round
+tower, but a large square building with battlements and turrets, which
+it seems you do not see.
+
+_Alc_. What will you infer from thence?
+
+_Euph._ I would infer that the very object which you strictly and
+properly perceive by sight is not that thing which is several miles
+distant.
+
+_Alc._ Why so?
+
+_Euph._ Because a little round object is one thing, and a great square
+object is another. Is it not so?...”
+
+Some analogous examples concerning a planet and a cloud are then cited
+in the dialogue, and this passage finally concludes with:
+
+“_Euphranor._ Is it not plain, therefore, that neither the castle, the
+planet, nor the cloud, _which you see here_, are those real ones which
+you suppose exist at a distance?”
+
+It is made explicit in the first passage, already quoted, that Berkeley
+himself adopts an extreme idealistic interpretation. For him mind is the
+only absolute reality, and the unity of nature is the unity of ideas in
+the mind of God. Personally, I think that Berkeley’s solution of the
+metaphysical problem raises difficulties not less than those which he
+points out as arising from a realistic interpretation of the scientific
+scheme. There is, however, another possible line of thought, which
+enables us to adopt anyhow an attitude of provisional realism, and to
+widen the scientific scheme in a way which is useful for science itself.
+
+I recur to the passage from Francis Bacon’s _Natural History_, already
+quoted in the previous lecture:
+
+“It is certain that all bodies whatsoever, though they have no sense,
+yet they have perception: ... and whether the body be alterant or
+altered, evermore a perception precedeth operation; for else all bodies
+would be alike one to another....”
+
+Also in the previous lecture I construed _perception_ (as used by Bacon)
+as meaning _taking account_ of the essential character of the thing
+perceived, and I construed _sense_ as meaning _cognition_. We certainly
+do take account of things of which at the time we have no explicit
+cognition. We can even have a cognitive memory of the taking account,
+without having had a contemporaneous cognition. Also, as Bacon points
+out by his statement, “... for else all bodies would be alike one to
+another,” it is evidently some element of the essential character which
+we take account of, namely something on which diversity is founded and
+not mere bare logical diversity.
+
+The word ‘_perceive_’ is, in our common usage, shot through and through
+with the notion of cognitive apprehension. So is the word
+‘_apprehension_’, even with the adjective _cognitive_ omitted. I will
+use the word ‘_prehension_’ for _uncognitive apprehension_: by this I
+mean _apprehension_ which may or or may not be cognitive. Now take
+Euphranor’s last remark:
+
+“Is it not plain, therefore, that neither the castle, the planet, nor
+the cloud, _which you see here_, are those real ones which you suppose
+exist at distance?” Accordingly, there is a prehension, _here_ in this
+place, of things which have a reference to _other_ places.
+
+Now go back to Berkeley’s sentences, quoted from his _Principles of
+Human Knowledge_. He contends that what constitutes the realisation of
+natural entities is the being perceived within the unity of mind.
+
+We can substitute the concept, that the realisation is a gathering of
+things into the unity of a prehension; and that what is thereby realised
+is the prehension, and not the things. This unity of a prehension
+defines itself as a _here_ and a _now_, and the things so gathered into
+the grasped unity have essential reference to other places and other
+times. For Berkeley’s _mind_, I substitute a process of prehensive
+unification. In order to make intelligible this concept of the
+progressive realisation of natural occurrences, considerable expansion
+is required, and confrontation with its actual implications in terms of
+concrete experience. This will be the task of the subsequent lectures.
+In the first place, note that the idea of simple location has gone. The
+things which are grasped into a realised unity, here and now, are not
+the castle, the cloud, and the planet simply in themselves; but they are
+the castle, the cloud, and the planet from the standpoint, in space and
+time, of the prehensive unification. In other words, it is the
+perspective of the castle over there from the standpoint of the
+unification here. It is, therefore, aspects of the castle, the cloud,
+and the planet which are grasped into unity here. You will remember that
+the idea of perspectives is quite familiar in philosophy. It was
+introduced by Leibniz, in the notion of his monads mirroring
+perspectives of the universe. I am using the same notion, only I am
+toning down his monads into the unified events in space and time. In
+some ways, there is a greater analogy with Spinoza’s modes; that is why
+I use the terms ‘_mode_’ and ‘_modal_.’ In the analogy with Spinoza, his
+one substance is for me the one underlying activity of realisation
+individualising itself in an interlocked plurality of modes. Thus,
+concrete fact is process. Its primary analysis is into underlying
+activity of prehension, and into realised prehensive events. Each event
+is an individual matter of fact issuing from an individualisation of the
+substrate activity. But individualisation does not mean substantial
+independence.
+
+An entity of which we become aware in sense perception is the terminus
+of our act of perception. I will call such an entity, a
+‘_sense-object_’. For example, green of a definite shade is a
+sense-object; so is a sound of definite quality and pitch; and so is a
+definite scent; and a definite quality of touch. The way in which such
+an entity is related to space during a definite lapse of time is
+complex. I will say that a sense-object has ‘_ingression_’ into
+space-time. The cognitive perception of a sense-object is the awareness
+of the prehensive unification (into a standpoint A) of various modes of
+various sense-objects, including the sense-object in question. The
+standpoint A is, of course, a region of space-time; that is to say, it
+is a volume of space through a duration of time. But as one entity, this
+standpoint is a unit of realised experience. A mode of a sense-object at
+A (as abstracted from the sense-object whose relationship to A the mode
+is conditioning) is the aspect from A of some other region B. Thus the
+sense-object is present in A with the mode of location in B. Thus if
+green be the sense-object in question, green is not simply at A where it
+is being perceived, nor is it simply at B where it is perceived as
+located; but it is present at A with the mode of location in B. There is
+no particular mystery about this. You have only got to look into a
+mirror and to see the image in it of some green leaves behind your back.
+For you at A there will be green; but not green simply at A where you
+are. The green at A will be green with the mode of having location at
+the image of the leaf behind the mirror. Then turn round and look at the
+leaf. You are now perceiving the green in the same way as you did
+before, except that now the green has the mode of being located in the
+actual leaf. I am merely describing what we do perceive: we are aware of
+green as being one element in a prehensive unification of sense-objects;
+each sense-object, and among them green, having its particular mode,
+which is expressible as location elsewhere. There are various types of
+modal location. For example, sound is voluminous: it fills a hall, and
+so sometimes does diffused colour. But the modal location of a colour
+may be that of being the remote boundary of a volume, as for example the
+colours on the walls of a room. Thus primarily space-time is the locus
+of the modal ingression of sense-objects. This is the reason why space
+and time (if for simplicity we disjoin them) are given in their
+entireties. For each volume of space, or each lapse of time, includes in
+its essence aspects of all volumes of space, or of all lapses of time.
+The difficulties of philosophy in respect to space and time are founded
+on the error of considering them as primarily the loci of simple
+locations. Perception is simply the cognition of prehensive unification;
+or more shortly, perception is cognition of prehension. The actual world
+is a manifold of prehensions; and a ‘prehension’ is a ‘prehensive
+occasion’; and a prehensive occasion is the most concrete finite entity,
+conceived as what it is in itself and for itself, and not as from its
+aspect in the essence of another such occasion. Prehensive unification
+might be said to have simple location in its volume A. But this would be
+a mere tautology. For space and time are simply abstractions from the
+totality of prehensive unifications as mutually patterned in each other.
+Thus a prehension has simple location at the volume A in the same way as
+that in which a man’s face fits on to the smile which spreads over it.
+There is, so far as we have gone, more sense in saying that an act of
+perception has simple location; for it may be conceived as being simply
+at the cognised prehension.
+
+There are more entities involved in nature than the mere sense-objects,
+so far considered. But, allowing for the necessity of revision
+consequent on a more complete point of view, we can frame our answer to
+Berkeley’s question as to the character of the reality to be assigned to
+nature. He states it to be the reality of ideas in mind. A complete
+metaphysic which has attained to some notion of mind, and to some notion
+of ideas, may perhaps ultimately adopt that view. It is unnecessary for
+the purpose of these lectures to ask such a fundamental question. We can
+be content with a provisional realism in which nature is conceived as a
+complex of prehensive unifications. Space and time exhibit the general
+scheme of interlocked relations of these prehensions. You cannot tear
+any one of them out of its context. Yet each one of them within its
+context has all the reality that attaches to the whole complex.
+Conversely, the totality has the same reality as each prehension; for
+each prehension unifies the modalities to be ascribed, from its
+standpoint, to every part of the whole. A prehension is a process of
+unifying. Accordingly, nature is a process of expansive development,
+necessarily transitional from prehension to prehension. What is achieved
+is thereby passed beyond, but it is also retained as having aspects of
+itself present to prehensions which lie beyond it.
+
+Thus nature is a structure of evolving processes. The reality is the
+process. It is nonsense to ask if the colour red is real. The colour red
+is ingredient in the process of realisation. The realities of nature are
+the prehensions in nature, that is to say, the events in nature.
+
+Now that we have cleared space and time from the taint of simple
+location, we may partially abandon the awkward term prehension. This
+term was introduced to signify the essential unity of an event, namely,
+the event as one entity, and not as a mere assemblage of parts or of
+ingredients. It is necessary to understand that space-time is nothing
+else than a system of pulling together of assemblages into unities. But
+the word _event_ just means one of these spatio-temporal unities.
+Accordingly, it may be used instead of the term ‘prehension’ as meaning
+the thing prehended.
+
+An event has contemporaries. This means that an event mirrors within
+itself the modes of its contemporaries as a display of immediate
+achievement. An event has a past. This means that an event mirrors
+within itself the modes of its predecessors, as memories which are fused
+into its own content. An event has a future. This means that an event
+mirrors within itself such aspects as the future throws back onto the
+present, or, in other words, as the present has determined concerning
+the future. Thus an event has anticipation:
+
+         “The prophetic soul
+         Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.” [cvii]
+
+These conclusions are essential for any form of realism. For there is in
+the world for our cognisance, memory of the past, immediacy of
+realisation, and indication of things to come.
+
+In this sketch of an analysis more concrete than that of the scientific
+scheme of thought, I have started from our own psychological field, as
+it stands for our cognition. I take it for what it claims to be: the
+self-knowledge of our bodily event. I mean the total event, and not the
+inspection of the details of the body. This self-knowledge discloses a
+prehensive unification of modal presences of entities beyond itself. I
+generalise by the use of the principle that this total bodily event is
+on the same level as all other events, except for an unusual complexity
+and stability of inherent pattern. The strength of the theory of
+materialistic mechanism has been the demand, that no arbitrary breaks be
+introduced into nature, to eke out the collapse of an explanation. I
+accept this principle. But if you start from the immediate facts of our
+psychological experience, as surely an empiricist should begin, you are
+at once led to the organic conception of nature of which the description
+has been commenced in this lecture.
+
+It is the defect of the eighteenth century scientific scheme that it
+provides none of the elements which compose the immediate psychological
+experiences of mankind. Nor does it provide any elementary trace of the
+organic unity of a whole, from which the organic unities of electrons,
+protons, molecules, and living bodies can emerge. According to that
+scheme, there is no reason in the nature of things why portions of
+material should have any physical relations to each other. Let us grant
+that we cannot hope to be able to discern the laws of nature to be
+necessary. But we can hope to see that it is necessary that there should
+be an order of nature. The concept of the order of nature is bound up
+with the concept of nature as the locus of organisms in process of
+development.
+
+  NOTE. In connection with the latter portion of this chapter a sentence
+  from Descartes’ ‘Reply to Objections ... against the Meditations’ is
+  interesting:—“Hence the idea of the sun will be the sun itself
+  existing in the mind, not indeed formally, as it exists in the sky,
+  but objectively, _i.e._, in the way in which objects are wont to exist
+  in the mind; and this mode of being is truly much less perfect than
+  that in which things exist outside the mind, but it is not on that
+  account mere nothing, as I have already said.” [Reply to Objections I,
+  Translation by Haldane and Ross, vol. ii, p. 10.] I find difficulty in
+  reconciling this theory of ideas (with which I agree) with other parts
+  of the Cartesian philosophy.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER V
+
+                         THE ROMANTIC REACTION
+
+
+My last lecture described the influence upon the eighteenth century of
+the narrow and efficient scheme of scientific concepts which it had
+inherited from its predecessor. That scheme was the product of a
+mentality which found the Augustinian theology extremely congenial. The
+Protestant Calvinism and the Catholic Jansenism exhibited man as
+helpless to co-operate with Irresistible Grace: the contemporary scheme
+of science exhibited man as helpless to co-operate with the irresistable
+mechanism of nature. The mechanism of God and the mechanism of matter
+were the monstrous issues of limited metaphysics and clear logical
+intellect. Also the seventeenth century had genius, and cleared the
+world of muddled thought. The eighteenth century continued the work of
+clearance, with ruthless efficiency. The scientific scheme has lasted
+longer than the theological scheme. Mankind soon lost interest in
+Irresistible Grace; but it quickly appreciated the competent engineering
+which was due to science. Also in the first quarter of the eighteenth
+century, George Berkeley launched his philosophical criticism against
+the whole basis of the system. He failed to disturb the dominant current
+of thought. In my last lecture I developed a parallel line of argument,
+which would lead to a system of thought basing nature upon the concept
+of organism, and not upon the concept of matter. In the present lecture,
+I propose in the first place to consider how the concrete educated
+thought of men has viewed this opposition of mechanism and organism. It
+is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its
+expression. Accordingly it is to literature that we must look,
+particularly in its more concrete forms, namely in poetry and in drama,
+if we hope to discover the inward thoughts of a generation.
+
+We quickly find that the Western peoples exhibit on a colossal scale a
+peculiarity which is popularly supposed to be more especially
+characteristic of the Chinese. Surprise is often expressed that a
+Chinaman can be of two religions, a Confucian for some occasions and a
+Buddhist for other occasions. Whether this is true of China I do not
+know; nor do I know whether, if true, these two attitudes are really
+inconsistent. But there can be no doubt that an analogous fact is true
+of the West, and that the two attitudes involved are inconsistent. A
+scientific realism, based on mechanism, is conjoined with an unwavering
+belief in the world of men and of the higher animals as being composed
+of self-determining organisms. This radical inconsistency at the basis
+of modern thought accounts for much that is half-hearted and wavering in
+our civilisation. It would be going too far to say that it distracts
+thought. It enfeebles it, by reason of the inconsistency lurking in the
+background. After all, the men of the Middle Ages were in pursuit of an
+excellency of which we have nearly forgotten the existence. They set
+before themselves the ideal of the attainment of a harmony of the
+understanding. We are content with superficial orderings from diverse
+arbitrary starting points. For instance, the enterprises produced by the
+individualistic energy of the European peoples presupposes physical
+actions directed to final causes. But the science which is employed in
+their development is based on a philosophy which asserts that physical
+causation is supreme, and which disjoins the physical cause from the
+final end. It is not popular to dwell on the absolute contradiction here
+involved. It is the fact, however you gloze it over with phrases. Of
+course, we find in the eighteenth century Paley’s famous argument, that
+mechanism presupposes a God who is the author of nature. But even before
+Paley put the argument into its final form, Hume had written the retort,
+that the God whom you will find will be the sort of God who makes that
+mechanism. In other words, that mechanism can, at most, presuppose a
+mechanic, and not merely _a_ mechanic but _its_ mechanic. The only way
+of mitigating mechanism is by the discovery that it is not mechanism.
+
+When we leave apologetic theology, and come to ordinary literature, we
+find, as we might expect, that the scientific outlook is in general
+simply ignored. So far as the mass of literature is concerned, science
+might never have been heard of. Until recently nearly all writers have
+been soaked in classical and renaissance literature. For the most part,
+neither philosophy nor science interested them, and their minds were
+trained to ignore it.
+
+There are exceptions to this sweeping statement; and, even if we confine
+ourselves to English literature, they concern some of the greatest
+names; also the indirect influence of science has been considerable.
+
+A side light on this distracting inconsistency in modern thought is
+obtained by examining some of those great serious poems in English
+literature, whose general scale gives them a didactic character. The
+relevant poems are Milton’s _Paradise Lost_, Pope’s _Essay on Man_,
+Wordsworth’s _Excursion_, Tennyson’s _In Memoriam_. Milton, though he is
+writing after the Restoration, voices the theological aspect of the
+earlier portion of his century, untouched by the influence of the
+scientific materialism. Pope’s poem represents the effect on popular
+thought of the intervening sixty years which includes the first period
+of assured triumph for the scientific movement. Wordsworth in his whole
+being expresses a conscious reaction against the mentality of the
+eighteenth century. This mentality means nothing else than the
+acceptance of the scientific ideas at their full face value. Wordsworth
+was not bothered by any intellectual antagonism. What moved him was a
+moral repulsion. He felt that something had been left out, and that what
+had been left out comprised everything that was most important. Tennyson
+is the mouthpiece of the attempts of the waning romantic movement in the
+second quarter of the nineteenth century to come to terms with science.
+By this time the two elements in modern thought had disclosed their
+fundamental divergence by their jarring interpretations of the course of
+nature and the life of man. Tennyson stands in this poem as the perfect
+example of the distraction which I have already mentioned. There are
+opposing visions of the world, and both of them command his assent by
+appeals to ultimate intuitions from which there seems no escape.
+Tennyson goes to the heart of the difficulty. It is the problem of
+mechanism which appalls him,
+
+              “‘The stars,’ she whispers, ‘blindly run.’”
+
+This line states starkly the whole philosophic problem implicit in the
+poem. Each molecule blindly runs. The human body is a collection of
+molecules. Therefore, the human body blindly runs, and therefore there
+can be no individual responsibility for the actions of the body. If you
+once accept that the molecule is definitely determined to be what it is,
+independently of any determination by reason of the total organism of
+the body, and if you further admit that the blind run is settled by the
+general mechanical laws, there can be no escape from this conclusion.
+But mental experiences are derivative from the actions of the body,
+including of course its internal behaviour. Accordingly, the sole
+function of the mind is to have at least some of its experiences settled
+for it, and to add such others as may be open to it independently of the
+body’s motions, internal and external.
+
+There are then two possible theories as to the mind. You can either deny
+that it can supply for itself any experiences other than those provided
+for it by the body, or you can admit them.
+
+If you refuse to admit the additional experiences, then all individual
+moral responsibility is swept away. If you do admit them, then a human
+being may be responsible for the state of his mind though he has no
+responsibility for the actions of his body. The enfeeblement of thought
+in the modern world is illustrated by the way in which this plain issue
+is avoided in Tennyson’s poem. There is something kept in the
+background, a skeleton in the cupboard. He touches on almost every
+religious and scientific problem, but carefully avoids more than a
+passing allusion to this one.
+
+This very problem was in full debate at the date of the poem. John
+Stuart Mill was maintaining his doctrine of determinism. In this
+doctrine volitions are determined by motives, and motives are
+expressible in terms of antecedent conditions including states of mind
+as well as states of the body.
+
+It is obvious that this doctrine affords no escape from the dilemma
+presented by a thoroughgoing mechanism. For if the volition affects the
+state of the body, then the molecules in the body do not blindly run. If
+the volition does not affect the state of the body, the mind is still
+left in its uncomfortable position.
+
+Mill’s doctrine is generally accepted, especially among scientists, as
+though in some way it allowed you to accept the extreme doctrine of
+materialistic mechanism, and yet mitigated its unbelievable
+consequences. It does nothing of the sort. Either the bodily molecules
+blindly run, or they do not. If they do blindly run, the mental states
+are irrelevant in discussing the bodily actions.
+
+I have stated the arguments concisely, because in truth the issue is a
+very simple one. Prolonged discussion is merely a source of confusion.
+The question as to the metaphysical status of molecules does not come
+in. The statement that they are mere formulae has no bearing on the
+argument. For presumably the formulae mean something. If they mean
+nothing, the whole mechanical doctrine is likewise without meaning, and
+the question drops. But if the formulae mean anything, the argument
+applies to exactly what they do mean. The traditional way of evading the
+difficulty—other than the simple way of ignoring it—is to have recourse
+to some form of what is now termed ‘vitalism.’ This doctrine is really a
+compromise. It allows a free run to mechanism throughout the whole of
+inanimate nature, and holds that the mechanism is partially mitigated
+within living bodies. I feel that this theory is an unsatisfactory
+compromise. The gap between living and dead matter is too vague and
+problematical to bear the weight of such an arbitrary assumption, which
+involves an essential dualism somewhere.
+
+The doctrine which I am maintaining is that the whole concept of
+materialism only applies to very abstract entities, the products of
+logical discernment. The concrete enduring entities are organisms, so
+that the plan of the _whole_ influences the very characters of the
+various subordinate organisms which enter into it. In the case of an
+animal, the mental states enter into the plan of the total organism and
+thus modify the plans of the successive subordinate organisms until the
+ultimate smallest organisms, such as electrons, are reached. Thus an
+electron within a living body is different from an electron outside it,
+by reason of the plan of the body. The electron blindly runs either
+within or without the body; but it runs within the body in accordance
+with its character within the body; that is to say, in accordance with
+the general plan of the body, and this plan includes the mental state.
+But this principle of modification is perfectly general throughout
+nature, and represents no property peculiar to living bodies. In
+subsequent lectures it will be explained that this doctrine involves the
+abandonment of the traditional scientific materialism, and the
+substitution of an alternative doctrine of organism.
+
+I shall not discuss Mill’s determinism, as it lies outside the scheme of
+these lectures. The foregoing discussion has been directed to secure
+that either determinism or free will shall have some relevance,
+unhampered by the difficulties introduced by materialistic mechanism, or
+by the compromise of vitalism. I would term the doctrine of these
+lectures, the theory of _organic mechanism_. In this theory, the
+molecules may blindly run in accordance with the general laws, but the
+molecules differ in their intrinsic characters according to the general
+organic plans of the situations in which they find themselves.
+
+The discrepancy between the materialistic mechanism of science and the
+moral intuitions, which are presupposed in the concrete affairs of life,
+only gradually assumed its true importance as the centuries advanced.
+The different tones of the successive epochs to which the poems, already
+mentioned, belong are curiously reflected in their opening passages.
+Milton ends his introduction with the prayer,
+
+               “That to the height of this great argument
+               I may assert eternal Providence,
+               And justify the ways of God to men.”
+
+To judge from many modern writers on Milton, we might imagine that the
+_Paradise Lost_ and the _Paradise Regained_ were written as a series of
+experiments in blank verse. This was certainly not Milton’s view of his
+work. To ‘justify the ways of God to men’ was very much his main object.
+He recurs to the same idea in the _Samson Agonistes_,
+
+                       “Just are the ways of God
+                       And justifiable to men;”
+
+We note the assured volume of confidence, untroubled by the coming
+scientific avalanche. The actual date of the publication of the
+_Paradise Lost_ lies just beyond the epoch to which it belongs. It is
+the swansong of a passing world of untroubled certitude.
+
+A comparison between Pope’s _Essay on Man_ and the _Paradise Lost_
+exhibits the change of tone in English thought in the fifty or sixty
+years which separate the age of Milton from the age of Pope. Milton
+addresses his poem to God, Pope’s poem is addressed to Lord Bolingbroke,
+
+              “Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things
+              To low ambition and the pride of kings.
+              Let us (since life can little more supply
+              Than just to look about us and to die)
+              Expatiate free o’er all this scene of man;
+              A mighty maze! but not without a plan;”
+
+Compare the jaunty assurance of Pope,
+
+                “A mighty maze! but not without a plan.”
+
+with Milton’s
+
+                       “Just are the ways of God
+                       And justifiable to men;”
+
+But the real point to notice is that Pope as well as Milton was
+untroubled by the great perplexity which haunts the modern world. The
+clue which Milton followed was to dwell on the ways of God in dealings
+with man. Two generations later we find Pope equally confident that the
+enlightened methods of modern science provided a plan adequate as a map
+of the ‘mighty maze.’
+
+Wordsworth’s _Excursion_ is the next English poem on the same subject. A
+prose preface tells us that it is a fragment of a larger projected work,
+described as ‘A philosophical poem containing views of Man, Nature, and
+Society.’
+
+Very characteristically the poem begins with the line,
+
+             “’Twas summer, and the sun had mounted high:”
+
+Thus the romantic reaction started neither with God nor with Lord
+Bolingbroke, but with nature. We are here witnessing a conscious
+reaction against the whole tone of the eighteenth century. That century
+approached nature with the abstract analysis of science, whereas
+Wordsworth opposes to the scientific abstractions his full concrete
+experience.
+
+A generation of religious revival and of scientific advance lies between
+the _Excursion_ and Tennyson’s _In Memoriam_. The earlier poets had
+solved the perplexity by ignoring it. That course was not open to
+Tennyson. Accordingly his poem begins thus:
+
+                 “Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
+                 Whom we, that have not seen Thy face,
+                 By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
+                 Believing where we cannot prove;”
+
+The note of perplexity is struck at once. The nineteenth century has
+been a perplexed century, in a sense which is not true of any of its
+predecessors of the modern period. In the earlier times there were
+opposing camps, bitterly at variance on questions which they deemed
+fundamental. But, except for a few stragglers, either camp was
+whole-hearted. The importance of Tennyson’s poem lies in the fact that
+it exactly expressed the character of its period. Each individual was
+divided against himself. In the earlier times, the deep thinkers were
+the clear thinkers,—Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz. They knew
+exactly what they meant and said it. In the nineteenth century, some of
+the deeper thinkers among theologians and philosophers were muddled
+thinkers. Their assent was claimed by incompatible doctrines; and their
+efforts at reconciliation produced inevitable confusion.
+
+Matthew Arnold, even more than Tennyson, was the poet who expressed this
+mood of individual distraction which was so characteristic of this
+century. Compare with _In Memoriam_ the closing lines of Arnold’s _Dover
+Beach_:
+
+           “And we are here as on a darkling plain
+           Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
+           Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
+
+Cardinal Newman in his _Apologia pro Vitâ Suâ_ mentions it as a
+peculiarity of Pusey, the great Anglican ecclesiastic, “He was haunted
+by no intellectual perplexities.” In this respect Pusey recalls Milton,
+Pope, Wordsworth, as in contrast with Tennyson, Clough, Matthew Arnold,
+and Newman himself.
+
+So far as concerns English literature we find, as might be anticipated,
+the most interesting criticism of the thoughts of science among the
+leaders of the romantic reaction which accompanied and succeeded the
+epoch of the French Revolution. In English literature, the deepest
+thinkers of this school were Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley. Keats
+is an example of literature untouched by science. We may neglect
+Coleridge’s attempt at an explicit philosophical formulation. It was
+influential in his own generation; but in these lectures it is my object
+only to mention those elements of the thought of the past which stand
+for all time. Even with this limitation, only a selection is possible.
+For our purposes Coleridge is only important by his influence on
+Wordsworth. Thus Wordsworth and Shelley remain.
+
+Wordsworth was passionately absorbed in nature. It has been said of
+Spinoza, that he was drunk with God. It is equally true that Wordsworth
+was drunk with nature. But he was a thoughtful, well-read man, with
+philosophical interests, and sane even to the point of prosiness. In
+addition, he was a genius. He weakens his evidence by his dislike of
+science. We all remember his scorn of the poor man whom he somewhat
+hastily accuses of peeping and botanising on his mother’s grave. Passage
+after passage could be quoted from him, expressing this repulsion. In
+this respect, his characteristic thought can be summed up in his phrase,
+‘We murder to dissect.’
+
+In this latter passage, he discloses the intellectual basis of his
+criticism of science. He alleges against science its absorption in
+abstractions. His consistent theme is that the important facts of nature
+elude the scientific method. It is important therefore to ask, what
+Wordsworth found in nature that failed to receive expression in science.
+I ask this question in the interest of science itself; for one main
+position in these lectures is a protest against the idea that the
+abstractions of science are irreformable and unalterable. Now it is
+emphatically not the case that Wordsworth hands over inorganic matter to
+the mercy of science, and concentrates on the faith that in the living
+organism there is some element that science cannot analyse. Of course he
+recognises, what no one doubts, that in some sense living things are
+different from lifeless things. But that is not his main point. It is
+the brooding presence of the hills which haunts him. His theme is nature
+_in solido_, that is to say, he dwells on that mysterious presence of
+surrounding things, which imposes itself on any separate element that we
+set up as an individual for its own sake. He always grasps the whole of
+nature as involved in the tonality of the particular instance. That is
+why he laughs with the daffodils, and finds in the primrose “thoughts
+too deep for terms.”
+
+Wordsworth’s greatest poem is, by far, the first book of _The Prelude_.
+It is pervaded by this sense of the haunting presences of nature. A
+series of magnificent passages, too long for quotation, express this
+idea. Of course, Wordsworth is a poet writing a poem, and is not
+concerned with dry philosophical statements. But it would hardly be
+possible to express more clearly a feeling for nature, as exhibiting
+entwined prehensive unities, each suffused with modal presences of
+others:
+
+             “Ye Presences of Nature in the sky
+             And on the earth! Ye Visions of the hills!
+             And Souls of lonely places! can I think
+             A vulgar hope was yours when ye employed
+             Such ministry, when ye through many a year
+             Haunting me thus among my boyish sports,
+             On caves and trees, upon the woods and hills,
+             Impressed upon all forms the characters
+             Of danger or desire; and thus did make
+             The surface of the universal earth
+             With triumph and delight, with hope and fear,
+             Work like a sea?...”
+
+In thus citing Wordsworth, the point which I wish to make is that we
+forget how strained and paradoxical is the view of nature which modern
+science imposes on our thoughts. Wordsworth, to the height of genius,
+expresses the concrete facts of our apprehension, facts which are
+distorted in the scientific analysis. Is it not possible that the
+standardised concepts of science are only valid within narrow
+limitations, perhaps too narrow for science itself?
+
+Shelley’s attitude to science was at the opposite pole to that of
+Wordsworth. He loved it, and is never tired of expressing in poetry the
+thoughts which it suggests. It symbolises to him joy, and peace, and
+illumination. What the hills were to the youth of Wordsworth, a chemical
+laboratory was to Shelley. It is unfortunate that Shelley’s literary
+critics have, in this respect, so little of Shelley in their own
+mentality. They tend to treat as a casual oddity of Shelley’s nature
+what was, in fact, part of the main structure of his mind, permeating
+his poetry through and through. If Shelley had been born a hundred years
+later, the twentieth century would have seen a Newton among chemists.
+
+For the sake of estimating the value of Shelley’s evidence it is
+important to realise this absorption of his mind in scientific ideas. It
+can be illustrated by lyric after lyric. I will choose one poem only,
+the fourth act of his _Prometheus Unbound_. The Earth and the Moon
+converse together in the language of accurate science. Physical
+experiments guide his imagery. For example, the Earth’s exclamation,
+
+             “The vaporous exultation not to be confined!”
+
+is the poetic transcript of ‘the expansive force of gases,’ as it is
+termed in books on science. Again, take the Earth’s stanza,
+
+      “I spin beneath my pyramid of night,
+      Which points into the heavens,—dreaming delight,
+      Murmuring victorious joy in my enchanted sleep;
+      As a youth lulled in love-dreams faintly sighing,
+      Under the shadow of his beauty lying,
+      Which round his rest a watch of light and warmth doth keep.”
+
+This stanza could only have been written by someone with a definite
+geometrical diagram before his inward eye—a diagram which it has often
+been my business to demonstrate to mathematical classes. As evidence,
+note especially the last line which gives poetical imagery to the light
+surrounding night’s pyramid. This idea could not occur to anyone without
+the diagram. But the whole poem and other poems are permeated with
+touches of this kind.
+
+Now the poet, so sympathetic with science, so absorbed in its ideas, can
+simply make nothing of the doctrine of secondary qualities which is
+fundamental to its concepts. For Shelley nature retains its beauty and
+its colour. Shelley’s nature is in its essence a nature of organisms,
+functioning with the full content of our perceptual experience. We are
+so used to ignoring the implications of orthodox scientific doctrine,
+that it is difficult to make evident the criticism upon it which is
+thereby implied. If anybody could have treated it seriously, Shelley
+would have done so.
+
+Furthermore Shelley is entirely at one with Wordsworth as to the
+interfusing of the Presence in nature. Here is the opening stanza of his
+poem entitled _Mont Blanc_:
+
+           “The everlasting universe of Things
+           Flows through the Mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
+           Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—
+           Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
+           The source of human thought its tribute brings
+           Of waters,—with a sound but half its own,
+           Such as a feeble brook will oft assume
+           In the wild woods, among the Mountains lone,
+           Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
+           Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
+           Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.”
+
+Shelley has written these lines with explicit reference to some form of
+idealism, Kantian or Berkeleyan or Platonic. But however you construe
+him, he is here an emphatic witness to a prehensive unification as
+constituting the very being of nature.
+
+Berkeley, Wordsworth, Shelley are representative of the intuitive
+refusal seriously to accept the abstract materialism of science.
+
+There is an interesting difference in the treatment of nature by
+Wordsworth and by Shelley, which brings forward the exact questions we
+have got to think about. Shelley thinks of nature as changing,
+dissolving, transforming as it were at a fairy’s touch. The leaves fly
+before the West Wind
+
+                “Like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.”
+
+In his poem _The Cloud_ it is the transformations of water which excite
+his imagination. The subject of the poem is the endless, eternal,
+elusive change of things:
+
+                      “I change but I cannot die.”
+
+This is one aspect of nature, its elusive change: a change not merely to
+be expressed by locomotion, but a change of inward character. This is
+where Shelley places his emphasis, on the change of what cannot die.
+
+Wordsworth was born among hills; hills mostly barren of trees, and thus
+showing the minimum of change with the seasons. He was haunted by the
+enormous permanences of nature. For him change is an incident which
+shoots across a background of endurance,
+
+                   “Breaking the silence of the seas
+                   Among the farthest Hebrides.”
+
+Every scheme for the analysis of nature has to face these two facts,
+_change_ and _endurance_. There is yet a third fact to be placed by it,
+_eternality_, I will call it. The mountain endures. But when after ages
+it has been worn away, it has gone. If a replica arises, it is yet a new
+mountain. A colour is eternal. It haunts time like a spirit. It comes
+and it goes. But where it comes, it is the same colour. It neither
+survives nor does it live. It appears when it is wanted. The mountain
+has to time and space a different relation from that which colour has.
+In the previous lecture, I was chiefly considering the relation to
+space-time of things which, in my sense of the term, are eternal. It was
+necessary to do so before we can pass to the consideration of the things
+which endure.
+
+Also we must recollect the basis of our procedure. I hold that
+philosophy is the critic of abstractions. Its function is the double
+one, first of harmonising them by assigning to them their right relative
+status as abstractions, and secondly of completing them by direct
+comparison with more concrete intuitions of the universe, and thereby
+promoting the formation of more complete schemes of thought. It is in
+respect to this comparison that the testimony of great poets is of such
+importance. Their survival is evidence that they express deep intuitions
+of mankind penetrating into what is universal in concrete fact.
+Philosophy is not one among the sciences with its own little scheme of
+abstractions which it works away at perfecting and improving. It is the
+survey of sciences, with the special objects of their harmony, and of
+their completion. It brings to this task, not only the evidence of the
+separate sciences, but also its own appeal to concrete experience. It
+confronts the sciences with concrete fact.
+
+The literature of the nineteenth century, especially its English poetic
+literature, is a witness to the discord between the aesthetic intuitions
+of mankind and the mechanism of science. Shelley brings vividly before
+us the elusiveness of the eternal objects of sense as they haunt the
+change which infects underlying organisms. Wordsworth is the poet of
+nature as being the field of enduring permanences carrying within
+themselves a message of tremendous significance. The eternal objects are
+also there for him,
+
+              “The light that never was, on sea or land.”
+
+Both Shelley and Wordsworth emphatically bear witness that nature cannot
+be divorced from its aesthetic values; and that these values arise from
+the cumulation, in some sense, of the brooding presence of the whole
+onto its various parts. Thus we gain from the poets the doctrine that a
+philosophy of nature must concern itself at least with these five
+notions: change, value, eternal objects, endurance, organism,
+interfusion.
+
+We see that the literary romantic movement at the beginning of the
+nineteenth century, just as much as Berkeley’s philosophical idealistic
+movement a hundred years earlier, refused to be confined within the
+materialistic concepts of the orthodox scientific theory. We know also
+that when in these lectures we come to the twentieth century, we shall
+find a movement in science itself to reorganise its concepts, driven
+thereto by its own intrinsic development.
+
+It is, however, impossible to proceed until we have settled whether
+this refashioning of ideas is to be carried out on an objectivist
+basis or on a subjectivist basis. By a subjectivist basis I mean the
+belief that the nature of our immediate experience is the outcome of
+the perceptive peculiarities of the subject enjoying the experience.
+In other words, I mean that for this theory what is perceived is not a
+partial vision of a complex of things generally independent of that
+act of cognition; but that it merely is the expression of the
+individual peculiarities of the cognitive act. Accordingly what is
+common to the multiplicity of cognitive acts is the ratiocination
+connected with them. Thus, though there is a common world of thought
+associated with our sense-perceptions, there is no common world to
+think about. What we do think about is a common conceptual world
+applying indifferently to our individual experiences which are
+strictly personal to ourselves. Such a conceptual world will
+ultimately find its complete expression in the equations of applied
+mathematics. This is the extreme subjectivist position. There is of
+course the half-way house of those who believe that our perceptual
+experience does tell us of a common objective world; but that the
+things perceived are merely the outcome for us of this world, and are
+not _in themselves_ elements in the common world itself.
+
+Also there is the objectivist position. This creed is that the actual
+elements perceived by our senses are _in themselves_ the elements of a
+common world; and that this world is a complex of things, including
+indeed our acts of cognition, but transcending them. According to this
+point of view the things experienced are to be distinguished from our
+knowledge of them. So far as there is dependence, the _things_ pave the
+way for the _cognition_, rather than _vice versa_. But the point is that
+the actual things experienced enter into a common world which transcends
+knowledge, though it includes knowledge. The intermediate subjectivists
+would hold that the things experienced only indirectly enter into the
+common world by reason of their dependence on the subject who is
+cognising. The objectivist holds that the things experienced and the
+cognisant subject enter into the common world on equal terms. In these
+lectures I am giving the outline of what I consider to be the essentials
+of an objectivist philosophy adapted to the requirement of science and
+to the concrete experience of mankind. Apart from the detailed criticism
+of the difficulties raised by subjectivism in any form, my broad reasons
+for distrusting it are three in number. One reason arises from the
+direct interrogation of our perceptive experience. It appears from this
+interrogation that we are _within_ a world of colours, sounds, and other
+sense-objects, related in space and time to enduring objects such as
+stones, trees, and human bodies. We seem to be ourselves elements of
+this world in the same sense as are the other things which we perceive.
+But the subjectivist, even the moderate intermediate subjectivist, makes
+this world, as thus described, depend on us, in a way which directly
+traverses our naïve experience. I hold that the ultimate appeal is to
+naïve experience and that is why I lay such stress on the evidence of
+poetry. My point is, that in our sense-experience we know away from and
+beyond our own personality; whereas the subjectivist holds that in such
+experience we merely know about our own personality. Even the
+intermediate subjectivist places our personality between the world we
+know of and the common world which he admits. The world we know of is
+for him the internal strain of our personality under the stress of the
+common world which lies behind.
+
+My second reason for distrusting subjectivism is based on the particular
+content of experience. Our historical knowledge tells us of ages in the
+past when, so far as we can see, no living being existed on earth. Again
+it also tells us of countless star-systems, whose detailed history
+remains beyond our ken. Consider even the moon and the earth. What is
+going on within the interior of the earth, and on the far side of the
+moon! Our perceptions lead us to infer that there is something happening
+in the stars, something happening within the earth, and something
+happening on the far side of the moon. Also they tell us that in remote
+ages there were things happening. But all these things which it appears
+certainly happened, are either unknown in detail, or else are
+reconstructed by inferential evidence. In the face of this content of
+our personal experience, it is difficult to believe that the experienced
+world is an attribute of our own personality. My third reason is based
+upon the instinct for action. Just as sense-perception seems to give
+knowledge of what lies beyond individuality, so action seems to issue in
+an instinct for self-transcendence. The activity passes beyond self into
+the known transcendent world. It is here that final ends are of
+importance. For it is not activity urged from behind, which passes out
+into the veiled world of the intermediate subjectivist. It is activity
+directed to determinate ends in the known world; and yet it is activity
+transcending self and it is activity within the known world. It follows
+therefore that the world, as known, transcends the subject which is
+cognisant of it.
+
+The subjectivist position has been popular among those who have been
+engaged in giving a philosophical interpretation to the recent theories
+of relativity in physical science. The dependence of the world of sense
+on the individual percipient seems an easy mode of expressing the
+meanings involved. Of course, with the exception of those who are
+content with themselves as forming the entire universe, solitary amid
+nothing, everyone wants to struggle back to some sort of objectivist
+position. I do not understand how a common world of thought can be
+established in the absence of a common world of sense. I will not argue
+this point in detail; but in the absence of a transcendence of thought,
+or a transcendence of the world of sense, it is difficult to see how the
+subjectivist is to divest himself of his solitariness. Nor does the
+intermediate subjectivist appear to get any help from his unknown world
+in the background.
+
+The distinction between realism and idealism does not coincide with that
+between objectivism and subjectivism. Both realists and idealists can
+start from an objective standpoint. They may both agree that the world
+disclosed in sense-perception is a common world, transcending the
+individual percipient. But the objective idealist, when he comes to
+analyse what the reality of this world involves, finds that cognitive
+mentality is in some way inextricably concerned in every detail. This
+position the realist denies. Accordingly these two classes of
+objectivists do not part company till they have arrived at the ultimate
+problem of metaphysics. There is a great deal which they share in
+common. This is why, in my last lecture, I said that I adopted a
+position of provisional realism.
+
+In the past, the objectivist position has been distorted by the supposed
+necessity of accepting the classical scientific materialism, with its
+doctrine of simple location. This has necessitated the doctrine of
+secondary and primary qualities. Thus the secondary qualities, such as
+the sense-objects, are dealt with on subjectivist principles. This is a
+half-hearted position which falls an easy prey to subjectivist
+criticism.
+
+If we are to include the secondary qualities in the common world, a very
+drastic reorganisation of our fundamental concepts is necessary. It is
+an evident fact of experience that our apprehensions of the external
+world depend absolutely on the occurrences within the human body. By
+playing appropriate tricks on the body a man can be got to perceive, or
+not to perceive, almost anything. Some people express themselves as
+though bodies, brains, and nerves were the only real things in an
+entirely imaginary world. In other words, they treat bodies on
+objectivist principles, and the rest of the world on subjectivist
+principles. This will not do; especially, when we remember that it is
+the experimenter’s perception of another person’s body which is in
+question as evidence.
+
+But we have to admit that the body is the organism whose states regulate
+our cognisance of the world. The unity of the perceptual field therefore
+must be a unity of bodily experience. In being aware of the bodily
+experience, we must thereby be aware of aspects of the whole
+spatio-temporal world as mirrored within the bodily life. This is the
+solution of the problem which I gave in my last lecture. I will not
+repeat myself now, except to remind you that my theory involves the
+entire abandonment of the notion that simple location is the primary way
+in which things are involved in space-time. In a certain sense,
+everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an
+aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal
+standpoint mirrors the world.
+
+If you try to imagine this doctrine in terms of our conventional views
+of space and time, which presuppose simple location, it is a great
+paradox. But if you think of it in terms of our naïve experience, it is
+a mere transcript of the obvious facts. You are in a certain place
+perceiving things. Your perception takes place where you are, and is
+entirely dependent on how your body is functioning. But this functioning
+of the body in one place, exhibits for your cognisance an aspect of the
+distant environment, fading away into the general knowledge that there
+are things beyond. If this cognisance conveys knowledge of a
+transcendent world, it must be because the event which is the bodily
+life unifies in itself aspects of the universe.
+
+This is a doctrine extremely consonant with the vivid expression of
+personal experience which we find in the nature-poetry of imaginative
+writers such as Wordsworth or Shelley. The brooding, immediate presences
+of things are an obsession to Wordsworth. What the theory does do is to
+edge cognitive mentality away from being the necessary substratum of the
+unity of experience. That unity is now placed in the unity of an event.
+Accompanying this unity, there may or there may not be cognition.
+
+At this point we come back to the great question which was posed before
+us by our examination of the evidence afforded by the poetic insight of
+Wordsworth and Shelley. This single question has expanded into a group
+of questions. What are enduring things, as distinguished from the
+eternal objects, such as colour and shape? How are they possible? What
+is their status and meaning in the universe? It comes to this: What is
+the status of the enduring stability of the order of nature? There is
+the summary answer, which refers nature to some greater reality standing
+behind it. This reality occurs in the history of thought under many
+names, The Absolute, Brahma, The Order of Heaven, God. The delineation
+of final metaphysical truth is no part of this lecture. My point is that
+any summary conclusion jumping from our conviction of the existence of
+such an order of nature to the easy assumption that there is an ultimate
+reality which, in some unexplained way, is to be appealed to for the
+removal of perplexity, constitutes the great refusal of rationality to
+assert its rights. We have to search whether nature does not in its very
+being show itself as self-explanatory. By this I mean, that the sheer
+statement, of what things are, may contain elements explanatory of why
+things are. Such elements may be expected to refer to depths beyond
+anything which we can grasp with a clear apprehension. In a sense, all
+explanation must end in an ultimate arbitrariness. My demand is, that
+the ultimate arbitrariness of matter of fact from which our formulation
+starts should disclose the same general principles of reality, which we
+dimly discern as stretching away into regions beyond our explicit powers
+of discernment. Nature exhibits itself as exemplifying a philosophy of
+the evolution of organisms subject to determinate conditions. Examples
+of such conditions are the dimensions of space, the laws of nature, the
+determinate enduring entities, such as atoms and electrons, which
+exemplify these laws. But the very nature of these entities, the very
+nature of their spatiality and temporality, should exhibit the
+arbitrariness of these conditions as the outcome of a wider evolution
+beyond nature itself, and within which nature is but a limited mode.
+
+One all-pervasive fact, inherent in the very character of what is real
+is the transition of things, the passage one to another. This passage is
+not a mere linear procession of discrete entities. However we fix a
+determinate entity, there is always a narrower determination of
+something which is presupposed in our first choice. Also there is always
+a wider determination into which our first choice fades by transition
+beyond itself. The general aspect of nature is that of evolutionary
+expansiveness. These unities, which I call events, are the emergence
+into actuality of something. How are we to characterise the something
+which thus emerges? The name ‘_event_’ given to such a unity, draws
+attention to the inherent transitoriness, combined with the actual
+unity. But this abstract word cannot be sufficient to characterise what
+the fact of the reality of an event is in itself. A moment’s thought
+shows us that no one idea can in itself be sufficient. For every idea
+which finds its significance in each event must represent something
+which contributes to what realisation is in itself. Thus no one word can
+be adequate. But conversely, nothing must be left out. Remembering the
+poetic rendering of our concrete experience, we see at once that the
+element of value, of being valuable, of having value, of being an end in
+itself, of being something which is for its own sake, must not be
+omitted in any account of an event as the most concrete actual
+something. ‘Value’ is the word I use for the intrinsic reality of an
+event. Value is an element which permeates through and through the
+poetic view of nature. We have only to transfer to the very texture of
+realisation in itself that value which we recognise so readily in terms
+of human life. This is the secret of Wordsworth’s worship of nature.
+Realization therefore is in itself the attainment of value. But there is
+no such thing as mere value. Value is the outcome of limitation. The
+definite finite entity is the selected mode which is the shaping of
+attainment; apart from such shaping into individual matter of fact there
+is no attainment. The mere fusion of all that there is would be the
+nonentity of indefiniteness. The salvation of reality is its obstinate,
+irreducible, matter-of-fact entities, which are limited to be no other
+than themselves. Neither science, nor art, nor creative action can tear
+itself away from obstinate, irreducible, limited facts. The endurance of
+things has its significance in the self-retention of that which imposes
+itself as a definite attainment for its own sake. That which endures is
+limited, obstructive, intolerant, infecting its environment with its own
+aspects. But it is not self-sufficient. The aspects of all things enter
+into its very nature. It is only itself as drawing together into its own
+limitation the larger whole in which it finds itself. Conversely it is
+only itself by lending its aspects to this same environment in which it
+finds itself. The problem of evolution is the development of enduring
+harmonies of enduring shapes of value, which merge into higher
+attainments of things beyond themselves. Aesthetic attainment is
+interwoven in the texture of realisation. The endurance of an entity
+represents the attainment of a limited aesthetic success, though if we
+look beyond it to its external effects, it may represent an aesthetic
+failure. Even within itself, it may represent the conflict between a
+lower success and a higher failure. The conflict is the presage of
+disruption.
+
+The further discussion of the nature of enduring objects and of the
+conditions they require will be relevant to the consideration of the
+doctrine of evolution which dominated the latter half of the nineteenth
+century. The point which in this lecture I have endeavoured to make
+clear is that the nature-poetry of the romantic revival was a protest on
+behalf of the organic view of nature, and also a protest against the
+exclusion of value from the essence of matter of fact. In this aspect of
+it, the romantic movement may be conceived as a revival of Berkeley’s
+protest which had been launched a hundred years earlier. The romantic
+reaction was a protest on behalf of value.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER VI
+
+                         THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
+
+
+My previous lecture was occupied with the comparison of the
+nature-poetry of the romantic movement in England with the materialistic
+scientific philosophy inherited from the eighteenth century. It noted
+the entire disagreement of the two movements of thought. The lecture
+also continued the endeavour to outline an objectivist philosophy,
+capable of bridging the gap between science and that fundamental
+intuition of mankind which finds its expression in poetry and its
+practical exemplification in the presuppositions of daily life. As the
+nineteenth century passed on, the romantic movement died down. It did
+not die away, but it lost its clear unity of tidal stream, and dispersed
+itself into many estuaries as it coalesced with other human interests.
+The faith of the century was derived from three sources: one source was
+the romantic movement, showing itself in religious revival, in art, and
+in political aspiration: another source was the gathering advance of
+science which opened avenues of thought: the third source was the
+advance in technology which completely changed the conditions of human
+life.
+
+Each of these springs of faith had its origin in the previous period.
+The French Revolution itself was the first child of romanticism in the
+form in which it tinged Rousseau. James Watt obtained his patent for his
+steam-engine in 1769. The scientific advance was the glory of France and
+of French influence, throughout the same century.
+
+Also even during this earlier period, the streams interacted, coalesced,
+and antagonised each other. But it was not until the nineteenth century
+that the threefold movement came to that full development and peculiar
+balance characteristic of the sixty years following the battle of
+Waterloo.
+
+What is peculiar and new to the century, differentiating it from all its
+predecessors, is its technology. It was not merely the introduction of
+some great isolated inventions. It is impossible not to feel that
+something more than that was involved. For example, writing was a
+greater invention than the steam-engine. But in tracing the continuous
+history of the growth of writing we find an immense difference from that
+of the steam-engine. We must, of course, put aside minor and sporadic
+anticipations of both; and confine attention to the periods of their
+effective elaboration. The scale of time is so absolutely disparate. For
+the steam-engine, we may give about a hundred years; for writing, the
+time period is of the order of a thousand years. Further, when writing
+was finally popularised, the world was not then expecting the next step
+in technology. The process of change was slow, unconscious, and
+unexpected.
+
+In the nineteenth century, the process became quick, conscious, and
+expected. The earlier half of the century was the period in which this
+new attitude to change was first established and enjoyed. It was a
+peculiar period of hope, in the sense in which, sixty or seventy years
+later, we can now detect a note of disillusionment, or at least of
+anxiety.
+
+The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of
+the method of invention. A new method entered into life. In order to
+understand our epoch, we can neglect all the details of change, such as
+railways, telegraphs, radios, spinning machines, synthetic dyes. We must
+concentrate on the method in itself; that is the real novelty, which has
+broken up the foundations of the old civilisation. The prophecy of
+Francis Bacon has now been fulfilled; and man, who at times dreamt of
+himself as a little lower than the angels, has submitted to become the
+servant and the minister of nature. It still remains to be seen whether
+the same actor can play both parts.
+
+The whole change has arisen from the new scientific information.
+Science, conceived not so much in its principles as in its results, is
+an obvious storehouse of ideas for utilisation. But, if we are to
+understand what happened during the century, the analogy of a mine is
+better than that of a storehouse. Also, it is a great mistake to think
+that the bare scientific idea is the required invention, so that it has
+only to be picked up and used. An intense period of imaginative design
+lies between. One element in the new method is just the discovery of how
+to set about bridging the gap between the scientific ideas, and the
+ultimate product. It is a process of disciplined attack upon one
+difficulty after another.
+
+The possibilities of modern technology were first in practice realised
+in England, by the energy of a prosperous middle class. Accordingly, the
+industrial revolution started there. But the Germans explicitly realised
+the methods by which the deeper veins in the mine of science could be
+reached. They abolished haphazard methods of scholarship. In their
+technological schools and universities progress did not have to wait for
+the occasional genius, or the occasional lucky thought. Their feats of
+scholarship during the nineteenth century were the admiration of the
+world. This discipline of knowledge applies beyond technology to pure
+science, and beyond science to general scholarship. It represents the
+change from amateurs to professionals.
+
+There have always been people who devoted their lives to definite
+regions of thought. In particular, lawyers and the clergy of the
+Christian churches form obvious examples of such specialism. But the
+full self-conscious realisation of the power of professionalism in
+knowledge in all its departments, and of the way to produce the
+professionals, and of the importance of knowledge to the advance of
+technology, and of the methods by which abstract knowledge can be
+connected with technology, and of the boundless possibilities of
+technological advance,—the realisation of all these things was first
+completely attained in the nineteenth century; and among the various
+countries, chiefly in Germany.
+
+In the past human life was lived in a bullock cart; in the future it
+will be lived in an aeroplane; and the change of speed amounts to a
+difference in quality.
+
+The transformation of the field of knowledge, which has been thus
+effected, has not been wholly a gain. At least, there are dangers
+implicit in it, although the increase of efficiency is undeniable. The
+discussion of various effects on social life arising from the new
+situation is reserved for my last lecture. For the present it is
+sufficient to note that this novel situation of disciplined progress is
+the setting within which the thought of the century developed.
+
+In the period considered four great novel ideas were introduced into
+theoretical science. Of course, it is possible to show good cause for
+increasing my list far beyond the number _four_. But I am keeping to
+ideas which, if taken in their broadest signification, are vital to
+modern attempts at reconstructing the foundations of physical science.
+
+Two of these ideas are antithetical, and I will consider them together.
+We are not concerned with details, but with ultimate influences on
+thought. One of the ideas is that of a field of physical activity
+pervading all space, even where there is an apparent vacuum. This notion
+had occurred to many people, under many forms. We remember the medieval
+axiom, nature abhors a vacuum. Also, Descartes’ vortices at one time, in
+the seventeenth century, seemed as if established among scientific
+assumptions. Newton believed that gravitation was caused by something
+happening in a medium. But, on the whole, in the eighteenth century
+nothing was made of any of these ideas. The passage of light was
+explained in Newton’s fashion by the flight of minute corpuscles, which
+of course left room for a vacuum. Mathematical physicists were far too
+busy deducing the consequences of the theory of gravitation to bother
+much about the causes; nor did they know where to look, if they had
+troubled themselves over the question. There were speculations, but
+their importance was not great. Accordingly, when the nineteenth century
+opened, the notion of physical occurrences pervading all space held no
+effective place in science. It was revived from two sources. The
+undulatory theory of light triumphed, thanks to Thomas Young and
+Fresnel. This demands that there shall be something throughout space
+which can undulate. Accordingly, the ether was produced, as a sort of
+all pervading subtle material. Again the theory of electromagnetism
+finally, in Clerk Maxwell’s hands, assumed a shape in which it demanded
+that there should be electromagnetic occurrences throughout all space.
+Maxwell’s complete theory was not shaped until the eighteen-seventies.
+But it had been prepared for by many great men, Ampère, Oersted,
+Faraday. In accordance with the current materialistic outlook, these
+electromagnetic occurrences also required a material in which to happen.
+So again the ether was requisitioned. Then Maxwell, as the immediate
+first-fruits of his theory, demonstrated that the waves of light were
+merely waves of his electromagnetic occurrences. Accordingly, the theory
+of electromagnetism swallowed up the theory of light. It was a great
+simplification, and no one doubts its truth. But it had one unfortunate
+effect so far as materialism was concerned. For, whereas quite a simple
+sort of elastic ether sufficed for light when taken by itself, the
+electromagnetic ether has to be endowed with just those properties
+necessary for the production of the electromagnetic occurrences. In
+fact, it becomes a mere name for the material which is postulated to
+underlie these occurrences. If you do not happen to hold the
+metaphysical theory which makes you postulate such an ether, you can
+discard it. For it has no independent vitality.
+
+Thus in the seventies of the last century, some main physical sciences
+were established on a basis which presupposed the idea of _continuity_.
+On the other hand, the idea of _atomicity_ had been introduced by John
+Dalton, to complete Lavoisier’s work on the foundation of chemistry.
+This is the second great notion. Ordinary matter was conceived as
+atomic: electromagnetic effects were conceived as arising from a
+continuous field.
+
+There was no contradiction. In the first place, the notions are
+antithetical; but, apart from special embodiments, are not logically
+contradictory. Secondly, they were applied to different regions of
+science, one to chemistry, and the other to electromagnetism. And, as
+yet, there were but faint signs of coalescence between the two.
+
+The notion of matter as atomic has a long history. Democritus and
+Lucretius will at once occur to your minds. In speaking of these ideas
+as novel, I merely mean _relatively novel_, having regard to the
+settlement of ideas which formed the efficient basis of science
+throughout the eighteenth century. In considering the history of
+thought, it is necessary to distinguish the real stream, determining a
+period, from ineffectual thoughts casually entertained. In the
+eighteenth century every well-educated man read Lucretius, and
+entertained ideas about atoms. But John Dalton made them efficient in
+the stream of science; and in this function of efficiency atomicity was
+a new idea.
+
+The influence of atomicity was not limited to chemistry. The living cell
+is to biology what the electron and the proton are to physics. Apart
+from cells and from aggregates of cells there are no biological
+phenomena. The cell theory was introduced into biology contemporaneously
+with, and independently of, Dalton’s atomic theory. The two theories are
+independent exemplifications of the same idea of ‘atomism.’ The
+biological cell theory was a gradual growth, and a mere list of dates
+and names illustrates the fact that the biological sciences, as
+effective schemes of thought, are barely one hundred years old. Bichât
+in 1801 elaborated a tissue theory: Johannes Müller in 1835 described
+‘cells’ and demonstrated facts concerning their nature and relations:
+Schleiden in 1838 and Schwann in 1839 finally established their
+fundamental character. Thus by 1840 both biology and chemistry were
+established on an atomic basis. The final triumph of atomism had to wait
+for the arrival of electrons at the end of the century. The importance
+of the imaginative background is illustrated by the fact that nearly
+half a century after Dalton had done his work, another chemist, Louis
+Pasteur, carried over these same ideas of atomicity still further into
+the region of biology. The cell theory and Pasteur’s work were in some
+respects more revolutionary than that of Dalton. For they introduced the
+notion of _organism_ into the world of minute beings. There had been a
+tendency to treat the atom as an ultimate entity, capable only of
+external relations. This attitude of mind was breaking down under the
+influence of Mendeleef’s periodic law. But Pasteur showed the decisive
+importance of the idea of organism at the stage of infinitesimal
+magnitude. The astronomers had shown us how big is the universe. The
+chemists and biologists teach us how small it is. There is in modern
+scientific practice a famous standard of length. It is rather small: to
+obtain it, you must divide a centimetre into one hundred million parts,
+and take one of them. Pasteur’s organisms are a good deal bigger than
+this length. In connection with atoms, we now know that there are
+organisms for which such distances are uncomfortably great.
+
+The remaining pair of new ideas to be ascribed to this epoch are both of
+them connected with the notion of transition or change. They are the
+doctrine of the conservation of energy, and the doctrine of evolution.
+
+The doctrine of energy has to do with the notion of quantitative
+permanence underlying change. The doctrine of evolution has to do with
+the emergence of novel organisms as the outcome of change. The theory of
+energy lies in the province of physics. The theory of evolution lies
+mainly in the province of biology, although it had previously been
+touched upon by Kant and Laplace in connection with the formation of
+suns and planets.
+
+The convergent effect of the new power for scientific advance, which
+resulted from these four ideas, transformed the middle period of the
+century into an orgy of scientific triumph. Clear-sighted men, of the
+sort who are so clearly wrong, now proclaimed that the secrets of the
+physical universe were finally disclosed. If only you ignored everything
+which refused to come into line, your powers of explanation were
+unlimited. On the other side, muddle-headed men muddled themselves into
+the most indefensible positions. Learned dogmatism, conjoined with
+ignorance of the crucial facts, suffered a heavy defeat from the
+scientific advocates of new ways. Thus to the excitement derived from
+technological revolution, there was now added the excitement arising
+from the vistas disclosed by scientific theory. Both the material and
+the spiritual bases of social life were in process of transformation.
+When the century entered upon its last quarter, its three sources of
+inspiration, the romantic, the technological, and the scientific had
+done their work.
+
+Then, almost suddenly, a pause occurred; and in its last twenty years
+the century closed with one of the dullest stages of thought since the
+time of the First Crusade. It was an echo of the eighteenth century,
+lacking Voltaire and the reckless grace of the French aristocrats. The
+period was efficient, dull, and half-hearted. It celebrated the triumph
+of the professional man.
+
+But looking backwards upon this time of pause, we can now discern signs
+of change. In the first place, the modern conditions of systematic
+research prevent absolute stagnation. In every branch of science, there
+was effective progress, indeed rapid progress, although it was confined
+somewhat strictly within the accepted ideas of each branch. It was an
+age of successful scientific orthodoxy, undisturbed by much thought
+beyond the conventions.
+
+In the second place, we can now see that the adequacy of scientific
+materialism as a scheme of thought for the use of science was
+endangered. The conservation of energy provided a new type of
+quantitative permanence. It is true that energy could be construed as
+something subsidiary to matter. But, anyhow, the notion of _mass_ was
+losing its unique preeminence as being the one final permanent quantity.
+Later on, we find the relations of mass and energy inverted; so that
+mass now becomes the name for a quantity of energy considered in
+relation to some of its dynamical effects. This train of thought leads
+to the notion of energy being fundamental, thus displacing matter from
+that position. But energy is merely the name for the quantitative aspect
+of a structure of happenings; in short, it depends on the notion of the
+functioning of an organism. The question is, can we define an organism
+without recurrence to the concept of matter in simple location? We must,
+later on, consider this point in more detail.
+
+The same relegation of matter to the background occurs in connection
+with the electromagnetic fields. The modern theory presupposes
+happenings in that field which are divorced from immediate dependence
+upon matter. It is usual to provide an ether as a substratum. But the
+ether does not really enter into the theory. Thus again the notion of
+material loses its fundamental position. Also, the atom is transforming
+itself into an organism; and finally the evolution theory is nothing
+else than the analysis of the conditions for the formation and survival
+of various types of organisms. In truth, one most significant fact of
+this later period is the advance in biological sciences. These sciences
+are essentially sciences concerning organisms. During the epoch in
+question, and indeed also at the present moment, the prestige of the
+more perfect scientific form belongs to the physical sciences.
+Accordingly, biology apes the manners of physics. It is orthodox to
+hold, that there is nothing in biology but what is physical mechanism
+under somewhat complex circumstances.
+
+One difficulty in this position is the present confusion as to the
+foundational concepts of physical science. This same difficulty also
+attaches to the opposed doctrine of vitalism. For, in this later theory,
+the fact of mechanism is accepted—I mean, mechanism based upon
+materialism—and an additional vital control is introduced to explain the
+actions of living bodies. It cannot be too clearly understood that the
+various physical laws which appear to apply to the behaviour of atoms
+are not mutually consistent as at present formulated. The appeal to
+mechanism on behalf of biology was in its origin an appeal to the
+well-attested self-consistent physical concepts as expressing the basis
+of all natural phenomena. But at present there is no such system of
+concepts.
+
+Science is taking on a new aspect which is neither purely physical, nor
+purely biological. It is becoming the study of organisms. Biology is the
+study of the larger organisms; whereas physics is the study of the
+smaller organisms. There is another difference between the two divisions
+of science. The organisms of biology include as ingredients the smaller
+organisms of physics; but there is at present no evidence that the
+smaller of the physical organisms can be analysed into component
+organisms. It may be so. But anyhow we are faced with the question as to
+whether there are not primary organisms which are incapable of further
+analysis. It seems very unlikely that there should be any infinite
+regress in nature. Accordingly, a theory of science which discards
+materialism must answer the question as to the character of these
+primary entities. There can be only one answer on this basis. We must
+start with the event as the ultimate unit of natural occurrence. An
+event has to do with all that there is, and in particular with all other
+events. This interfusion of events is effected by the aspects of those
+eternal objects, such as colours, sounds, scents, geometrical
+characters, which are required for nature and are not emergent from it.
+Such an eternal object will be an ingredient of one event under the
+guise, or aspect, of qualifying another event. There is a reciprocity of
+aspects, and there are patterns of aspects. Each event corresponds to
+two such patterns; namely, the pattern of aspects of other events which
+it grasps into its own unity, and the pattern of its aspects which other
+events severally grasp into their unities. Accordingly, a
+non-materialistic philosophy of nature will identify a primary organism
+as being the emergence of some particular pattern as grasped in the
+unity of a real event. Such a pattern will also include the aspects of
+the event in question as grasped in other events, whereby those other
+events receive a modification, or partial determination. There is thus
+an intrinsic and an extrinsic reality of an event, namely, the event as
+in its own prehension, and the event as in the prehension of other
+events. The concept of an organism includes, therefore, the concept of
+the interaction of organisms. The ordinary scientific ideas of
+transmission and continuity are, relatively speaking, details concerning
+the empirically observed characters of these patterns throughout space
+and time. The position here maintained is that the relationships of an
+event are internal, so far as concerns the event itself; that is to say,
+that they are constitutive of what the event is in itself.
+
+Also in the previous lecture, we arrived at the notion that an actual
+event is an achievement for its own sake, a grasping of diverse
+entities into a value by reason of their real togetherness in that
+pattern, to the exclusion of other entities. It is not the mere
+logical togetherness of merely diverse things. For in that case, to
+modify Bacon’s words, “all eternal objects would be alike one to
+another.” This reality means that each intrinsic essence, that is to
+say, what each eternal object is in itself, becomes relevant to the
+one limited value emergent in the guise of the event. But values
+differ in importance. Thus though each event is necessary for the
+community of events, the weight of its contribution is determined by
+something intrinsic in itself. We have now to discuss what that
+property is. Empirical observation shows that it is the property which
+we may call indifferently _retention_, _endurance_ or _reiteration_.
+This property amounts to the recovery, on behalf of value amid the
+transitoriness of reality, of the self-identity which is also enjoyed
+by the primary eternal objects. The reiteration of a particular shape
+(or formation) of value within an event occurs when the event as a
+whole repeats some shape which is also exhibited by each one of a
+succession of its parts. Thus however you analyse the event according
+to the flux of its parts through time, there is the same
+thing-for-its-own-sake standing before you. Thus the event, in its own
+intrinsic reality, mirrors in itself, as derived from its own parts,
+aspects of the same patterned value as it realises in its complete
+self. It thus realises itself under the guise of an enduring
+individual entity, with a life history contained within itself.
+Furthermore, the extrinsic reality of such an event, as mirrored in
+other events, takes this same form of an enduring individuality; only
+in this case, the individuality is implanted as a reiteration of
+aspects of itself in the alien events composing the environment.
+
+The total temporal duration of such an event bearing an enduring
+pattern, constitutes its specious present. Within this specious present
+the event realises itself as a totality, and also in so doing realises
+itself as grouping together a number of aspects of its own temporal
+parts. One and the same pattern is realised in the total event, and is
+exhibited by each of these various parts through an aspect of each part
+grasped into the togetherness of the total event. Also, the earlier
+life-history of the same pattern is exhibited by its aspects in this
+total event. There is, thus, in this event a memory of the antecedent
+life-history of its own dominant pattern, as having formed an element of
+value in its own antecedent environment. This concrete prehension, from
+within, of the life-history of an enduring fact is analysable into two
+abstractions, of which one is the enduring entity which has emerged as a
+real matter of fact to be taken account of by other things, and the
+other is the individualised embodiment of the underlying energy of
+realisation.
+
+The consideration of the general flux of events leads to this analysis
+into an underlying eternal energy in whose nature there stands an
+envisagement of the realm of all eternal objects. Such an envisagement
+is the ground of the individualised thoughts which emerge as
+thought-aspects grasped within the life-history of the subtler and more
+complex enduring patterns. Also in the nature of the eternal activity
+there must stand an envisagement of all values to be obtained by a real
+togetherness of eternal objects, as envisaged in ideal situations. Such
+ideal situations, apart from any reality, are devoid of intrinsic value,
+but are valuable as elements in purpose. The individualised prehension
+into individual events of aspects of these ideal situations takes the
+form of individualised thoughts, and as such has intrinsic value. Thus
+value arises because there is now a real togetherness of the ideal
+aspects, as in thought, with the actual aspects, as in process of
+occurrence. Accordingly no value is to be ascribed to the underlying
+activity as divorced from the matter-of-fact events of the real world.
+
+Finally, to sum up this train of thought, the underlying activity, as
+conceived apart from the fact of realisation, has three types of
+envisagement. These are: first, the envisagement of eternal objects;
+secondly, the envisagement of possibilities of value in respect to the
+synthesis of eternal objects; and lastly, the envisagement of the actual
+matter of fact which must enter into the total situation which is
+achievable by the addition of the future. But in abstraction from
+actuality, the eternal activity is divorced from value. For the
+actuality is the value. The individual perception arising from enduring
+objects will vary in its individual depth and width according to the way
+in which the pattern dominates its own route. It may represent the
+faintest ripple differentiating the general substrate energy; or, in the
+other extreme, it may rise to conscious thought, which includes poising
+before self-conscious judgment the abstract possibilities of value
+inherent in various situations of ideal togetherness. The intermediate
+cases will group round the individual perception as envisaging (without
+self-consciousness) that one immediate possibility of attainment which
+represents the closest analogy to its own immediate past, having regard
+to the actual aspects which are there for prehension. The laws of
+physics represent the harmonised adjustment of development which results
+from this unique principle of determination. Thus dynamics is dominated
+by a principle of least action, whose detailed character has to be
+learnt from observation.
+
+The atomic material entities which are considered in physical science
+are merely these individual enduring entities, conceived in abstraction
+from everything except what concerns their mutual interplay in
+determining each other’s historical routes of life-history. Such
+entities are partially formed by the inheritance of aspects from their
+own past. But they are also partially formed by the aspects of other
+events forming their environments. The laws of physics are the laws
+declaring how the entities mutually react among themselves. For physics
+these laws are arbitrary, because that science has abstracted from what
+the entities are in themselves. We have seen that this fact of what the
+entities are in themselves is liable to modification by their
+environments. Accordingly, the assumption that no modification of these
+laws is to be looked for in environments, which have any striking
+difference from the environments for which the laws have been observed
+to hold, is very unsafe. The physical entities may be modified in very
+essential ways, so far as these laws are concerned. It is even possible
+that they may be developed into individualities of more fundamental
+types, with wider embodiment of envisagement. Such envisagement might
+reach to the attainment of the poising of alternative values with
+exercise of choice lying outside the physical laws, and expressible only
+in terms of purpose. Apart from such remote possibilities, it remains an
+immediate deduction that an individual entity, whose own life-history is
+a part within the life-history of some larger, deeper, more complete
+pattern, is liable to have aspects of that larger pattern dominating its
+own being, and to experience modifications of that larger pattern
+reflected in itself as modifications of its own being. This is the
+theory of organic mechanism.
+
+According to this theory the evolution of laws of nature is concurrent
+with the evolution of enduring pattern. For the general state of the
+universe, as it now is, partly determines the very essences of the
+entities whose modes of functioning these laws express. The general
+principle is that in a new environment there is an evolution of the old
+entities into new forms.
+
+This rapid outline of a thoroughgoing organic theory of nature enables
+us to understand the chief requisites of the doctrine of evolution. The
+main work, proceeding during this pause at the end of the nineteenth
+century, was the absorption of this doctrine as guiding the methodology
+of all branches of science. By a blindness which is almost judicial as
+being a penalty affixed to hasty, superficial thinking, many religious
+thinkers opposed the new doctrine; although, in truth, a thoroughgoing
+evolutionary philosophy is inconsistent with materialism. The aboriginal
+stuff, or material, from which a materialistic philosophy starts is
+incapable of evolution. This material is in itself the ultimate
+substance. Evolution, on the materialistic theory, is reduced to the
+rôle of being another word for the description of the changes of the
+external relations between portions of matter. There is nothing to
+evolve, because one set of external relations is as good as any other
+set of external relations. There can merely be change, purposeless and
+unprogressive. But the whole point of the modern doctrine is the
+evolution of the complex organisms from antecedent states of less
+complex organisms. The doctrine thus cries aloud for a conception of
+organism as fundamental for nature. It also requires an underlying
+activity—a substantial activity—expressing itself in individual
+embodiments, and evolving in achievements of organism. The organism is a
+unit of emergent value, a real fusion of the characters of eternal
+objects, emerging for its own sake.
+
+Thus in the process of analysing the character of nature in itself, we
+find that the emergence of organisms depends on a selective activity
+which is akin to purpose. The point is that the enduring organisms are
+now the outcome of evolution; and that, beyond these organisms, there is
+nothing else that endures. On the materialistic theory, there is
+material—such as matter or electricity—which endures. On the organic
+theory, the only endurances are structures of activity, and the
+structures are evolved.
+
+Enduring things are thus the outcome of a temporal process; whereas
+eternal things are the elements required for the very being of the
+process. We can give a precise definition of endurance in this way: Let
+an event A be pervaded by an enduring structural pattern. Then A can be
+exhaustively subdivided into a temporal succession of events. Let B be
+any part of A, which is obtained by picking out any one of the events
+belonging to a series which thus subdivides A. Then the enduring pattern
+is a pattern of aspects within the complete pattern prehended into the
+unity of A, and it is also a pattern within the complete pattern
+prehended into the unity of any temporal slice of A, such as B. For
+example, a molecule is a pattern exhibited in an event of one minute,
+and of any second of that minute. It is obvious that such an enduring
+pattern may be of more, or of less, importance. It may express some
+slight fact connecting the underlying activities thus individualised; or
+it may express some very close connection. If the pattern which endures
+is merely derived from the direct aspects of the external environment,
+mirrored in the standpoints of the various parts, then the endurance is
+an extrinsic fact of slight importance. But if the enduring pattern is
+wholly derived from the direct aspects of the various temporal sections
+of the event in question, then the endurance is an important intrinsic
+fact. It expresses a certain unity of character uniting the underlying
+individualised activities. There is then an enduring object with a
+certain unity for itself and for the rest of nature. Let us use the term
+physical endurance to express endurance of this type. Then physical
+endurance is the process of continuously inheriting a certain identity
+of character transmitted throughout a historical route of events. This
+character belongs to the whole route, and to every event of the route.
+This is the exact property of material. If it has existed for ten
+minutes, it has existed during every minute of the ten minutes, and
+during every second of every minute. Only if you take _material_ to be
+fundamental, this property of endurance is an arbitrary fact at the base
+of the order of nature; but if you take _organism_ to be fundamental,
+this property is the result of evolution.
+
+It looks at first sight, as if a physical object, with its process of
+inheritance from itself, were independent of the environment. But such a
+conclusion is not justified. For let B and C be two successive slices in
+the life of such an object, such that C succeeds B. Then the enduring
+pattern in C is inherited from B, and from other analogous antecedent
+parts of its life. It is transmitted through B to C. But what is
+transmitted to C is the complete pattern of aspects derived from such
+events as B. These complete patterns include the influence of the
+environment on B, and on the other antecedent parts of the life of the
+object. Thus the complete aspects of the antecedent life are inherited
+as the partial pattern which endures throughout all the various periods
+of the life. Thus a favourable environment is essential to the
+maintenance of a physical object.
+
+Nature, as we know it, comprises enormous permanences. There are the
+permanences of ordinary matter. The molecules within the oldest rocks
+known to geologists may have existed unchanged for over a thousand
+million years, not only unchanged in themselves, but unchanged in their
+relative dispositions to each other. In that length of time the number
+of pulsations of a molecule vibrating with the frequency of yellow
+sodium light would be about 16.3 × 10^{22} = 163,000 × (10^6)³. Until
+recently, an atom was apparently indestructible. We know better now. But
+the indestructible atom has been succeeded by the apparently
+indestructible electron and the indestructible proton.
+
+Another fact to be explained is the great similarity of these
+practically indestructible objects. All electrons are very similar to
+each other. We need not outrun the evidence, and say that they are
+identical; but our powers of observation cannot detect any differences.
+Analogously, all hydrogen nuclei are alike. Also we note the great
+numbers of these analogous objects. There are throngs of them. It seems
+as though a certain similarity were a favourable condition for
+endurance. Common sense also suggests this conclusion. If organisms are
+to survive, they must work together.
+
+Accordingly, the key to the mechanism of evolution is the necessity for
+the evolution of a favourable environment, conjointly with the evolution
+of any specific type of enduring organisms of great permanence. Any
+physical object which by its influence deteriorates its environment,
+commits suicide.
+
+One of the simplest ways of evolving a favourable environment
+concurrently with the development of the individual organism, is that
+the influence of each organism on the environment should be favourable
+to the _endurance_ of other organisms of the same type. Further, if the
+organism also favours the _development_ of other organisms of the same
+type, you have then obtained a mechanism of evolution adapted to produce
+the observed state of large multitudes of analogous entities, with high
+powers of endurance. For the environment automatically develops with the
+species, and the species with the environment.
+
+The first question to ask is, whether there is any direct evidence for
+such a mechanism for the evolution of enduring organisms. In surveying
+nature, we must remember that there are not only basic organisms whose
+ingredients are merely aspects of eternal objects. There are also
+organisms of organisms. Suppose for the moment and for the sake of
+simplicity, we assume, without any evidence, that electrons and hydrogen
+nuclei are such basic organisms. Then the atoms, and the molecules, are
+organisms of a higher type, which also represent a compact definite
+organic unity. But when we come to the larger aggregations of matter,
+the organic unity fades into the background. It appears to be but faint
+and elementary. It is there; but the pattern is vague and indecisive. It
+is a mere aggregation of effects. When we come to living beings, the
+definiteness of pattern is recovered, and the organic character again
+rises into prominence. Accordingly, the characteristic laws of inorganic
+matter are mainly the statistical averages resulting from confused
+aggregates. So far are they from throwing light on the ultimate nature
+of things, that they blur and obliterate the individual characters of
+the individual organisms. If we wish to throw light upon the facts
+relating to organisms, we must study either the individual molecules and
+electrons, or the individual living beings. In between we find
+comparative confusion. Now the difficulty of studying the individual
+molecule is that we know so little about its life history. We cannot
+keep an individual under continuous observation. In general, we deal
+with them in large aggregates. So far as individuals are concerned,
+sometimes with difficulty a great experimenter throws, so to speak, a
+flash light on one of them, and just observes one type of instantaneous
+effect. Accordingly, the history of the functioning of individual
+molecules, or electrons, is largely hidden from us.
+
+But in the case of living beings, we can trace the history of
+individuals. We now find exactly the mechanism which is here demanded.
+In the first place, there is the propagation of the species from members
+of the same species. There is also the careful provision of the
+favourable environment for the endurance of the family, the race, or the
+seed in the fruit.
+
+It is evident, however, that I have explained the evolutionary mechanism
+in terms which are far too simple. We find associated species of living
+things, providing for each other a favourable environment. Thus just as
+the members of the same species mutually favour each other, so do
+members of associated species. We find the rudimentary fact of
+association in the existence of the two species, electrons and hydrogen
+nuclei. The simplicity of the dual association, and the apparent absence
+of competition from other antagonistic species accounts for the massive
+endurance which we find among them.
+
+There are thus two sides to the machinery involved in the development of
+nature. On one side, there is a given environment with organisms
+adapting themselves to it. The scientific materialism of the epoch in
+question emphasised this aspect. From this point of view, there is a
+given amount of material, and only a limited number of organisms can
+take advantage of it. The givenness of the environment dominates
+everything. Accordingly, the last words of science appeared to be the
+Struggle for Existence, and Natural Selection. Darwin’s own writings are
+for all time a model of refusal to go beyond the direct evidence, and of
+careful retention of every possible hypothesis. But those virtues were
+not so conspicuous in his followers, and still less in his
+camp-followers. The imagination of European sociologists and publicists
+was stained by exclusive attention to this aspect of conflicting
+interests. The idea prevailed that there was a peculiar strong-minded
+realism in discarding ethical considerations in the determination of the
+conduct of commercial and national interests.
+
+The other side of the evolutionary machinery, the neglected side, is
+expressed by the word _creativeness_. The organisms can create their own
+environment. For this purpose, the single organism is almost helpless.
+The adequate forces require societies of coöperating organisms. But with
+such coöperation and in proportion to the effort put forward, the
+environment has a plasticity which alters the whole ethical aspect of
+evolution.
+
+In the immediate past, and at present, a muddled state of mind is
+prevalent. The increased plasticity of the environment for mankind,
+resulting from the advances in scientific technology, is being construed
+in terms of habits of thought which find their justification in the
+theory of a fixed environment.
+
+The riddle of the universe is not so simple. There is the aspect of
+permanence in which a given type of attainment is endlessly repeated for
+its own sake; and there is the aspect of transition to other things,—it
+may be of higher worth, and it may be of lower worth. Also there are its
+aspects of struggle and of friendly help. But romantic ruthlessness is
+no nearer to real politics, than is romantic self-abnegation.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VII
+
+                               RELATIVITY
+
+
+In the previous lectures of this course we have considered the
+antecedent conditions which led up to the scientific movement, and have
+traced the progress of thought from the seventeenth to the nineteenth
+century. In the nineteenth century this history falls into three parts,
+so far as it is to be grouped around science. These divisions are, the
+contact between the romantic movement and science, the development of
+technology and physics in the earlier part of the century, and lastly
+the theory of evolution combined with the general advance of the
+biological sciences.
+
+The dominating note of the whole period of three centuries is that the
+doctrine of materialism afforded an adequate basis for the concepts of
+science. It was practically unquestioned. When undulations were wanted,
+an ether was supplied, in order to perform the duties of an undulatory
+material. To show the full assumption thus involved, I have sketched in
+outline an alternative doctrine of an organic theory of nature. In the
+last lecture it was pointed out that the biological developments, the
+doctrine of evolution, the doctrine of energy, and the molecular
+theories were rapidly undermining the adequacy of the orthodox
+materialism. But until the close of the century no one drew that
+conclusion. Materialism reigned supreme.
+
+The note of the present epoch is that so many complexities have
+developed regarding material, space, time, and energy, that the simple
+security of the old orthodox assumptions has vanished. It is obvious
+that they will not do as Newton left them, or even as Clerk Maxwell left
+them. There must be a reorganization. The new situation in the thought
+of to-day arises from the fact that scientific theory is outrunning
+common sense. The settlement as inherited by the eighteenth century was
+a triumph of organised common sense. It had got rid of medieval
+phantasies, and of Cartesian vortices. As a result it gave full reign to
+its anti-rationalistic tendencies derived from the historical revolt of
+the Reformation period. It grounded itself upon what every plain man
+could see with his own eyes, or with a microscope of moderate power. It
+measured the obvious things to be measured, and it generalised the
+obvious things to be generalised. For example, it generalised the
+ordinary notions of weight and massiveness. The eighteenth century
+opened with the quiet confidence that at last nonsense had been got rid
+of. To-day we are at the opposite pole of thought. Heaven knows what
+seeming nonsense may not to-morrow be demonstrated truth. We have
+recaptured some of the tone of the early nineteenth century, only on a
+higher imaginative level.
+
+The reason why we are on a higher imaginative level is not because we
+have finer imagination, but because we have better instruments. In
+science, the most important thing that has happened during the last
+forty years is the advance in instrumental design. This advance is
+partly due to a few men of genius such as Michelson and the German
+opticians. It is also due to the progress of technological processes of
+manufacture, particularly in the region of metallurgy. The designer has
+now at his disposal a variety of material of differing physical
+properties. He can thus depend upon obtaining the material he desires;
+and it can be ground to the shapes he desires, within very narrow limits
+of tolerance. These instruments have put thought onto a new level. A
+fresh instrument serves the same purpose as foreign travel; it shows
+things in unusual combinations. The gain is more than a mere addition;
+it is a transformation. The advance in experimental ingenuity is,
+perhaps, also due to the larger proportion of national ability which now
+flows into scientific pursuits. Anyhow, whatever be the cause, subtle
+and ingenious experiments have abounded within the last generation. The
+result is, that a great deal of information has been accumulated in
+regions of nature very far removed from the ordinary experience of
+mankind.
+
+Two famous experiments, one devised by Galileo at the outset of the
+scientific movement, and the other by Michelson with the aid of his
+famous interferometer, first carried out in 1881, and repeated in 1887
+and 1905, illustrate the assertions I have made. Galileo dropped heavy
+bodies from the top of the leaning tower of Pisa, and demonstrated that
+bodies of different weights, if released simultaneously, would reach the
+earth together. So far as experimental skill, and delicacy of apparatus
+were concerned, this experiment could have been made at any time within
+the preceding five thousand years. The ideas involved merely concerned
+weight and speed of travel, ideas which are familiar in ordinary life.
+The whole set of ideas might have been familiar to the family of King
+Minos of Crete, as they dropped pebbles into the sea from high
+battlements rising from the shore. We cannot too carefully realise that
+science started with the organisation of ordinary experiences. It was in
+this way that it coalesced so readily with the anti-rationalistic bias
+of the historical revolt. It was not asking for ultimate meanings. It
+confined itself to investigating the connections regulating the
+succession of obvious occurrences.
+
+Michelson’s experiment could not have been made earlier than it was. It
+required the general advance in technology, and Michelson’s experimental
+genius. It concerns the determination of the earth’s motion through the
+ether, and it assumes that light consists of waves of vibration
+advancing at a fixed rate through the ether in any direction. Also, of
+course, the earth is moving through the ether, and Michelson’s apparatus
+is moving with the earth. In the centre of the apparatus a ray of light
+is divided so that one half-ray goes in one direction _along_ the
+apparatus through a given distance, and is reflected back to the centre
+by a mirror in the apparatus. The other half-ray goes the same distance
+_across_ the apparatus in a direction at right angles to the former ray,
+and it also is reflected back to the centre. These reunited rays are
+then reflected onto a screen in the apparatus. If precautions are taken,
+you will see interference bands; namely bands of blackness where the
+crests of the waves of one ray have filled up the troughs of the other
+rays, owing to a minute difference in the lengths of paths of the two
+half-rays, up to certain parts of the screens. These differences in
+length will be affected by the motion of the earth. For it is the
+lengths of the paths in the ether which count. Thus, since the apparatus
+is moving with the earth, the path of one half-ray will be disturbed by
+the motion in a different manner from the path of the other half-ray.
+Think of yourself as moving in a railway carriage, first along the train
+and then across the train; and mark out your paths on the railway track
+which in this analogy corresponds to the ether. Now the motion of the
+earth is very slow compared to that of light. Thus in the analogy you
+must think of the train almost at a standstill, and of yourself as
+moving very quickly.
+
+In the experiment this effect of the earth’s motion would affect the
+positions on the screen of the interference bands. Also if you turn the
+apparatus round, through a right-angle, the effect of the earth’s motion
+on the two half-rays will be interchanged, and the positions of the
+interference bands would be shifted. We can calculate the small shift
+which should result owing to the earth’s motion round the sun. Also to
+this effect, we have to add that due to the sun’s motion through the
+ether. The delicacy of the instrument can be tested, and it can be
+proved that these effects of shifting are large enough to be observed by
+it. Now the point is, that nothing was observed. There was no shifting
+as you turned the instrument round.
+
+The conclusion is either that the earth is always stationary in the
+ether, or that there is something wrong with the fundamental principles
+on which the interpretation of the experiment relies. It is obvious
+that, in this experiment, we are very far away from the thoughts and the
+games of the children of King Minos. The ideas of an ether, of waves in
+it, of interference, of the motion of the earth through the ether, and
+of Michelson’s interferometer, are remote from ordinary experience. But
+remote as they are, they are simple and obvious compared to the accepted
+explanation of the nugatory result of the experiment.
+
+The ground of the explanation is that the ideas of space and of time
+employed in science are too simple-minded, and must be modified. This
+conclusion is a direct challenge to common sense, because the earlier
+science had only refined upon the ordinary notions of ordinary people.
+Such a radical reorganization of ideas would not have been adopted,
+unless it had also been supported by many other observations which we
+need not enter upon. Some form of the relativity theory seems to be the
+simplest way of explaining a large number of facts which otherwise would
+each require some _ad hoc_ explanation. The theory, therefore, does not
+merely depend upon the experiments which led to its origination.
+
+The central point of the explanation is that every instrument, such as
+Michelson’s apparatus as used in the experiment, necessarily records the
+velocity of light as having one and the same definite speed relatively
+to it. I mean that an interferometer in a comet and an interferometer on
+the earth would necessarily bring out the velocity of light, relatively
+to themselves, as at the same value. This is an obvious paradox, since
+the light moves with a definite velocity through the ether. Accordingly
+two bodies, the earth and the comet, moving with unequal velocities
+through the ether, might be expected to have different velocities
+relatively to rays of light. For example, consider two cars on a road,
+moving at ten and twenty miles an hour respectively, and being passed by
+another car at fifty miles an hour. The rapid car will pass one of the
+two cars at the relative velocity of forty miles per hour, and the other
+at the rate of thirty miles per hour. The allegation as to light is
+that, if we substituted a ray of light for the rapid car, the velocity
+of the light along the roadway would be exactly the same as its velocity
+relatively to either of the two cars which it overtakes. The velocity of
+light is immensely large, being about three hundred thousand kilometres
+per second. We must have notions as to space and time such that just
+this velocity has this peculiar character. It follows that all our
+notions of relative velocity must be recast. But these notions are the
+immediate outcome of our habitual notions as to space and time. So we
+come back to the position, that there has been something overlooked in
+the current expositions of what we mean by space and of what we mean by
+time.
+
+Now our habitual fundamental assumption is that there is a unique
+meaning to be given to space and a unique meaning to be given to time,
+so that whatever meaning is given to spatial relations in respect to the
+instrument on the earth, the same meaning must be given to them in
+respect to the instrument on the comet, and the same meaning for an
+instrument at rest in the ether. In the theory of relativity, this is
+denied. As far as concerns space, there is no difficulty in agreeing, if
+you think of the obvious facts of relative motion. But even here the
+change in meaning has to go further than would be sanctioned by common
+sense. Also the same demand is made for time; so that the relative
+dating of events and the lapses of time between them are to be reckoned
+as different for the instrument on the earth, for the instrument in the
+comet, and for the instrument at rest in the ether. This is a greater
+strain on our credulity. We need not probe the question further than the
+conclusion that for the earth and for the comet spatiality and
+temporality are each to have different meanings amid different
+conditions, such as those presented by the earth and the comet.
+Accordingly velocity has different meanings for the two bodies. Thus the
+modern scientific assumption is that if anything has the speed of light
+by reference to any one meaning of space and time, then it has the same
+speed according to any other meaning of space and time.
+
+This is a heavy blow at the classical scientific materialism, which
+presupposes a definite present instant at which all matter is
+simultaneously real. In the modern theory there is no such unique
+present instant. You can find a meaning for the notion of the
+simultaneous instant throughout all nature, but it will be a different
+meaning for different notions of temporality.
+
+There has been a tendency to give an extreme subjectivist interpretation
+to this new doctrine. I mean that the relativity of space and time has
+been construed as though it were dependent on the choice of the
+observer. It is perfectly legitimate to bring in the observer, if he
+facilitates explanations. But it is the observer’s body that we want,
+and not his mind. Even this body is only useful as an example of a very
+familiar form of apparatus. On the whole, it is better to concentrate
+attention on Michelson’s interferometer, and to leave Michelson’s body
+and Michelson’s mind out of the picture. The question is, why did the
+interferometer have black bands on its screen, and why did not these
+bands slightly shift as the instrument turned. The new relativity
+associates space and time with an intimacy not hitherto contemplated;
+and presupposes that their separation in concrete fact can be achieved
+by alternative modes of abstraction, yielding alternative meanings. But
+each mode of abstraction is directing attention to something which is in
+nature; and thereby is isolating it for the purpose of contemplation.
+The fact relevant to experiment, is the relevance of the interferometer
+to just one among the many alternative systems of these spatio-temporal
+relations which hold between natural entities.
+
+What we must now ask of philosophy is to give us an interpretation of
+the status in nature of space and time, so that the possibility of
+alternative meanings is preserved. These lectures are not suited for the
+elaboration of details; but there is no difficulty in pointing out where
+to look for the origin of the discrimination between space and time. I
+am presupposing the organic theory of nature, which I have outlined as a
+basis for a thoroughgoing objectivism.
+
+An event is the grasping into unity of a pattern of aspects. The
+effectiveness of an event beyond itself arises from the aspects of
+itself which go to form the prehended unities of other events. Except
+for the systematic aspects of geometrical shape, this effectiveness is
+trivial, if the mirrored pattern attaches merely to the event as one
+whole. If the pattern endures throughout the successive parts of the
+event, and also exhibits itself in the whole, so that the event is the
+life history of the pattern, then in virtue of that enduring pattern the
+event gains in external effectiveness. For its own effectiveness is
+reënforced by the analogous aspects of all its successive parts. The
+event constitutes a patterned value with a permanence inherent
+throughout its own parts; and by reason of this inherent endurance the
+event is important for the modification of its environment.
+
+It is in this endurance of pattern that time differentiates itself from
+space. The pattern is spatially _now_; and this temporal determination
+constitutes its relation to each partial event. For it is reproduced in
+this temporal succession of these spatial parts of its own life. I mean
+that this particular rule of temporal order allows the pattern to be
+reproduced in each temporal slice of its history. So to speak, each
+enduring object discovers in nature and requires from nature a principle
+discriminating space from time. Apart from the fact of an enduring
+pattern this principle might be there, but it would be latent and
+trivial. Thus the importance of space as against time, and of time as
+against space, has developed with the development of enduring organisms.
+Enduring objects are significant of a differentiation of space from time
+in respect to the patterns ingredient within events; and conversely the
+differentiation of space from time in the patterns ingredient within
+events expresses the patience of the community of events for enduring
+objects. There might be the community without objects, but there could
+not be the enduring objects without the community with its peculiar
+patience for them.
+
+It is very necessary that this point should not be misunderstood.
+Endurance means that a pattern which is exhibited in the prehension of
+one event is also exhibited in the prehension of those of its parts
+which are discriminated by a certain rule. It is not true that any part
+of the whole event will yield the same pattern as does the whole. For
+example, consider the total bodily pattern exhibited in the life of a
+human body during one minute. One of the thumbs during the same minute
+is part of the whole bodily event. But the pattern of this part is the
+pattern of the thumb, and is not the pattern of the whole body. Thus
+endurance requires a definite rule for obtaining the parts. In the above
+example, we know at once what the rule is: You must take the life of the
+whole body during any portion of that same minute; for example, during a
+second or a tenth of a second. In other words, the meaning of endurance
+presupposes a meaning for the lapse of time within the spatio-temporal
+continuum.
+
+The question now arises whether all enduring objects discover the same
+principle of differentiation of space from time; or even whether at
+different stages of its own life-history one object may not vary in its
+spatio-temporal discrimination. Up till a few years ago, everyone
+unhesitatingly assumed that there was only one such principle to be
+discovered. Accordingly, in dealing with one object, time would have
+exactly the same meaning in reference to endurance as in dealing with
+the endurance of another object. It would also follow then that spatial
+relations would have one unique meaning. But now it seems that the
+observed effectiveness of objects can only be explained by assuming that
+objects in a state of motion relatively to each other are utilising, for
+their endurance, meanings of space and of time which are not identical
+from one object to another. Every enduring object is to be conceived as
+at rest in its own proper space, and in motion throughout any space
+defined in a way which is not that inherent in its peculiar endurance.
+If two objects are mutually at rest, they are utilising the same
+meanings of space and of time for the purposes of expressing their
+endurance; if in relative motion, the spaces and times differ. It
+follows that, if we can conceive a body at one stage of its life history
+as in motion relatively to itself at another stage, then the body at
+these two stages is utilising diverse meanings of space, and
+correlatively diverse meanings of time.
+
+In an organic philosophy of nature there is nothing to decide between
+the old hypothesis of the uniqueness of the time discrimination and the
+new hypothesis of its multiplicity. It is purely a matter for evidence
+drawn from observations.[5]
+
+Footnote 5:
+
+  _Cf._ my _Principles of Natural Knowledge_, Sec. 52:3.
+
+In an earlier lecture, I said that an event had contemporaries. It is an
+interesting question whether, on the new hypothesis, such a statement
+can be made without the qualification of a reference to a definite
+space-time system. It is possible to do so, in the sense that in _some_
+time-system or other the two events are simultaneous. In other
+time-systems the two contemporary events will not be simultaneous,
+though they may overlap. Analogously one event will precede another
+without qualification, if in _every_ time-system this precedence occurs.
+It is evident that if we start from a given event A, other events in
+general are divided into two sets, namely, those which without
+qualification are contemporaneous with A and those which either precede
+or succeed A. But there will be a set left over, namely, those events
+which bound the two sets. There we have a critical case. You will
+remember that we have a critical velocity to account for, namely the
+theoretical velocity of light _in vacuo_.[6] Also you will remember that
+the utilisation of different spatio-temporal systems means the relative
+motion of objects. When we analyse this critical relation of a special
+set of events to any given event A, we find the explanation of the
+critical velocity which we require. I am suppressing all details. It is
+evident that exactness of statement must be introduced by the
+introduction of points, and lines, and instants. Also that the origin of
+geometry requires discussion; for example, the measurement of lengths,
+the straightness of lines, and the flatness of planes, and
+perpendicularity. I have endeavoured to carry out these investigations
+in some earlier books, under the heading of the theory of extensive
+abstraction; but they are too technical for the present occasion.
+
+Footnote 6:
+
+  This is not the velocity of light in a gravitational field or in a
+  medium of molecules and electrons.
+
+If there be no one definite meaning to the geometrical relations of
+distance, it is evident that the law of gravitation needs restatement.
+For the formula expressing that law is that two particles attract each
+other in proportion to the product of their masses and the inverse
+square of their distances. This enunciation tacitly assumes that there
+is one definite meaning to be ascribed to the instant at which the
+attraction is considered, and also one definite meaning to be ascribed
+to _distance_. But distance is a purely spatial notion, so that in the
+new doctrine, there are an indefinite number of such meanings according
+to the space-time system which you adopt. If the two particles are
+relatively at rest, then we might be content with the space-time systems
+which they are both utilising. Unfortunately this suggestion gives no
+hint as to procedure when they are not mutually at rest. It is,
+therefore, necessary to reformulate the law in a way which does not
+presuppose any particular space-time system. Einstein has done this.
+Naturally the result is more complicated. He introduced into
+mathematical physics certain methods of pure mathematics which render
+the formulae independent of the particular systems of measurement
+adopted. The new formula introduces various small effects which are
+absent in Newton’s law. But for the major effects Newton’s law and
+Einstein’s law agree. Now these extra effects of Einstein’s law serve to
+explain irregularities of the planet Mercury’s orbit which by Newton’s
+law were inexplicable. This is a strong confirmation of the new theory.
+Curiously enough, there is more than one alternative formula, based on
+the new theory of multiple space-time systems, having the property of
+embodying Newton’s law and in addition of explaining the peculiarities
+of Mercury’s motion. The only method of selection between them is to
+wait for experimental evidence respecting those effects on which the
+formulae differ. Nature is probably quite indifferent to the aesthetic
+preferences of mathematicians.
+
+It only remains to add that Einstein would probably reject the theory of
+multiple space-time systems which I have been expounding to you. He
+would interpret his formula in terms of contortions in space-time which
+alter the invariance theory for measure properties, and of the proper
+times of each historical route. His mode of statement has the greater
+mathematical simplicity, and only allows of one law of gravitation,
+excluding the alternatives. But, for myself, I cannot reconcile it with
+the given facts of our experience as to simultaneity, and spatial
+arrangement. There are also other difficulties of a more abstract
+character.
+
+The theory of the relationship between events at which we have now
+arrived is based first upon the doctrine that the relatednesses of an
+event are all internal relations, so far as concerns that event, though
+not necessarily so far as concerns the other relata. For example, the
+eternal objects, thus involved, are externally related to events. This
+internal relatedness is the reason why an event can be found only just
+where it is and how it is,—that is to say, in just one definite set of
+relationships. For each relationship enters into the essence of the
+event; so that, apart from that relationship, the event would not be
+itself. This is what is meant by the very notion of internal relations.
+It has been usual, indeed universal, to hold that spatio-temporal
+relationships are external. This doctrine is what is here denied.
+
+The conception of internal relatedness involves the analysis of the
+event into two factors, one the underlying substantial activity of
+individualisation, and the other the complex of aspects—that is to say,
+the complex of relatednesses as entering into the essence of the given
+event—which are unified by this individualised activity. In other words,
+the concept of internal relations requires the concept of substance as
+the activity synthesising the relationships into its emergent character.
+The event is what it is, by reason of the unification in itself of a
+multiplicity of relationships. The general scheme of these mutual
+relationships is an abstraction which presupposes each event as an
+independent entity, which it is not, and asks what remnant of these
+formative relationships is then left in the guise of external
+relationships. The scheme of relationships as thus impartially expressed
+becomes the scheme of a complex of events variously related as wholes to
+parts and as joint parts within some one whole. Even here, the internal
+relationship forces itself on our attention; for the part evidently is
+constitutive of the whole. Also an isolated event which has lost its
+status in any complex of events is equally excluded by the very nature
+of an event. So the whole is evidently constitutive of the part. Thus
+the internal character of the relationship really shows through this
+impartial scheme of abstract external relations.
+
+But this exhibition of the actual universe as extensive and divisible
+has left out the distinction between space and time. It has in fact left
+out the process of realisation, which is the adjustment of the synthetic
+activities by virtue of which the various events become their realised
+selves. This adjustment is thus the adjustment of the underlying active
+substances whereby these substances exhibit themselves as the
+individualisations or modes of Spinoza’s one substance. This adjustment
+is what introduces temporal process.
+
+Thus, in some sense, time, in its character of the adjustment of the
+process of synthetic realisation, extends beyond the spatio-temporal
+continuum of nature.[7] There is no necessity that temporal process, in
+this sense, should be constituted by one single series of linear
+succession. Accordingly, in order to satisfy the present demands of
+scientific hypothesis, we introduce the metaphysical hypothesis that
+this is not the case. We do assume (basing ourselves upon direct
+observation), however, that temporal process of realisation can be
+analysed into a group of linear serial processes. Each of these linear
+series is a space-time system. In support of this assumption of definite
+serial processes, we appeal: (1) to the immediate presentation through
+the senses of an extended universe beyond ourselves and _simultaneous_
+with ourselves, (2) to the intellectual apprehension of a meaning to the
+question which asks what is _now immediately happening_ in regions
+beyond the cognisance of our senses, (3) to the analysis of what is
+involved in the _endurance_ of emergent objects. This endurance of
+objects involves the display of a pattern as now realised. This display
+is the display of a pattern as inherent in an event, but also as
+exhibiting a temporal slice of nature as lending aspects to eternal
+objects (or, equally, of eternal objects as lending aspects to events).
+The pattern is spatialised in a whole duration for the benefit of the
+event into whose essence the pattern enters. The event is part of the
+duration, _i.e._, is part of what is exhibited in the aspects inherent
+in itself; and conversely the duration is the whole of nature
+simultaneous with the event, in that sense of simultaneity. Thus an
+event in realising itself displays a pattern, and this pattern requires
+a definite duration determined by a definite meaning of simultaneity.
+Each such meaning of simultaneity relates the pattern as thus displayed
+to one definite space-time system. The actuality of the space-time
+systems is constituted by the realisation of pattern; but it is inherent
+in the general scheme of events as constituting its patience for the
+temporal process of realisation.
+
+Footnote 7:
+
+  _Cf._ my _Concept of Nature_, Ch. III.
+
+Notice that the pattern requires a duration involving a definite lapse
+of time, and not merely an instantaneous moment. Such a moment is more
+abstract, in that it merely denotes a certain relation of contiguity
+between the concrete events. Thus a duration is spatialised; and by
+‘spatialised’ is meant that the duration is the field for the realised
+pattern constituting the character of the event. A duration, as the
+field of the pattern realised in the actualisation of one of its
+contained events, is an epoch, _i.e._, an arrest. Endurance is the
+repetition of the pattern in successive events. Thus endurance requires
+a succession of durations, each exhibiting the pattern. In this account
+‘time’ has been separated from ‘extension’ and from the ‘divisibility’
+which arises from the character of spatio-temporal extension’.
+Accordingly we must not proceed to conceive time as another form of
+extensiveness. Time is sheer succession of epochal durations. But the
+entities which succeed each other in this account are durations. The
+duration is that which is required for the realisation of a pattern in
+the given event. Thus the divisibility and extensiveness is within the
+given duration. The epochal duration is not realised _via_ its
+_successive_ divisible parts, but is given _with_ its parts. In this
+way, the objection which Zeno might make to the joint validity of two
+passages from Kant’s _Critique of Pure Reason_ is met by abandoning the
+earlier of the two passages. I refer to passages from the section ‘Of
+the Axioms of Intuition’; the earlier from the subsection on _Extensive
+Quantity_, and the latter from the subsection on _Intensive Quantity_
+where considerations respecting quantity in general, extensive and
+intensive, are summed up. The earlier passage runs thus:[8]
+
+Footnote 8:
+
+  Max Müller’s translation.
+
+“I call an extensive quantity that in which the representation of the
+whole is rendered possible by the representation of its parts, _and
+therefore necessarily preceded by it_.[9] I cannot represent to myself
+any line, however small it may be, without drawing it in thought, that
+is, without producing all its parts one after the other, starting from a
+given point, and thus, first of all, drawing its intuition. The same
+applies to every, even the smallest portion of time. I can only think in
+it the successive progress from one moment to another, thus producing in
+the end, by all the portions of time, and their addition, a definite
+quantity of time.”
+
+Footnote 9:
+
+  Italics mine, and also in the second passage.
+
+The second passage runs thus:
+
+“This peculiar property of quantities that no part of them is the
+smallest possible part (no part indivisible) is called continuity. Time
+and space are quanta continua, because there is no part of them that is
+not enclosed between limits (points and moments), _no part that is not
+itself again a space or a time. Space consists of spaces only, time of
+times. Points and moments are only limits_, mere places of limitation,
+and as places _presupposing always_ those intuitions which they are
+meant to limit or to determine. Mere places or parts that might be given
+before space or time, could never be compounded into space or time.”
+
+I am in complete agreement with the second extract if ‘time and space’
+is the extensive continuum; but it is inconsistent with its predecessor.
+For Zeno would object that a vicious infinite regress is involved. Every
+part of time involves some smaller part of itself, and so on. Also this
+series regresses backwards ultimately to nothing; since the initial
+moment is without duration and merely marks the relation of contiguity
+to an earlier time. Thus time is impossible, if the two extracts are
+both adhered to. I accept the later, and reject the earlier, passage.
+Realisation is the becoming of time in the field of extension. Extension
+is the complex of events, _quâ_ their potentialities. In realisation the
+potentiality becomes actuality. But the potential pattern requires a
+duration; and the duration must be exhibited as an epochal whole, by the
+realisation of the pattern. Thus time is the succession of elements in
+themselves divisible and contiguous. A duration, in becoming temporal,
+thereby incurs realisation in respect to some enduring object.
+Temporalisation is realisation. Temporalisation is not another
+continuous process. It is an atomic succession. Thus time is atomic
+(_i.e._, epochal), though what is temporalised is divisible. This
+doctrine follows from the doctrine of events, and of the nature of
+enduring objects. In the next chapter we must consider its relevance to
+the quantum theory of recent science.
+
+It is to be noted that this doctrine of the epochal character of time
+does not depend on the modern doctrine of relativity, and holds
+equally—and indeed, more simply—if this doctrine be abandoned. It does
+depend on the analysis of the intrinsic character of an event,
+considered as the most concrete finite entity.
+
+In reviewing this argument, note first that the second quotation from
+Kant, on which it is based, does not depend on any peculiar Kantian
+doctrine. The latter of the two is in agreement with Plato as against
+Aristotle.[10] In the second place, the argument assumes that Zeno
+understated his argument. He should have urged it against the current
+notion of time in itself, and not against motion, which involves
+relations between time and space. For, what becomes has duration. But no
+duration can become until a smaller duration (part of the former) has
+antecedently come into being [Kant’s earlier statement]. The same
+argument applies to this smaller duration, and so on. Also the infinite
+regress of these durations converges to nothing—and even on the
+Aristotelian view there is no first moment. Accordingly time would be an
+irrational notion. Thirdly, in the epochal theory Zeno’s difficulty is
+met by conceiving temporalisation as the realisation of a complete
+organism. This organism is an event holding in its essence its
+spatio-temporal relationships (both within itself, and beyond itself)
+throughout the spatio-temporal continuum.
+
+Footnote 10:
+
+  _Cf._ ‘Euclid in Greek,’ by Sir T. L. Heath, Camb. Univ. Press, in a
+  note on Points.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VIII
+
+                           THE QUANTUM THEORY
+
+
+The theory of relativity has justly excited a great amount of public
+attention. But, for all its importance, it has not been the topic which
+has chiefly absorbed the recent interest of physicists. Without question
+that position is held by the quantum theory. The point of interest in
+this theory is that, according to it, some effects which appear
+essentially capable of gradual increase or gradual diminution are in
+reality to be increased or decreased only by certain definite jumps. It
+is as though you could walk at three miles per hour or at four miles per
+hour, but not at three and a half miles per hour.
+
+The effects in question are concerned with the radiation of light from a
+molecule which has been excited by some collision. Light consists of
+waves of vibration in the electromagnetic field. After a complete wave
+has passed a given point everything at that point is restored to its
+original state and is ready for the next wave which follows on. Picture
+to yourselves the waves on the ocean, and reckon from crest to crest of
+successive waves. The number of waves which pass a given point in one
+second is called the frequency of that system of waves. A system of
+light-waves of definite frequency corresponds to a definite colour in
+the spectrum. Now a molecule, when excited, vibrates with a certain
+number of definite frequencies. In other words, there are a definite set
+of modes of vibration of the molecule, and each mode of vibration has
+one definite frequency. Each mode of vibration can stir up in the
+electromagnetic field waves of its own frequency. These waves carry away
+the energy of the vibration; so that finally (when such waves are in
+being) the molecule loses the energy of its excitement and the waves
+cease. Thus a molecule can radiate light of certain definite colours,
+that is to say, of certain definite frequencies.
+
+You would think that each mode of vibration could be excited to any
+intensity, so that the energy carried away by light of that frequency
+could be of any amount. But this is not the case. There appear to be
+certain minimum amounts of energy which cannot be subdivided. The case
+is analogous to that of a citizen of the United States who, in paying
+his debts in the currency of his country, cannot subdivide a cent so as
+to correspond to some minute subdivision of the goods obtained. The cent
+corresponds to the minimum quantity of the light energy, and the goods
+obtained correspond to the energy of the exciting cause. This exciting
+cause is either strong enough to procure the emission of one cent of
+energy, or fails to procure the emission of any energy whatsoever. In
+any case the molecule will only emit an integral number of cents of
+energy. There is a further peculiarity which we can illustrate by
+bringing an Englishman onto the scene. He pays his debts in English
+currency, and his smallest unit is a farthing which differs in value
+from the cent. The farthing is in fact about half a cent, to a very
+rough approximation. In the molecule, different modes of vibration have
+different frequencies. Compare each mode to a nation. One mode
+corresponds to the United States, and another mode corresponds to
+England. One mode can only radiate its energy in an integral number of
+cents, so that a cent of energy is the least it can pay out; whereas the
+other mode can only radiate its energy in an integral number of
+farthings, so that a farthing of energy is the least that it can pay
+out. Also a rule can be found to tell us the relative value of the cent
+of energy of one mode to the farthing of energy of another mode. The
+rule is childishly simple: Each smallest coin of energy has a value in
+strict proportion to the frequency belonging to that mode. By this rule,
+and comparing farthings with cents, the frequency of an American would
+be about twice that of an Englishman. In other words, the American would
+do about twice as many things in a second as an Englishman. I must leave
+you to judge whether this corresponds to the reputed characters of the
+two nations. Also I suggest that there are merits attaching to both ends
+of the solar spectrum. Sometimes you want red light and sometimes violet
+light.
+
+There has been, I hope, no great difficulty in comprehending what the
+quantum theory asserts about molecules. The perplexity arises from the
+effort to fit the theory into the current scientific picture of what is
+going on in the molecule or atom.
+
+It has been the basis of the materialistic theory, that the happenings
+of nature are to be explained in terms of the locomotion of material. In
+accordance with this principle, the waves of light were explained in
+terms of the locomotion of a material ether, and the internal happenings
+of a molecule are now explained in terms of the locomotion of separate
+material parts. In respect to waves of light, the material ether has
+retreated to an indeterminate position in the background, and is rarely
+talked about. But the principle is unquestioned as regards its
+application to the atom. For example a neutral hydrogen atom is assumed
+to consist of at least two lumps of material; one lump is the nucleus
+consisting of a material called positive electricity, and the other is a
+single electron which is negative electricity. The nucleus shows signs
+of being complex, and of being subdivisible into smaller lumps, some of
+positive electricity and others electronic. The assumption is, that
+whatever vibration takes place in the atom is to be attributed to the
+vibratory locomotion of some bit of material, detachable from the
+remainder. The difficulty with the quantum theory is that, on this
+hypothesis, we have to picture the atom as providing a limited number of
+definite grooves, which are the sole tracks along which vibration can
+take place, whereas the classical scientific picture provides none of
+these grooves. The quantum theory wants trolley-cars with a limited
+number of routes, and the scientific picture provides horses galloping
+over prairies. The result is that the physical doctrine of the atom has
+got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of
+astronomy before Copernicus.
+
+On the organic theory of nature there are two sorts of vibrations which
+radically differ from each other. There is vibratory locomotion, and
+there is vibratory organic deformation; and the conditions for the two
+types of change are of a different character. In other words, there is
+vibratory locomotion of a given pattern as one whole, and there is
+vibratory change of pattern.
+
+A complete organism in the organic theory is what corresponds to a bit
+of material on the materialistic theory. There will be a primary genus,
+comprising a number of species of organisms, such that each primary
+organism, belonging to a species of the primary genus, is not
+decomposable into subordinate organisms. I will call any organism of the
+primary genus a primate. There may be different species of primates.
+
+It must be kept in mind that we are dealing with the abstractions of
+physics. Accordingly, we are not thinking of what a primate is in
+itself, as a pattern arising from the prehension of the concrete
+aspects; nor are we thinking of what a primate is for its environment,
+in respect to its concrete aspects prehended therein. We are thinking of
+these various aspects merely in so far as their effects on patterns and
+on locomotion are expressible in spatio-temporal terms. Accordingly, in
+the language of physics, the aspects of a primate are merely its
+contributions to the electromagnetic field. This is in fact exactly what
+we know of electrons and protons. An electron for us is merely the
+pattern of its aspects in its environment, so far as those aspects are
+relevant to the electromagnetic field.
+
+Now in discussing the theory of relativity, we saw that the relative
+motion of two primates means simply that their organic patterns are
+utilising diverse space-time systems. If two primates do not continue
+either mutually at rest, or mutually in uniform relative motion, at
+least one of them is changing its intrinsic space-time system. The laws
+of motion express the conditions under which these changes of space-time
+systems are effected. The conditions for vibratory _locomotion_ are
+founded upon these general laws of motion.
+
+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 can
+imagine the atomic nucleus as composed of a large number of primates of
+differing species, and perhaps with many primates of the same species,
+the whole association being such as to favour stability. An example of
+such an association is afforded by the association of a positive nucleus
+with negative electrons to obtain a neutral atom. The neutral atom is
+thereby shielded from any electric field which would otherwise produce
+changes in the space-time system of the atom.
+
+The requirements of physics now suggest an idea which is very consonant
+with the organic philosophical theory. I put it in the form of a
+question: Has our organic theory of endurance been tainted by the
+materialistic theory in so far as it assumes without question that
+endurance must mean undifferentiated sameness throughout the
+life-history concerned? Perhaps you noticed that (in a previous chapter)
+I used the word ‘reiteration’ as a synonym of ‘endurance.’ It obviously
+is not quite synonymous in its meaning; and now I want to suggest that
+_reiteration_ where it differs from _endurance_ is more nearly what the
+organic theory requires. The difference is very analogous to that
+between the Galileans and the Aristotelians: Aristotle said ‘rest’ where
+Galileo added ‘or uniform motion in a straight line.’ Thus in the
+organic theory, a pattern need not endure in undifferentiated sameness
+through time. The pattern may be essentially one of aesthetic contrasts
+requiring a lapse of time for its unfolding. A tune is an example of
+such a pattern. Thus the endurance of the pattern now means the
+reiteration of its succession of contrasts. This is obviously the most
+general notion of endurance on the organic theory, and ‘reiteration’ is
+perhaps the word which expresses it with most directness. But when we
+translate this notion into the abstractions of physics, it at once
+becomes the technical notion of ‘vibration.’ This vibration is not the
+vibratory locomotion: it is the vibration of organic deformation. There
+are certain indications in modern physics that for the rôle of
+corpuscular organisms at the base of the physical field, we require
+vibratory entities. Such corpuscles would be the corpuscles detected as
+expelled from the nuclei of atoms, which then dissolve into waves of
+light. We may conjecture that such a corpuscular body has no great
+stability of endurance, when in isolation. Accordingly, an unfavourable
+environment leading to rapid changes in its proper space-time system,
+that is to say, an environment jolting it into violent accelerations,
+causes the corpuscles to go to pieces and dissolve into light-waves of
+the same period of vibration.
+
+A proton, and perhaps an electron, would be an association of such
+primates, superposed on each other, with their frequencies and spatial
+dimensions so arranged as to promote the stability of the complex
+organism, when jolted into accelerations of locomotion. The conditions
+for stability would give the associations of periods possible for
+protons. The expulsion of a primate would come from a jolt which leads
+the proton either to settle down into an alternative association, or to
+generate a new primate by the aid of the energy received.
+
+A primate must be associated with a definite frequency of vibratory
+organic deformation so that when it goes to pieces it dissolves into
+light waves of the same frequency, which then carry off all its average
+energy. It is quite easy (as a particular hypothesis) to imagine
+stationary vibrations of the electromagnetic field of definite
+frequency, and directed radially to and from a centre, which, in
+accordance with the accepted electromagnetic laws, would consist of a
+vibratory spherical nucleus satisfying one set of conditions and a
+vibratory external field satisfying another set of conditions. This is
+an example of vibratory organic deformation. Further [on this particular
+hypothesis], there are two ways of determining the subsidiary conditions
+so as to satisfy the ordinary requirements of mathematical physics. The
+total energy, according to one of these ways, would satisfy the quantum
+condition; so that it consists of an integral number of units or cents,
+which are such that the cent of energy of any primate is proportional to
+its frequency. I have not worked out the conditions for stability or for
+a stable association. I have mentioned the particular hypothesis by way
+of showing by example that the organic theory of nature affords
+possibilities for the reconsideration of ultimate physical laws, which
+are not open to the opposed materialistic theory.
+
+In this particular hypothesis of vibratory primates, the Maxwellian
+equations are supposed to hold throughout all space, including the
+interior of a proton. They express the laws governing the vibratory
+production and absorption of energy. The whole process for each primate
+issues in a certain average energy characteristic of the primate, and
+proportional to its mass. In fact the energy is the mass. There are
+vibratory radial streams of energy, both without and within a primate.
+Within the primate, there are vibratory distributions of electric
+density. On the materialistic theory such density marks the presence of
+material: on the organic theory of vibration, it marks the vibratory
+production of energy. Such production is restricted to the interior of
+the primate.
+
+All science must start with some assumptions as to the ultimate analysis
+of the facts with which it deals. These assumptions are justified partly
+by their adherence to the types of occurrence of which we are directly
+conscious, and partly by their success in representing the observed
+facts with a certain generality, devoid of _ad hoc_ suppositions. The
+general theory of the vibration of primates, which I have outlined, is
+merely given as an example of the sort of possibilities which the
+organic theory leaves open for physical science. The point is that it
+adds the possibility of organic deformation to that of mere locomotion.
+Light waves form one great example of organic deformation.
+
+At any epoch the assumptions of a science are giving way, when they
+exhibit symptoms of the epicyclic state from which astronomy was rescued
+in the sixteenth century. Physical science is now exhibiting such
+symptoms. In order to reconsider its foundations, it must recur to a
+more concrete view of the character of real things, and must conceive
+its fundamental notions as abstractions derived from this direct
+intuition. It is in this way that it surveys the general possibilities
+of revision which are open to it.
+
+The discontinuities introduced by the quantum theory require revision of
+physical concepts in order to meet them. In particular, it has been
+pointed out that some theory of discontinuous existence is required.
+What is asked from such a theory, is that an orbit of an electron can be
+regarded as a series of detached positions, and not as a continuous
+line.
+
+The theory of a primate or a vibrating pattern, given above, together
+with the distinction between temporality and extensiveness in the
+previous chapter, yields exactly this result. It will be remembered that
+the continuity of the complex of events arises from the relationships of
+extensiveness; whereas the temporality arises from the realisation in a
+subject-event of a pattern which requires for its display that the whole
+of a duration be spatialised (_i.e._, arrested), as given by its aspects
+in the event. Thus realization proceeds _viâ_ a succession of epochal
+durations; and the continuous transition, _i.e._, the organic
+deformation, is within the duration which is already given. The
+vibratory organic deformation is in fact the reiteration of the pattern.
+One complete period defines the duration required for the complete
+pattern. Thus the primate is realised atomically in a succession of
+durations, each duration to be measured from one maximum to another.
+Accordingly, so far as the primate as one enduring whole entity is to be
+taken account of, it is to be assigned to these durations successively.
+If it is considered as one thing, its orbit is to be diagrammatically
+exhibited by a series of detached dots. Thus the locomotion of the
+primate is discontinuous in space and time. If we go below the quanta of
+time which are the successive vibratory periods of the primate, we find
+a succession of vibratory electromagnetic fields, each stationary in the
+space-time of its own duration. Each of these fields exhibits a single
+complete period of the electromagnetic vibration which constitutes the
+primate. This vibration is not to be thought of as the becoming of
+reality; it is what the primate is in one of its discontinuous
+realisations. Also the successive durations in which the primate is
+realised are contiguous; it follows that the life history of the primate
+can be exhibited as being the continuous development of occurrences in
+the electromagnetic field. But these occurrences enter into realisation
+as whole atomic blocks, occupying definite periods of time.
+
+There is no need to conceive that time is atomic in the sense that all
+patterns must be realised in the same successive durations. In the first
+place, even if the periods were the same in the case of two primates,
+the durations of realisation may not be the same. In other words, the
+two primates may be out of phase. Also if the periods are different, the
+atomism of any one duration of one primate is necessarily subdivided by
+the boundary moments of durations of the other primate.
+
+The laws of the locomotion of primates express under what conditions any
+primate will change its space-time system.
+
+It is unnecessary to pursue this conception further. The justification
+of the concept of vibratory existence must be purely experimental. The
+point illustrated by this example is that the cosmological outlook,
+which is here adopted, is perfectly consistent with the demands for
+discontinuity which have been urged from the side of physics. Also if
+this concept of temporalisation as a successive realisation of epochal
+durations be adopted, the difficulty of Zeno is evaded. The particular
+form, which has been given here to this concept, is purely for that
+purpose of illustration and must necessarily require recasting before it
+can be adapted to the results of experimental physics.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER IX
+
+                         SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY
+
+
+In the present lecture, it is my object to consider some reactions of
+science upon the stream of philosophic thought during the modern
+centuries with which we are concerned. I shall make no attempt to
+compress a history of modern philosophy within the limits of one
+lecture. We shall merely consider some contacts between science and
+philosophy, in so far as they lie within the scheme of thought which it
+is the purpose of these lectures to develop. For this reason the whole
+of the great German idealistic movement will be ignored, as being out of
+effective touch with its contemporary science so far as reciprocal
+modification of concepts is concerned. Kant, from whom this movement
+took its rise, was saturated with Newtonian physics, and with the ideas
+of the great French physicists—such as Clairaut,[11] for instance—who
+developed the Newtonian ideas. But the philosophers who developed the
+Kantian school of thought, or who transformed it into Hegelianism,
+either lacked Kant’s background of scientific knowledge, or lacked his
+potentiality of becoming a great physicist if philosophy had not
+absorbed his main energies.
+
+Footnote 11:
+
+  _Cf._ the curious evidence of Kant’s scientific reading in the
+  _Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Analytic, Second Analogy of
+  Experience_, where he refers to the phenomenon of capillary action.
+  This is an unnecessarily complex illustration; a book resting on a
+  table would have equally well sufficed. But the subject had just been
+  adequately treated for the first time by Clairaut in an appendix to
+  his _Figure of the Earth_. Kant evidently had read this appendix, and
+  his mind was full of it.
+
+The origin of modern philosophy is analogous to that of science, and is
+contemporaneous. The general trend of its development was settled in the
+seventeenth century, partly at the hands of the same men who established
+the scientific principles. This settlement of purpose followed upon a
+transitional period dating from the fifteenth century. There was in fact
+a general movement of European mentality, which carried along with its
+stream, religion, science and philosophy. It may shortly be
+characterised as being the direct recurrence to the original sources of
+Greek inspiration on the part of men whose spiritual shape had been
+derived from inheritance from the Middle Ages. There was therefore no
+revival of Greek mentality. Epochs do not rise from the dead. The
+principles of aesthetics and of reason, which animated the Greek
+civilisation, were reclothed in a modern mentality. Between the two
+there lay other religions, other systems of law, other anarchies, and
+other racial inheritances, dividing the living from the dead.
+
+Philosophy is peculiarly sensitive to such differences. For, whereas you
+can make a replica of an ancient statue, there is no possible replica of
+an ancient state of mind. There can be no nearer approximation than that
+which a masquerade bears to real life. There may be understanding of the
+past, but there is a difference between the modern and the ancient
+reactions to the same stimuli.
+
+In the particular case of philosophy, the distinction in tonality lies
+on the surface. Modern philosophy is tinged with subjectivism, as
+against the objective attitude of the ancients. The same change is to be
+seen in religion. In the early history of the Christian Church, the
+theological interest centred in discussions on the nature of God, the
+meaning of the Incarnation, and apocalyptic forecasts of the ultimate
+fate of the world. At the Reformation, the Church was torn asunder by
+dissension as to the individual experiences of believers in respect to
+justification. The individual subject of experience had been substituted
+for the total drama of all reality. Luther asked, ‘How am I justified?’;
+modern philosophers have asked, ‘How do I have knowledge?’ The emphasis
+lies upon the subject of experience. This change of standpoint is the
+work of Christianity in its pastoral aspect of shepherding the company
+of believers. For century after century it insisted upon the infinite
+worth of the individual human soul. Accordingly, to the instinctive
+egotism of physical desires, it has superadded an instinctive feeling of
+justification for an egotism of intellectual outlook. Every human being
+is the natural guardian of his own importance. Without a doubt, this
+modern direction of attention emphasises truths of the highest value.
+For example, in the field of practical life, it has abolished slavery,
+and has impressed upon the popular imagination the primary rights of
+mankind.
+
+Descartes, in his _Discourse on Method_, and in his _Meditations_,
+discloses with great clearness the general conceptions which have since
+influenced modern philosophy. There is a subject receiving experience:
+in the _Discourse_ this subject is always mentioned in the first person,
+that is to say, as being Descartes himself. Descartes starts with
+himself as being a mentality, which in virtue of its consciousness of
+its own inherent presentations of sense and of thought, is thereby
+conscious of its own existence as a unit entity. The subsequent history
+of philosophy revolves round the Cartesian formulation of the primary
+datum. The ancient world takes its stand upon the drama of the Universe,
+the modern world upon the inward drama of the Soul. Descartes, in his
+_Meditations_, expressly grounds the existence of this inward drama upon
+the possibility of error. There may be no correspondence with objective
+fact, and thus there must be a soul with activities whose reality is
+purely derivative from itself. For example, here is a quotation[12] from
+_Meditation II_: “But it will be said that these presentations are
+false, and that I am dreaming. Let it be so. At all events it is certain
+that I seem to see light, hear a noise, and feel heat; this cannot be
+false, and this is what in me is properly called perceiving (sentire),
+which is nothing else than thinking. From this I begin to know what I am
+with somewhat greater clearness and distinctness than heretofore.” Again
+in _Meditation III_: “...; for, as I before remarked, although the
+things which I perceive or imagine are perhaps nothing at all apart from
+me, I am nevertheless assured that those modes of consciousness which I
+call perceptions and imaginations, in as far only as they are modes of
+consciousness, exist in me.”
+
+Footnote 12:
+
+  Quoted from Veitch’s translation.
+
+The objectivism of the medieval and the ancient worlds passed over into
+science. Nature is there conceived as for itself, with its own mutual
+reactions. Under the recent influence of relativity, there has been a
+tendency towards subjectivist formulations. But, apart from this recent
+exception, nature, in scientific thought, has had its laws formulated
+without any reference to dependence on individual observers. There is,
+however, this difference between the older and the later attitudes
+towards science. The anti-rationalism of the moderns has checked any
+attempt to harmonise the ultimate concepts of science with ideas drawn
+from a more concrete survey of the whole of reality. The material, the
+space, the time, the various laws concerning the transition of material
+configurations, are taken as ultimate stubborn facts, not to be tampered
+with.
+
+The effect of this antagonism to philosophy has been equally unfortunate
+both for philosophy and for science. In this lecture we are concerned
+with philosophy. Philosophers are rationalists. They are seeking to go
+behind stubborn and irreducible facts: they wish to explain in the light
+of universal principles the mutual reference between the various details
+entering into the flux of things. Also, they seek such principles as
+will eliminate mere arbitrariness; so that, whatever portion of fact is
+assumed or given, the existence of the remainder of things shall satisfy
+some demand of rationality. They demand meaning. In the words of Henry
+Sidgwick[13]—“It is the primary aim of philosophy to unify completely,
+bring into clear coherence, all departments of rational thought, and
+this aim cannot be realised by any philosophy that leaves out of its
+view the important body of judgments and reasonings which form the
+subject matter of ethics.” Accordingly, the bias towards history on the
+part of the physical and social sciences with their refusal to
+rationalise below some ultimate mechanism, has pushed philosophy out of
+the effective currents of modern life. It has lost its proper rôle as a
+constant critic of partial formulations. It has retreated into the
+subjectivist sphere of mind, by reason of its expulsion by science from
+the objectivist sphere of matter. Thus the evolution of thought in the
+seventeenth century coöperated with the enhanced sense of individual
+personality derived from the Middle Ages. We see Descartes taking his
+stand upon his own ultimate mind, which his philosophy assures him of;
+and asking about its relations to the ultimate matter—exemplified, in
+the second _Meditation_, by the human body and a lump of wax—which his
+science assumes. There is Aaron’s rod, and the magicians’ serpents; and
+the only question for philosophy is, which swallows which; or whether,
+as Descartes thought, they all lived happily together. In this stream of
+thought are to be found Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant. Two great names lie
+outside this list, Spinoza and Leibniz. But there is a certain isolation
+of both of them in respect to their philosophical influence so far as
+science is concerned; as though they had strayed to extremes which lie
+outside the boundaries of safe philosophy, Spinoza by retaining older
+ways of thought, and Leibniz by the novelty of his monads.
+
+Footnote 13:
+
+  _Cf._ _Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir_, Appendix I.
+
+The history of philosophy runs curiously parallel to that of science. In
+the case of both, the seventeenth century set the stage for its two
+successors. But with the twentieth century a new act commences. It is an
+exaggeration to attribute a general change in a climate of thought to
+any one piece of writing, or to any one author. No doubt Descartes only
+expressed definitely and in decisive form what was already in the air of
+his period. Analogously, in attributing to William James the
+inauguration of a new stage in philosophy, we should be neglecting other
+influences of his time. But, admitting this, there still remains a
+certain fitness in contrasting his essay, _Does Consciousness Exist_,
+published in 1904, with Descartes’ _Discourse on Method_, published in
+1637. James clears the stage of the old paraphernalia; or rather he
+entirely alters its lighting. Take for example these two sentences from
+his essay: “To deny plumply that ‘consciousness’ exists seems so absurd
+on the face of it—for undeniably ‘thoughts’ do exist—that I fear some
+readers will follow me no farther. Let me then immediately explain that
+I mean only to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to insist
+most emphatically that it does stand for a function.”
+
+The scientific materialism and the Cartesian Ego were both challenged at
+the same moment, one by science and the other by philosophy, as
+represented by William James with his psychological antecedents; and the
+double challenge marks the end of a period which lasted for about two
+hundred and fifty years. Of course, ‘matter’ and ‘consciousness’ both
+express something so evident in ordinary experience that any philosophy
+must provide some things which answer to their respective meanings. But
+the point is that, in respect to both of them, the seventeenth century
+settlement was infected with a presupposition which is now challenged.
+James denies that consciousness is an entity, but admits that it is a
+function. The discrimination between an entity and a function is
+therefore vital to the understanding of the challenge which James is
+advancing against the older modes of thought. In the essay in question,
+the character which James assigns to consciousness is fully discussed.
+But he does not unambiguously explain what he means by the notion of an
+entity, which he refuses to apply to consciousness. In the sentence
+which immediately follows the one which I have already quoted, he says:
+
+“There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted
+with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts
+of them are made; but there is a function in experience which thoughts
+perform, and for the performance of which this quality of being is
+invoked. That function is _knowing_. ‘Consciousness’ is supposed
+necessary to explain the fact that things not only are, but get
+reported, are known.”
+
+Thus James is denying that consciousness is a ‘stuff.’
+
+The term ‘entity,’ or even that of ‘stuff,’ does not fully tell its own
+tale. The notion of ‘entity’ is so general that it may be taken to mean
+anything that can be thought about. You cannot think of mere nothing;
+and the something which is an object of thought may be called an entity.
+In this sense, a function is an entity. Obviously, this is not what
+James had in his mind.
+
+In agreement with the organic theory of nature which I have been
+tentatively putting forward in these lectures, I shall for my own
+purposes construe James as denying exactly what Descartes asserts in his
+_Discourse_ and his _Meditations_. Descartes discriminates two species
+of entities, _matter_ and _soul_. The essence of matter is spatial
+extension; the essence of soul is its cogitation, in the full sense
+which Descartes assigns to the word ‘_cogitare_.’ For example, in
+Section Fifty-three of Part I of his _Principles of Philosophy_, he
+enunciates: “That of every substance there is one principal attribute,
+as thinking of the mind, extension of the body.” In the earlier,
+Fifty-first Section, Descartes states: “By substance we can conceive
+nothing else than a thing which exists in such a way as to stand in need
+of nothing beyond itself in order to its existence.” Furthermore, later
+on, Descartes says: “For example, because any substance which ceases to
+endure ceases also to exist, duration is not distinct from substance
+except in thought;....” Thus we conclude that, for Descartes, minds and
+bodies exist in such a way as to stand in need of nothing beyond
+themselves individually (God only excepted, as being the foundation of
+all things); that both minds and bodies endure, because without
+endurance they would cease to exist; that spatial extension is the
+essential attribute of bodies; and that cogitation is the essential
+attribute of minds.
+
+It is difficult to praise too highly the genius exhibited by Descartes
+in the complete sections of his _Principles_ which deal with these
+questions. It is worthy of the century in which he writes, and of the
+clearness of the French intellect. Descartes in his distinction between
+time and duration, and in his way of grounding time upon motion, and in
+his close relation between matter and extension, anticipates, as far as
+it was possible at his epoch, modern notions suggested by the doctrine
+of relativity, or by some aspects of Bergson’s doctrine of the
+generation of things. But the fundamental principles are so set out as
+to presuppose independently existing substances with simple location in
+a community of temporal durations, and, in the case of bodies, with
+simple location in the community of spatial extensions. Those principles
+lead straight to the theory of a materialistic, mechanistic nature,
+surveyed by cogitating minds. After the close of the seventeenth
+century, science took charge of the materialistic nature, and philosophy
+took charge of the cogitating minds. Some schools of philosophy admitted
+an ultimate dualism; and the various idealistic schools claimed that
+nature was merely the chief example of the cogitations of minds. But all
+schools admitted the Cartesian analysis of the ultimate elements of
+nature. I am excluding Spinoza and Leibniz from these statements as to
+the main stream of modern philosophy, as derivative from Descartes;
+though of course they were influenced by him, and in their turn
+influenced philosophers. I am thinking mainly of the effective contacts
+between science and philosophy.
+
+This division of territory between science and philosophy was not a
+simple business; and in fact it illustrated the weakness of the whole
+cut-and-dried presupposition upon which it rested. We are aware of
+nature as an interplay of bodies, colours, sounds, scents, tastes,
+touches and other various bodily feelings, displayed as in space, in
+patterns of mutual separation by intervening volumes, and of individual
+shape. Also the whole is a flux, changing with the lapse of time. This
+systematic totality is disclosed to us as one complex of things. But the
+seventeenth century dualism cuts straight across it. The objective world
+of science was confined to mere spatial material with simple location in
+space and time, and subjected to definite rules as to its locomotion.
+The subjective world of philosophy annexed the colours, sounds, scents,
+tastes, touches, bodily feelings, as forming the subjective content of
+the cogitations of the individual minds. Both worlds shared in the
+general flux; but time, as measured, is assigned by Descartes to the
+cogitations of the observer’s mind. There is obviously one fatal
+weakness to this scheme. The cogitations of mind exhibit themselves as
+holding up entities, such as colours for instance, before the mind as
+the termini of contemplation. But in this theory these colours are,
+after all, merely the furniture of the mind. Accordingly, the mind seems
+to be confined to its own private world of cogitations. The
+subject-object conformation of experience in its entirety lies within
+the mind as one of its private passions. This conclusion from the
+Cartesian data is the starting point from which Berkeley, Hume, and Kant
+developed their respective systems. And, antecedently to them, it was
+the point upon which Locke concentrated as being the vital question.
+Thus the question as to how any knowledge is obtained of the truly
+objective world of science becomes a problem of the first magnitude.
+Descartes states that the objective body is perceived by the intellect.
+He says (_Meditation II_): “I must, therefore, admit that I cannot even
+comprehend by imagination what the piece of wax is, and that it is the
+mind alone which perceives it. I speak of one piece in particular; for,
+as to wax in general, this is still more evident. But what is the piece
+of wax that can be perceived only by the mind?... The perception of it
+is neither an act of sight, of touch, nor of imagination, and never was
+either of these, though it might formerly seem so, but is simply an
+_intuition_ (_inspectio_) of the mind,....” It must be noted that the
+Latin word ‘inspectio’ is associated in its classical use with the
+notion of theory as opposed to practice.
+
+The two great preoccupations of modern philosophy now lie clearly before
+us. The study of mind divides into psychology, or the study of mental
+functionings as considered in themselves and in their mutual relations,
+and into epistemology, or the theory of the knowledge of a common
+objective world. In other words, there is the study of the cogitations,
+_quâ_ passions of the mind, and their study _quâ_ leading to an
+inspection (_intuition_) of an objective world. This is a very uneasy
+division, giving rise to a host of perplexities whose consideration has
+occupied the intervening centuries.
+
+As long as men thought in terms of physical notions for the objective
+world and of mentality for the subjective world, the setting out of the
+problem, as achieved by Descartes, sufficed as a starting point. But the
+balance has been upset by the rise of physiology. In the seventeenth
+century men passed from the study of physics to the study of philosophy.
+Towards the end of the nineteenth century, notably in Germany, men
+passed from the study of physiology to the study of psychology. The
+change in tone has been decisive. Of course, in the earlier period the
+intervention of the human body was fully considered, for example, by
+Descartes in Part V of the ‘_Discourse on Method_.’ But the
+physiological instinct had not been developed. In considering the human
+body, Descartes thought with the outfit of a physicist; whereas the
+modern psychologists are clothed with the mentalities of medical
+physiologists. The career of William James is an example of this change
+in standpoint. He also possessed the clear, incisive genius which could
+state in a flash the exact point at issue.
+
+The reason why I have put Descartes and James in close juxtaposition is
+now evident. Neither philosopher finished an epoch by a final solution
+of a problem. Their great merit is of the opposite sort. They each of
+them open an epoch by their clear formulation of terms in which thought
+could profitably express itself at particular stages of knowledge, one
+for the seventeenth century, the other for the twentieth century. In
+this respect, they are both to be contrasted with St. Thomas Aquinas,
+who expressed the culmination of Aristotelian scholasticism.
+
+In many ways neither Descartes nor James were the most characteristic
+philosophers of their respective epochs. I should be disposed to ascribe
+these positions to Locke and to Bergson respectively, at least so far as
+concerns their relations to the science of their times. Locke developed
+the lines of thought which kept philosophy on the move; for example he
+emphasized the appeal to psychology. He initiated the age of
+epoch-making enquiries into urgent problems of limited scope.
+Undoubtedly, in so doing, he infected philosophy with something of the
+anti-rationalism of science. But the very groundwork of a fruitful
+methodology is to start from those clear postulates which must be held
+to be ultimate so far as concerns the occasion in question. The
+criticism of such methodological postulates is thus reserved for another
+opportunity. Locke discovered that the philosophical situation
+bequeathed by Descartes involved the problems of epistemology and
+psychology.
+
+Bergson introduced into philosophy the organic conceptions of
+physiological science. He has most completely moved away from the static
+materialism of the seventeenth century. His protest against
+spatialisation is a protest against taking the Newtonian conception of
+nature as being anything except a high abstraction. His so-called
+anti-intellectualism should be construed in this sense. In some respects
+he recurs to Descartes; but the recurrence is accompanied with an
+instinctive grasp of modern biology.
+
+There is another reason for associating Locke and Bergson. The germ of
+an organic theory of nature is to be found in Locke. His most recent
+expositor, Professor Gibson,[14] states that Locke’s way of conceiving
+the identity of self-consciousness ‘like that of a living organism,
+involves a genuine transcending of the mechanical view of nature and of
+mind, embodied in the composition theory.’ But it is to be noticed that
+in the first place Locke wavers in his grasp of this position; and in
+the second place, what is more important still, he only applies his idea
+to self-consciousness. The physiological attitude has not yet
+established itself. The effect of physiology was to put mind back into
+nature. The neurologist traces first the effect of stimuli along the
+bodily nerves, then integration at nerve centres, and finally the rise
+of a projective reference beyond the body with a resulting motor
+efficacy in renewed nervous excitement. In biochemistry, the delicate
+adjustment of the chemical composition of the parts to the preservation
+of the whole organism is detected. Thus the mental cognition is seen as
+the reflective experience of a totality, reporting for itself what it is
+in itself as one unit occurrence. This unit is the integration of the
+sum of its partial happenings, but it is not their numerical aggregate.
+It has its own unity as an event. This total unity, considered as an
+entity for its own sake, is the prehension into unity of the patterned
+aspects of the universe of events. Its knowledge of itself arises from
+its own relevance to the things of which it prehends the aspects. It
+knows the world as a system of mutual relevance, and thus sees itself as
+mirrored in other things. These other things include more especially the
+various parts of its own body.
+
+Footnote 14:
+
+  _Cf._ his book, _Locke’s Theory of Knowledge and its Historical
+  Relations_, Camb. Univ. Press, 1917.
+
+It is important to discriminate the bodily pattern, which endures, from
+the bodily event, which is pervaded by the enduring pattern, and from
+the parts of the bodily event. The parts of the bodily event are
+themselves pervaded by their own enduring patterns, which form elements
+in the bodily pattern. The parts of the body are really portions of the
+environment of the total bodily event, but so related that their mutual
+aspects, each in the other, are peculiarly effective in modifying the
+pattern of either. This arises from the intimate character of the
+relation of whole to part. Thus the body is a portion of the environment
+for the part, and the part is a portion of the environment for the body;
+only they are peculiarly sensitive, each to modifications of the other.
+This sensitiveness is so arranged that the part adjusts itself to
+preserve the stability of the pattern of the body. It is a particular
+example of the favourable environment shielding the organism. The
+relation of part to whole has the special reciprocity associated with
+the notion of organism, in which the part is for the whole; but this
+relation reigns throughout nature and does not start with the special
+case of the higher organisms.
+
+Further, viewing the question as a matter of chemistry, there is no need
+to construe the actions of each molecule in a living body by its
+exclusive particular reference to the pattern of the complete living
+organism. It is true that each molecule is affected by the aspect of
+this pattern as mirrored in it, so as to be otherwise than what it would
+have been if placed elsewhere. In the same way, under some circumstances
+an electron may be a sphere, and under other circumstances an egg-shaped
+volume. The mode of approach to the problem, so far as science is
+concerned, is merely to ask if molecules exhibit in living bodies
+properties which are not to be observed amid inorganic surroundings. In
+the same way, in a magnetic field soft iron exhibits magnetic properties
+which are in abeyance elsewhere. The prompt self-preservative actions of
+living bodies, and our experience of the physical actions of our bodies
+following the determinations of will, suggest the modification of
+molecules in the body as the result of the total pattern. It seems
+possible that there may be physical laws expressing the modification of
+the ultimate basic organisms when they form part of higher organisms
+with adequate compactness of pattern. It would, however, be entirely in
+consonance with the empirically observed action of environments, if the
+direct effects of aspects as between the whole body and its parts were
+negligible. We should expect transmission. In this way the modification
+of total pattern would transmit itself by means of a series of
+modifications of a descending series of parts, so that finally the
+modification of the cell changes its aspect in the molecule, thus
+effecting a corresponding alteration in the molecule,—or in some subtler
+entity. Thus the question for physiology is the question of the physics
+of molecules in cells of different characters.
+
+We can now see the relation of psychology to physiology and to physics.
+The private psychological field is merely the event considered from its
+own standpoint. The unity of this field is the unity of the event. But
+it is the event as one entity, and not the event as a sum of parts. The
+relations of the parts, to each other and to the whole, are their
+aspects, each in the other. A body for an external observer is the
+aggregate of the aspects for him of the body as a whole, and also of the
+body as a sum of parts. For the external observer the aspects of shape
+and of sense-objects are dominant, at least for cognition. But we must
+also allow for the possibility that we can detect in ourselves direct
+aspects of the mentalities of higher organisms. The claim that the
+cognition of alien mentalities must necessarily be by means of indirect
+inferences from aspects of shape and of sense-objects is wholly
+unwarranted by this philosophy of organism. The fundamental principle is
+that whatever merges into actuality, implants its aspects in every
+individual event.
+
+Further, even for self-cognition, the aspects of the parts of our own
+bodies partly take the form of aspects of shape, and of sense-objects.
+But that part of the bodily event, in respect to which the cognitive
+mentality is associated, is for itself the unit psychological field. Its
+ingredients are not referent to the event itself; they are aspects of
+what lies beyond that event. Thus the self-knowledge inherent in the
+bodily event is the knowledge of itself as a complex unity, whose
+ingredients involve all reality beyond itself, restricted under the
+limitation of its pattern of aspects. Thus we know ourselves as a
+function of unification of a plurality of things which are other than
+ourselves. Cognition discloses an event as being an activity, organising
+a real togetherness of alien things. But this psychological field does
+not depend on its cognition; so that this field is still a unit event as
+abstracted from its self-cognition.
+
+Accordingly, consciousness will be the function of knowing. But what is
+known is already a prehension of aspects of the one real universe. These
+aspects are aspects of other events as mutually modifying, each the
+others. In the pattern of aspects they stand in their pattern of mutual
+relatedness.
+
+The aboriginal data in terms of which the pattern weaves itself are the
+aspects of shapes, of sense-objects, and of other eternal objects whose
+self-identity is not dependent on the flux of things. Wherever such
+objects have ingression into the general flux, they interpret events,
+each to the other. They are here in the perceiver; but, as perceived by
+him, they convey for him something of the total flux which is beyond
+himself. The subject-object relation takes its origin in the double rôle
+of these eternal objects. They are modifications of the subject, but
+only in their character of conveying aspects of other subjects in the
+community of the universe. Thus no individual subject can have
+independent reality, since it is a prehension of limited aspects of
+subjects other than itself.
+
+The technical phrase ‘subject-object’ is a bad term for the fundamental
+situation disclosed in experience. It is really reminiscent of the
+Aristotelian ‘subject-predicate.’ It already presupposes the
+metaphysical doctrine of diverse subjects qualified by their private
+predicates. This is the doctrine of subjects with private worlds of
+experience. If this be granted, there is no escape from solipsism. The
+point is that the phrase ‘subject-object’ indicates a fundamental entity
+underlying the objects. Thus the ‘objects,’ as thus conceived, are
+merely the ghosts of Aristotelian predicates. The primary situation
+disclosed in cognitive experience is ‘ego-object amid objects.’ By this
+I mean that the primary fact is an impartial world transcending the
+‘here-now’ which marks the ego-object, and transcending the ‘now’ which
+is the spatial world of simultaneous realisation. It is a world also
+including the actuality of the past, and the limited potentiality of the
+future, together with the complete world of abstract potentiality, the
+realm of eternal objects, which transcends, and finds exemplification in
+and comparison with, the actual course of realisation. The ego-object,
+as consciousness here-now, is conscious of its experient essence as
+constituted by its internal relatedness to the world of realities, and
+to the world of ideas. But the ego-object, in being thus constituted, is
+within the world of realities, and exhibits itself as an organism
+requiring the ingression of ideas for the purpose of this status among
+realities. This question of consciousness must be reserved for treatment
+on another occasion.
+
+The point to be made for the purposes of the present discussion is that
+a philosophy of nature as organic must start at the opposite end to that
+requisite for a materialistic philosophy. The materialistic starting
+point is from independently existing substances, matter and mind. The
+matter suffers modifications of its external relations of locomotion,
+and the mind suffers modifications of its contemplated objects. There
+are, in this materialistic theory, two sorts of independent substances,
+each qualified by their appropriate passions. The organic starting point
+is from the analysis of process as the realisation of events disposed in
+an interlocked community. The event is the unit of things real. The
+emergent enduring pattern is the stabilisation of the emergent
+achievement so as to become a fact which retains its identity throughout
+the process. It will be noted that endurance is not primarily the
+property of enduring beyond itself, but of enduring within itself. I
+mean that endurance is the property of finding its pattern reproduced in
+the temporal parts of the total event. It is in this sense that a total
+event carries an enduring pattern. There is an intrinsic value identical
+for the whole and for its succession of parts. Cognition is the
+emergence, into some measure of individualised reality, of the general
+substratum of activity, poising before itself possibility, actuality,
+and purpose.
+
+It is equally possible to arrive at this organic conception of the world
+if we start from the fundamental notions of modern physics, instead of,
+as above, from psychology and physiology. In fact by reason of my own
+studies in mathematics and mathematical physics, I did in fact arrive at
+my convictions in this way. Mathematical physics presumes in the first
+place an electromagnetic field of activity pervading space and time. The
+laws which condition this field are nothing else than the conditions
+observed by the general activity of the flux of the world, as it
+individualises itself in the events. In physics, there is an
+abstraction. The science ignores what anything is in itself. Its
+entities are merely considered in respect to their extrinsic reality,
+that is to say, in respect to their aspects in other things. But the
+abstraction reaches even further than that; for it is only the aspects
+in other things, as modifying the spatio-temporal specifications of the
+life histories of those other things, which count. The intrinsic reality
+of the observer comes in: I mean what the observer is for himself is
+appealed to. For example, the fact that he will see red or blue enters
+into scientific statements. But the red which the observer sees does not
+in truth enter into science. What is relevant is merely the bare
+diversity of the observer’s red experiences from all of his other
+experiences. Accordingly, the intrinsic character of the observer is
+merely relevant in order to fix the self-identical individuality of the
+physical entities. These entities are only considered as agencies in
+fixing the routes in space and in time of the life histories of enduring
+entities.
+
+The phraseology of physics is derived from the materialistic ideas of
+the seventeenth century. But we find that, even in its extreme
+abstraction, what it is really presupposing is the organic theory of
+aspects as explained above. First, consider any event in empty space
+where the word ‘empty’ means devoid of electrons, or protons, or of any
+other form of electric charge. Such an event has three rôles in physics.
+In the first place, it is the actual scene of an adventure of energy,
+either as its _habitat_ or as the locus of a particular stream of
+energy: anyhow, in this rôle the energy is there, either as located in
+space during the time considered, or as streaming through space.
+
+In its second rôle, the event is a necessary link in the pattern of
+transmission, by which the character of every event receives some
+modification from the character of every other event.
+
+In its third rôle, the event is the repository of a possibility, as to
+what would happen to an electric charge, either by way of deformation or
+of locomotion, if it should have happened to be there.
+
+If we modify our assumption by considering an event which includes in
+itself a portion of the life-history of an electric charge, then the
+analysis of its three rôles still remains; except that the possibility
+embodied in the third rôle is now transformed into an actuality. In this
+replacement of possibility by actuality, we obtain the distinction
+between empty and occupied events.
+
+Recurring to the empty events, we note the deficiency in them of
+individuality of intrinsic content. Considering the first rôle of an
+empty event, as being a _habitat_ of energy, we note that there is no
+individual discrimination of an individual bit of energy, either as
+statically located, or as an element in the stream. There is simply a
+quantitative determination of activity, without individualisation of the
+activity in itself. This lack of individualisation is still more evident
+in the second and third rôles. An empty event is something in itself,
+but it fails to realise a stable individuality of content. So far as its
+content is concerned, the empty event is one realised element in a
+general scheme of organised activity.
+
+Some qualification is required when the empty event is the scene of the
+transmission of a definite train of recurrent wave-forms. There is now a
+definite pattern which remains permanent in the event. We find here the
+first faint trace of enduring individuality. But it is individuality
+without the faintest capture of originality: for it is merely a
+permanence arising solely from the implication of the event in a larger
+scheme of patterning.
+
+Turning now to the examination of an occupied event, the electron has a
+determinate individuality. It can be traced throughout its life-history
+through a variety of events. A collection of electrons, together with
+the analogous atomic charges of positive electricity, forms a body such
+as we ordinarily perceive. The simplest body of this kind is a molecule,
+and a set of molecules forms a lump of ordinary matter, such as a chair,
+or a stone. Thus a charge of electricity is the mark of individuality of
+content, as additional to the individuality of an event in itself. This
+individuality of content is the strong point of the materialistic
+doctrine.
+
+It can, however, be equally well explained on the theory of organism.
+When we look into the function of the electric charge, we note that its
+rôle is to mark the origination of a pattern which is transmitted
+through space and time. It is the key of some particular pattern. For
+example, the field of force in any event is to be constructed by
+attention to the adventures of electrons and protons, and so also are
+the streams and distributions of energy. Further, the electric waves
+find their origin in the vibratory adventures of these charges. Thus the
+transmitted pattern is to be conceived as the flux of aspects throughout
+space and time derived from the life history of the atomic charge. The
+individualisation of the charge arises by a conjunction of two
+characters, in the first place by the continued identity of its mode of
+functioning as a key for the determination of a diffusion of pattern;
+and, in the second place, by the unity and continuity of its life
+history.
+
+We may conclude, therefore, that the organic theory represents directly
+what physics actually does assume respecting its ultimate entities. We
+also notice the complete futility of these entities, if they are
+conceived as fully concrete individuals. So far as physics is concerned,
+they are wholly occupied in moving each other about, and they have no
+reality outside this function. In particular for physics, there is no
+intrinsic reality.
+
+It is obvious that the basing of philosophy upon the presupposition of
+organism must be traced back to Leibniz.[15] His monads are for him the
+ultimately real entities. But he retained the Cartesian substances with
+their qualifying passions, as also equally expressing for him the final
+characterisation of real things. Accordingly for him there was no
+concrete reality of internal relations. He had therefore on his hands
+two distinct points of view. One was that the final real entity is an
+organising activity, fusing ingredients into a unity, so that this unity
+is the reality. The other point of view is that the final real entities
+are substances supporting qualities. The first point of view depends
+upon the acceptance of internal relations binding together all reality.
+The latter is inconsistent with the reality of such relations. To
+combine these two points of view, his monads were therefore windowless;
+and their passions merely mirrored the universe by the divine
+arrangement of a preëstablished harmony. This system thus presupposed an
+aggregate of independent entities. He did not discriminate the event, as
+the unit of experience, from the enduring organism as its stabilisation
+into importance, and from the cognitive organism as expressing an
+increased completeness of individualisation. Nor did he admit the
+many-termed relations, relating sense-data to various events in diverse
+ways. These many-termed relations are in fact the perspectives which
+Leibniz does admit, but only on the condition that they are purely
+qualities of the organising monads. The difficulty really arises from
+the unquestioned acceptance of the notion of simple location as
+fundamental for space and time, and from the acceptance of the notion of
+independent individual substance as fundamental for a real entity. The
+only road open to Leibniz was thus the same as that later taken by
+Berkeley [in a prevalent interpretation of his meaning], namely an
+appeal to a _Deux ex machinâ_ who was capable of rising superior to the
+difficulties of metaphysics.
+
+Footnote 15:
+
+  _Cf._ Bertrand Russell, _The Philosophy of Leibniz_, for the
+  suggestion of this line of thought.
+
+In the same way as Descartes introduced the tradition of thought which
+kept subsequent philosophy in some measure of contact with the
+scientific movement, so Leibniz introduced the alternative tradition
+that the entities, which are the ultimate actual things, are in some
+sense procedures of organisation. This tradition has been the foundation
+of the great achievements of German philosophy. Kant reflected the two
+traditions, one upon the other. Kant was a scientist, but the schools
+derivative from Kant have had but slight effect on the mentality of the
+scientific world. It should be the task of the philosophical schools of
+this century to bring together the two streams into an expression of the
+world-picture derived from science, and thereby end the divorce of
+science from the affirmations of our aesthetic and ethical experiences.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER X
+
+                              ABSTRACTION
+
+
+In the previous chapters I have been examining the reactions of the
+scientific movement upon the deeper issues which have occupied modern
+thinkers. No one man, no limited society of men, and no one epoch can
+think of everything at once. Accordingly for the sake of eliciting the
+various impacts of science upon thought, the topic has been treated
+historically. In this retrospect I have kept in mind that the ultimate
+issue of the whole story is the patent dissolution of the comfortable
+scheme of scientific materialism which has dominated the three centuries
+under review. Accordingly various schools of criticism of the dominant
+opinions have been stressed; and I have endeavoured to outline an
+alternative cosmological doctrine, which shall be wide enough to include
+what is fundamental both for science and for its critics. In this
+alternative scheme, the notion of material, as fundamental, has been
+replaced by that of organic synthesis. But the approach has always been
+from the consideration of the actual intricacies of scientific thought,
+and of the peculiar perplexities which it suggests.
+
+In the present chapter, and in the immediately succeeding chapter, we
+will forget the peculiar problems of modern science, and will put
+ourselves at the standpoint of a dispassionate consideration of the
+nature of things, antecedently to any special investigation into their
+details. Such a standpoint is termed ‘metaphysical.’ Accordingly those
+readers who find metaphysics, even in two slight chapters, irksome, will
+do well to proceed at once to the Chapter on ‘Religion and Science,’
+which resumes the topic of the impact of science on modern thought.
+
+These metaphysical chapters are purely descriptive. Their justification
+is to be sought, (i) in our direct knowledge of the actual occasions
+which compose our immediate experience, and (ii) in their success as
+forming a basis for harmonising our systematised accounts of various
+types of experience, and (iii) in their success as providing the
+concepts in terms of which an epistemology can be framed. By (iii) I
+mean that an account of the general character of what we know must
+enable us to frame an account of how knowledge is possible as an adjunct
+within things known.
+
+In any occasion of cognition, that which is known is an actual occasion
+of experience, as diversified[16] by reference to a realm of entities
+which transcend that immediate occasion in that they have analogous or
+different connections with other occasions of experience. For example a
+definite shade of red may, in the immediate occasion, be implicated with
+the shape of sphericity in some definite way. But that shade of red, and
+that spherical shape, exhibit themselves as transcending that occasion,
+in that either of them has other relationships to other occasions. Also,
+apart from the actual occurrence of the same things in other occasions,
+every actual occasion is set within a realm of alternative
+interconnected entities. This realm is disclosed by all the untrue
+propositions which can be predicated significantly of that occasion. It
+is the realm of alternative suggestions, whose foothold in actuality
+transcends each actual occasion. The real relevance of untrue
+propositions for each actual occasion is disclosed by art, romance, and
+by criticism in reference to ideals. It is the foundation of the
+metaphysical position which I am maintaining that the understanding of
+actuality requires a reference to ideality. The two realms are
+intrinsically inherent in the total metaphysical situation. The truth
+that some proposition respecting an actual occasion is untrue may
+express the vital truth as to the aesthetic achievement. It expresses
+the ‘great refusal’ which is its primary characteristic. An event is
+decisive in proportion to the importance (for it) of its untrue
+propositions: their relevance to the event cannot be dissociated from
+what the event is in itself by way of achievement. These transcendent
+entities have been termed ‘universals.’ I prefer to use the term
+‘eternal objects,’ in order to disengage myself from presuppositions
+which cling to the former term owing to its prolonged philosophical
+history. Eternal objects are thus, in their nature, abstract. By
+‘abstract’ I mean that what an eternal object is in itself—that is to
+say, its essence—is comprehensible without reference to some one
+particular occasion of experience. To be abstract is to transcend
+particular concrete occasions of actual happening. But to transcend an
+actual occasion does not mean being disconnected from it. On the
+contrary, I hold that each eternal object has its own proper connection
+with each such occasion, which I term its mode of ingression into that
+occasion. Thus an eternal object is to be comprehended by acquaintance
+with (i) its particular individuality, (ii) its general relationships to
+other eternal objects as apt for realisation in actual occasions, and
+(iii) the general principle which expresses its ingression in particular
+actual occasions.
+
+Footnote 16:
+
+  _Cf._ my _Principles of Natural Knowledge_, Ch. V, Sec. 13.
+
+These three headings express two principles. The first principle is that
+each eternal object is an individual which, in its own peculiar fashion,
+is what it is. This particular individuality is the individual essence
+of the object, and cannot be described otherwise than as being itself.
+Thus the individual essence is merely the essence considered in respect
+to its uniqueness. Further, the essence of an eternal object is merely
+the eternal object considered as adding its own unique contribution to
+each actual occasion. This unique contribution is identical for all such
+occasions in respect to the fact that the object in all modes of
+ingression is just its identical self. But it varies from one occasion
+to another in respect to the differences of its modes of ingression.
+Thus the metaphysical status of an eternal object is that of a
+possibility for an actuality. Every actual occasion is defined as to its
+character by how these possibilities are actualised for that occasion.
+Thus actualisation is a selection among possibilities. More accurately,
+it is a selection issuing in a gradation of possibilities in respect to
+their realisation in that occasion. This conclusion brings us to the
+second metaphysical principle: An eternal object, considered as an
+abstract entity, cannot be divorced from its reference to other eternal
+objects, and from its reference to actuality generally; though it is
+disconnected from its actual modes of ingression into definitive actual
+occasions. This principle is expressed by the statement that each
+eternal object has a ‘relational essence.’ This relational essence
+determines how it is possible for the object to have ingression into
+actual occasions.
+
+In other words: If _A_ be an eternal object, then what _A_ is in itself
+involves _A’s_ status in the universe, and _A_ cannot be divorced from
+this status. In the essence of _A_ there stands a determinateness as to
+the relationships of _A_ to other eternal objects, and an
+indeterminateness as to the relationships of _A_ to actual occasions.
+Since the relationships of _A_ to other eternal objects stand
+determinately in the essence of _A_, it follows that they are internal
+relations. I mean by this that these relationships are constitutive of
+_A_; for an entity which stands in internal relations has no being as an
+entity not in these relations. In other words, once with internal
+relations, always with internal relations. The internal relationships of
+_A_ conjointly form its significance.
+
+Again an entity cannot stand in external relations unless in its essence
+there stands an indeterminateness which is its patience for such
+external relations. The meaning of the term ‘possibility’ as applied to
+_A_ is simply that there stands in the essence of _A_ a patience for
+relationships to actual occasions. The relationships of _A_ to an actual
+occasion are simply how the eternal relationships of _A_ to other
+eternal objects are graded as to their realisation in that occasion.
+
+Thus the general principle which expresses _A’s_ ingression in the
+particular actual occasion α is the indeterminateness which stands in
+the essence of _A_ as to its ingression into α, and is the
+determinateness which stands in the essence of α as to the ingression of
+_Α_ into α. Thus the synthetic prehension, which is α, is the solution
+of the indeterminateness of _Α_ into the determinateness of α.
+Accordingly the relationship between _Α_ and α is external as regards
+_Α_, and is internal as regards α. Every actual occasion α is the
+solution of all modalities into actual categorical ingressions: truth
+and falsehood take the place of possibility. The complete ingression of
+_Α_ into α is expressed by all the true propositions which are about
+both _Α_ and α, and also—it may be—about other things.
+
+The determinate relatedness of the eternal object _Α_ to every other
+eternal object is how _Α_ is systematically and by the necessity of its
+nature related to every other eternal object. Such relatedness
+represents a possibility for realisation. But a relationship is a fact
+which concerns all the implicated relata, and cannot be isolated as if
+involving only one of the relata. Accordingly there is a general fact of
+systematic mutual relatedness which is inherent in the character of
+possibility. The realm of eternal objects is properly described as a
+‘realm,’ because each eternal object has its status in this general
+systematic complex of mutual relatedness.
+
+In respect to the ingression of _Α_ into an actual occasion α, the
+mutual relationships of _Α_ to other eternal objects, as thus graded in
+realisation, require for their expression a reference to the status of
+_Α_ and of the other eternal objects in the spatio-temporal
+relationship. Also this status is not expressible (for this purpose)
+without a reference to the status of α and of other actual occasions in
+the same spatio-temporal relationship. Accordingly the spatio-temporal
+relationship, in terms of which the actual course of events is to be
+expressed, is nothing else than a selective limitation within the
+general systematic relationships among eternal objects. By ‘limitation,’
+as applied to the spatio-temporal continuum, I mean those matter-of-fact
+determinations—such as the three dimensions of space, and the four
+dimensions of the spatio-temporal continuum—which are inherent in the
+actual course of events, but which present themselves as arbitrary in
+respect to a more abstract possibility. The consideration of these
+general limitations at the base of actual things, as distinct from the
+limitations peculiar to each actual occasion, will be more fully resumed
+in the chapter on ‘God.’
+
+Further, the status of all possibility in reference to actuality
+requires a reference to this spatio-temporal continuum. In any
+particular consideration of a possibility we may conceive this continuum
+to be transcended. But in so far as there is any definite reference to
+actuality, the definite _how_ of transcendence of that spatio-temporal
+continuum is required. Thus primarily the spatio-temporal continuum is a
+locus of relational possibility, selected from the more general realm of
+systematic relationship. This limited locus of relational possibility
+expresses one limitation of possibility inherent in the general system
+of the process of realisation. Whatever possibility is generally
+coherent with that system falls within this limitation. Also whatever is
+abstractedly possible in relation to the general course of events—as
+distinct from the particular limitations introduced by particular
+occasions—pervades the spatio-temporal continuum in every alternative
+spatial situation and at all alternative times.
+
+Fundamentally, the spatio-temporal continuum is the general system of
+relatedness of all possibilities, in so far as that system is limited by
+its relevance to the general fact of actuality. Also it is inherent in
+the nature of possibility that it should include this relevance to
+actuality. For possibility is that in which there stands achievability,
+abstracted from achievement.
+
+It has already been emphasised that an actual occasion is to be
+conceived as a limitation; and that this process of limitation can be
+still further characterised as a gradation. This characteristic of an
+actual occasion (α, say) requires further elucidation: An
+indeterminateness stands in the essence of any eternal object (_Α_,
+say). The actual occasion α synthesises in itself every eternal object;
+and, in so doing, it includes the _complete_ determinate relatedness of
+_Α_ to every other eternal object, or set of eternal objects. This
+synthesis is a limitation of realisation but _not_ of content. Each
+relationship preserves its inherent self-identity. But grades of entry
+into this synthesis are inherent in each actual occasion, such as α.
+These grades can be expressed only as relevance of value. This relevance
+of value varies—as comparing different occasions—in grade from the
+inclusion of the individual essence of _Α_ as an element in the
+aesthetic synthesis (in some grade of inclusion) to the lowest grade
+which is the exclusion of the individual essence of _Α_ as an element in
+the aesthetic synthesis. In so far as it stands in this lowest grade,
+every determinate relationship of _Α_ is merely ingredient in the
+occasion in respect to the determinate _how_ this relationship is an
+unfulfilled alternative, not contributing any aesthetic value, except as
+forming an element in the systematic substratum of unfulfilled content.
+In a higher grade, it may remain unfulfilled, but be aesthetically
+relevant.
+
+Thus _A_, conceived merely in respect to its relationships to other
+eternal objects, is ‘_A_ conceived as _not-being_’; where ‘not-being’
+means ‘abstracted from the determinate fact of inclusions in, and
+exclusions from, actual events.’ Also ‘_A_ as _not-being_ in respect to
+a definite occasion α’ means that _A_ in all its determinate
+relationships is excluded from α. Again ‘_A_ as _being_ in respect to α’
+means that _A_ in some of its determinate relationships is included in
+α. But there can be no occasion which includes _A_ in all its
+determinate relationships; for some of these relationships are
+contraries. Thus, in regard to excluded relationships, _A_ will be
+_not-being_ in α, even when in regard to other relationships _A_ will be
+_being_ in α. In this sense, every occasion is a synthesis of _being_
+and _not-being_. Furthermore, though some eternal objects are
+synthesised in an occasion α merely _quâ not-being_, each eternal object
+which is synthesised _quâ being_ is also synthesised _quâ not-being_.
+‘_Being_’ here means ‘individually effective in the aesthetic
+synthesis.’ Also the ‘aesthetic synthesis’ is the ‘experient synthesis’
+viewed as self-creative, under the limitations laid upon it by its
+internal relatedness to all other actual occasions. We thus
+conclude—what has already been stated above—that the general fact of the
+synthetic prehension of all eternal objects into every occasion wears
+the double aspect of the indeterminate relatedness of each eternal
+object to occasions generally, and of its determinate relatedness to
+each particular occasion. This statement summarises the account of how
+external relations are possible. But the account depends upon
+disengaging the spatio-temporal continuum from its mere implication in
+actual occasions—according to the usual explanation—and upon exhibiting
+it in its origin from the general nature of abstract possibility, as
+limited by the general character of the actual course of events.
+
+The difficulty which arises in respect to internal relations is to
+explain how any particular truth is possible. In so far as there are
+internal relations, everything must depend upon everything else. But if
+this be the case, we cannot know about anything till we equally know
+everything else. Apparently, therefore, we are under the necessity of
+saying everything at once. This supposed necessity is palpably untrue.
+Accordingly it is incumbent on us to explain how there can be internal
+relations, seeing that we admit finite truths.
+
+Since actual occasions are selections from the realm of possibilities,
+the ultimate explanation of how actual occasions have the general
+character which they do have, must lie in an analysis of the general
+character of the realm of possibility.
+
+The _analytical character_ of the realm of eternal objects is the
+primary metaphysical truth concerning it. By this character it is meant
+that the status of any eternal object _A_ in this realm is capable of
+analysis into an indefinite number of subordinate relationships of
+limited scope. For example if _B_ and _C_ are two other eternal objects,
+then there is some perfectly definite relationship _R(A, B, C)_ which
+involves _A, B, C_ only, as to require the mention of no other definite
+eternal objects in the capacity of relata. Of course, the relationship
+_R(A, B, C)_ may involve subordinate relationships which are themselves
+eternal objects, and _R(A, B, C)_ is also itself an eternal object. Also
+there will be other relationships which in the same sense involve only
+_A, B, C_. We have now to examine how, having regard to the internal
+relatedness of eternal objects, this limited relationship _R(A, B, C)_
+is possible.
+
+The reason for the existence of finite relationships in the realm of
+eternal objects is that relationships of these objects among themselves
+are entirely unselective, and are systematically complete. We are
+discussing possibility; so that every relationship which is possible is
+thereby in the realm of possibility. Every such relationship of each
+eternal object is founded upon the perfectly definite status of that
+object as a relatum in the general scheme of relationships. This
+definite status is what I have termed the ‘relational essence’ of the
+object. This relational essence is determinable by reference to that
+object alone, and does not require reference to any other objects,
+except those which are specifically involved in its individual essence
+when that essence is complex (as will be explained immediately). The
+meaning of the words ‘any’ and ‘some’ springs from this principle—that
+is to say, the meaning of the ‘variable’ in logic. The whole principle
+is that a particular determination can be made of the _how_ of some
+definite relationship of a definite eternal object _A_ to a definite
+finite number _n_ of other eternal objects, _without_ any determination
+of the other _n_ objects, X1, X2, ... Xn, except that they have, each of
+them, the requisite status to play their respective parts in that
+multiple relationship. This principle depends on the fact that the
+relational essence of an eternal object is not unique to that object.
+The mere relational essence of each eternal object determines the
+complete uniform scheme of relational essences, since each object stands
+internally in all its possible relationships. Thus the realm of
+possibility provides a uniform scheme of relationships among finite sets
+of eternal objects; and all eternal objects stand in all such
+relationships, so far as the status of each permits.
+
+Accordingly the relationships (as in possibility) do not involve the
+individual essences of the eternal objects; they involve _any_ eternal
+objects as relata, subject to the proviso that these relata have the
+requisite relational essences. [It is this proviso which, automatically
+and by the nature of the case, limits the ‘any’ of the phrase ‘any
+eternal objects.’] This principle is the principle of the _Isolation of
+Eternal Objects_ in the realm of possibility. The eternal objects are
+isolated, because their relationships as possibilities are expressible
+without reference to their respective individual essences. 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; value, as abstracted from any particular superject, is
+the abstract matter—the ὕλη—which is common to all actual occasions; and
+the synthetic activity which prehends valueless possibility into
+superjicient informed value is the substantial activity. This
+substantial activity is that which is omitted in any analysis of the
+static factors in the metaphysical situation. The analysed elements of
+the situation are the attributes of the substantial activity.
+
+The difficulty inherent in the concept of finite internal relations
+among eternal objects is thus evaded by two metaphysical principles, (i)
+that the relationships of any eternal object _A_, considered as
+constitutive of _A_, merely involve other eternal objects as bare relata
+without reference to their individual essences, and (ii) that the
+divisibility of the general relationship of _A_ into a multiplicity of
+finite relationships of _A_ stands therefore in the essence of that
+eternal object. The second principle obviously depends upon the first.
+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. This spatio-temporal scheme is, so
+to speak, the greatest common measure of the schemes of relationship (as
+limited by actuality) inherent in all the eternal objects. By this it is
+meant that, _how_ select relationships of an eternal object (_A_) are
+realised in any actual occasion, is always explicable by expressing the
+status of _A_ in respect to this spatio-temporal scheme, and by
+expressing in this scheme the relationship of the actual occasion to
+other actual occasions. A definite finite relationship involving the
+definite eternal objects of a limited set of such objects is itself an
+eternal object: it is those eternal objects as in that relationship. I
+will call such an eternal object ‘complex.’ The eternal objects which
+are the relata in a complex eternal object will be called the
+‘components’ of that eternal object. Also if any of these relata are
+themselves complex, their components will be called ‘derivative
+components’ of the original complex object. Also the components of
+derivative components will also be called derivative components of the
+original object. Thus the complexity of an eternal object means its
+analysability into a relationship of component eternal objects. Also the
+analysis of the general scheme of relatedness of eternal objects means
+its exhibition as a multiplicity of complex eternal objects. An eternal
+object, such as a definite shade of green, which cannot be analysed into
+a relationship of components, will be called ‘simple.’
+
+We can now explain how the analytical character of the realm of eternal
+objects allows of an analysis of that realm into grades.
+
+In the lowest grade of eternal objects are to be placed those objects
+whose individual essences are simple. This is the grade of zero
+complexity. Next consider any set of such objects, finite or infinite as
+to the number of its members. For example, consider the set of three
+eternal objects _A, B, C_, of which none is complex. Let us write _R(A,
+B, C)_ for some definite possible relatedness of _A, B, C_. To take a
+simple example, _A, B, C_ may be three definite colours with the
+spatio-temporal relatedness to each other of three faces of a regular
+tetrahedron, anywhere at any time. Then _R(A, B, C)_ is another eternal
+object of the lowest complex grade. Analogously there are eternal
+objects of successively higher grades. In respect to any complex eternal
+object, _S(D1, D2, ... Dn)_, the eternal objects _D1, ... Dn_, whose
+individual essences are constitutive of the individual essence of _S(D1,
+... Dn)_, are called the components of _S(D1, ... Dn)_. It is obvious
+that the grade of complexity to be ascribed to _S(D1, ... Dn)_ is to be
+taken as one above the highest grade of complexity to be found among its
+components.
+
+There is thus an analysis of the realm of possibility into simple
+eternal objects, and into various grades of complex eternal objects. A
+complex eternal object is an abstract situation. There is a double sense
+of ‘abstraction,’ in regard to the abstraction of _definite_ eternal
+objects, _i.e._, non-mathematical abstraction. There is abstraction from
+actuality, and abstraction from possibility. For example, _A_ and _R(A,
+B, C)_ are both abstractions from the realm of possibility. Note that
+_A_ must mean _A_ in all its possible relationships, and among them
+_R(A, B, C)_. Also _R(A, B, C)_ means _R(A, B, C)_ in all its
+relationships. But this meaning of _R(A, B, C)_ excludes other
+relationships into which _A_ can enter. Hence _A_ as in _R(A, B, C)_ is
+more abstract than _A simpliciter_. Thus as we pass from the grade of
+simple eternal objects to higher and higher grades of complexity, we are
+indulging in higher grades of abstraction from the realm of possibility.
+
+We can now conceive the successive stages of a definite progress towards
+some assigned mode of abstraction from the realm of possibility,
+involving a progress (in thought) through successive grades of
+increasing complexity. I will call any such route of progress ‘an
+abstractive hierarchy.’ Any abstractive hierarchy, finite or infinite,
+is based upon some definite group of simple eternal objects. This group
+will be called the ‘base’ of the hierarchy. Thus the base of an
+abstractive hierarchy is a set of objects of zero complexity. The formal
+definition of an abstractive hierarchy is as follows:
+
+An ‘abstractive hierarchy based upon _g_,’ where _g_ is a group of
+simple eternal objects, is a set of eternal objects which satisfy the
+following conditions,
+
+(i) the members of _g_ belong to it, and are the only simple eternal
+objects in the hierarchy,
+
+(ii) the components of any complex eternal object in the hierarchy are
+also members of the hierarchy, and
+
+(iii) any set of eternal objects belonging to the hierarchy, whether all
+of the same grade or whether differing among themselves as to grade, are
+jointly among the components or derivative components of at least one
+eternal object which also belongs to the hierarchy.
+
+It is to be noticed that the components of an eternal object are
+necessarily of a lower grade of complexity than itself. Accordingly any
+member of such a hierarchy, which is of the first grade of complexity,
+can have as components only members of the group _g_; and any member of
+the second grade can have as components only members of the first grade,
+and members of _g_; and so on for the higher grades.
+
+The third condition to be satisfied by an abstractive hierarchy will be
+called the condition of connexity. Thus an abstractive hierarchy springs
+from its base; it includes every successive grade from its base either
+indefinitely onwards, or to its maximum grade; and it is ‘connected’ by
+the reappearance (in a higher grade) of any set of its members belonging
+to lower grades, in the function of a set of components or derivative
+components of at least one member of the hierarchy.
+
+An abstractive hierarchy is called ‘finite’ if it stops at a finite
+grade of complexity. It is called ‘infinite’ if it includes members
+belonging respectively to all degrees of complexity.
+
+It is to be noted that the base of an abstractive hierarchy may contain
+any number of members, finite or infinite. Further, the infinity of the
+number of the members of the base has nothing to do with the question as
+to whether the hierarchy be finite or infinite.
+
+A finite abstractive hierarchy will, by definition, possess a grade of
+maximum complexity. It is characteristic of this grade that a member of
+it is a component of no other eternal object belonging to any grade of
+the hierarchy. Also it is evident that this grade of maximum complexity
+must possess only one member; for otherwise the condition of connexity
+would not be satisfied. Conversely any complex eternal object defines a
+finite abstractive hierarchy to be discovered by a process of analysis.
+This complex eternal object from which we start will be called the
+‘vertex’ of the abstractive hierarchy: it is the sole member of the
+grade of maximum complexity. In the first stage of the analysis we
+obtain the components of the vertex. These components may be of varying
+complexity; but there must be among them at least one member whose
+complexity is of a grade one lower than that of the vertex. A grade
+which is one lower than that of a given eternal object will be called
+the ‘proximate grade’ for that object. We take then those components of
+the vertex which belong to its proximate grade; and as the second stage
+we analyse them into their components. Among these components there must
+be some belonging to the proximate grade for the objects thus analysed.
+Add to them the components of the vertex which also belong to this grade
+of ‘second proximation’ from the vertex; and, at the third stage analyse
+as before. We thus find objects belonging to the grade of third
+proximation from the vertex; and we add to them the components belonging
+to this grade, which have been left over from the preceding stages of
+the analysis. We proceed in this way through successive stages, till we
+reach the grade of simple objects. This grade forms the base of the
+hierarchy.
+
+It is to be noted that in dealing with hierarchies we are entirely
+within the realm of possibility. Accordingly the eternal objects are
+devoid of real togetherness: they remain within their ‘isolation.’
+
+The logical instrument which Aristotle used for the analysis of actual
+fact into more abstract elements was that of classification into species
+and genera. This instrument has its overwhelmingly important application
+for science in its preparatory stages. But its use in metaphysical
+description distorts the true vision of the metaphysical situation. The
+use of the term ‘universal’ is intimately connected with this
+Aristotelian analysis: the term has been broadened of late; but still it
+suggests that classificatory analysis. For this reason I have avoided
+it.
+
+In any actual occasion α, there will be a group _g_ of simple eternal
+objects which are ingredient in that group in the most concrete mode.
+This complete ingredience in an occasion, so as to yield the most
+complete fusion of individual essence with other eternal objects in the
+formation of the individual emergent occasion, is evidently of its own
+kind and cannot be defined in terms of anything else. But it has a
+peculiar characteristic which necessarily attaches to it. This
+characteristic is that there is an _infinite_ abstractive hierarchy
+based upon _g_ which is such that all its members are equally involved
+in this complete inclusion in α.
+
+The existence of such an infinite abstractive hierarchy is what is meant
+by the statement that it is impossible to complete the description of an
+actual occasion by means of concepts. I will call this infinite
+abstractive hierarchy which is associated with α ‘the associated
+hierarchy of α.’ It is also what is meant by the notion of the
+connectedness of an actual occasion. This connectedness of an occasion
+is necessary for its synthetic unity and for its intelligibility. There
+is a connected hierarchy of concepts applicable to the occasion,
+including concepts of all degrees of complexity. Also in the actual
+occasion, the individual essences of the eternal objects involved in
+these complex concepts achieve an aesthetic synthesis, productive of the
+occasion as an experience for its own sake. This associated hierarchy is
+the shape, or pattern, or form, of the occasion in so far as the
+occasion is constituted of what enters into its full realisation.
+
+Some confusion of thought has been caused by the fact that abstraction
+from possibility runs in the opposite direction to an abstraction from
+actuality, so far as degree of abstractness is concerned. For evidently
+in describing an actual occasion α, we are nearer to the total concrete
+fact when we describe α by predicating of it some member of its
+associated hierarchy, which is of a high grade of complexity. We have
+then said more about α. Thus, with a high grade of complexity we gain in
+approach to the full concreteness of α, and with a low grade we lose in
+this approach. Accordingly the simple eternal objects represent the
+extreme of abstraction from an actual occasion; whereas simple eternal
+objects represent the minimum of abstraction from the realm of
+possibility. It will, I think, be found that, when a high degree of
+abstraction is spoken of, abstraction from the realm of possibility is
+what is usually meant—in other words, an elaborate logical construction.
+
+So far I have merely been considering an actual occasion on the side of
+its full concreteness. It is this side of the occasion in virtue of
+which it is an event in nature. But a natural event, in this sense of
+the term, is only an abstraction from a complete actual occasion. A
+complete occasion includes that which in cognitive experience takes the
+form of memory, anticipation, imagination, and thought. These elements
+in an experient occasion are also modes of inclusion of complex eternal
+objects in the synthetic prehension, as elements in the emergent value.
+They differ from the concreteness of full inclusion. In a sense this
+difference is inexplicable; for each mode of inclusion is of its own
+kind, not to be explained in terms of anything else. But there is a
+common difference which discriminates these modes of inclusion from the
+full concrete ingression which has been discussed. This _differentia_ is
+_abruptness_. By ‘abruptness’ I mean that what is remembered, or
+anticipated, or imagined, or thought, is exhausted by a finite complex
+concept. In each case there is one finite eternal object prehended
+within the occasion as the vertex of a finite hierarchy. This breaking
+off from an actual illimitability is what in any occasion marks off that
+which is termed mental from that which belongs to the physical event to
+which the mental functioning is referred.
+
+In general there seems to be some loss of vividness in the apprehension
+of the eternal objects concerned: for example, Hume speaks of ‘faint
+copies.’ But this faintness seems to be a very unsafe ground for
+differentiation. Often things realised in thought are more vivid than
+the same things in inattentive physical experience. But the things
+apprehended as mental are always subject to the condition that we come
+to a stop when we attempt to explore ever higher grades of complexity in
+their realised relationships. We always find that we have thought of
+just this—whatever it may be—and of no more. There is a limitation which
+breaks off the finite concept from the higher grades of illimitable
+complexity.
+
+Thus an actual occasion is a prehension of one infinite hierarchy (its
+associated hierarchy) together with various finite hierarchies. The
+synthesis into the occasion of the infinite hierarchy is according to
+its specific mode of realisation, and that of the finite hierarchies is
+according to various other specific modes of realisation. There is one
+metaphysical principle which is essential for the rational coherence of
+this account of the general character of an experient occasion. I call
+this principle, ‘The Translucency of Realisation.’ By this I mean that
+any eternal object is just itself in whatever mode of realisation it is
+involved. There can be no distortion of the individual essence without
+thereby producing a different eternal object. In the essence of each
+eternal object there stands an indeterminateness which expresses its
+indifferent patience for any mode of ingression into any actual
+occasion. Thus in cognitive experience, there can be the cognition of
+the same eternal object as in the same occasion having ingression with
+implication in more than one grade of realisation. Thus the translucency
+of realisation, and the possible multiplicity of modes of ingression
+into the same occasion, together form the foundation for the
+correspondence theory of truth.
+
+In this account of an actual occasion in terms of its connection with
+the realm of eternal objects, we have gone back to the train of thought
+in our second chapter, where the nature of mathematics was discussed.
+The idea, ascribed to Pythagoras, has been amplified, and put forward as
+the first chapter in metaphysics. The next chapter is concerned with the
+puzzling fact that there is an actual course of events which is in
+itself a limited fact, in that metaphysically speaking it might have
+been otherwise. But other metaphysical investigations are omitted; for
+example, epistemology, and the classification of some elements in the
+unfathomable wealth of the field of possibility. This last topic brings
+metaphysics in sight of the special topics of the various sciences.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER XI
+
+                                  GOD
+
+
+Aristotle found it necessary to complete his metaphysics by the
+introduction of a Prime Mover—God. This, for two reasons, is an
+important fact in the history of metaphysics. In the first place if we
+are to accord to anyone the position of the greatest metaphysician,
+having regard to genius of insight, to general equipment in knowledge,
+and to the stimulus of his metaphysical ancestry, we must choose
+Aristotle. Secondly, in his consideration of this metaphysical question
+he was entirely dispassionate; and he is the last European metaphysician
+of first rate importance for whom this claim can be made. After
+Aristotle, ethical and religious interests began to influence
+metaphysical conclusions. The Jews dispersed, first willingly and then
+forcibly, and the Judaic-Alexandrian school arose. Then Christianity
+closely followed by Mahometanism, intervened. The Greek gods who
+surrounded Aristotle were subordinate metaphysical entities, well within
+nature. Accordingly on the subject of his Prime Mover, he would have no
+motive, except to follow his metaphysical train of thought whithersoever
+it led him. It did not lead him very far towards the production of a God
+available for religious purposes. It may be doubted whether any properly
+general metaphysics can ever, without the illicit introduction of other
+considerations, get much further than Aristotle. But his conclusion does
+represent a first step without which no evidence on a narrower
+experiential basis can be of much avail in shaping the conception. For
+nothing, within any limited type of experience, can give intelligence to
+shape our ideas of any entity at the base of all actual things, unless
+the general character of things requires that there be such an entity.
+
+The phrase, Prime Mover, warns us that Aristotle’s thought was enmeshed
+in the details of an erroneous physics and an erroneous cosmology. In
+Aristotle’s physics special causes were required to sustain the motions
+of material things. These could easily be fitted into his system,
+provided that the general cosmic motions could be sustained. For then in
+relation to the general working system, each thing could be provided
+with its true end. Hence the necessity for a Prime Mover who sustains
+the motions of the spheres on which depend the adjustment of things.
+To-day we repudiate the Aristotelian physics and the Aristotelian
+cosmology, so that the exact form of the above argument manifestly
+fails. But if our general metaphysics is in any way similar to that
+outlined in the previous chapter, an analogous metaphysical problem
+arises which can be solved only in an analogous fashion. In the place of
+Aristotle’s God as Prime Mover, we require God as the Principle of
+Concretion. This position can be substantiated only by the discussion of
+the general implication of the course of actual occasions,—that is to
+say, of the process of realisation.
+
+We conceive actuality as in essential relation to an unfathomable
+possibility. Eternal objects inform actual occasions with hierarchic
+patterns, included and excluded in every variety of discrimination.
+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. It is my task in this chapter to
+describe the unity of actual occasions. The previous chapter centered
+its interest in the abstract: the present chapter deals with the
+concrete, _i.e._, that which has grown together.
+
+Consider an occasion α:—we have to enumerate how other actual occasions
+are in α, in the sense that their relationships with α are constitutive
+of the essence of α. What α is in itself, is that it is a unit of
+realised experience; accordingly we ask how other occasions are in the
+experience which is α. Also for the present I am excluding cognitive
+experience. The complete answer to this question is, that the
+relationships among actual occasions are as unfathomable in their
+variety of type as are those among eternal objects in the realm of
+abstraction. But there are fundamental types of such relationships in
+terms of which the whole complex variety can find its description.
+
+A preliminary for the understanding of these types of entry (of one
+occasion into the essence of another) is to note that they are involved
+in the modes of realisation of abstractive hierarchies, discussed in the
+previous chapter. The spatio-temporal relationships, involved in those
+hierarchies as realised in α, have all a definition in terms of α and of
+the occasions entrant in α. Thus the entrant occasions lend their
+aspects to the hierarchies, and thereby convert spatio-temporal
+modalities into categorical determinations; and the hierarchies lend
+their forms to the occasions and thereby limit the entrant occasions to
+being entrant only under those forms. Thus in the same way (as seen in
+the previous chapter) that every occasion is a synthesis of all eternal
+objects under the limitation of gradations of actuality, so every
+occasion is a synthesis of all occasions under the limitation of
+gradations of types of entry. Each occasion synthesises the totality of
+content under its own limitations of mode.
+
+In respect to these types of internal relationship between α and other
+occasions, these other occasions (as constitutive of α) can be
+classified in many alternative ways. These are all concerned with
+different definitions of past, present, and future. It has been usual in
+philosophy to assume that these various definitions must necessarily be
+equivalent. The present state of opinion in physical science
+conclusively shows that this assumption is without metaphysical
+justification, even though any such discrimination may be found to be
+unnecessary for physical science. This question has already been dealt
+with in the chapter on Relativity. But the physical theory of relativity
+touches only the fringe of the various theories which are metaphysically
+tenable. It is important for my argument to insist upon the unbounded
+freedom within which the actual is a unique categorical determination.
+
+Every actual occasion exhibits itself as a process: it is a
+becomingness. In so disclosing itself, it places itself as one among a
+multiplicity of other occasions, without which it could not be itself.
+It also defines itself as a particular individual achievement, focussing
+in its limited way an unbounded realm of eternal objects.
+
+Any one occasion α issues from other occasions which collectively form
+its _past_. It displays for itself other occasions which collectively
+form its _present_. It is in respect to its associated hierarchy, as
+displayed in this immediate present, that an occasion finds its own
+originality. It is that display which is its own contribution to the
+output of actuality. It may be conditioned, and even completely
+determined by the past from which it issues. But its display in the
+present under those conditions is what directly emerges from its
+prehensive activity. The occasion α also holds within itself an
+indetermination in the form of a future, which has partial determination
+by reason of its inclusion in α and also has determinate spatio-temporal
+relatedness to α and to actual occasions of the past from α and of the
+present for α.
+
+This future is a synthesis in α of eternal objects as not-being and as
+requiring the passage from α to other individualisations (with
+determinate spatio-temporal relations to α) in which not-being becomes
+being.
+
+There is also in α what, in the previous chapter, I have termed the
+‘abrupt’ realisation of finite eternal objects. This abrupt realisation
+requires _either_ a reference of the basic objects of the finite
+hierarchy to determinate occasions other than α (as their situations),
+in past, present, future; _or_ requires a realisation of these eternal
+objects in determinate relationships, but under the aspect of exemption
+from inclusion in the spatio-temporal scheme of relatedness between
+actual occasions. This abrupt synthesis of eternal objects in each
+occasion is the inclusion in actuality of the analytical character of
+the realm of eternality. 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 prehends into each
+occasion the full sweep of eternal relatedness. I term this abrupt
+realisation the ‘graded envisagement’ which each occasion prehends 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.
+It is the source of error, of truth, of art, of ethics, and of religion.
+By it, fact is confronted with alternatives.
+
+This general concept, of an event as a process whose outcome is a unit
+of experience, points to the analysis of an event into (i) substantial
+activity, (ii) conditioned potentialities which are there for synthesis,
+and (iii) the achieved outcome of the synthesis. The unity of all actual
+occasions forbids the analysis of substantial activities into
+independent entities. Each individual activity is nothing but the mode
+in which the general activity is individualised by the imposed
+conditions. The envisagement which enters into the synthesis is also a
+character which conditions the synthesising activity. The general
+activity is not an entity in the sense in which occasions or eternal
+objects are entities. It is a general metaphysical character which
+underlies all occasions, in a particular mode for each occasion. There
+is nothing with which to compare it: it is Spinoza’s one infinite
+substance. Its attributes are its character of individualisation into a
+multiplicity of modes, and the realm of eternal objects which are
+variously synthesised in these modes. Thus eternal possibility and modal
+differentiation into individual multiplicity are the attributes of the
+one substance. In fact each general element of the metaphysical
+situation is an attribute of the substantial activity.
+
+Yet another element in the metaphysical situation is disclosed by the
+consideration that the general attribute of modality is limited. This
+element must rank as an attribute of the substantial activity. In its
+nature each mode is limited, so as not to be other modes. But, beyond
+these limitations of particulars, the general modal individualisation is
+limited in two ways: In the first place it is an actual course of
+events, which might be otherwise so far as concerns eternal possibility,
+but _is_ that course. This limitation takes three forms, (i) the special
+logical relations which all events must conform to, (ii) the selection
+of relationships to which the events do conform, and (iii) the
+particularity which infects the course even within those general
+relationships of logic and causation. Thus this first limitation is a
+limitation of antecedent selection. So far as the general metaphysical
+situation is concerned, there might have been an indiscriminate modal
+pluralism apart from logical or other limitation. But there could not
+then have been these modes, for each mode represents a synthesis of
+actualities which are limited to conform to a standard. We here come to
+the second way of limitation. Restriction is the price of value. There
+cannot be value without antecedent standards of value, to discriminate
+the acceptance or rejection of what is before the envisaging mode of
+activity. Thus there is an antecedent limitation among values,
+introducing contraries, grades, and oppositions.
+
+According to this argument the fact that there is a process of actual
+occasions, and the fact that the occasions are the emergence of values
+which require such limitation, both require that the course of events
+should have developed amid an antecedent limitation composed of
+conditions, particularisation, and standards of value.
+
+Thus as a further element in the metaphysical situation, there is
+required a principle of limitation. Some particular _how_ is necessary,
+and some particularisation in the _what_ of matter of fact is necessary.
+The only alternative to this admission, is to deny the reality of actual
+occasions. Their apparent irrational limitation must be taken as a proof
+of illusion and we must look for reality behind the scene. If we reject
+this alternative behind the scene, we must provide a ground for
+limitation which stands among the attributes of the substantial
+activity. This attribute provides the limitation for which no reason can
+be given: for all reason flows from it. God is the ultimate limitation,
+and His existence is the ultimate irrationality. For no reason can be
+given for just that limitation which it stands in His nature to impose.
+God is not concrete, but He is the ground for concrete actuality. No
+reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the
+ground of rationality.
+
+In this argument the point to notice is, that what is metaphysically
+indeterminate has nevertheless to be categorically determinate. We have
+come to the limit of rationality. For there is a categorical limitation
+which does not spring from any metaphysical reason. There is a
+metaphysical need for a principle of determination, but there can be no
+metaphysical reason for what is determined. If there were such a reason,
+there would be no need for any further principle: for metaphysics would
+already have provided the determination. The general principle of
+empiricism depends upon the doctrine that there is a principle of
+concretion which is not discoverable by abstract reason. What further
+can be known about God must be sought in the region of particular
+experiences, and therefore rests on an empirical basis. In respect to
+the interpretation of these experiences, mankind have differed
+profoundly. He has been named respectively, Jehovah, Allah, Brahma,
+Father in Heaven, Order of Heaven, First Cause, Supreme Being, Chance.
+Each name corresponds to a system of thought derived from the
+experiences of those who have used it.
+
+Among medieval and modern philosophers, anxious to establish the
+religious significance of God, an unfortunate habit has prevailed of
+paying to Him metaphysical compliments. He has been conceived as the
+foundation of the metaphysical situation with its ultimate activity. If
+this conception be adhered to, there can be no alternative except to
+discern in Him the origin of all evil as well as of all good. He is then
+the supreme author of the play, and to Him must therefore be ascribed
+its shortcomings as well as its success. If He be conceived as the
+supreme ground for limitation, it stands in His very nature to divide
+the Good from the Evil, and to establish Reason ‘within her dominions
+supreme.’
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XII
+
+                          RELIGION AND SCIENCE
+
+
+The difficulty in approaching the question of the relations between
+Religion and Science is, that its elucidation requires that we have in
+our minds some clear idea of what we mean by either of the terms,
+‘religion’ and ‘science.’ Also I wish to speak in the most general way
+possible, and to keep in the background any comparison of particular
+creeds, scientific or religious. We have got to understand the type of
+connection which exists between the two spheres, and then to draw some
+definite conclusions respecting the existing situation which at present
+confronts the world.
+
+The _conflict_ between religion and science is what naturally occurs to
+our minds when we think of this subject. It seems as though, during the
+last half-century, the results of science and the beliefs of religion
+had come into a position of frank disagreement, from which there can be
+no escape, except by abandoning either the clear teaching of science, or
+the clear teaching of religion. This conclusion has been urged by
+controversialists on either side. Not by all controversialists, of
+course, but by those trenchant intellects which every controversy calls
+out into the open.
+
+The distress of sensitive minds, and the zeal for truth, and the sense
+of the importance of the issues, must command our sincerest sympathy.
+When we consider what religion is for mankind, and what science is, it
+is no exaggeration to say that the future course of history depends upon
+the decision of this generation as to the relations between them. We
+have here the two strongest general forces (apart from the mere impulse
+of the various senses) which influence men, and they seem to be set one
+against the other—the force of our religious intuitions, and the force
+of our impulse to accurate observation and logical deduction.
+
+A great English statesman once advised his countrymen to use large-scale
+maps, as a preservative against alarms, panics, and general
+misunderstanding of the true relations between nations. In the same way
+in dealing with the clash between permanent elements of human nature, it
+is well to map our history on a large scale, and to disengage ourselves
+from our immediate absorption in the present conflicts. When we do this,
+we immediately discover two great facts. In the first place, there has
+always been a conflict between religion and science; and in the second
+place, both religion and science have always been in a state of
+continual development. In the early days of Christianity, there was a
+general belief among Christians that the world was coming to an end in
+the lifetime of people then living. We can make only indirect inferences
+as to how far this belief was authoritatively proclaimed; but it is
+certain that it was widely held, and that it formed an impressive part
+of the popular religious doctrine. The belief proved itself to be
+mistaken, and Christian doctrine adjusted itself to the change. Again in
+the early Church individual theologians very confidently deduced from
+the Bible opinions concerning the nature of the physical universe. In
+the year A. D. 535, a monk named Cosmas[17] wrote a book which he
+entitled, _Christian Topography_. He was a travelled man who had visited
+India and Ethiopia; and finally he lived in a monastery at Alexandria,
+which was then a great centre of culture. In this book, basing himself
+upon the direct meaning of Biblical texts as construed by him in a
+literal fashion, he denied the existence of the antipodes, and asserted
+that the world is a flat parallelogram whose length is double its
+breadth.
+
+Footnote 17:
+
+  _Cf._ Lecky’s _The Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe_, Ch.
+  III.
+
+In the seventeenth century the doctrine of the motion of the earth was
+condemned by a Catholic tribunal. A hundred years ago the extension of
+time demanded by geological science distressed religious people,
+Protestant and Catholic. And to-day the doctrine of evolution is an
+equal stumbling-block. These are only a few instances illustrating a
+general fact.
+
+But all our ideas will be in a wrong perspective if we think that this
+recurring perplexity was confined to contradictions between religion and
+science; and that in these controversies religion was always wrong, and
+that science was always right. The true facts of the case are very much
+more complex, and refuse to be summarised in these simple terms.
+
+Theology itself exhibits exactly the same character of gradual
+development, arising from an aspect of conflict between its own proper
+ideas. This fact is a commonplace to theologians, but is often obscured
+in the stress of controversy. I do not wish to overstate my case; so I
+will confine myself to Roman Catholic writers. In the seventeenth
+century a learned Jesuit, Father Petavius, showed that the theologians
+of the first three centuries of Christianity made use of phrases and
+statements which since the fifth century would be condemned as
+heretical. Also Cardinal Newman devoted a treatise to the discussion of
+the development of doctrine. He wrote it before he became a great Roman
+Catholic ecclesiastic; but throughout his life, it was never retracted
+and continually reissued.
+
+Science is even more changeable than theology. No man of science could
+subscribe without qualification to Galileo’s beliefs, or to Newton’s
+beliefs, or to all his own scientific beliefs of ten years ago.
+
+In both regions of thought, additions, distinctions, and modifications
+have been introduced. So that now, even when the same assertion is made
+to-day as was made a thousand, or fifteen hundred years ago, it is made
+subject to limitations or expansions of meaning, which were not
+contemplated at the earlier epoch. We are told by logicians that a
+proposition must be either true or false, and that there is no middle
+term. But in practice, we may know that a proposition expresses an
+important truth, but that it is subject to limitations and
+qualifications which at present remain undiscovered. It is a general
+feature of our knowledge, that we are insistently aware of important
+truths; and yet that the only formulations of these truths which we are
+able to make presuppose a general standpoint of conceptions which may
+have to be modified. I will give you two illustrations, both from
+science: Galileo said that the earth moves and that the sun is fixed;
+the Inquisition said that the earth is fixed and the sun moves; and
+Newtonian astronomers, adopting an absolute theory of space, said that
+both the sun and the earth move. But now we say that any one of these
+three statements is equally true, provided that you have fixed your
+sense of ‘rest’ and ‘motion’ in the way required by the statement
+adopted. At the date of Galileo’s controversy with the Inquisition,
+Galileo’s way of stating the facts was, beyond question, the fruitful
+procedure for the sake of scientific research. But in itself it was not
+more true than the formulation of the Inquisition. But at that time the
+modern concepts of relative motion were in nobody’s mind; so that the
+statements were made in ignorance of the qualifications required for
+their more perfect truth. Yet this question of the motions of the earth
+and the sun expresses a real fact in the universe; and all sides had got
+hold of important truths concerning it. But with the knowledge of those
+times, the truths appeared to be inconsistent.
+
+Again I will give you another example taken from the state of modern
+physical science. Since the time of Newton and Huyghens in the
+seventeenth century there have been two theories as to the physical
+nature of light. Newton’s theory was that a beam of light consists of a
+stream of very minute particles, or corpuscles, and that we have the
+sensation of light when these corpuscles strike the retinas of our eyes.
+Huyghens’ theory was that light consists of very minute waves of
+trembling in an all-pervading ether, and that these waves are travelling
+along a beam of light. The two theories are contradictory. In the
+eighteenth century Newton’s theory was believed, in the nineteenth
+century Huyghens’ theory was believed. To-day there is one large group
+of phenomena which can be explained only on the wave theory, and another
+large group which can be explained only on the corpuscular theory.
+Scientists have to leave it at that, and wait for the future, in the
+hope of attaining some wider vision which reconciles both.
+
+We should apply these same principles to the questions in which there is
+a variance between science and religion. We would believe nothing in
+either sphere of thought which does not appear to us to be certified by
+solid reasons based upon the critical research either of ourselves or of
+competent authorities. But granting that we have honestly taken this
+precaution, a clash between the two on points of detail where they
+overlap should not lead us hastily to abandon doctrines for which we
+have solid evidence. It may be that we are more interested in one set of
+doctrines than in the other. But, if we have any sense of perspective
+and of the history of thought, we shall wait and refrain from mutual
+anathemas.
+
+We should wait: but we should not wait passively, or in despair. The
+clash is a sign that there are wider truths and finer perspectives
+within which a reconciliation of a deeper religion and a more subtle
+science will be found.
+
+In one sense, therefore, the conflict between science and religion is a
+slight matter which has been unduly emphasised. A mere logical
+contradiction cannot in itself point to more than the necessity of some
+readjustments, possibly of a very minor character on both sides.
+Remember the widely different aspects of events which are dealt with in
+science and in religion respectively. Science is concerned with the
+general conditions which are observed to regulate physical phenomena;
+whereas religion is wholly wrapped up in the contemplation of moral and
+aesthetic values. On the one side there is the law of gravitation, and
+on the other the contemplation of the beauty of holiness. What one side
+sees, the other misses; and vice versa.
+
+Consider, for example, the lives of John Wesley and of Saint Francis of
+Assisi. For physical science you have in these lives merely ordinary
+examples of the operation of the principles of physiological chemistry,
+and of the dynamics of nervous reactions: for religion you have lives of
+the most profound significance in the history of the world. Can you be
+surprised that, in the absence of a perfect and complete phrasing of the
+principles of science and of the principles of religion which apply to
+these specific cases, the accounts of these lives from these divergent
+standpoints should involve discrepancies? It would be a miracle if it
+were not so.
+
+It would, however, be missing the point to think that we need not
+trouble ourselves about the conflict between science and religion. In an
+intellectual age there can be no active interest which puts aside all
+hope of a vision of the harmony of truth. To acquiesce in discrepancy is
+destructive of candour, and of moral cleanliness. It belongs to the
+self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final
+unravelment. If you check that impulse, you will get no religion and no
+science from an awakened thoughtfulness. The important question is, In
+what spirit are we going to face the issue? There we come to something
+absolutely vital.
+
+A clash of doctrines is not a disaster—it is an opportunity. I will
+explain my meaning by some illustrations from science. The weight of an
+atom of nitrogen was well known. Also it was an established scientific
+doctrine that the average weight of such atoms in any considerable mass
+will be always the same. Two experimenters, the late Lord Rayleigh and
+the late Sir William Ramsay, found that if they obtained nitrogen by two
+different methods, each equally effective for that purpose, they always
+observed a persistent slight difference between the average weights of
+the atoms in the two cases. Now I ask you, would it have been rational
+of these men to have despaired because of this conflict between chemical
+theory and scientific observation? Suppose that for some reason the
+chemical doctrine had been highly prized throughout some district as the
+foundation of its social order:—would it have been wise, would it have
+been candid, would it have been moral, to forbid the disclosure of the
+fact that the experiments produced discordant results? Or, on the other
+hand, should Sir William Ramsay and Lord Rayleigh have proclaimed that
+chemical theory was now a detected delusion? We see at once that either
+of these ways would have been a method of facing the issue in an
+entirely wrong spirit. What Rayleigh and Ramsay did do was this: They at
+once perceived that they had hit upon a line of investigation which
+would disclose some subtlety of chemical theory that had hitherto eluded
+observation. The discrepancy was not a disaster: it was an opportunity
+to increase the sweep of chemical knowledge. You all know the end of the
+story: finally argon was discovered, a new chemical element which had
+lurked undetected, mixed with the nitrogen. But the story has a sequel
+which forms my second illustration. This discovery drew attention to the
+importance of observing accurately minute differences in chemical
+substances as obtained by different methods. Further researches of the
+most careful accuracy were undertaken. Finally another physicist, F. W.
+Aston, working in the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge in England,
+discovered that even the same element might assume two or more distinct
+forms, termed _isotopes_, and that the law of the constancy of average
+atomic weight holds for each of these forms, but as between the
+different isotopes differs slightly. The research has effected a great
+stride in the power of chemical theory, far transcending in importance
+the discovery of argon from which it originated. The moral of these
+stories lies on the surface, and I will leave to you their application
+to the case of religion and science.
+
+In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of a defeat: but in the
+evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress towards
+a victory. This is one great reason for the utmost toleration of variety
+of opinion. Once and forever, this duty of toleration has been summed up
+in the words, ‘Let both grow together until the harvest.’ The failure of
+Christians to act up to this precept, of the highest authority, is one
+of the curiosities of religious history. But we have not yet exhausted
+the discussion of the moral temper required for the pursuit of truth.
+There are short cuts leading merely to an illusory success. It is easy
+enough to find a theory, logically harmonious and with important
+applications in the region of fact, provided that you are content to
+disregard half your evidence. Every age produces people with clear
+logical intellects, and with the most praiseworthy grasp of the
+importance of some sphere of human experience, who have elaborated, or
+inherited, a scheme of thought which exactly fits those experiences
+which claim their interest. Such people are apt resolutely to ignore, or
+to explain away, all evidence which confuses their scheme with
+contradictory instances. What they cannot fit in is for them nonsense.
+An unflinching determination to take the whole evidence into account is
+the only method of preservation against the fluctuating extremes of
+fashionable opinion. This advice seems so easy, and is in fact so
+difficult to follow.
+
+One reason for this difficulty is that we cannot think first and act
+afterwards. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can
+only fitfully guide it by taking thought. We have, therefore, in various
+spheres of experience to adopt those ideas which seem to work within
+those spheres. It is absolutely necessary to trust to ideas which are
+generally adequate, even though we know that there are subtleties and
+distinctions beyond our ken. Also apart from the necessities of action,
+we cannot even keep before our minds the whole evidence except under the
+guise of doctrines which are incompletely harmonised. 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. They are transformed by the urge
+of critical reason, by the vivid evidence of emotional experience, and
+by the cold certainties of scientific perception. One fact is certain,
+you cannot keep them still. No generation can merely reproduce its
+ancestors. You may preserve the life in a flux of form, or preserve the
+form amid an ebb of life. But you cannot permanently enclose the same
+life in the same mould.
+
+The present state of religion among the European races illustrates the
+statements which I have been making. The phenomena are mixed. There have
+been reactions and revivals. But on the whole, during many generations,
+there has been a gradual decay of religious influence in European
+civilisation. Each revival touches a lower peak than its predecessor,
+and each period of slackness a lower depth. The average curve marks a
+steady fall in religious tone. In some countries the interest in
+religion is higher than in others. But in those countries where the
+interest is relatively high, it still falls as the generations pass.
+Religion is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to
+embellish a comfortable life. A great historical movement on this scale
+results from the convergence of many causes. I wish to suggest two of
+them which lie within the scope of this chapter for consideration.
+
+In the first place for over two centuries religion has been on the
+defensive, and on a weak defensive. The period has been one of
+unprecedented intellectual progress. In this way a series of novel
+situations have been produced for thought. Each such occasion has found
+the religious thinkers unprepared. Something, which has been proclaimed
+to be vital, has finally, after struggle, distress, and anathema, been
+modified and otherwise interpreted. The next generation of religious
+apologists then congratulates the religious world on the deeper insight
+which has been gained. The result of the continued repetition of this
+undignified retreat, during many generations, has at last almost
+entirely destroyed the intellectual authority of religious thinkers.
+Consider this contrast: when Darwin or Einstein proclaim theories which
+modify our ideas, it is a triumph for science. We do not go about saying
+that there is another defeat for science, because its old ideas have
+been abandoned. We know that another step of scientific insight has been
+gained.
+
+Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the
+same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the
+expression of those principles requires continual development. This
+evolution of religion is in the main a disengagement of its own proper
+ideas from the adventitious notions which have crept into it by reason
+of the expression of its own ideas in terms of the imaginative picture
+of the world entertained in previous ages. Such a release of religion
+from the bonds of imperfect science is all to the good. It stresses its
+own genuine message. The great point to be kept in mind is that normally
+an advance in science will show that statements of various religious
+beliefs require some sort of modification. It may be that they have to
+be expanded or explained, or indeed entirely restated. If the religion
+is a sound expression of truth, this modification will only exhibit more
+adequately the exact point which is of importance. This process is a
+gain. In so far, therefore, as any religion has any contact with
+physical facts, it is to be expected that the point of view of those
+facts must be continually modified as scientific knowledge advances. In
+this way, the exact relevance of these facts for religious thought will
+grow more and more clear. The progress of science must result in the
+unceasing modification of religious thought, to the great advantage of
+religion.
+
+The religious controversies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
+put theologians into a most unfortunate state of mind. They were always
+attacking and defending. They pictured themselves as the garrison of a
+fort surrounded by hostile forces. All such pictures express
+half-truths. That is why they are so popular. But they are dangerous.
+This particular picture fostered a pugnacious party spirit which really
+expresses an ultimate lack of faith. They dared not modify, because they
+shirked the task of disengaging their spiritual message from the
+associations of a particular imagery.
+
+Let me explain myself by an example. In the early medieval times, Heaven
+was in the sky, and Hell was underground; volcanoes were the jaws of
+Hell. I do not assert that these beliefs entered into the official
+formulations: but they did enter into the popular understanding of the
+general doctrines of Heaven and Hell. These notions were what everyone
+thought to be implied by the doctrine of the future state. They entered
+into the explanations of the most influential exponents of Christian
+belief. For example, they occur in the _Dialogues_ of Pope Gregory,[18]
+the Great, a man whose high official position is surpassed only by the
+magnitude of his services to humanity. I am not saying what we ought to
+believe about the future state. But whatever be the right doctrine, in
+this instance the clash between religion and science, which has
+relegated the earth to the position of a second-rate planet attached to
+a second-rate sun, has been greatly to the benefit of the spirituality
+of religion by dispersing these medieval fancies.
+
+Footnote 18:
+
+  _Cf._ Gregorovius’ _History of Rome in the Middle Ages_, Book III, Ch.
+  III, Vol. II, English Trans.
+
+Another way of looking at this question of the evolution of religious
+thought is to note that any verbal form of statement which has been
+before the world for some time discloses ambiguities; and that often
+such ambiguities strike at the very heart of the meaning. The effective
+sense in which a doctrine has been held in the past cannot be determined
+by the mere logical analysis of verbal statements, made in ignorance of
+the logical trap. You have to take into account the whole reaction of
+human nature to the scheme of thought. This reaction is of a mixed
+character, including elements of emotion derived from our lower natures.
+It is here that the impersonal criticism of science and of philosophy
+comes to the aid of religious evolution. Example after example can be
+given of this motive force in development. For example, the logical
+difficulties inherent in the doctrine of the moral cleansing of human
+nature by the power of religion rent Christianity in the days of
+Pelagius and Augustine—that is to say, at the beginning of the fifth
+century. Echoes of that controversy still linger in theology.
+
+So far, my point has been this: that religion is the expression of one
+type of fundamental experiences of mankind: that religious thought
+develops into an increasing accuracy of expression, disengaged from
+adventitious imagery: that the interaction between religion and science
+is one great factor in promoting this development.
+
+I now come to my second reason for the modern fading of interest in
+religion. This involves the ultimate question which I stated in my
+opening sentences. We have to know what we mean by religion. The
+churches, in their presentation of their answers to this query, have put
+forward aspects of religion which are expressed in terms either suited
+to the emotional reactions of bygone times or directed to excite modern
+emotional interests of a nonreligious character. What I mean under the
+first heading is that religious appeal is directed partly to excite that
+instinctive fear of the wrath of a tyrant which was inbred in the
+unhappy populations of the arbitrary empires of the ancient world, and
+in particular to excite that fear of an all-powerful arbitrary tyrant
+behind the unknown forces of nature. This appeal to the ready instinct
+of brute fear is losing its force. It lacks any directness of response,
+because modern science and modern conditions of life have taught us to
+meet occasions of apprehension by a critical analysis of their causes
+and conditions. Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search
+for God. The presentation of God under the aspect of power awakens every
+modern instinct of critical reaction. This is fatal; for religion
+collapses unless its main positions command immediacy of assent. In this
+respect the old phraseology is at variance with the psychology of modern
+civilisations. This change in psychology is largely due to science, and
+is one of the chief ways in which the advance of science has weakened
+the hold of the old religious forms of expression. The nonreligious
+motive which has entered into modern religious thought is the desire for
+a comfortable organisation of modern society. Religion has been
+presented as valuable for the ordering of life. Its claims have been
+rested upon its function as a sanction to right conduct. Also the
+purpose of right conduct quickly degenerates into the formation of
+pleasing social relations. We have here a subtle degradation of
+religious ideas, following upon their gradual purification under the
+influence of keener ethical intuitions. Conduct is a by-product of
+religion—an inevitable by-product, but not the main point. Every great
+religious teacher has revolted against the presentation of religion as a
+mere sanction of rules of conduct. Saint Paul denounced the Law, and
+Puritan divines spoke of the filthy rags of righteousness. The
+insistence upon rules of conduct marks the ebb of religious fervour.
+Above and beyond all things, the religious life is not a research after
+comfort. I must now state, in all diffidence, what I conceive to be the
+essential character of the religious spirit.
+
+Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and
+within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real,
+and yet waiting to be realised; something which is a remote possibility,
+and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to
+all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession
+is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the
+ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.
+
+The immediate reaction of human nature to the religious vision is
+worship. Religion has emerged into human experience mixed with the
+crudest fancies of barbaric imagination. Gradually, slowly, steadily the
+vision recurs in history under nobler form and with clearer expression.
+It is the one element in human experience which persistently shows an
+upward trend. It fades and then recurs. But when it renews its force, it
+recurs with an added richness and purity of content. 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.
+
+The vision claims nothing but worship; and worship is a surrender to the
+claim for assimilation, urged with the motive force of mutual love. The
+vision never overrules. It is always there, and it has the power of love
+presenting the one purpose whose fulfilment is eternal harmony. Such
+order as we find in nature is never force—it presents itself as the one
+harmonious adjustment of complex detail. Evil is the brute motive force
+of fragmentary purpose, disregarding the eternal vision. Evil is
+overruling, retarding, hurting. The power of God is the worship He
+inspires. That religion is strong which in its ritual and its modes of
+thought evokes an apprehension of the commanding vision. The worship of
+God is not a rule of safety—it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight
+after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression
+of the high hope of adventure.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XIII
+
+                     REQUISITES FOR SOCIAL PROGRESS
+
+
+It has been the purpose of these lectures to analyse the reactions of
+science in forming that background of instinctive ideas which control
+the activities of successive generations. Such a background takes the
+form of a certain vague philosophy as to the last word about things,
+when all is said. The three centuries, which form the epoch of modern
+science, have revolved round the ideas of _God_, _mind_, _matter_, and
+also of _space_ and _time_ in their characters of expressing _simple
+location_ for matter. Philosophy has on the whole emphasised _mind_, and
+has thus been out of touch with science during the two latter centuries.
+But it is creeping back into its old importance owing to the rise of
+psychology and its alliance with physiology. Also, this rehabilitation
+of philosophy has been facilitated by the recent breakdown of the
+seventeenth century settlement of the principles of physical science.
+But, until that collapse, science seated itself securely upon the
+concepts of matter, space, time, and latterly, of energy. Also there
+were arbitrary laws of nature determining locomotion. They were
+empirically observed, but for some obscure reason were known to be
+universal. Anyone who in practice or theory disregarded them was
+denounced with unsparing vigour. This position on the part of scientists
+was pure bluff, if one may credit them with believing their own
+statements. For their current philosophy completely failed to justify
+the assumption that the immediate knowledge inherent in any present
+occasion throws any light either on its past, or its future.
+
+I have also sketched an alternative philosophy of science in which
+_organism_ takes the place of _matter_. For this purpose, the mind
+involved in the materialist theory dissolves into a function of
+organism. The psychological field then exhibits what an event is in
+itself. Our bodily event is an unusually complex type of organism and
+consequently includes cognition. Further, space and time, in their most
+concrete signification, become the locus of events. An organism is the
+realisation of a definite shape of value. The emergence of some actual
+value depends on limitation which excludes neutralising cross-lights.
+Thus an event is a matter of fact which by reason of its limitation is a
+value for itself; but by reason of its very nature it also requires the
+whole universe in order to be itself.
+
+Importance depends on endurance. Endurance is the retention through time
+of an achievement of value. What endures is identity of pattern,
+self-inherited. Endurance requires the favourable environment. The whole
+of science revolves round this question of enduring organisms.
+
+The general influence of science at the present moment can be analysed
+under the headings: General Conceptions Respecting the Universe,
+Technological Applications, Professionalism in Knowledge, Influence of
+Biological Doctrines on the Motives of Conduct. I have endeavoured in
+the preceding lectures to give a glimpse of these points. It lies within
+the scope of this concluding lecture to consider the reaction of science
+upon some problems confronting civilised societies.
+
+The general conceptions introduced by science into modern thought cannot
+be separated from the philosophical situation as expressed by Descartes.
+I mean the assumption of bodies and minds as independent individual
+substances, each existing in its own right apart from any necessary
+reference to each other. Such a conception was very concordant with the
+individualism which had issued from the moral discipline of the Middle
+Ages. But, though the easy reception of the idea is thus explained, the
+derivation in itself rests upon a confusion, very natural but none the
+less unfortunate. The moral discipline had emphasized the intrinsic
+value of the individual entity. This emphasis had put the notions of the
+individual and of its experiences into the foreground of thought. At
+this point the confusion commences. The emergent individual value of
+each entity is transformed into the independent substantial existence of
+each entity, which is a very different notion.
+
+I do not mean to say that Descartes made this logical, or rather
+illogical, transition, in the form of explicit reasoning. Far from it.
+What he did, was first to concentrate upon his own conscious
+experiences, as being facts within the independent world of his own
+mentality. He was led to speculate in this way by the current emphasis
+upon the individual value of his total self. He implicitly transformed
+this emergent individual value, inherent in the very fact of his own
+reality, into a private world of passions, or modes, of independent
+substance.
+
+Also the independence ascribed to bodily substances carried them away
+from the realm of values altogether. They degenerated into a mechanism
+entirely valueless, except as suggestive of an external ingenuity. The
+heavens had lost the glory of God. This state of mind is illustrated in
+the recoil of Protestantism from aesthetic effects dependent upon a
+material medium. It was taken to lead to an ascription of value to what
+is in itself valueless. This recoil was already in full strength
+antecedently to Descartes. Accordingly, the Cartesian scientific
+doctrine of bits of matter, bare of intrinsic value, was merely a
+formulation, in explicit terms, of a doctrine which was current before
+its entrance into scientific thought or Cartesian philosophy. Probably
+this doctrine was latent in the scholastic philosophy, but it did not
+lead to its consequences till it met with the mentality of northern
+Europe in the sixteenth century. But science, as equipped by Descartes,
+gave stability and intellectual status to a point of view which has had
+very mixed effects upon the moral presuppositions of modern communities.
+Its good effects arose from its efficiency as a method for scientific
+researches within those limited regions which were then best suited for
+exploration. The result was a general clearing of the European mind away
+from the stains left upon it by the hysteria of remote barbaric ages.
+This was all to the good, and was most completely exemplified in the
+eighteenth century.
+
+But in the nineteenth century, when society was undergoing
+transformation into the manufacturing system, the bad effects of these
+doctrines have been very fatal. The doctrine of minds, as independent
+substances, leads directly not merely to private worlds of experience,
+but also to private worlds of morals. The moral intuitions can be held
+to apply only to the strictly private world of psychological experience.
+Accordingly, self-respect, and the making the most of your own
+individual opportunities, together constituted the efficient morality of
+the leaders among the industrialists of that period. The western world
+is now suffering from the limited moral outlook of the three previous
+generations.
+
+Also the assumption of the bare valuelessness of mere matter led to a
+lack of reverence in the treatment of natural or artistic beauty. Just
+when the urbanisation of the western world was entering upon its state
+of rapid development, and when the most delicate, anxious consideration
+of the aesthetic qualities of the new material environment was
+requisite, the doctrine of the irrelevance of such ideas was at its
+height. In the most advanced industrial countries, art was treated as a
+frivolity. A striking example of this state of mind in the middle of the
+nineteenth century is to be seen in London where the marvellous beauty
+of the estuary of the Thames, as it curves through the city, is wantonly
+defaced by the Charing Cross railway bridge, constructed apart from any
+reference to aesthetic values.
+
+The two evils are: one, the ignoration of the true relation of each
+organism to its environment; and the other, the habit of ignoring the
+intrinsic worth of the environment which must be allowed its weight in
+any consideration of final ends.
+
+Another great fact confronting the modern world is the discovery of the
+method of training professionals, who specialise in particular regions
+of thought and thereby progressively add to the sum of knowledge within
+their respective limitations of subject. In consequence of the success
+of this professionalising of knowledge, there are two points to be kept
+in mind, which differentiate our present age from the past. In the first
+place, the rate of progress is such that an individual human being, of
+ordinary length of life, will be called upon to face novel situations
+which find no parallel in his past. The fixed person for the fixed
+duties, who in older societies was such a godsend, in the future will be
+a public danger. In the second place, the modern professionalism in
+knowledge works in the opposite direction so far as the intellectual
+sphere is concerned. The modern chemist is likely to be weak in zoology,
+weaker still in his general knowledge of the Elizabethan drama, and
+completely ignorant of the principles of rhythm in English
+versification. It is probably safe to ignore his knowledge of ancient
+history. Of course I am speaking of general tendencies; for chemists are
+no worse than engineers, or mathematicians, or classical scholars.
+Effective knowledge is professionalised knowledge, supported by a
+restricted acquaintance with useful subjects subservient to it.
+
+This situation has its dangers. It produces minds in a groove. Each
+profession makes progress, but it is progress in its own groove. Now to
+be mentally in a groove is to live in contemplating a given set of
+abstractions. The groove prevents straying across country, and the
+abstraction abstracts from something to which no further attention is
+paid. But there is no groove of abstractions which is adequate for the
+comprehension of human life. Thus in the modern world, the celibacy of
+the medieval learned class has been replaced by a celibacy of the
+intellect which is divorced from the concrete contemplation of the
+complete facts. Of course, no one is merely a mathematician, or merely a
+lawyer. People have lives outside their professions or their businesses.
+But the point is the restraint of serious thought within a groove. The
+remainder of life is treated superficially, with the imperfect
+categories of thought derived from one profession.
+
+The dangers arising from this aspect of professionalism are great,
+particularly in our democratic societies. The directive force of reason
+is weakened. The leading intellects lack balance. They see this set of
+circumstances, or that set; but not both sets together. The task of
+coördination is left to those who lack either the force or the character
+to succeed in some definite career. In short, the specialised functions
+of the community are performed better and more progressively, but the
+generalised direction lacks vision. The progressiveness in detail only
+adds to the danger produced by the feebleness of coördination.
+
+This criticism of modern life applies throughout, in whatever sense you
+construe the meaning of a community. It holds if you apply it to a
+nation, a city, a district, an institution, a family, or even to an
+individual. There is a development of particular abstractions, and a
+contraction of concrete appreciation. The whole is lost in one of its
+aspects. It is not necessary for my point that I should maintain that
+our directive wisdom, either as individuals or as communities, is less
+now than in the past. Perhaps it has slightly improved. But the novel
+pace of progress requires a greater force of direction if disasters are
+to be avoided. The point is that the discoveries of the nineteenth
+century were in the direction of professionalism, so that we are left
+with no expansion of wisdom and with greater need of it.
+
+Wisdom is the fruit of a balanced development. It is this balanced
+growth of individuality which it should be the aim of education to
+secure. The most useful discoveries for the immediate future would
+concern the furtherance of this aim without detriment to the necessary
+intellectual professionalism.
+
+My own criticism of our traditional educational methods is that they are
+far too much occupied with intellectual analysis, and with the
+acquirement of formularised information. What I mean is, that we neglect
+to strengthen habits of concrete appreciation of the individual facts in
+their full interplay of emergent values, and that we merely emphasise
+abstract formulations which ignore this aspect of the interplay of
+diverse values.
+
+In every country the problem of the balance of the general and
+specialist education is under consideration. I cannot speak with
+first-hand knowledge of any country but my own. I know that there, among
+practical educationalists, there is considerable dissatisfaction with
+the existing practice. Also, the adaptation of the whole system to the
+needs of a democratic community is very far from being solved. I do not
+think that the secret of the solution lies in terms of the antithesis
+between thoroughness in special knowledge and general knowledge of a
+slighter character. The make-weight which balances the thoroughness of
+the specialist intellectual training should be of a radically different
+kind from purely intellectual analytical knowledge. At present our
+education combines a thorough study of a few abstractions, with a
+slighter study of a larger number of abstractions. We are too
+exclusively bookish in our scholastic routine. The general training
+should aim at eliciting our concrete apprehensions, and should satisfy
+the itch of youth to be doing something. There should be some analysis
+even here, but only just enough to illustrate the ways of thinking in
+diverse spheres. In the Garden of Eden Adam saw the animals before he
+named them: in the traditional system, children named the animals before
+they saw them.
+
+There is no easy single solution of the practical difficulties of
+education. We can, however, guide ourselves by a certain simplicity in
+its general theory. The student should concentrate within a limited
+field. Such concentration should include all practical and intellectual
+acquirements requisite for that concentration. This is the ordinary
+procedure; and, in respect to it, I should be inclined even to increase
+the facilities for concentration rather than to diminish them. With the
+concentration there are associated certain subsidiary studies, such as
+languages for science. Such a scheme of professional training should be
+directed to a clear end congenial to the student. It is not necessary to
+elaborate the qualifications of these statements. Such a training must,
+of course, have the width requisite for its end. But its design should
+not be complicated by the consideration of other ends. This professional
+training can only touch one side of education. Its centre of gravity
+lies in the intellect, and its chief tool is the printed book. The
+centre of gravity of the other side of training should lie in intuition
+without an analytical divorce from the total environment. Its object is
+immediate apprehension with the minimum of eviscerating analysis. The
+type of generality, which above all is wanted, is the appreciation of
+variety of value. I mean an aesthetic growth. There is something between
+the gross specialised values of the mere practical man, and the thin
+specialised values of the mere scholar. Both types have missed
+something; and if you add together the two sets of values, you do not
+obtain the missing elements. What is wanted is an appreciation of the
+infinite variety of vivid values achieved by an organism in its proper
+environment. When you understand all about the sun and all about the
+atmosphere and all about the rotation of the earth, you may still miss
+the radiance of the sunset. There is no substitute for the direct
+perception of the concrete achievement of a thing in its actuality. We
+want concrete fact with a high light thrown on what is relevant to its
+preciousness.
+
+What I mean is art and aesthetic education. It is, however, art in such
+a general sense of the term that I hardly like to call it by that name.
+Art is a special example. What we want is to draw out habits of
+aesthetic apprehension. According to the metaphysical doctrine which I
+have been developing, to do so is to increase the depth of
+individuality. The analysis of reality indicates the two factors,
+activity emerging into individualised aesthetic value. Also the emergent
+value is the measure of the individualisation of the activity. We must
+foster the creative initiative towards the maintenance of objective
+values. You will not obtain the apprehension without the initiative, or
+the initiative without the apprehension. As soon as you get towards the
+concrete, you cannot exclude action. Sensitiveness without impulse
+spells decadence, and impulse without sensitiveness spells brutality. I
+am using the word “sensitiveness” in its most general signification, so
+as to include apprehension of what lies beyond oneself; that is to say,
+sensitiveness to all the facts of the case. Thus “art” in the general
+sense which I require is any selection by which the concrete facts are
+so arranged as to elicit attention to particular values which are
+realisable by them. For example, the mere disposing of the human body
+and the eyesight so as to get a good view of a sunset is a simple form
+of artistic selection. The habit of art is the habit of enjoying vivid
+values.
+
+But, in this sense, art concerns more than sunsets. A factory, with its
+machinery, its community of operatives, its social service to the
+general population, its dependence upon organising and designing genius,
+its potentialities as a source of wealth to the holders of its stock is
+an organism exhibiting a variety of vivid values. What we want to train
+is the habit of apprehending such an organism in its completeness. It is
+very arguable that the science of political economy, as studied in its
+first period after the death of Adam Smith (1790), did more harm than
+good. It destroyed many economic fallacies, and taught how to think
+about the economic revolution then in progress. But it riveted on men a
+certain set of abstractions which were disastrous in their influence on
+modern mentality. It de-humanised industry. This is only one example of
+a general danger inherent in modern science. Its methodological
+procedure is exclusive and intolerant, and rightly so. It fixes
+attention on a definite group of abstractions, neglects everything else,
+and elicits every scrap of information and theory which is relevant to
+what it has retained. This method is triumphant, provided that the
+abstractions are judicious. But, however triumphant, the triumph is
+within limits. The neglect of these limits leads to disastrous
+oversights. The anti-rationalism of science is partly justified, as a
+preservation of its useful methodology; it is partly mere irrational
+prejudice. Modern professionalism is the training of minds to conform to
+the methodology. The historical revolt of the seventeenth century, and
+the earlier reaction towards naturalism, were examples of transcending
+the abstractions which fascinated educated society in the Middle Ages.
+These early ages had an ideal of rationalism, but they failed in its
+pursuit. For they neglected to note that the methodology of reasoning
+requires the limitations involved in the abstract. Accordingly, the true
+rationalism must always transcend itself by recurrence to the concrete
+in search of inspiration. A self-satisfied rationalism is in effect a
+form of anti-rationalism. It means an arbitrary halt at a particular set
+of abstractions. This was the case with science.
+
+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 integration 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. The character of existent reality is
+composed of organisms enduring through the flux of things. The low type
+of organisms have achieved a self-identity dominating their whole
+physical life. Electrons, molecules, crystals, belong to this type. They
+exhibit a massive and complete sameness. In the higher types, where life
+appears, there is greater complexity. Thus, though there is a complex,
+enduring pattern, it has retreated into deeper recesses of the total
+fact. In a sense, the self-identity of a human being is more abstract
+than that of a crystal. It is the life of the spirit. It relates rather
+to the individualisation of the creative activity; so that the changing
+circumstances received from the environment, are differentiated from the
+living personality, and are thought of as forming its perceived field.
+In truth, the field of perception and the perceiving mind are
+abstractions which, in the concrete, combine into the successive bodily
+events. The psychological field, as restricted to sense-objects and
+passing emotions, is the minor permanence, barely rescued from the
+nonentity of mere change; and the mind is the major permanence,
+permeating that complete field, whose endurance is the living soul. But
+the soul would wither without fertilisation from its transient
+experiences. The secret of the higher organisms lies in their two grades
+of permanences. By this means the freshness of the environment is
+absorbed into the permanence of the soul. The changing environment is no
+longer, by reason of its variety, an enemy to the endurance of the
+organism. The pattern of the higher organism has retreated into the
+recesses of the individualised activity. It has become a uniform way of
+dealing with circumstances; and this way is only strengthened by having
+a proper variety of circumstances to deal with.
+
+This fertilisation of the soul is the reason for the necessity of art. A
+static value, however serious and important, becomes unendurable by its
+appalling monotony of endurance. The soul cries aloud for release into
+change. It suffers the agonies of claustrophobia. The transitions of
+humour, wit, irreverence, play, sleep, and—above all—of art are
+necessary for it. Great art is the arrangement of the environment so as
+to provide for the soul vivid, but transient, values. Human beings
+require something which absorbs them for a time, something out of the
+routine which they can stare at. But you cannot subdivide life, except
+in the abstract analysis of thought. Accordingly, the great art is more
+than a transient refreshment. It is something which adds to the
+permanent richness of the soul’s self-attainment. It justifies itself
+both by its immediate enjoyment, and also by its discipline of the
+inmost being. Its discipline is not distinct from enjoyment, but by
+reason of it. It transforms the soul into the permanent realisation of
+values extending beyond its former self. This element of transition in
+art is shown by the restlessness exhibited in its history. An epoch gets
+saturated by the masterpieces of any one style. Something new must be
+discovered. The human being wanders on. Yet there is a balance in
+things. Mere change before the attainment of adequacy of achievement,
+either in quality or output, is destructive of greatness. But the
+importance of a living art, which moves on and yet leaves its permanent
+mark, can hardly be exaggerated.
+
+In regard to the aesthetic needs of civilised society the reactions of
+science have so far been unfortunate. Its materialistic basis has
+directed attention to _things_ as opposed to _values_. The antithesis is
+a false one, if taken in a concrete sense. But it is valid at the
+abstract level of ordinary thought. This misplaced emphasis coalesced
+with the abstractions of political economy, which are in fact the
+abstractions in terms of which commercial affairs are carried on. Thus
+all thought concerned with social organisation expressed itself in terms
+of material things and of capital. Ultimate values were excluded. They
+were politely bowed to, and then handed over to the clergy to be kept
+for Sundays. A creed of competitive business morality was evolved, in
+some respects curiously high; but entirely devoid of consideration for
+the value of human life. The workmen were conceived as mere hands, drawn
+from the pool of labour. To God’s question, men gave the answer of
+Cain—“Am I my brother’s keeper?”; and they incurred Cain’s guilt. This
+was the atmosphere in which the industrial revolution was accomplished
+in England, and to a large extent elsewhere. The internal history of
+England during the last half century has been an endeavour slowly and
+painfully to undo the evils wrought in the first stage of the new epoch.
+It may be that civilisation will never recover from the bad climate
+which enveloped the introduction of machinery. This climate pervaded the
+whole commercial system of the progressive northern European races. It
+was partly the result of the aesthetic errors of Protestantism and
+partly the result of scientific materialism, and partly the result of
+the natural greed of mankind, and partly the result of the abstractions
+of political economy. An illustration of my point is to be found in
+Macaulay’s Essay criticising Southey’s _Colloquies on Society_. It was
+written in 1830. Now Macaulay was a very favourable example of men
+living at that date, or at any date. He had genius; he was kind-hearted,
+honourable, and a reformer. This is the extract:—“We are told, that our
+age has invented atrocities beyond the imagination of our fathers; that
+society has been brought into a state compared with which extermination
+would be a blessing; and all because the dwellings of cotton-spinners
+are naked and rectangular. Mr. Southey has found out a way he tells us,
+in which the effects of manufactures and agriculture may be compared.
+And what is this way? To stand on a hill, to look at a cottage and a
+factory, and to see which is the prettier.”
+
+Southey seems to have said many silly things in his book; but, so far as
+this extract is concerned, he could make a good case for himself if he
+returned to earth after the lapse of nearly a century. The evils of the
+early industrial system are now a commonplace of knowledge. The point
+which I am insisting on is the stone-blind eye with which even the best
+men of that time regarded the importance of aesthetics in a nation’s
+life. I do not believe that we have as yet nearly achieved the right
+estimate. A contributory cause, of substantial efficacy to produce this
+disastrous error, was the scientific creed that matter in motion is the
+one concrete reality in nature; so that aesthetic values form an
+adventitious, irrelevant addition.
+
+There is another side to this picture of the possibilities of decadence.
+At the present moment a discussion is raging as to the future of
+civilisation in the novel circumstances of rapid scientific and
+technological advance. The evils of the future have been diagnosed in
+various ways, the loss of religious faith, the malignant use of material
+power, the degradation attending a differential birth rate favouring the
+lower types of humanity, the suppression of aesthetic creativeness.
+Without doubt, these are all evils, dangerous and threatening. But they
+are not new. From the dawn of history, mankind has always been losing
+its religious faith, has always suffered from the malignant use of
+material power, has always suffered from the infertility of its best
+intellectual types, has always witnessed the periodical decadence of
+art. In the reign of the Egyptian king, Tutankhamen, there was raging a
+desperate religious struggle between Modernists and Fundamentalists; the
+cave pictures exhibit a phase of delicate aesthetic achievement as
+superseded by a period of comparative vulgarity; the religious leaders,
+the great thinkers, the great poets and authors, the whole clerical
+caste in the Middle Ages, have been notably infertile; finally, if we
+attend to what actually has happened in the past, and disregard romantic
+visions of democracies, aristocracies, kings, generals, armies, and
+merchants, material power has generally been wielded with blindness,
+obstinacy and selfishness, often with brutal malignancy. And yet,
+mankind has progressed. Even if you take a tiny oasis of peculiar
+excellence, the type of modern man who would have most chance of
+happiness in ancient Greece at its best period is probably (as now) an
+average professional heavy-weight boxer, and not an average Greek
+scholar from Oxford or Germany. 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.
+
+But, after all, there have been real periods of decadence; and at the
+present time, as at other epochs, society is decaying, and there is need
+for preservative action. Professionals are not new to the world. But in
+the past, professionals have formed unprogressive castes. The point is
+that professionalism has now been mated with progress. The world is now
+faced with a self-evolving system, which it cannot stop. There are
+dangers and advantages in this situation. It is obvious that the gain in
+material power affords opportunity for social betterment. If mankind can
+rise to the occasion, there lies in front a golden age of beneficent
+creativeness. But material power in itself is ethically neutral. It can
+equally well work in the wrong direction. The problem is not how to
+produce great men, but how to produce great societies. The great society
+will put up the men for the occasions. The materialistic philosophy
+emphasised the given quantity of material, and thence derivatively the
+given nature of the environment. It thus operated most unfortunately
+upon the social conscience of mankind. For it directed almost exclusive
+attention to the aspect of struggle for existence in a fixed
+environment. To a large extent the environment is fixed, and to this
+extent there is a struggle for existence. It is folly to look at the
+universe through rose-tinted spectacles. We must admit the struggle. The
+question is, who is to be eliminated. In so far as we are educators, we
+have to have clear ideas upon that point; for it settles the type to be
+produced and the practical ethics to be inculcated.
+
+But during the last three generations, the exclusive direction of
+attention to this aspect of things has been a disaster of the first
+magnitude. The watchwords of the nineteenth century have been, struggle
+for existence, competition, class warfare, commercial antagonism between
+nations, military warfare. The struggle for existence has been construed
+into the gospel of hate. The full conclusion to be drawn from a
+philosophy of evolution is fortunately of a more balanced character.
+Successful organisms modify their environment. Those organisms are
+successful which modify their environments so as to assist each other.
+This law is exemplified in nature on a vast scale. For example, the
+North American Indians accepted their environment, with the result that
+a scanty population barely succeeded in maintaining themselves over the
+whole continent. The European races when they arrived in the same
+continent pursued an opposite policy. They at once coöperated in
+modifying their environment. The result is that a population more than
+twenty times that of the Indian population now occupies the same
+territory, and the continent is not yet full. Again, there are
+associations of different species which mutually coöperate. This
+differentiation of species is exhibited in the simplest physical
+entities, such as the association between electrons and positive nuclei,
+and in the whole realm of animate nature. The trees in a Brazilian
+forest depend upon the association of various species of organisms, each
+of which is mutually dependent on the other species. A single tree by
+itself is dependent upon all the adverse chances of shifting
+circumstances. The wind stunts it: the variations in temperature check
+its foliage: the rains denude its soil: its leaves are blown away and
+are lost for the purpose of fertilisation. You may obtain individual
+specimens of fine trees either in exceptional circumstances, or where
+human cultivation has intervened. But in nature the normal way in which
+trees flourish is by their association in a forest. Each tree may lose
+something of its individual perfection of growth, but they mutually
+assist each other in preserving the conditions for survival. The soil is
+preserved and shaded; and the microbes necessary for its fertility are
+neither scorched, nor frozen, nor washed away. A forest is the triumph
+of the organisation of mutually dependent species. Further a species of
+microbes which kills the forest, also exterminates itself. Again the two
+sexes exhibit the same advantage of differentiation. In the history of
+the world, the prize has not gone to those species which specialised in
+methods of violence, or even in defensive armour. In fact, nature began
+with producing animals encased in hard shells for defence against the
+ills of life. It also experimented in size. But smaller animals, without
+external armour, warm-blooded, sensitive, and alert, have cleared these
+monsters off the face of the earth. Also, the lions and tigers are not
+the successful species. There is something in the ready use of force
+which defeats its own object. Its main defect is that it bars
+coöperation. Every organism requires an environment of friends, partly
+to shield it from violent changes, and partly to supply it with its
+wants. The Gospel of Force is incompatible with a social life. By
+_force_, I mean _antagonism_ in its most general sense.
+
+Almost equally dangerous is the Gospel of Uniformity. The differences
+between the nations and races of mankind are required to preserve the
+conditions under which higher development is possible. One main factor
+in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering.
+Perhaps this is why the armour-plated monsters fared badly. They could
+not wander. Animals wander into new conditions. They have to adapt
+themselves or die. 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. A diversification among
+human communities is essential for the provision of the incentive and
+material for the Odyssey of the human spirit. 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 admiration. We must not expect, however, all the virtues. We
+should even be satisfied if there is something odd enough to be
+interesting.
+
+Modern science has imposed on humanity the necessity for wandering. Its
+progressive thought and its progressive technology make the transition
+through time, from generation to generation, a true migration into
+uncharted seas of adventure. The very benefit of wandering is that it is
+dangerous and needs skill to avert evils. We must expect, therefore,
+that the future will disclose dangers. 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. The prosperous middle classes, who ruled the
+nineteenth century, placed an excessive value upon placidity of
+existence. They refused to face the necessities for social reform
+imposed by the new industrial system, and they are now refusing to face
+the necessities for intellectual reform imposed by the new knowledge.
+The middle class pessimism over the future of the world comes from a
+confusion between civilisation and security. In the immediate future
+there will be less security than in the immediate past, less stability.
+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.
+
+I have endeavoured in these lectures to give a record of a great
+adventure in the region of thought. It was shared in by all the races of
+western Europe. It developed with the slowness of a mass movement. Half
+a century is its unit of time. The tale is the epic of an episode in the
+manifestation of reason. It tells how a particular direction of reason
+emerges in a race by the long preparation of antecedent epochs, how
+after its birth its subject-matter gradually unfolds itself, how it
+attains its triumphs, how its influence moulds the very springs of
+action of mankind, and finally how at its moment of supreme success its
+limitations disclose themselves and call for a renewed exercise of the
+creative imagination. The moral of the tale is the power of reason, its
+decisive influence on the life of humanity. The great conquerors, from
+Alexander to Caesar, and from Caesar to Napoleon, influenced profoundly
+the lives of subsequent generations. But the total effect of this
+influence shrinks to insignificance, if compared to the entire
+transformation of human habits and human mentality produced by the long
+line of men of thought from Thales to the present day, men individually
+powerless, but ultimately the rulers of the world.
+
+
+
+
+                                 INDEX
+
+The numbers refer to pages; and ‘_e.s._’ stands for ‘_et seqq._’, where
+the reference is to the succeeding pages of the chapter in question.
+
+ Abruptness (in Ingression), 239.
+ Absolute, The, 129.
+ Abstract, 221.
+ Abstraction, 233, _e.s._
+ Abstraction (in Mathematics), 28, _e.s._
+ Abstractive Hierarchy, 234, _e.s._
+ Acceleration, 66.
+ Actualisation, 222.
+ Adam Smith, 280.
+ Aeschylus, 14.
+ Alexander, S., _preface_.
+ Algebra, 42, 44.
+ Alva, 2.
+ Ampère, 139.
+ Analytical Character (Eternal Objects), 228.
+ Anselm, St., 80.
+ ‘Any,’ 229.
+ Aquinas, Thomas, 12, 13, 205.
+ Arabic Arithmetical Notation, 42.
+ Archimedes, 7, 8, 9, 10.
+ Arguments (of functions), 44.
+ Aristotle, 7, _e.s._; 41, 42; 64, _e.s._; 180, 187; 236, _e.s._
+ Arnold, Matthew, 115.
+ Art, 279, _e.s._
+ Art, Medieval, 18, _e.s._
+ Aspect, 98; 146, _e.s._
+ Associated Hierarchy, 237.
+ Aston, F. W., 260.
+ Atom, 140, 144.
+ Augustine, Saint, 266.
+
+ Bacon, Francis, 11; 56, _e.s._; 92, 136.
+ Bacon, Roger, 7.
+ Base of Abstractive Hierarchy, 235.
+ Being, 227.
+ Belisarius, 19.
+ Benedict, Saint, 21.
+ Bergson, 72; 202, _e.s._
+ Berkeley, George, 93, _e.s._; 105, 120, 198.
+ Bichât, 141.
+ Biology, 58, 88, 144.
+ Bonaventure, Saint, 12.
+ Boyle, Robert, 57.
+ Brown University, _Preface_.
+ Bruno, Giordano, 1.
+ Byzantine Empire, 19.
+
+ Carlyle, 85.
+ Cervantes, 56.
+ Change, 121.
+ Chaucer, 22.
+ China, 8, 106.
+ Clairaut, 85, 193.
+ Classification, 41, _e.s._
+ Clough, A. H., 115.
+ Cognition, 97.
+ Coleridge, 115, 116.
+ Columbus, 22, 49.
+ Complex Eternal Objects, 232.
+ Components, 232.
+ Conic Sections, 42.
+ Connexity (of a Hierarchy), 235.
+ Connectedness (of an occasion), 237.
+ Conservation of Energy, 142, _e.s._
+ Continuity, 140.
+ Copernicus, 1, 22, 56, 184.
+ Cosmas, 254.
+ Cromwell, Oliver, 23.
+
+ D’Alembert, 80, 85.
+ Dalton, John, 140, 141.
+ Da Vinci, Leonardo, 60.
+ Darwin, 263.
+ Democritus, 140.
+ Demos, R., _Preface_.
+ Density, 70, 189.
+ Desargues, 78.
+ Descartes, 25; 43, _e.s._; 56, 57; 104; 115; 195, _e.s._; 272.
+ Determinism, 110.
+ Differential Calculus, 78.
+ Discontinuous Existence, 51; 190, _e.s._
+ Distance, 173.
+ Divinity, Scholastic, 17.
+ Divisibility, 177.
+
+ Education, 277, _e.s._
+ Egyptians, 20, 43.
+ Einstein, 14, 41, 86, 88; 173, _e.s._; 263.
+ Electron, 50, _e.s._; 111, _e.s._; 185, _e.s._
+ Empty Events, 214.
+ Endurance, 121; 147, _e.s._; 169, _e.s._; 186, _e.s._; 212.
+ Endurance, Vibratory, 51.
+ Energy, Physical, 51, _e.s._
+ Environment, 155, _e.s._
+ Envisagement, 148, _e.s._
+ Epochs, 177.
+ Epochal Durations, 192.
+ Essence, 175.
+ Eternal Objects, 121, _e.s._; 146, _e.s._; 221, _e.s._
+ Ether, 184.
+ Euripides, 14.
+ Event, 102; 168, _e.s._
+ Evolution, 130; 142, _e.s._
+ Exhaustion, Method of, 42.
+ Extension, 177.
+ Extensive Quantity, 178.
+ External Relations, 223, _e.s._
+ Extrinsic Reality, 146.
+
+ Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness, 72, _e.s._; 82.
+ Faraday, 139.
+ Fate, 14.
+ Fermat, 78.
+ Finite Abstractive Hierarchy, 235.
+ Form, 230.
+ Force, 64, _e.s._
+ Fourier, 85.
+ Francis of Assisi, 258.
+ Frederick, the Great, 89.
+ Frequency, 181, _e.s._
+ Fresnel, 139.
+ Frost, Robert, 22.
+ Future, 245, _e.s._
+
+ Galileo, 2, _e.s._; 43, 45; 56, _e.s._; 88, 162, 187; 255, _e.s._
+ Galvani, 88.
+ Gauss, 86, 88.
+ Geometry, 31, _e.s._
+ George II, 93.
+ Germany, 57.
+ Gibson, 206.
+ God, 17, 86, 129; 242, _e.s._
+ Gradation of Envisagement, 247.
+ Gravitation, 65, 172.
+ Greece, 8, _e.s._
+ Gregorovius, 265.
+ Giotto, 22.
+ Gregory, The Great, 21, 265.
+
+ Harvey, 56, 57.
+ Heath, Sir T. L., 180.
+ Hegel, 40.
+ Herz, 86, 88.
+ Historical Revolt, 11, _e.s._; 55, 150.
+ Hooker, Richard, 13.
+ Hume, 5, 47, 61, 73; 80, _e.s._; 107, 198.
+ Huyghens, 45; 57, _e.s._; 256.
+
+ Idealism, 89; 127, _e.s._
+ Immediate Occasion, 36, _e.s._; 62.
+ Individual Essence, 222, _e.s._
+ Induction, 34; 60, _e.s._
+ Infinite Abstractive Hierarchy, 235.
+ Ingression, 99, _e.s._; 222.
+ Integral Calculus, 42.
+ Internal Relations, 175; 223, _e.s._
+ Intrinsic Reality, 146.
+ Invention, 136, _e.s._
+ Ionian Philosophers, 9.
+ Irresistible Grace, 105.
+ Isolated Systems, 66.
+ Isolation of Eternal Objects, 230.
+ Isotopes, 260.
+ Italy, 57.
+
+ James, Henry, 3.
+ James, William, 3; 199, _e.s._
+ Joseph, Hapsburgh Emperor, 89.
+ Justinian, 19, 20.
+
+ Kant, 47; 93, _e.s._; 116, 142, 178; 193, _e.s._
+ Kepler, 9, 45, 57, 67.
+
+ Lagrange, 84, _e.s._
+ Laplace, 85, 142.
+ Lavoisier, 84, 146.
+ Law, Roman, 16.
+ Laws of Nature, 45, 150.
+ Least Action, 87, 150.
+ Lecky, 15, 16, 254.
+ Leibniz, 43, 44, 48, 57, 92, 115; 198, _e.s._
+ Life, 58.
+ Limitation, 225, _e.s._
+ Lloyd Morgan, _Preface_.
+ Location, Simple, 69, _e.s._; 81, _e.s._; 95.
+ Locke, John, 43, 47; 57, _e.s._; 89, 94, 115, 198.
+ Locomotion, Vibratory, 184, _e.s._
+ Logic, Abstract, 37, _e.s._
+ Logic, Scholastic, 17.
+ Lucretius, 140.
+
+ Macaulay, 285.
+ Milton, 108, _e.s._
+ Mind, 79.
+ Mass, 64, _e.s._; 144.
+ Mathematics, 10, 23; 28, _e.s._
+ Mathematics, Applied, 34, _e.s._
+ Matter, 24, 94, 58, 144.
+ Matter (philosophical), 231.
+ Maupertuis, 85, _e.s._
+ Max Müller, 178.
+ Maxwell, Clerk, 85, _e.s._; 139, _e.s._; 161.
+ Mechanical Explanation, 23.
+ Mechanism, 107, _e.s._
+ Mechanistic Theory, 71.
+ Memory, 73.
+ Mersenne, 46.
+ Michelson, 162, _e.s._
+ Mill, John Stuart, 110.
+ Modal Character of Space, 90, _e.s._
+ Modal Limitation, 248, _e.s._
+ Mode, 99.
+ Moral Responsibility, 109, _e.s._
+ Motion, Laws of, 65, _e.s._
+ Müller, Johannes, 141.
+
+ Narses, 19.
+ Natural Selection, 158.
+ Naturalism in Art, 22.
+ Newman, John Henry, 115, 255.
+ Newton, 8, 9, 15; 43, _e.s._; 58, _e.s._; 84, _e.s._; 161; 255, _e.s._
+ Not-Being, 227.
+
+ Objectivism, 124, _e.s._
+ Occasions, Community of, 63.
+ Occupied Events, 215.
+ Oersted, 139.
+ Order of Nature, 5, _e.s._; 39, _e.s._; 55.
+ Organic Mechanism, 112, 151.
+ Organism, 51, _e.s._; 58, 90; 105, _e.s._; 111, _e.s._; 145; 185,
+    _e.s._; 209.
+
+ Padua, University of, 57, 58.
+ Paley, 107.
+ Papacy, 13, 20.
+ Pascal, 57, 78.
+ Past, 245, _e.s._
+ Pasteur, Louis, 141, _e.s._
+ Pelagius, 266.
+ Perception, 101.
+ Periodic Law (Mendeleëf), 141.
+ Periodicity, 45, _e.s._
+ Perspective, 98.
+ Petavius, 255.
+ Philosophy, 122.
+ Physical Field, 138.
+ Physics, 57.
+ Plato, 10; 41, _e.s._; 180.
+ Pope, Alexander, 108, _e.s._
+ Possibility, 223.
+ Prehension, 97, _e.s._; 207.
+ Prehensive Character of Space, 90, _e.s._
+ Present, 245, _e.s._
+ Primary Qualities, 76.
+ Primate, 185, _e.s._
+ Prime Mover, 242, _e.s._
+ Primordial Element, 51, _e.s._
+ Process, 102.
+ Professionalism, 271, _e.s._
+ Proton, 51, _e.s._; 185, _e.s._
+ Psychology, 88, 103.
+ Pusey, 115.
+ Pythagoras, 39, _e.s._; 240.
+
+ Quality, 73, _e.s._
+ Quantum Theory, 50; 181, _e.s._
+
+ Rationalism, 12, _e.s._; 55.
+ Ramsay, Sir William, 259.
+ Rawley, Dr., 58.
+ Rayleigh, Lord, 259.
+ Realism, 127, _e.s._
+ Reformation, 11.
+ Reiteration, 147; 186, _e.s._
+ Relational Essence, 223, _e.s._
+ Relativity, 68; 165, _e.s._
+ Retention, 147.
+ Riemann, 86, 88.
+ Romans, 8.
+ Roman Law, 20.
+ Rome, 21.
+ Rousseau, 50, 93, 135.
+ Royal Society, 43, 73.
+ Russell, Bertrand, 216.
+
+ Sarpi, Paul, 12, 26.
+ Schleiden, 141.
+ Schwann, 141.
+ Scientific Materialism, 24, 25.
+ Scientific Movement, 11.
+ Secondary Qualities, 76, 127.
+ Seneca, 15.
+ Sense-Object, 99.
+ Separative Character of Space, 90, _e.s._
+ Shakespeare, 56.
+ Shape, 92.
+ Shelley, 116, _e.s._
+ Sidgwick, Henry, 197.
+ Simple Eternal Objects, 232.
+ Simple Location, 69, _e.s._; 81, _e.s._; 95; 127, _e.s._; 217.
+ Simultaneity, 174.
+ ‘Some,’ 229.
+ Southey, 285.
+ Space, Physical, 32.
+ Spatialisation, 72, 175, 206.
+ Specious Present, 148.
+ Spinoza, 43, 57, 99, 115, 116, 175, 198, 248.
+ Sophocles, 14.
+ Standpoint, 99, _e.s._
+ Stoicism, 16.
+ Struggle for Existence, 158.
+ Subjectivism, 123, _e.s._
+ Substance, 73, _e.s._; 175.
+ Substantial Activity, 152, 174, 231.
+ Superject, 230.
+ Synthetic Prehension, 224, _e.s._
+
+ Technology, 135, _e.s._
+ Temporalisation, 179.
+ Tennyson, 108, _e.s._
+ Time, 169, _e.s._
+ Tragedy, 15.
+ Translucency of Realisation, 240.
+ Trent, Council of, 12.
+ Trigonometry, 42.
+ True Propositions, 224.
+
+ Unknowns (in Mathematics), 44.
+ Universals, 221.
+ Untrue Propositions, 221.
+
+ Value, 123, _e.s._; 226, 249.
+ Variable, The, 37, _e.s._; 229.
+ Vasco da Gama, 22.
+ Velocity, 64, _e.s._; 165, _e.s._
+ Vertex of Abstractive Hierarchy, 236.
+ Vesalius, 1.
+ Vibration, 186, _e.s._
+ Vibratory Organic Deformation, 184, _e.s._
+ Virtual Work, 88.
+ Vitalism, 111, _e.s._; 145.
+ Volta, 88.
+ Voltaire, 57; 80, _e.s._; 143.
+
+ Walpole, 89.
+ Washington, George, 89.
+ Watt, James, 135.
+ Wesley, John, 93.
+ Whitman, Walt, 22.
+ Wordsworth, 22; 108, _e.s._
+
+ Young, Thomas, 139.
+
+ Zeno, 178, 179, 192.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+                           Transcriber’s Note
+
+The printer employed the diaeresis in words like ‘coördination’ or
+‘coöperation’. On p. 157, the first syllable of ‘coöperating’ fell on
+the line break, and the word was hyphenated as ‘co-operating’, since the
+diaeresis was not needed. The word has been joined here and the
+diaeresis employed as ‘coöperating’.
+
+The following words appear both with and without a hyphen: to-day,
+non-entity, half-way, inter-connected, non-entity.
+
+Errors deemed most likely to be the printer’s have been corrected, and
+are noted here. The references are to the page and line in the original.
+
+ 20.10  restraining g[i/o]vernment.                        Replaced.
+ 21.31  is kept in contact w[ti/it]h                       Transposed.
+ 57.30  Now the scientific philosop[h]y                    Inserted.
+ 69.9   no other way of putting[s] things                  Removed.
+ 77.6   these relationships constitute[s] nature.          Added.
+ 157.20 societies of c[o-/ö]perating organisms.            Replaced.
+ 160.8  These divis[i]ons are                              Inserted.
+ 176.3  extends beyond[s] the spatio-temporal continuum    Removed.
+ 177.6  by the reali[z/s]ation of pattern                  Consistency.
+ 177.25 character of spatio-temporal [of ]extension        Removed.
+ 183.5  radiate its energy i[s/n] an integral number       Replaced.
+ 195.4  history of the Christi[o/a]n Church                Replaced.
+ 195.7  apocalyptic forecast[e]s                           Removed.
+ 202.21 This divis[i]on of territory                       Inserted.
+ 213.10 what anything is in i[t]self.                      Inserted.
+ 245.27 even [al]though any such discrimination            Removed.
+ 274.14 its sta[k/t]e of rapid development                 Replaced.
+ 276.17 The task of coö[r]dination is left                 Inserted.
+ 279.22 What I mean is art [(]and aesthetic education.     Removed.
+ 288.33 mutually coö[o]perate.                             Removed.
+ 290.3  it bars coö[o]peration.                            Removed.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SCIENCE AND THE MODERN
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+<p style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Science and the modern world, by Alfred North Whitehead</p>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
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+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
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+</div>
+
+<p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: Science and the modern world</p>
+<p style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:0; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:1em;'>Lowell Lectures 1925</p>
+<p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Alfred North Whitehead</p>
+<p style='display:block; text-indent:0; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: July 25, 2022 [eBook #68611]</p>
+<p style='display:block; text-indent:0; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</p>
+  <p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; text-align:left'>Produced by: KD Weeks, Steve Mattern and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)</p>
+<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SCIENCE AND THE MODERN WORLD ***</div>
+
+<div class='pbb'>
+ <hr class='pb c000' />
+</div>
+<div class='tnotes'>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+  <div class='nf-center'>
+    <div>Transcriber’s Note:</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c001'>Footnotes have been moved to follow the paragraphs in which they
+are referenced, and are linked for ease of reference.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Minor errors, attributable to the printer, have been corrected. Please
+see the transcriber’s <a href='#endnote'>note</a> at the end of this text
+for details regarding the handling of any textual issues encountered
+during its preparation.</p>
+
+<div class='htmlonly'>
+
+<p class='c001'>Any corrections are indicated using an <ins class='correction' title='original'>underline</ins>
+highlight. Placing the cursor over the correction will produce the
+original text in a small popup.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The blank cover image has been enhanced with information from the title
+page.</p>
+
+<div  class='figcenter id001'>
+<img src='images/cover.jpg' alt='' class='ig001' />
+</div>
+
+</div>
+<div class='epubonly'>
+
+<p class='c001'>Any corrections are indicated as hyperlinks, which will navigate the
+reader to the corresponding entry in the corrections table in the
+note at the end of the text.</p>
+
+</div>
+
+</div>
+<div class='pbb'>
+ <hr class='pb c000' />
+</div>
+<div>
+  <h1 class='c002'>SCIENCE AND THE MODERN WORLD</h1>
+</div>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+<div class='nf-center c000'>
+    <div><span class='large'>LOWELL LECTURES, 1925</span></div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<div class='pbb'>
+ <hr class='pb c000' />
+</div>
+
+<div  class='figcenter id002'>
+<img src='images/i002.jpg' alt='' class='ig001' />
+</div>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+  <div class='nf-center'>
+    <div>THE MACMILLAN COMPANY</div>
+    <div><span class='small'>NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO . DALLAS</span></div>
+    <div><span class='small'>ATLANTA . SAN FRANCISCO</span></div>
+    <div class='c000'>CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS</div>
+    <div><span class='small'>LONDON</span></div>
+    <div class='c000'>MACMILLAN &amp; CO., <span class='sc'>Ltd.</span></div>
+    <div><span class='small'>BOMBAY . CALCUTTA . MADRAS</span></div>
+    <div class='c000'>THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, <span class='sc'>Ltd.</span></div>
+    <div><span class='small'>TORONTO</span></div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<div class='pbb'>
+ <hr class='pb c000' />
+</div>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+  <div class='nf-center'>
+    <div><span class='xlarge'>SCIENCE</span></div>
+    <div><span class='xlarge'>AND THE MODERN WORLD</span></div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+<div class='nf-center c003'>
+    <div>LOWELL LECTURES, 1925</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+<div class='nf-center c003'>
+    <div>BY</div>
+    <div><span class='large'>ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD</span></div>
+    <div><span class='small'>F.R.S., Sc.D. (Cambridge), Hon. D.Sc. (Manchester),</span></div>
+    <div><span class='small'>Hon. LL.D. (St. Andrews)</span></div>
+    <div class='c000'><span class='small'>FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE</span></div>
+    <div><span class='small'>AND PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY</span></div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+<div class='nf-center c004'>
+    <div><span class="blackletter">New York</span></div>
+    <div><span class='large'>THE MACMILLAN COMPANY</span></div>
+    <div>1925</div>
+    <div><span class='small'><i>All rights reserved</i></span></div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<div class='pbb'>
+ <hr class='pb c000' />
+</div>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+<div class='nf-center c003'>
+    <div><span class='pageno' id='Page_I'>I</span><span class='sc'>Copyright, 1925.</span></div>
+    <div><span class='sc'>By</span> THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class='c005' />
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+  <div class='nf-center'>
+    <div>Set up and printed.</div>
+    <div>Published October, 1925.</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+<div class='nf-center c004'>
+    <div>PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY</div>
+    <div>THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<div class='pbb'>
+ <hr class='pb c000' />
+</div>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+<div class='nf-center c004'>
+    <div>TO</div>
+    <div>MY COLLEAGUES,</div>
+    <div>PAST AND PRESENT,</div>
+    <div>WHOSE FRIENDSHIP IS INSPIRATION.</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c006'>TABLE OF CONTENTS</h2>
+</div>
+
+<table class='table0' summary=''>
+<colgroup>
+<col width='12%' />
+<col width='79%' />
+<col width='7%' />
+</colgroup>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c007'><span class='small'>CHAPTER</span></td>
+    <td class='c008'>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class='c009'><span class='small'>PAGE</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c007'>I.</td>
+    <td class='c008'><span class='sc'>The Origins of Modern Science</span></td>
+    <td class='c009'><a href='#Page_1'>1</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c007'>II.</td>
+    <td class='c008'><span class='sc'>Mathematics as an Element in the History of Thought</span></td>
+    <td class='c009'><a href='#Page_28'>28</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c007'>III.</td>
+    <td class='c008'><span class='sc'>The Century of Genius</span></td>
+    <td class='c009'><a href='#Page_55'>55</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c007'>IV.</td>
+    <td class='c008'><span class='sc'>The Eighteenth Century</span></td>
+    <td class='c009'><a href='#Page_80'>80</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c007'>V.</td>
+    <td class='c008'><span class='sc'>The Romantic Reaction</span></td>
+    <td class='c009'><a href='#Page_105'>105</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c007'>VI.</td>
+    <td class='c008'><span class='sc'>The Nineteenth Century</span></td>
+    <td class='c009'><a href='#Page_134'>134</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c007'>VII.</td>
+    <td class='c008'><span class='sc'>Relativity</span></td>
+    <td class='c009'><a href='#Page_160'>160</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c007'>VIII.</td>
+    <td class='c008'><span class='sc'>The Quantum Theory</span></td>
+    <td class='c009'><a href='#Page_181'>181</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c007'>IX.</td>
+    <td class='c008'><span class='sc'>Science and Philosophy</span></td>
+    <td class='c009'><a href='#Page_193'>193</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c007'>X.</td>
+    <td class='c008'><span class='sc'>Abstraction</span></td>
+    <td class='c009'><a href='#Page_219'>219</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c007'>XI.</td>
+    <td class='c008'><span class='sc'>God</span></td>
+    <td class='c009'><a href='#Page_242'>242</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c007'>XII.</td>
+    <td class='c008'><span class='sc'>Religion and Science</span></td>
+    <td class='c009'><a href='#Page_252'>252</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c007'>XIII.</td>
+    <td class='c008'><span class='sc'>Requisites for Social Progress</span></td>
+    <td class='c009'><a href='#Page_270'>270</a></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_ix'>ix</span>
+  <h2 id='PREFACE' class='c006'>PREFACE</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'>The present book embodies a study of some aspects of
+Western culture during the past three centuries, in so
+far as it has been influenced by the development of
+science. This study has been guided by the conviction
+that the mentality of an epoch springs from the
+view of the world which is, in fact, dominant in the
+educated sections of the communities in question.
+There may be more than one such scheme, corresponding
+to cultural divisions. The various human interests
+which suggest cosmologies, and also are influenced by
+them, are science, aesthetics, ethics, religion. In every
+age each of these topics suggests a view of the world.
+In so far as the same set of people are swayed by all,
+or more than one, of these interests, their effective
+outlook will be the joint production from these
+sources. But each age has it dominant preoccupation;
+and, during the three centuries in question, the cosmology
+derived from science has been asserting itself
+at the expense of older points of view with their origins
+elsewhere. Men can be provincial in time, as well as
+in place. We may ask ourselves whether the scientific
+mentality of the modern world in the immediate past
+is not a successful example of such provincial
+limitation.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_x'>x</span>in 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Bearing this in mind, I have avoided the introduction
+of a variety of abstruse detail respecting scientific
+advance. What is wanted, and what I have striven
+after, is a sympathetic study of main ideas as seen from
+the inside. If my view of the function of philosophy
+is correct, it is the most effective of all the intellectual
+pursuits. It builds cathedrals before the workmen
+have moved a stone, and it destroys them before the
+elements have worn down their arches. It is the architect
+of the buildings of the spirit, and it is also their
+solvent:—and the spiritual precedes the material.
+Philosophy works slowly. Thoughts lie dormant for
+ages; and then, almost suddenly as it were, mankind
+finds that they have embodied themselves in institutions.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>This book in the main consists of a set of eight
+Lowell Lectures delivered in the February of 1925.
+These lectures with some slight expansion, and the
+subdivision of one lecture into Chapters VII and
+VIII, are here printed as delivered. But some additional
+matter has been added, so as to complete the
+thought of the book on a scale which could not be
+included within that lecture course. Of this new
+matter, the second chapter—‘Mathematics as an Element
+in the History of Thought’—was delivered as a
+lecture before the Mathematical Society of Brown
+University, Providence, R. I.; and the twelfth chapter—‘Religion
+and Science’—formed an address delivered
+in the Phillips Brooks House at Harvard, and
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_xi'>xi</span>is to be published in the August number of the <cite>Atlantic
+Monthly</cite> of this year (1925). The tenth and
+eleventh chapters—‘Abstraction’ and ‘God’—are additions
+which now appear for the first time. But the
+book represents one train of thought, and the antecedent
+utilisation of some of its contents is a subsidiary
+point.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>There has been no occasion in the text to make
+detailed reference to Lloyd Morgan’s <cite>Emergent Evolution</cite>
+or to Alexander’s <cite>Space, Time and Deity</cite>. It
+will be obvious to readers that I have found them very
+suggestive. I am especially indebted to Alexander’s
+great work. The wide scope of the present book
+makes it impossible to acknowledge in detail the various
+sources of information or of ideas. The book is
+the product of thought and reading in past years,
+which were not undertaken with any anticipation of
+utilisation for the present purpose. Accordingly it
+would now be impossible for me to give reference to
+my sources for details, even if it were desirable so to
+do. But there is no need: the facts which are relied
+upon are simple and well known. On the philosophical
+side, any consideration of epistemology has been
+entirely excluded. It would have been impossible to
+discuss that topic without upsetting the whole balance
+of the work. The key to the book is the sense
+of the overwhelming importance of a prevalent
+philosophy.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>My most grateful thanks are due to my colleague
+Mr. Raphael Demos for reading the proofs and for
+the suggestion of many improvements in expression.</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-l c011'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>Harvard University,</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>June 29, 1925.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<div class='pbb'>
+ <hr class='pb c000' />
+</div>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+  <div class='nf-center'>
+    <div><span class='pageno' id='Page_1'>1</span><span class='xxlarge'>SCIENCE AND THE MODERN</span></div>
+    <div><span class='xxlarge'>WORLD</span></div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c006'>CHAPTER I <br /> <br /> THE ORIGINS OF MODERN SCIENCE</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'>The progress of civilisation is not wholly a uniform
+drift towards better things. It may perhaps wear this
+aspect if we map it on a scale which is large enough.
+But such broad views obscure the details on which
+rest our whole understanding of the process. New
+epochs emerge with comparative suddenness, if we
+have regard to the scores of thousands of years
+throughout which the complete history extends. Secluded
+races suddenly take their places in the main
+stream of events: technological discoveries transform
+the mechanism of human life: a primitive art quickly
+flowers into full satisfaction of some aesthetic craving:
+great religions in their crusading youth spread
+through the nations the peace of Heaven and the
+sword of the Lord.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The sixteenth century of our era saw the disruption
+of Western Christianity and the rise of modern
+science. It was an age of ferment. Nothing was settled,
+though much was opened—new worlds and new
+ideas. In science, Copernicus and Vesalius may be
+chosen as representative figures: they typify the new
+cosmology and the scientific emphasis on direct observation.
+Giordano Bruno was the martyr; but the
+cause for which he suffered was not that of science,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_2'>2</span>but that of free imaginative speculation. His death
+in the year 1600 ushered in the first century of modern
+science in the strict sense of the term. In his execution
+there was an unconscious symbolism: for the subsequent
+tone of scientific thought has contained distrust
+of his type of general speculativeness. The
+Reformation, for all its importance, may be considered
+as a domestic affair of the European races. Even the
+Christianity of the East viewed it with profound disengagement.
+Furthermore, such disruptions are no
+new phenomena in the history of Christianity or of
+other religions. When we project this great revolution
+upon the whole history of the Christian Church,
+we cannot look upon it as introducing a new principle
+into human life. For good or for evil, it was a great
+transformation of religion; but it was not the coming
+of religion. It did not itself claim to be so. Reformers
+maintained that they were only restoring what had
+been forgotten.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>It is quite otherwise with the rise of modern science.
+In every way it contrasts with the contemporary religious
+movement. The Reformation was a popular uprising,
+and for a century and a half drenched Europe
+in blood. The beginnings of the scientific movement
+were confined to a minority among the intellectual
+élite. In a generation which saw the Thirty Years’
+War and remembered Alva in the Netherlands, the
+worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo
+suffered an honourable detention and a mild reproof,
+before dying peacefully in his bed. The way in which
+the persecution of Galileo has been remembered is a
+tribute to the quiet commencement of the most intimate
+change in outlook which the human race had yet encountered.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_3'>3</span>Since a babe was born in a manger, it
+may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened
+with so little stir.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The thesis which these lectures will illustrate is
+that this quiet growth of science has practically recoloured
+our mentality so that modes of thought which
+in former times were exceptional, are now broadly
+spread through the educated world. This new colouring
+of ways of thought had been proceeding slowly
+for many ages in the European peoples. At last it
+issued in the rapid development of science; and has
+thereby strengthened itself by its most obvious application.
+The new mentality is more important even
+than the new science and the new technology. It has
+altered the metaphysical presuppositions and the
+imaginative contents of our minds; so that now the old
+stimuli provoke a new response. Perhaps my metaphor
+of a new colour is too strong. What I mean is
+just that slightest change of tone which yet makes all
+the difference. This is exactly illustrated by a sentence
+from a published letter of that adorable genius,
+William James. When he was finishing his great
+treatise on the <cite>Principles of Psychology</cite>, he wrote to
+his brother Henry James, ‘I have to forge every sentence
+in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts.’</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>This new tinge to modern minds is a vehement and
+passionate interest in the relation of general principles
+to irreducible and stubborn facts. All the world over
+and at all times there have been practical men, absorbed
+in ‘irreducible and stubborn facts’: all the
+world over and at all times there have been men of
+philosophic temperament who have been absorbed in
+the weaving of general principles. It is this union of
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_4'>4</span>passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal
+devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the
+novelty in our present society. Previously it had
+appeared sporadically and as if by chance. This
+balance of mind has now become part of the tradition
+which infects cultivated thought. It is the salt which
+keeps life sweet. The main business of universities
+is to transmit this tradition as a widespread inheritance
+from generation to generation.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Another contrast which singles out science from
+among the European movements of the sixteenth and
+seventeenth centuries, is its universality. Modern
+science was born in Europe, but its home is the whole
+world. In the last two centuries there has been a long
+and confused impact of Western modes upon the civilisation
+of Asia. The wise men of the East have been
+puzzling, and are puzzling, as to what may be the
+regulative secret of life which can be passed from
+West to East without the wanton destruction of their
+own inheritance which they so rightly prize. 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In this course of lectures I shall not discuss the
+details of scientific discovery. My theme is the energising
+of a state of mind in the modern world, its
+broad generalisations, and its impact upon other
+spiritual forces. There are two ways of reading history,
+forwards and backwards. In the history of
+thought, we require both methods. A climate of
+opinion—to use the happy phrase of a seventeenth
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_5'>5</span>century writer—requires for its understanding the
+consideration of its antecedents and its issues. Accordingly
+in this lecture I shall consider some of the antecedents
+of our modern approach to the investigation
+of nature.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In the first place, there can be no living science
+unless there is a widespread instinctive conviction in
+the existence of an <em>Order of Things</em>, and, in particular,
+of an <em>Order of Nature</em>. I have used the word <em>instinctive</em>
+advisedly. It does not matter what men say in
+words, so long as their activities are controlled by
+settled instincts. The words may ultimately destroy
+the instincts. But until this has occurred, words do
+not count. This remark is important in respect to the
+history of scientific thought. For we shall find that
+since the time of Hume, the fashionable scientific philosophy
+has been such as to deny the rationality of
+science. This conclusion lies upon the surface of
+Hume’s philosophy. Take, for example, the following
+passage from Section IV of his <cite>Inquiry Concerning
+Human Understanding</cite>:</p>
+
+<div class='quote'>
+
+<p class='c001'>“In a word, then, every effect is a distinct event from its cause.
+It could not, therefore, be discovered in the cause; and the first
+invention or conception of it, <span lang="la" xml:lang="la"><i>à priori</i></span>, must be entirely arbitrary.”</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class='c012'>If the cause in itself discloses no information as to
+the effect, so that the first invention of it must be
+<em>entirely</em> arbitrary, it follows at once that science is
+impossible, except in the sense of establishing <em>entirely
+arbitrary</em> connections which are not warranted by anything
+intrinsic to the natures either of causes or effects.
+Some variant of Hume’s philosophy has generally
+prevailed among men of science. But scientific faith
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_6'>6</span>has risen to the occasion, and has tacitly removed the
+philosophic mountain.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In view of this strange contradiction in scientific
+thought, it is of the first importance to consider the
+antecedents of a faith which is impervious to the demand
+for a consistent rationality. We have therefore
+to trace the rise of the instinctive faith that there is an
+Order of Nature which can be traced in every detailed
+occurrence.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Of course we all share in this faith, and we therefore
+believe that the reason for the faith is our apprehension
+of its truth. But the formation of a general
+idea—such as the idea of the Order of Nature—, and
+the grasp of its importance, and the observation of its
+exemplification in a variety of occasions are by no
+means the necessary consequences of the truth of the
+idea in question. Familiar things happen, and mankind
+does not bother about them. It requires a very
+unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
+Accordingly I wish to consider the stages in which
+this analysis became explicit, and finally became unalterably
+impressed upon the educated minds of Western
+Europe.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Obviously, the main recurrences of life are too
+insistent to escape the notice of the least rational of
+humans; and even before the dawn of rationality, they
+have impressed themselves upon the instincts of animals.
+It is unnecessary to labour the point, that in
+broad outline certain general states of nature recur,
+and that our very natures have adapted themselves to
+such repetitions.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>But there is a complementary fact which is equally
+true and equally obvious:—nothing ever really recurs
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_7'>7</span>in exact detail. No two days are identical, no two
+winters. What has gone, has gone forever. Accordingly
+the practical philosophy of mankind has been
+to expect the broad recurrences, and to accept the
+details as emanating from the inscrutable womb of
+things, beyond the ken of rationality. Men expected
+the sun to rise, but the wind bloweth where it listeth.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Certainly from the classical Greek civilisation onwards
+there have been men, and indeed groups of men,
+who have placed themselves beyond this acceptance of
+an ultimate irrationality. Such men have endeavoured
+to explain all phenomena as the outcome of an
+order of things which extends to every detail. Geniuses
+such as Aristotle, or Archimedes, or Roger
+Bacon, must have been endowed with the full scientific
+mentality, which instinctively holds that all things
+great and small are conceivable as exemplifications of
+general principles which reign throughout the natural
+order.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>But until the close of the Middle Ages the general
+educated public did not feel that intimate conviction,
+and that detailed interest, in such an idea, so as to
+lead to an unceasing supply of men, with ability and
+opportunity adequate to maintain a coordinated search
+for the discovery of these hypothetical principles.
+Either people were doubtful about the existence of
+such principles, or were doubtful about any success
+in finding them, or took no interest in thinking about
+them, or were oblivious to their practical importance
+when found. For whatever reason, search was languid,
+if we have regard to the opportunities of a high
+civilisation and the length of time concerned. Why
+did the pace suddenly quicken in the sixteenth and
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_8'>8</span>seventeenth centuries? At the close of the Middle
+Ages a new mentality discloses itself. Invention stimulated
+thought, thought quickened physical speculation,
+Greek manuscripts disclosed what the ancients
+had discovered. Finally although in the year 1500
+Europe knew less than Archimedes who died in the
+year 212 B. C., yet in the year 1700, Newton’s <cite>Principia</cite>
+had been written and the world was well started
+on the modern epoch.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>There have been great civilisations in which the
+peculiar balance of mind required for science has
+only fitfully appeared and has produced the feeblest
+result. For example, the more we know of Chinese
+art, of Chinese literature, and of the Chinese philosophy
+of life, the more we admire the heights to
+which that civilization attained. For thousands of
+years, there have been in China acute and learned men
+patiently devoting their lives to study. Having regard
+to the span of time, and to the population concerned,
+China forms the largest volume of civilisation
+which the world has seen. There is no reason to
+doubt the intrinsic capacity of individual Chinamen
+for the pursuit of science. And yet Chinese science is
+practically negligible. There is no reason to believe
+that China if left to itself would have ever produced
+any progress in science. The same may be said of
+India. Furthermore, if the Persians had enslaved
+the Greeks, there is no definite ground for belief that
+science would have flourished in Europe. The Romans
+showed no particular originality in that line. Even
+as it was, the Greeks, though they founded the movement,
+did not sustain it with the concentrated interest
+which modern Europe has shown. I am not alluding
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_9'>9</span>to the last few generations of the European peoples on
+both sides of the ocean; I mean the smaller Europe
+of the Reformation period, distracted as it was with
+wars and religious disputes. Consider the world of
+the eastern Mediterranean, from Sicily to western
+Asia, during the period of about 1400 years from the
+death of Archimedes [in 212 B. C.] to the irruption of
+the Tartars. There were wars and revolutions and
+large changes of religion: but nothing much worse
+than the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
+throughout Europe. There was a great and
+wealthy civilisation, Pagan, Christian, Mahometan.
+In that period a great deal was added to science. But
+on the whole the progress was slow and wavering;
+and, except in mathematics, the men of the Renaissance
+practically started from the position which
+Archimedes had reached. There had been some
+progress in medicine and some progress in astronomy.
+But the total advance was very little compared
+to the marvellous success of the seventeenth
+century. For example, compare the progress of scientific
+knowledge from the year 1560, just before the
+births of Galileo and of Kepler, up to the year 1700,
+when Newton was in the height of his fame, with the
+progress in the ancient period, already mentioned,
+exactly ten times as long.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Nevertheless, Greece was the mother of Europe;
+and it is to Greece that we must look in order to find
+the origin of our modern ideas. We all know that on
+the eastern shores of the Mediterranean there was a
+very flourishing school of Ionian philosophers, deeply
+interested in theories concerning nature. Their ideas
+have been transmitted to us, enriched by the genius
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_10'>10</span>of Plato and Aristotle. But, with the exception of
+Aristotle, and it is a large exception, this school of
+thought had not attained to the complete scientific
+mentality. In some ways, it was better. The Greek
+genius was philosophical, lucid and logical. The
+men of this group were primarily asking philosophical
+questions. What is the substratum of nature? Is it
+fire, or earth, or water, or some combination of any
+two, or of all three? Or is it a mere flux, not reducible
+to some static material? Mathematics interested
+them mightily. They invented its generality, analysed
+its premises, and made notable discoveries of theorems
+by a rigid adherence to deductive reasoning. Their
+minds were infected with an eager generality. They
+demanded clear, bold ideas, and strict reasoning from
+them. All this was excellent; it was genius; it was
+ideal preparatory work. But it was not science as we
+understand it. The patience of minute observation
+was not nearly so prominent. Their genius was not so
+apt for the state of imaginative muddled suspense
+which precedes successful inductive generalisation.
+They were lucid thinkers and bold reasoners.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Of course there were exceptions, and at the very
+top: for example, Aristotle and Archimedes. Also
+for patient observation, there were the astronomers.
+There was a mathematical lucidity about the stars,
+and a fascination about the small numerable band of
+run-a-way planets.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Every philosophy is tinged with the colouring of
+some secret imaginative background, which never
+emerges explicitly into its trains of reasoning. The
+Greek view of nature, at least that cosmology transmitted
+from them to later ages, was essentially dramatic.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_11'>11</span>It is not necessarily wrong for this reason:
+but it was overwhelmingly dramatic. It thus conceived
+nature as articulated in the way of a work of
+dramatic art, for the exemplification of general ideas
+converging to an end. Nature was differentiated so
+as to provide its proper end for each thing. There
+was the centre of the universe as the end of motion
+for those things which are heavy, and the celestial
+spheres as the end of motion for those things whose
+natures lead them upwards. The celestial spheres
+were for things which are impassible and ingenerable,
+the lower regions for things impassible and generable.
+Nature was a drama in which each thing played its
+part.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>I do not say that this is a view to which Aristotle
+would have subscribed without severe reservations, in
+fact without the sort of reservations which we ourselves
+would make. But it was the view which subsequent
+Greek thought extracted from Aristotle and
+passed on to the Middle Ages. The effect of such an
+imaginative setting for nature was to damp down the
+historical spirit. For it was the end which seemed
+illuminating, so why bother about the beginning? The
+Reformation and the scientific movement were two
+aspects of the historical revolt which was the dominant
+intellectual movement of the later Renaissance.
+The appeal to the origins of Christianity, and Francis
+Bacon’s appeal to efficient causes as against final
+causes, were two sides of one movement of thought.
+Also for this reason Galileo and his adversaries were
+at hopeless cross purposes, as can be seen from his
+<cite>Dialogues on the Two Systems of the World</cite>.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Galileo keeps harping on how things happen,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_12'>12</span>whereas his adversaries had a complete theory as to
+why things happen. Unfortunately the two theories
+did not bring out the same results. Galileo insists
+upon ‘irreducible and stubborn facts,’ and Simplicius,
+his opponent, brings forward reasons, completely satisfactory,
+at least to himself. It is a great mistake to
+conceive this historical revolt as an appeal to reason.
+On the contrary, it was through and through an
+anti-intellectualist movement. It was the return to
+the contemplation of brute fact; and it was based on a
+recoil from the inflexible rationality of medieval
+thought. In making this statement I am merely summarising
+what at the time the adherents of the old
+régime themselves asserted. For example, in the fourth
+book of Father Paul Sarpi’s <cite>History of the Council
+of Trent</cite>, you will find that in the year 1551 the
+Papal Legates who presided over the Council ordered:
+‘That the Divines ought to confirm their opinions with
+the holy Scripture, Traditions of the Apostles, sacred
+and approved Councils, and by the Constitutions and
+Authorities of the holy Fathers; that they ought to
+use brevity, and avoid superfluous and unprofitable
+questions, and perverse contentions.... This order
+did not please the Italian Divines; who said it was a
+novity, and a condemning of School-Divinity, which,
+in all difficulties, <em>useth reason</em>, and because it was not
+lawful [<i>i.e.</i>, by this decree] to treat as St. Thomas
+[Aquinas], St. Bonaventure, and other famous men
+did.’</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>It is impossible not to feel sympathy with these
+Italian divines, maintaining the lost cause of unbridled
+rationalism. They were deserted on all hands.
+The Protestants were in full revolt against them. The
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_13'>13</span>Papacy failed to support them, and the Bishops of the
+Council could not even understand them. For a few
+sentences below the foregoing quotation, we read:
+‘Though many complained here-of [<i>i.e.</i>, of the Decree],
+yet it prevailed but little, because generally the
+Fathers [<i>i.e.</i>, the Bishops] desired to hear men speak
+with intelligible terms, not abstrusely, as in the matter
+of Justification, and others already handled.’</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Poor belated medievalists! When they used reason
+they were not even intelligible to the ruling powers
+of their epoch. It will take centuries before stubborn
+facts are reducible by reason, and meanwhile the
+pendulum swings slowly and heavily to the extreme of
+the historical method.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Forty-three years after the Italian divines had written
+this memorial, Richard Hooker in his famous
+<cite>Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity</cite> makes exactly the same
+complaint of his Puritan adversaries.<a id='r1' /><a href='#f1' class='c013'><sup>[1]</sup></a> Hooker’s balanced
+thought—from which the appellation ‘The Judicious
+Hooker’ is derived—, and his diffuse style,
+which is the vehicle of such thought, make his writings
+singularly unfit for the process of summarising by a
+short, pointed quotation. But, in the section referred
+to, he reproaches his opponents with <cite>Their Disparagement
+of Reason</cite>; and in support of his own position
+definitely refers to ‘The greatest amongst the school-divines,’
+by which designation I presume that he refers
+to St. Thomas Aquinas.</p>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f1'>
+<p class='c001'><a href='#r1'>1</a>. <i>Cf.</i> Book III, Section VIII.</p>
+</div>
+<p class='c001'>Hooker’s <cite>Ecclesiastical Polity</cite> was published just
+before Sarpi’s <cite>Council of Trent</cite>. Accordingly there
+was complete independence between the two works.
+But both the Italian divines of 1551, and Hooker at
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_14'>14</span>the end of that century testify to the anti-rationalist
+trend of thought at that epoch, and in this respect contrast
+their own age with the epoch of scholasticism.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>This reaction was undoubtedly a very necessary corrective
+to the unguarded rationalism of the Middle
+Ages. But reactions run to extremes. Accordingly,
+although one outcome of this reaction was the birth
+of modern science, yet we must remember that science
+thereby inherited the bias of thought to which it owes
+its origin.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The effect of Greek dramatic literature was many-sided
+so far as concerns the various ways in which it
+indirectly affected medieval thought. The pilgrim
+fathers of the scientific imagination as it exists today,
+are the great tragedians of ancient Athens, Aeschylus,
+Sophocles, Euripides. Their vision of fate, remorseless
+and indifferent, urging a tragic incident to its
+inevitable issue, is the vision possessed by science. Fate
+in Greek Tragedy becomes the order of nature in
+modern thought. The absorbing interest in the particular
+heroic incidents, as an example and a verification
+of the workings of fate, reappears in our epoch
+as concentration of interest on the crucial experiments.
+It was my good fortune to be present at the meeting of
+the Royal Society in London when the Astronomer
+Royal for England announced that the photographic
+plates of the famous eclipse, as measured by his colleagues
+in Greenwich Observatory, had verified the
+prediction of Einstein that rays of light are bent as
+they pass in the neighbourhood of the sun. The whole
+atmosphere of tense interest was exactly that of the
+Greek drama: we were the chorus commenting on the
+decree of destiny as disclosed in the development of a
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_15'>15</span>supreme incident. There was dramatic quality in the
+very staging:—the traditional ceremonial, and in the
+background the picture of Newton to remind us that
+the greatest of scientific generalisations was now, after
+more than two centuries, to receive its first modification.
+Nor was the personal interest wanting: a great
+adventure in thought had at length come safe to shore.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The conception of the moral order in the Greek
+plays was certainly not a discovery of the dramatists.
+It must have passed into the literary tradition from
+the general serious opinion of the times. But in finding
+this magnificent expression, it thereby deepened
+the stream of thought from which it arose. The spectacle
+of a moral order was impressed upon the imagination
+of classical civilisation.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The time came when that great society decayed, and
+Europe passed into the Middle Ages. The direct
+influence of Greek literature vanished. But the concept
+of the moral order and of the order of nature had
+enshrined itself in the Stoic philosophy. For example,
+Lecky in his <cite>History of European Morals</cite> tells us
+‘Seneca maintains that the Divinity has determined
+all things by an inexorable law of destiny, which He
+has decreed, but which He Himself obeys.’ But the
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_16'>16</span>most effective way in which the Stoics influenced the
+mentality of the Middle Ages was by the diffused
+sense of order which arose from Roman law. Again
+to quote Lecky, ‘The Roman legislation was in a two-fold
+manner the child of philosophy. It was in the
+first place formed upon the philosophical model, for,
+instead of being a mere empirical system adjusted to
+the existing requirements of society, it laid down
+abstract principles of right to which it endeavoured
+to conform; and, in the next place, these principles
+were borrowed directly from Stoicism.’ In spite of
+the actual anarchy throughout large regions in Europe
+after the collapse of the Empire, the sense of legal
+order always haunted the racial memories of the Imperial
+populations. Also the Western Church was
+always there as a living embodiment of the traditions
+of Imperial rule.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>It is important to notice that this legal impress upon
+medieval civilisation was not in the form of a few
+wise precepts which should permeate conduct. It
+was the conception of a definite articulated system
+which defines the legality of the detailed structure of
+social organism, and of the detailed way in which
+it should function. There was nothing vague. It
+was not a question of admirable maxims, but of definite
+procedure to put things right and to keep them
+there. The Middle Ages formed one long training
+of the intellect of Western Europe in the sense of
+order. There may have been some deficiency in respect
+to practice. But the idea never for a moment
+lost its grip. It was preëminently an epoch of orderly
+thought, rationalist through and through. The very
+anarchy quickened the sense for coherent system; just
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_17'>17</span>as the modern anarchy of Europe has stimulated the
+intellectual vision of a League of Nations.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>But for science something more is wanted than a
+general sense of the order in things. It needs but a
+sentence to point out how the habit of definite exact
+thought was implanted in the European mind by the
+long dominance of scholastic logic and scholastic
+divinity. The habit remained after the philosophy
+had been repudiated, the priceless habit of looking for
+an exact point and of sticking to it when found. Galileo
+owes more to Aristotle than appears on the surface
+of his <cite>Dialogues</cite>: he owes to him his clear head and his
+analytic mind.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>I do not think, however, that I have even yet
+brought out the greatest contribution of medievalism
+to the formation of the scientific movement. I mean
+the inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence
+can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly
+definite manner, exemplifying general principles.
+Without this belief the incredible labours of scientists
+would be without hope. It is this instinctive conviction,
+vividly poised before the imagination, which is
+the motive power of research:—that there is a secret,
+a secret which can be unveiled. How has this conviction
+been so vividly implanted on the European mind?</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>When we compare this tone of thought in Europe
+with the attitude of other civilisations when left to
+themselves, there seems but one source for its origin.
+It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality
+of God, conceived as with the personal energy
+of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher.
+Every detail was supervised and ordered:
+the search into nature could only result in the vindication
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_18'>18</span>of the faith in rationality. Remember that I
+am not talking of the explicit beliefs of a few individuals.
+What I mean is the impress on the European
+mind arising from the unquestioned faith of centuries.
+By this I mean the instinctive tone of thought and not
+a mere creed of words.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In Asia, the conceptions of God were of a being who
+was either too arbitrary or too impersonal for such
+ideas to have much effect on instinctive habits of mind.
+Any definite occurrence might be due to the fiat of an
+irrational despot, or might issue from some impersonal,
+inscrutable origin of things. There was not the
+same confidence as in the intelligible rationality of a
+personal being. I am not arguing that the European
+trust in the scrutability of nature was logically justified
+even by its own theology. My only point is to
+understand how it arose. My explanation is that the
+faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently
+to the development of modern scientific theory,
+is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>But science is not merely the outcome of instinctive
+faith. It also requires an active interest in the simple
+occurrences of life for their own sake.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>This qualification ‘for their own sake’ is important.
+The first phase of the Middle Ages was an age of symbolism.
+It was an age of vast ideas, and of primitive
+technique. There was little to be done with nature,
+except to coin a hard living from it. But there were
+realms of thought to be explored, realms of philosophy
+and realms of theology. Primitive art could symbolise
+those ideas which filled all thoughtful minds. The
+first phase of medieval art has a haunting charm beyond
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_19'>19</span>compare: its own intrinsic quality is enhanced by
+the fact that its message, which stretched beyond art’s
+own self-justification of aesthetic achievement, was the
+symbolism of things lying behind nature itself. In
+this symbolic phase, medieval art energised in nature
+as its medium, but pointed to another world.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In order to understand the contrast between these
+early Middle Ages and the atmosphere required by the
+scientific mentality, we should compare the sixth century
+in Italy with the sixteenth century. In both centuries
+the Italian genius was laying the foundations of
+a new epoch. The history of the three centuries preceding
+the earlier period, despite the promise for the
+future introduced by the rise of Christianity, is overwhelmingly
+infected by the sense of the decline of
+civilisation. In each generation something has been
+lost. As we read the records, we are haunted by the
+shadow of the coming barbarism. There are great
+men, with fine achievements in action or in thought.
+But their total effect is merely for some short time to
+arrest the general decline. In the sixth century we
+are, so far as Italy is concerned, at the lowest point of
+the curve. But in that century every action is laying
+the foundation for the tremendous rise of the new
+European civilisation. In the background the Byzantine
+Empire, under Justinian, in three ways determined
+the character of the early Middle Ages in Western
+Europe. In the first place, its armies, under Belisarius
+and Narses, cleared Italy from the Gothic
+domination. In this way, the stage was freed for the
+exercise of the old Italian genius for creating organisations
+which shall be protective of ideals of cultural
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_20'>20</span>activity. It is impossible not to sympathise with the
+Goths: yet there can be no doubt but that a thousand
+years of the Papacy were infinitely more valuable for
+Europe than any effects derivable from a well-established
+Gothic kingdom of Italy.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In the second place, the codification of the Roman
+law established the ideal of legality which dominated
+the sociological thought of Europe in the succeeding
+centuries. Law is both an engine for government, and
+a condition restraining <a id='corr20.10'></a><span class='htmlonly'><ins class='correction' title='givernment'>government</ins></span><span class='epubonly'><a href='#c_20.10'><ins class='correction' title='givernment'>government</ins></a></span>. The canon law
+of the Church, and the civil law of the State, owe
+to Justinian’s lawyers their influence on the development
+of Europe. They established in the Western
+mind the ideal that an authority should be at once
+lawful, and law-enforcing, and should in itself exhibit
+a rationally adjusted system of organisation. The sixth
+century in Italy gave the initial exhibition of the way
+in which the impress of these ideas was fostered by
+contact with the Byzantine Empire.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Thirdly, in the non-political spheres of art and
+learning Constantinople exhibited a standard of realised
+achievement which, partly by the impulse to direct
+imitation, and partly by the indirect inspiration arising
+from the mere knowledge that such things existed,
+acted as a perpetual spur to Western culture. The
+wisdom of the Byzantines, as it stood in the imagination
+of the first phase of medieval mentality, and the
+wisdom of the Egyptians as it stood in the imagination
+of the early Greeks, played analogous rôles.
+Probably the actual knowledge of these respective wisdoms
+was, in either case, about as much as was good
+for the recipients. They knew enough to know the
+sort of standards which are attainable, and not enough
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_21'>21</span>to be fettered by static and traditional ways of thought.
+Accordingly, in both cases men went ahead on their
+own and did better. No account of the rise of the
+European scientific mentality can omit some notice of
+this influence of the Byzantine civilisation in the background.
+In the sixth century there is a crisis in the
+history of the relations between the Byzantines and the
+West; and this crisis is to be contrasted with the influence
+of Greek literature on European thought in the
+fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The two outstanding
+men, who in the Italy of the sixth century laid the
+foundations of the future, were St. Benedict and Gregory
+the Great. By reference to them, we can at once
+see how absolutely in ruins was the approach to the
+scientific mentality which had been attained by the
+Greeks. We are at the zero point of scientific temperature.
+But the life-work of Gregory and of Benedict
+contributed elements to the reconstruction of
+Europe which secured that this reconstruction, when
+it arrived, should include a more effective scientific
+mentality than that of the ancient world. The Greeks
+were over-theoretical. For them science was an offshoot
+of philosophy. Gregory and Benedict were
+practical men, with an eye for the importance of ordinary
+things; and they combined this practical temperament
+with their religious and cultural activities.
+In particular, we owe it to St. Benedict that the monasteries
+were the homes of practical agriculturalists,
+as well as of saints and of artists and of men of learning.
+The alliance of science with technology, by which
+learning is kept in contact <a id='corr21.31'></a><span class='htmlonly'><ins class='correction' title='wtih'>with</ins></span><span class='epubonly'><a href='#c_21.31'><ins class='correction' title='wtih'>with</ins></a></span> irreducible and stubborn
+facts, owes much to the practical bent of the early
+Benedictines. Modern science derives from Rome as
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_22'>22</span>well as from Greece, and this Roman strain explains
+its gain in an energy of thought kept closely in contact
+with the world of facts.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>But the influence of this contact between the monasteries
+and the facts of nature showed itself first in
+art. The rise of Naturalism in the later Middle Ages
+was the entry into the European mind of the final
+ingredient necessary for the rise of science. It was the
+rise of interest in natural objects, and in natural occurrences,
+for their own sakes. The natural foliage of a
+district was sculptured in out-of-the-way spots of the
+later buildings, merely as exhibiting delight in those
+familiar objects. The whole atmosphere of every art
+exhibited a direct joy in the apprehension of the things
+which lie around us. The craftsmen who executed the
+late medieval decorative sculpture, Giotto, Chaucer,
+Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, and, at the present day,
+the New England poet Robert Frost, are all akin to
+each other in this respect. The simple immediate
+facts are the topics of interest, and these reappear in
+the thought of science as the ‘irreducible stubborn
+facts.’</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The mind of Europe was now prepared for its new
+venture of thought. It is unnecessary to tell in detail
+the various incidents which marked the rise of science:
+the growth of wealth and leisure; the expansion of
+universities; the invention of printing; the taking of
+Constantinople; Copernicus; Vasco da Gama; Columbus;
+the telescope. The soil, the climate, the seeds,
+were there, and the forest grew. Science has never
+shaken off the impress of its origin in the historical
+revolt of the later Renaissance. It has remained predominantly
+an anti-rationalistic movement, based upon
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_23'>23</span>a naïve faith. What reasoning it has wanted, has been
+borrowed from mathematics which is a surviving relic
+of Greek rationalism, following the deductive method.
+Science repudiates philosophy. In other words, it has
+never cared to justify its faith or to explain its meanings;
+and has remained blandly indifferent to its refutation
+by Hume.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Of course the historical revolt was fully justified.
+It was wanted. It was more than wanted: it was an
+absolute necessity for healthy progress. The world
+required centuries of contemplation of irreducible and
+stubborn facts. It is difficult for men to do more than
+one thing at a time, and that was the sort of thing they
+had to do after the rationalistic orgy of the Middle
+Ages. It was a very sensible reaction; but it was not
+a protest on behalf of reason.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>There is, however, a Nemesis which waits upon
+those who deliberately avoid avenues of knowledge.
+Oliver Cromwell’s cry echoes down the ages, ‘My
+brethren, by the bowels of Christ I beseech you, bethink
+you that you may be mistaken.’</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The progress of science has now reached a turning
+point. The stable foundations of physics have broken
+up: also for the first time physiology is asserting itself
+as an effective body of knowledge, as distinct from a
+scrap-heap. The old foundations of scientific thought
+are becoming unintelligible. Time, space, matter,
+material, ether, electricity, mechanism, organism, configuration,
+structure, pattern, function, all require reinterpretation.
+What is the sense of talking about a
+mechanical explanation when you do not know what
+you mean by mechanics?</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The truth is that science started its modern career
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_24'>24</span>by taking over ideas derived from the weakest side of
+the philosophies of Aristotle’s successors. In some
+respects it was a happy choice. It enabled the knowledge
+of the seventeenth century to be formularised so
+far as physics and chemistry were concerned, with a
+completeness which has lasted to the present time. But
+the progress of biology and psychology has probably
+been checked by the uncritical assumption of half-truths.
+If science is not to degenerate into a medley
+of <span lang="la" xml:lang="la"><i>ad hoc</i></span> hypotheses, it must become philosophical
+and must enter upon a thorough criticism of its own
+foundations.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In the succeeding lectures of this course, I shall trace
+the successes and the failures of the particular conceptions
+of cosmology with which the European intellect
+has clothed itself in the last three centuries. General
+climates of opinion persist for periods of about two
+to three generations, that is to say, for periods of sixty
+to a hundred years. There are also shorter waves of
+thought, which play on the surface of the tidal movement.
+We shall find, therefore, transformations in the
+European outlook, slowly modifying the successive
+centuries. There persists, however, throughout the
+whole period the fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes
+the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute
+matter, or material, spread throughout space in a flux
+of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless,
+valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do,
+following a fixed routine imposed by external relations
+which do not spring from the nature of its being.
+It is this assumption that I call ‘scientific materialism.’
+Also it is an assumption which I shall challenge as
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_25'>25</span>being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at
+which we have now arrived. It is not wrong, if properly
+construed. If we confine ourselves to certain
+types of facts, abstracted from the complete circumstances
+in which they occur, the materialistic assumption
+expresses these facts to perfection. But when we
+pass beyond the abstraction, either by more subtle employment
+of our senses, or by the request for meanings
+and for coherence of thoughts, the scheme breaks
+down at once. The narrow efficiency of the scheme
+was the very cause of its supreme methodological success.
+For it directed attention to just those groups of
+facts which, in the state of knowledge then existing,
+required investigation.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The success of the scheme has adversely affected the
+various currents of European thought. The historical
+revolt was anti-rationalistic, because the rationalism
+of the scholastics required a sharp correction by
+contact with brute fact. But the revival of philosophy
+in the hands of Descartes and his successors was entirely
+coloured in its development by the acceptance of
+the scientific cosmology at its face value. The success
+of their ultimate ideas confirmed scientists in their
+refusal to modify them as the result of an enquiry into
+their rationality. Every philosophy was bound in
+some way or other to swallow them whole. Also the
+example of science affected other regions of thought.
+The historical revolt has thus been exaggerated into
+the exclusion of philosophy from its proper rôle of
+harmonising the various abstractions of methodological
+thought. Thought is abstract; and the intolerant
+use of abstractions is the major vice of the intellect.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_26'>26</span>This vice is not wholly corrected by the recurrence to
+concrete experience. For after all, you need only attend
+to those aspects of your concrete experience which
+lie within some limited scheme. There are two methods
+for the purification of ideas. One of them is dispassionate
+observation by means of the bodily senses.
+But observation is selection. Accordingly, it is difficult
+to transcend a scheme of abstraction whose success
+is sufficiently wide. The other method is by comparing
+the various schemes of abstraction which are
+well founded in our various types of experience. This
+comparison takes the form of satisfying the demands
+of the Italian scholastic divines whom Paul Sarpi
+mentioned. They asked that <em>reason</em> should be used.
+Faith in reason is the trust that the ultimate natures of
+things lie together in a harmony which excludes mere
+arbitrariness. It is the faith that at the base of things
+we shall not find mere arbitrary mystery. The faith
+in the order of nature which has made possible the
+growth of science is a particular example of a deeper
+faith. This faith cannot be justified by any inductive
+generalisation. It springs from direct inspection of
+the nature of things as disclosed in our own immediate
+present experience. There is no parting from your
+own shadow. To experience this faith is to know that
+in being ourselves we are more than ourselves: to know
+that our experience, dim and fragmentary as it is, yet
+sounds the utmost depths of reality: to know that detached
+details merely in order to be themselves demand
+that they should find themselves in a system of things:
+to know that this system includes the harmony of logical
+rationality, and the harmony of aesthetic achievement:
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_27'>27</span>to know that, while the harmony of logic lies
+upon the universe as an iron necessity, the aesthetic
+harmony stands before it as a living ideal moulding
+the general flux in its broken progress towards finer,
+subtler issues.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_28'>28</span>
+  <h2 class='c006'>CHAPTER II <br /> <br /> MATHEMATICS AS AN ELEMENT IN <br /> THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'>The science of Pure Mathematics, in its modern developments,
+may claim to be the most original creation
+of the human spirit. Another claimant for this position
+is music. But we will put aside all rivals, and
+consider the ground on which such a claim can be
+made for mathematics. The originality of mathematics
+consists in the fact that in mathematical science
+connections between things are exhibited which, apart
+from the agency of human reason, are extremely unobvious.
+Thus the ideas, now in the minds of contemporary
+mathematicians, lie very remote from any notions
+which can be immediately derived by perception
+through the senses; unless indeed it be perception
+stimulated and guided by antecedent mathematical
+knowledge. This is the thesis which I proceed to
+exemplify.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Suppose we project our imaginations backwards
+through many thousands of years, and endeavour to
+realise the simple-mindedness of even the greatest intellects
+in those early societies. Abstract ideas which
+to us are immediately obvious must have been, for
+them, matters only of the most dim apprehension.
+For example take the question of number. We think
+of the number ‘five’ as applying to appropriate groups
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_29'>29</span>of any entities whatsoever—to five fishes, five children,
+five apples, five days. Thus in considering the relations
+of the number ‘five’ to the number ‘three,’ we are
+thinking of two groups of things, one with five members
+and the other with three members. But we are
+entirely abstracting from any consideration of any
+particular entities, or even of any particular sorts
+of entities, which go to make up the membership
+of either of the two groups. We are merely thinking
+of those relationships between those two groups
+which are entirely independent of the individual
+essences of any of the members of either group.
+This is a very remarkable feat of abstraction; and
+it must have taken ages for the human race to rise
+to it. During a long period, groups of fishes will
+have been compared to each other in respect to
+their multiplicity, and groups of days to each other.
+But the first man who noticed the analogy between
+a group of seven fishes and a group of seven days
+made a notable advance in the history of thought.
+He was the first man who entertained a concept belonging
+to the science of pure mathematics. At that
+moment it must have been impossible for him to divine
+the complexity and subtlety of these abstract mathematical
+ideas which were waiting for discovery. Nor
+could he have guessed that these notions would exert
+a widespread fascination in each succeeding generation.
+There is an erroneous literary tradition which
+represents the love of mathematics as a monomania
+confined to a few eccentrics in each generation. But
+be this as it may, it would have been impossible to
+anticipate the pleasure derivable from a type of abstract
+thinking which had no counterpart in the then-existing
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_30'>30</span>society. Thirdly, the tremendous future effect
+of mathematical knowledge on the lives of men, on
+their daily avocations, on their habitual thoughts, on
+the organization of society, must have been even more
+completely shrouded from the foresight of those early
+thinkers. Even now there is a very wavering grasp
+of the true position of mathematics as an element in
+the history of thought. I will not go so far as to say
+that to construct a history of thought without profound
+study of the mathematical ideas of successive
+epochs is like omitting Hamlet from the play which
+is named after him. That would be claiming too
+much. But it is certainly analogous to cutting out
+the part of Ophelia. This simile is singularly exact.
+For Ophelia is quite essential to the play, she is very
+charming,—and a little mad. Let us grant that the
+pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the
+human spirit, a refuge from the goading urgency of
+contingent happenings.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>When we think of mathematics, we have in our
+mind a science devoted to the exploration of number,
+quantity, geometry, and in modern times also including
+investigation into yet more abstract concepts of
+order, and into analogous types of purely logical relations.
+The point of mathematics is that in it we have
+always got rid of the particular instance, and even of
+any particular sorts of entities. So that for example,
+no mathematical truths apply merely to fish, or merely
+to stones, or merely to colours. So long as you are
+dealing with pure mathematics, you are in the realm of
+complete and absolute abstraction. All you assert is,
+that reason insists on the admission that, if any entities
+whatever have any relations which satisfy such-and-such
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_31'>31</span>purely abstract conditions, then they must have
+other relations which satisfy other purely abstract conditions.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Mathematics is thought moving in the sphere of
+complete abstraction from any particular instance of
+what it is talking about. So far is this view of mathematics
+from being obvious, that we can easily assure
+ourselves that it is not, even now, generally understood.
+For example, it is habitually thought that the
+certainty of mathematics is a reason for the certainty
+of our geometrical knowledge of the space of the
+physical universe. This is a delusion which has vitiated
+much philosophy in the past, and some philosophy
+in the present. This question of geometry is a test
+case of some urgency. There are certain alternative
+sets of purely abstract conditions possible for the relationships
+of groups of unspecified entities, which I
+will call <em>geometrical conditions</em>. I give them this
+name because of their general analogy to those conditions,
+which we believe to hold respecting the particular
+geometrical relations of things observed by us in
+our direct perception of nature. So far as our observations
+are concerned, we are not quite accurate
+enough to be certain of the exact conditions regulating
+the things we come across in nature. But we can by a
+slight stretch of hypothesis identify these observed
+conditions with some one set of the purely abstract
+geometrical conditions. In doing so, we make a particular
+determination of the group of unspecified entities
+which are the <span lang="la" xml:lang="la"><i>relata</i></span> in the abstract science. In
+the pure mathematics of geometrical relationships,
+we say that, if <em>any</em> group of entities enjoy <em>any</em> relationships
+among its members satisfying <em>this</em> set of abstract
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_32'>32</span>geometrical conditions, then such-and-such additional
+abstract conditions must also hold for such relationships.
+But when we come to physical space, we say
+that some definitely observed group of physical entities
+enjoys some definitely observed relationships
+among its members which do satisfy this above-mentioned
+set of abstract geometrical conditions. We
+thence conclude that the additional relationships
+which we concluded to hold in <em>any</em> such case, must
+therefore hold in <em>this particular</em> case.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The certainty of mathematics depends upon its complete
+abstract generality. But we can have no <span lang="la" xml:lang="la"><i>à priori</i></span>
+certainty that we are right in believing that the observed
+entities in the concrete universe form a particular
+instance of what falls under our general reasoning.
+To take another example from arithmetic. It is a
+general abstract truth of pure mathematics that any
+group of forty entities can be subdivided into two
+groups of twenty entities. We are therefore justified
+in concluding that a particular group of apples which
+we believe to contain forty members can be subdivided
+into two groups of apples of which each contains
+twenty members. But there always remains the possibility
+that we have miscounted the big group; so that,
+when we come in practice to subdivide it, we shall
+find that one of the two heaps has an apple too few or
+an apple too many.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Accordingly, in criticising an argument based upon
+the application of mathematics to particular matters
+of fact, there are always three processes to be kept
+perfectly distinct in our minds. We must first scan
+the purely mathematical reasoning to make sure that
+there are no mere slips in it—no casual illogicalities
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_33'>33</span>due to mental failure. Any mathematician knows
+from bitter experience that, in first elaborating a train
+of reasoning, it is very easy to commit a slight error
+which yet makes all the difference. But when a piece
+of mathematics has been revised, and has been before
+the expert world for some time, the chance of a casual
+error is almost negligible. The next process is to make
+quite certain of all the abstract conditions which have
+been presupposed to hold. This is the determination
+of the abstract premises from which the mathematical
+reasoning proceeds. This is a matter of considerable
+difficulty. In the past quite remarkable oversights
+have been made, and have been accepted by generations
+of the greatest mathematicians. The chief danger
+is that of oversight, namely, tacitly to introduce
+some condition, which it is natural for us to presuppose,
+but which in fact need not always be holding.
+There is another opposite oversight in this connection
+which does not lead to error, but only to lack of simplification.
+It is very easy to think that more postulated
+conditions are required than is in fact the case.
+In other words, we may think that some abstract postulate
+is necessary which is in fact capable of being
+proved from the other postulates that we have already
+on hand. The only effects of this excess of
+abstract postulates are to diminish our aesthetic pleasure
+in the mathematical reasoning, and to give us
+more trouble when we come to the third process of
+criticism.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>This third process of criticism is that of verifying
+that our abstract postulates hold for the particular case
+in question. It is in respect to this process of verification
+for the particular case that all the trouble arises.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_34'>34</span>In some simple instances, such as the counting of forty
+apples, we can with a little care arrive at practical
+certainty. But in general, with more complex instances,
+complete certainty is unattainable. Volumes,
+libraries of volumes, have been written on the subject.
+It is the battle ground of rival philosophers. There
+are two distinct questions involved. There are particular
+definite things observed, and we have to make
+sure that the relations between these things really do
+obey certain definite exact abstract conditions. There
+is great room for error here. The exact observational
+methods of science are all contrivances for limiting
+these erroneous conclusions as to direct matters of fact.
+But another question arises. The things directly observed
+are, almost always, only samples. We want to
+conclude that the abstract conditions, which hold for
+the samples, also hold for all other entities which, for
+some reason or other, appear to us to be of the same
+sort. This process of reasoning from the sample to
+the whole species is Induction. The theory of Induction
+is the despair of philosophy—and yet all our activities
+are based upon it. Anyhow, in criticising a
+mathematical conclusion as to a particular matter of
+fact, the real difficulties consist in finding out the
+abstract assumptions involved, and in estimating the
+evidence for their applicability to the particular case
+in hand.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>It often happens, therefore, that in criticising a
+learned book of applied mathematics, or a memoir,
+one’s whole trouble is with the first chapter, or even
+with the first page. For it is there, at the very outset,
+where the author will probably be found to slip in his
+assumptions. Farther, the trouble is not with what the
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_35'>35</span>author does say, but with what he does not say. Also
+it is not with what he knows he has assumed, but with
+what he has unconsciously assumed. We do not doubt
+the author’s honesty. It is his perspicacity which we
+are criticising. Each generation criticises the unconscious
+assumptions made by its parents. It may assent
+to them, but it brings them out in the open.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The history of the development of language illustrates
+this point. It is a history of the progressive
+analysis of ideas. Latin and Greek were inflected
+languages. This means that they express an unanalyzed
+complex of ideas by the mere modification of a
+word; whereas in English, for example, we use prepositions
+and auxiliary verbs to drag into the open the
+whole bundle of ideas involved. For certain forms of
+literary art,—though not always—the compact absorption
+of auxiliary ideas into the main word may be an
+advantage. But in a language such as English there
+is the overwhelming gain in explicitness. This increased
+explicitness is a more complete exhibition of
+the various abstractions involved in the complex idea
+which is the meaning of the sentence.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>By comparison with language, we can now see what
+is the function in thought which is performed by pure
+mathematics. It is a resolute attempt to go the whole
+way in the direction of complete analysis, so as to
+separate the elements of mere matter of fact from the
+purely abstract conditions which they exemplify.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The habit of such analysis enlightens every act of
+the functioning of the human mind. It first (by isolating
+it) emphasizes the direct aesthetic appreciation
+of the content of experience. This direct appreciation
+means an apprehension of what this experience is in
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_36'>36</span>itself in its own particular essence, including its immediate
+concrete values. This is a question of direct
+experience, dependent upon sensitive subtlety. There
+is then the abstraction of the particular entities involved,
+viewed in themselves, and as apart from that
+particular occasion of experience in which we are
+then apprehending them. Lastly there is the further
+apprehension of the absolutely general conditions satisfied
+by the particular relations of those entities as in
+that experience. These conditions gain their generality
+from the fact that they are expressible without
+reference to those particular relations or to those particular
+relata which occur in that particular occasion
+of experience. They are conditions which might hold
+for an indefinite variety of other occasions, involving
+other entities and other relations between them. Thus
+these conditions are perfectly general because they
+refer to no particular occasion, and to no particular
+entities (such as green, or blue, or trees) which enter
+into a variety of occasions, and to no particular relationships
+between such entities.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>There is, however, a limitation to be made to the
+generality of mathematics; it is a qualification which
+applies equally to all general statements. No statement,
+except one, can be made respecting any remote
+occasion which enters into no relationship with the
+immediate occasion so as to form a constitutive element
+of the essence of that immediate occasion. By
+the ‘immediate occasion’ I mean that occasion which
+involves as an ingredient the individual act of judgment
+in question. The one excepted statement is,—If
+anything out of relationship, then complete ignorance
+as to it. Here by ‘ignorance,’ I mean <em>ignorance</em>;
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_37'>37</span>accordingly no advice can be given as to how to expect
+it, or to treat it, in ‘practice’ or in any other way.
+Either we know something of the remote occasion by
+the cognition which is itself an element of the immediate
+occasion, or we know nothing. Accordingly the
+full universe, disclosed for every variety of experience,
+is a universe in which every detail enters into its
+proper relationship with the immediate occasion. The
+generality of mathematics is the most complete generality
+consistent with the community of occasions
+which constitutes our metaphysical situation.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>It is further to be noticed that the particular entities
+require these general conditions for their ingression
+into any occasions; but the same general conditions
+may be required by many types of particular
+entities. This fact, that the general conditions transcend
+any one set of particular entities, is the ground
+for the entry into mathematics, and into mathematical
+logic, of the notion of the ‘variable.’ It is by the
+employment of this notion that general conditions are
+investigated without any specification of particular
+entities. This irrelevance of the particular entities
+has not been generally understood: for example, the
+shape-iness of shapes, <i>e.g.</i>, circularity and sphericity
+and cubicality as in actual experience, do not enter
+into the geometrical reasoning.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The exercise of logical reason is always concerned
+with these absolutely general conditions. In its broadest
+sense, the discovery of mathematics is the discovery
+that the totality of these general abstract conditions,
+which are concurrently applicable to the relationships
+among the entities of any one concrete occasion,
+are themselves inter-connected in the manner of a
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_38'>38</span>pattern with a key to it. This pattern of relationships
+among general abstract conditions is imposed alike on
+external reality, and on our abstract representations of
+it, by the general necessity that every thing must be
+just its own individual self, with its own individual
+way of differing from everything else. This is nothing
+else than the necessity of abstract logic, which is the
+presupposition involved in the very fact of interrelated
+existence as disclosed in each immediate occasion
+of experience.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The key to the pattern means this fact:—that from
+a select set of those general conditions, exemplified in
+any one and the same occasion, a pattern involving an
+infinite variety of other such conditions, also exemplified
+in the same occasion, can be developed by the
+pure exercise of abstract logic. Any such select set is
+called the set of postulates, or premises, from which
+the reasoning proceeds. The reasoning is nothing else
+than the exhibition of the whole pattern of general
+conditions involved in the pattern derived from the
+selected postulates.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The harmony of the logical reason, which divines
+the complete pattern as involved in the postulates, is
+the most general aesthetic property arising from the
+mere fact of concurrent existence in the unity of one
+occasion. Wherever there is a unity of occasion there
+is thereby established an aesthetic relationship between
+the general conditions involved in that occasion. This
+aesthetic relationship is that which is divined in the
+exercise of rationality. Whatever falls within that
+relationship is thereby exemplified in that occasion;
+whatever falls without that relationship is thereby excluded
+from exemplification in that occasion. The
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_39'>39</span>complete pattern of general conditions, thus exemplified,
+is determined by any one of many select sets of
+these conditions. These key sets are sets of equivalent
+postulates. This reasonable harmony of being, which
+is required for the unity of a complex occasion, together
+with the completeness of the realisation (in that
+occasion) of all that is involved in its logical harmony,
+is the primary article of metaphysical doctrine.
+It means that for things to be together involves that
+they are reasonably together. This means that thought
+can penetrate into every occasion of fact, so that by
+comprehending its key conditions, the whole complex
+of its pattern of conditions lies open before it. It
+comes to this:—provided we know something which is
+perfectly general about the elements in any occasion,
+we can then know an indefinite number of other
+equally general concepts which must also be exemplified
+in that same occasion. The logical harmony involved
+in the unity of an occasion is both exclusive
+and inclusive. The occasion must exclude the inharmonious,
+and it must include the harmonious.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Pythagoras was the first man who had any grasp
+of the full sweep of this general principle. He lived
+in the sixth century before Christ. Our knowledge
+of him is fragmentary. But we know some points
+which establish his greatness in the history of thought.
+He insisted on the importance of the utmost generality
+in reasoning, and he divined the importance of number
+as an aid to the construction of any representation
+of the conditions involved in the order of nature.
+We know also that he studied geometry, and discovered
+the general proof of the remarkable theorem
+about right-angled triangles. The formation of the
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_40'>40</span>Pythagorean Brotherhood, and the mysterious rumours
+as to its rites and its influence, afford some evidence
+that Pythagoras divined, however dimly, the
+possible importance of mathematics in the formation
+of science. On the side of philosophy he started a
+discussion which has agitated thinkers ever since.
+He asked, ‘What is the status of mathematical entities,
+such as numbers for example, in the realm of things?’
+The number ‘two,’ for example, is in some sense exempt
+from the flux of time and the necessity of position
+in space. Yet it is involved in the real world.
+The same considerations apply to geometrical notions—to
+circular shape, for example. Pythagoras is said
+to have taught that the mathematical entities, such as
+numbers and shapes, were the ultimate stuff out of
+which the real entities of our perceptual experience
+are constructed. As thus boldly stated, the idea seems
+crude, and indeed silly. But undoubtedly, he had hit
+upon a philosophical notion of considerable importance;
+a notion which has a long history, and which
+has moved the minds of men, and has even entered into
+Christian theology. About a thousand years separate
+the Athanasian Creed from Pythagoras, and about two
+thousand four hundred years separate Pythagoras
+from Hegel. Yet for all these distances in time, the
+importance of definite number in the constitution of
+the Divine Nature, and the concept of the real world
+as exhibiting the evolution of an idea, can both be
+traced back to the train of thought set going by
+Pythagoras.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>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. In this respect
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_41'>41</span>Pythagoras was fortunate. His philosophical speculations
+reach us through the mind of Plato. The
+Platonic world of ideas is the refined, revised form of
+the Pythagorean doctrine that number lies at the base
+of the real world. Owing to the Greek mode of representing
+numbers by patterns of dots, the notions of
+number and of geometrical configuration are less separated
+than with us. Also Pythagoras, without doubt,
+included the shape-iness of shape, which is an impure
+mathematical entity. So to-day, when Einstein and his
+followers proclaim that physical facts, such as gravitation,
+are to be construed as exhibitions of local
+peculiarities of spatio-temporal properties, they are
+following the pure Pythagorean tradition. In a sense,
+Plato and Pythagoras stand nearer to modern physical
+science than does Aristotle. The two former were
+mathematicians, whereas Aristotle was the son of a
+doctor, though of course he was not thereby ignorant
+of mathematics. The practical counsel to be derived
+from Pythagoras, is to measure, and thus to express
+quality in terms of numerically determined quantity.
+But the biological sciences, then and till our own time,
+have been overwhelmingly classificatory. Accordingly,
+Aristotle by his Logic throws the emphasis on
+classification. The popularity of Aristotelian Logic
+retarded the advance of physical science throughout
+the Middle Ages. If only the schoolmen had measured
+instead of classifying, how much they might have
+learnt!</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Classification is a halfway house between the immediate
+concreteness of the individual thing and the
+complete abstraction of mathematical notions. The
+species take account of the specific character, and the
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_42'>42</span>genera of the generic character. But in the procedure
+of relating mathematical notions to the facts of nature,
+by counting, by measurement, and by geometrical relations,
+and by types of order, the rational contemplation
+is lifted from the incomplete abstractions involved
+in definite species and genera, to the complete,
+abstractions of mathematics. Classification is necessary.
+But unless you can progress from classification
+to mathematics, your reasoning will not take you very
+far.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Between the epoch which stretches from Pythagoras
+to Plato and the epoch comprised in the seventeenth
+century of the modern world nearly two thousand
+years elapsed. In this long interval mathematics
+had made immense strides. Geometry had gained
+the study of conic sections and trigonometry; the
+method of exhaustion had almost anticipated the
+integral calculus; and above all the Arabic arithmetical
+notation and algebra had been contributed by
+Asiatic thought. But the progress was on technical
+lines. Mathematics, as a formative element in the
+development of philosophy, never, during this long
+period, recovered from its deposition at the hands of
+Aristotle. Some of the old ideas derived from the
+Pythagorean-Platonic epoch lingered on, and can be
+traced among the Platonic influences which shaped
+the first period of evolution of Christian theology.
+But philosophy received no fresh inspiration from
+the steady advance of mathematical science. In the
+seventeenth century the influence of Aristotle was at
+its lowest, and mathematics recovered the importance
+of its earlier period. It was an age of great physicists
+and great philosophers; and the physicists and philosophers
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_43'>43</span>were alike mathematicians. The exception of
+John Locke should be made; although he was greatly
+influenced by the Newtonian circle of the Royal
+Society. In the age of Galileo, Descartes, Spinoza,
+Newton, and Leibniz, mathematics was an influence of
+the first magnitude in the formation of philosophic
+ideas. But the mathematics, which now emerged into
+prominence, was a very different science from the
+mathematics of the earlier epoch. It had gained in
+generality, and had started upon its almost incredible
+modern career of piling subtlety of generalization
+upon subtlety of generalization; and of finding, with
+each growth of complexity, some new application,
+either to physical science, or to philosophic thought.
+The Arabic notation had equipped the science with
+almost perfect technical efficiency in the manipulation
+of numbers. This relief from a struggle with
+arithmetical details (as instanced, for example, in the
+Egyptian arithmetic of B. C. 1600) gave room for a
+development which had already been faintly anticipated
+in later Greek mathematics. Algebra now came
+upon the scene, and algebra is a generalisation of
+arithmetic. In the same way as the notion of number
+abstracted from reference to any one particular set
+of entities, so in algebra abstraction is made from the
+notion of any particular numbers. Just as the number
+‘5’ refers impartially to any group of five entities, so
+in algebra the letters are used to refer impartially to
+any number, with the proviso that each letter is to
+refer to the same number throughout the same context
+of its employment.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>This usage was first employed in equations, which
+are methods of asking complicated arithmetical questions.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_44'>44</span>In this connection, the letters representing
+numbers were termed ‘unknowns.’ But equations
+soon suggested a new idea, that, namely, of a function
+of one or more general symbols, these symbols being
+letters representing any numbers. In this employment
+the algebraic letters are called the ‘arguments’
+of the function, or sometimes they are called the ‘variables.’
+Then, for instance, if an angle is represented
+by an algebraical letter, as standing for its numerical
+measure in terms of a given unit, Trigonometry is
+absorbed into this new algebra. Algebra thus develops
+into the general science of analysis in which
+we consider the properties of various functions of
+undetermined arguments. Finally the particular functions,
+such as the trigonometrical functions, and the
+logarithmic functions, and the algebraic functions,
+are generalised into the idea of ‘any function.’ Too
+large a generalisation leads to mere barrenness. It is
+the large generalisation, limited by a happy particularity,
+which is the fruitful conception. For instance
+the idea of any <em>continuous</em> function, whereby the limitation
+of continuity is introduced, is the fruitful idea
+which has led to most of the important applications.
+This rise of algebraic analysis was concurrent with
+Descartes’ discovery of analytical geometry, and then
+with the invention of the infinitesimal calculus by
+Newton and Leibniz. Truly, Pythagoras, if he could
+have foreseen the issue of the train of thought which
+he had set going would have felt himself fully justified
+in his brotherhood with its excitement of mysterious
+rites.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The point which I now want to make is that this
+dominance of the idea of functionality in the abstract
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_45'>45</span>sphere of mathematics found itself reflected in the
+order of nature under the guise of mathematically
+expressed laws of nature. Apart from this progress
+of mathematics, the seventeenth century developments
+of science would have been impossible. Mathematics
+supplied the background of imaginative thought with
+which the men of science approached the observation
+of nature. Galileo produced formulae, Descartes
+produced formulae, Huyghens produced formulae,
+Newton produced formulae.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>As a particular example of the effect of the abstract
+development of mathematics upon the science of those
+times, consider the notion of periodicity. The general
+recurrences of things are very obvious in our ordinary
+experience. Days recur, lunar phases recur, the seasons
+of the year recur, rotating bodies recur to their
+old positions, beats of the heart recur, breathing recurs.
+On every side, we are met by recurrence. Apart from
+recurrence, knowledge would be impossible; for nothing
+could be referred to our past experience. Also,
+apart from some regularity of recurrence, measurement
+would be impossible. In our experience, as we
+gain the idea of exactness, recurrence is fundamental.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the theory
+of periodicity took a fundamental place in science.
+Kepler divined a law connecting the major axes of the
+planetary orbits with the periods in which the planets
+respectively described their orbits: Galileo observed
+the periodic vibrations of pendulums: Newton explained
+sound as being due to the disturbance of air
+by the passage through it of periodic waves of condensation
+and rarefaction: Huyghens explained light as
+being due to the transverse waves of vibration of a
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_46'>46</span>subtle ether: Mersenne connected the period of the
+vibration of a violin string with its density, tension,
+and length. The birth of modern physics depended
+upon the application of the abstract idea of periodicity
+to a variety of concrete instances. But this would have
+been impossible, unless mathematicians had already
+worked out in the abstract the various abstract ideas
+which cluster round the notions of periodicity. The
+science of trigonometry arose from that of the relations
+of the angles of a right-angled triangle, to the ratios
+between the sides and hypotenuse of the triangle.
+Then, under the influence of the newly discovered
+mathematical science of the analysis of functions, it
+broadened out into the study of the simple abstract
+periodic functions which these ratios exemplify. Thus
+trigonometry became completely abstract; and in thus
+becoming abstract, it became useful. It illuminated
+the underlying analogy between sets of utterly diverse
+physical phenomena; and at the same time it supplied
+the weapons by which any one such set could have its
+various features analysed and related to each other.<a id='r2' /><a href='#f2' class='c013'><sup>[2]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Nothing is more impressive than the fact that, as
+mathematics withdrew increasingly into the upper
+regions of ever greater extremes of abstract thought,
+it returned back to earth with a corresponding growth
+of importance for the analysis of concrete fact. The
+history of the seventeenth century science reads as
+though it were some vivid dream of Plato or Pythagoras.
+In this characteristic the seventeenth century
+was only the forerunner of its successors.</p>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f2'>
+<p class='c001'><a href='#r2'>2</a>. For a more detailed consideration of the nature and function
+of pure mathematics <i>cf.</i> my <cite>Introduction to Mathematics</cite>, Home
+University Library, Williams and Norgate, London.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c001'><span class='pageno' id='Page_47'>47</span>The paradox is now fully established that the utmost
+abstractions are the true weapons with which to
+control our thought of concrete fact. As the result
+of the prominence of mathematicians in the seventeenth
+century, the eighteenth century was mathematically
+minded, more especially where French influence
+predominated. An exception must be made of
+the English empiricism derived from Locke. Outside
+France, Newton’s direct influence on philosophy is
+best seen in Kant, and not in Hume.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In the nineteenth century, the general influence of
+mathematics waned. The romantic movement in
+literature, and the idealistic movement in philosophy
+were not the products of mathematical minds. Also,
+even in science, the growth of geology, of zoology, and
+of the biological sciences generally, was in each case
+entirely disconnected from any reference to mathematics.
+The chief scientific excitement of the century
+was the Darwinian theory of evolution. Accordingly,
+mathematicians were in the background, so far as the
+general thought of that age was concerned. But this
+does not mean that mathematics was being neglected,
+or even that it was uninfluential. During the nineteenth
+century pure mathematics made almost as
+much progress as during all the preceding centuries
+from Pythagoras onwards. Of course progress was
+easier, because the technique had been perfected. But
+allowing for that, the change in mathematics between
+the years 1800 and 1900 is very remarkable. If we
+add in the previous hundred years, and take the two
+centuries preceding the present time, one is almost
+tempted to date the foundation of mathematics somewhere
+in the last quarter of the seventeenth century.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_48'>48</span>The period of the discovery of the elements stretches
+from Pythagoras to Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz,
+and the developed science has been created during the
+last two hundred and fifty years. This is not a boast
+as to the superior genius of the modern world; for it is
+harder to discover the elements than to develop the
+science.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Throughout the nineteenth century, the influence of
+the science was its influence on dynamics and physics,
+and thence derivatively on engineering and chemistry.
+It is difficult to overrate its indirect influence
+on human life through the medium of these sciences.
+But there was no direct influence of mathematics
+upon the general thought of the age.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In reviewing this rapid sketch of the influence of
+mathematics throughout European history, we see
+that it had two great periods of direct influence upon
+general thought, both periods lasting for about two
+hundred years. The first period was that stretching
+from Pythagoras to Plato, when the possibility of the
+science, and its general character, first dawned upon
+the Grecian thinkers. The second period comprised
+the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of our modern
+epoch. Both periods had certain common characteristics.
+In the earlier, as in the later period, the
+general categories of thought in many spheres of human
+interest, were in a state of disintegration. In the
+age of Pythagoras, the unconscious Paganism, with
+its traditional clothing of beautiful ritual and of magical
+rites, was passing into a new phase under two
+influences. There were waves of religious enthusiasm,
+seeking direct enlightenment into the secret depths of
+being; and at the opposite pole, there was the awakening
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_49'>49</span>of critical analytical thought, probing with cool
+dispassionateness into ultimate meanings. In both
+influences, so diverse in their outcome, there was one
+common element—an awakened curiosity, and a movement
+towards the reconstruction of traditional ways.
+The pagan mysteries may be compared to the Puritan
+reaction and to the Catholic reaction; critical
+scientific interest was alike in both epochs, though
+with minor differences of substantial importance.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In each age, the earlier stages were placed in
+periods of rising prosperity, and of new opportunities.
+In this respect, they differed from the period of gradual
+declension in the second and third centuries when
+Christianity was advancing to the conquest of the
+Roman world. It is only in a period, fortunate both
+in its opportunities for disengagement from the immediate
+pressure of circumstances, and in its eager
+curiosity, that the Age-Spirit can undertake any direct
+revision of those final abstractions which lie hidden
+in the more concrete concepts from which the serious
+thought of an age takes its start. In the rare periods
+when this task can be undertaken, mathematics becomes
+relevant to philosophy. For mathematics is
+the science of the most complete abstractions to which
+the human mind can attain.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The parallel between the two epochs must not be
+pressed too far. The modern world is larger and
+more complex than the ancient civilization round the
+shores of the Mediterranean, or even than that of the
+Europe which sent Columbus and the Pilgrim Fathers
+across the ocean. We cannot now explain our age
+by some simple formula which becomes dominant
+and will then be laid to rest for a thousand years.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_50'>50</span>Thus the temporary submergence of the mathematical
+mentality from the time of Rousseau onwards appears
+already to be at an end. 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In order to explain exactly how mathematics is
+gaining in general importance at the present time, let
+us start from a particular scientific perplexity and
+consider the notions to which we are naturally led by
+some attempt to unravel its difficulties. At present
+physics is troubled by the quantum theory. I need not
+now explain<a id='r3' /><a href='#f3' class='c013'><sup>[3]</sup></a> what this theory is, to those who are not
+already familiar with it. But the point is that one
+of the most hopeful lines of explanation is to assume
+that an electron does not continuously traverse its
+path in space. The alternative notion as to its mode
+of existence is that it appears at a series of discrete
+positions in space which it occupies for successive
+durations of time. It is as though an automobile
+moving at the average rate of thirty miles an hour
+along a road, did not traverse the road continuously;
+but appeared successively at the successive milestones,
+remaining for two minutes at each milestone.</p>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f3'>
+<p class='c001'><a href='#r3'>3</a>. <i>Cf.</i> Chapter VIII.</p>
+</div>
+<p class='c001'>In the first place there is required the purely technical
+use of mathematics to determine whether this
+conception does in fact explain the many perplexing
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_51'>51</span>characteristics of the quantum theory. If the notion
+survives this test, undoubtedly physics will adopt it.
+So far the question is purely one for mathematics and
+physical science to settle between them, on the basis
+of mathematical calculations and physical observations.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>But now a problem is handed over to the philosophers.
+This discontinuous existence in space, thus assigned
+to electrons, is very unlike the continuous existence
+of material entities which we habitually assume
+as obvious. The electron seems to be borrowing
+the character which some people have assigned
+to the Mahatmas of Tibet. These electrons, with the
+correlative protons, are now conceived as being the
+fundamental entities out of which the material bodies
+of ordinary experience are composed. Accordingly,
+if this explanation is allowed, we have to revise all our
+notions of the ultimate character of material existence.
+For when we penetrate to these final entities, this
+startling discontinuity of spatial existence discloses
+itself.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>There is no difficulty in explaining the paradox, if
+we consent to apply to the apparently steady undifferentiated
+endurance of matter the same principles as
+those now accepted for sound and light. A steadily
+sounding note is explained as the outcome of vibrations
+in the air: a steady colour is explained as the
+outcome of vibrations in ether. If we explain the
+steady endurance of matter on the same principle, we
+shall conceive each primordial element as a vibratory
+ebb and flow of an underlying energy, or activity.
+Suppose we keep to the physical idea of energy: then
+each primordial element will be an organized system
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_52'>52</span>of vibratory streaming of energy. Accordingly there
+will be a definite period associated with each element;
+and within that period the stream-system will sway
+from one stationary maximum to another stationary
+maximum,—or, taking a metaphor from the ocean
+tides, the system will sway from one high tide to another
+high tide. This system, forming the primordial
+element, is nothing at any instant. It requires its whole
+period in which to manifest itself. In an analogous
+way, a note of music is nothing at an instant, but it
+also requires its whole period in which to manifest
+itself.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Accordingly, in asking where the primordial element
+is, we must settle on its average position at the
+centre of each period. If we divide time into smaller
+elements, the vibratory system as one electronic entity
+has no existence. The path in space of such a
+vibratory entity—where the entity is <em>constituted by</em>
+the vibrations—must be represented by a series of detached
+positions in space, analogously to the automobile
+which is found at successive milestones and at
+nowhere between.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>We first must ask whether there is any evidence to
+associate the quantum theory with vibration. This
+question is immediately answered in the affirmative.
+The whole theory centres round the radiant energy
+from an atom, and is intimately associated with the
+periods of the radiant wave-systems. It seems, therefore,
+that the hypothesis of essentially vibratory existence
+is the most hopeful way of explaining the paradox
+of the discontinuous orbit.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In the second place, a new problem is now placed
+before philosophers and physicists, if we entertain the
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_53'>53</span>hypothesis that the ultimate elements of matter are in
+their essence vibratory. By this I mean that apart
+from being a periodic system, such an element would
+have no existence. With this hypothesis we have to
+ask, what are the ingredients which form the vibratory
+organism. We have already got rid of the matter
+with its appearance of undifferentiated endurance.
+Apart from some metaphysical compulsion, there is no
+reason to provide another more subtle stuff to take the
+place of the matter which has just been explained
+away. The field is now open for the introduction of
+some new doctrine of organism which may take the
+place of the materialism with which, since the seventeenth
+century, science has saddled philosophy. It
+must be remembered that the physicists’ energy is obviously
+an abstraction. The concrete fact, which is
+the organism, must be a complete expression of the
+character of a real occurrence. Such a displacement
+of scientific materialism, if it ever takes place, cannot
+fail to have important consequences in every field of
+thought.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Finally, our last reflection must be, that we have in
+the end come back to a version of the doctrine of old
+Pythagoras, from whom mathematics, and mathematical
+physics, took their rise. He discovered the importance
+of dealing with abstractions; and in particular
+directed attention to number as characterizing the
+periodicities of notes of music. The importance of
+the abstract idea of periodicity was thus present at the
+very beginning both of mathematics and of European
+philosophy.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In the seventeenth century, the birth of modern
+science required a new mathematics, more fully
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_54'>54</span>equipped for the purpose of analysing the characteristics
+of vibratory existence. And now in the twentieth
+century we find physicists largely engaged in analysing
+the periodicities of atoms. Truly, Pythagoras in
+founding European philosophy and European mathematics,
+endowed them with the luckiest of lucky
+guesses—or, was it a flash of divine genius, penetrating
+to the inmost nature of things?</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_55'>55</span>
+  <h2 class='c006'>CHAPTER III <br /> <br /> THE CENTURY OF GENIUS</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'>The previous chapters were devoted to the antecedent
+conditions which prepared the soil for the scientific
+outburst of the seventeenth century. They traced the
+various elements of thought and instinctive belief,
+from their first efflorescence in the classical civilisation
+of the ancient world, through the transformations
+which they underwent in the Middle Ages, up to the
+historical revolt of the sixteenth century. Three
+main factors arrested attention,—the rise of mathematics,
+the instinctive belief in a detailed order of
+nature, and the unbridled rationalism of the thought
+of the later Middle Ages. By this rationalism I mean
+the belief that the avenue to truth was predominantly
+through a metaphysical analysis of the nature of
+things, which would thereby determine how things
+acted and functioned. The historical revolt was the
+definite abandonment of this method in favour of the
+study of the empirical facts of antecedents and consequences.
+In religion, it meant the appeal to the
+origins of Christianity; and in science it meant the
+appeal to experiment and the inductive method of
+reasoning.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>A brief, and sufficiently accurate, description of the
+intellectual life of the European races during the succeeding
+two centuries and a quarter up to our own
+times is that they have been living upon the accumulated
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_56'>56</span>capital of ideas provided for them by the genius
+of the seventeenth century. The men of this epoch
+inherited a ferment of ideas attendant upon the historical
+revolt of the sixteenth century, and they bequeathed
+formed systems of thought touching every
+aspect of human life. It is the one century which consistently,
+and throughout the whole range of human
+activities, provided intellectual genius adequate for
+the greatness of its occasions. The crowded stage of
+this hundred years is indicated by the coincidences
+which mark its literary annals. At its dawn Bacon’s
+<cite>Advancement of Learning</cite> and Cervantes’ <cite>Don Quixote</cite>
+were published in the same year (1605), as though
+the epoch would introduce itself with a forward and
+a backward glance. The first quarto edition of <cite>Hamlet</cite>
+appeared in the preceding year, and a slightly variant
+edition in the same year. Finally Shakespeare
+and Cervantes died on the same day, April 23, 1616.
+In the spring of this same year Harvey is believed to
+have first expounded his theory of the circulation of
+the blood in a course of lectures before the College of
+Physicians in London. Newton was born in the year
+that Galileo died (1642), exactly one hundred years
+after the publication of Copernicus’ <span lang="la" xml:lang="la"><cite>De Revolutionibus</cite></span>.
+One year earlier Descartes published his <span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"><cite>Meditationes</cite></span>
+and two years later his <span lang="la" xml:lang="la"><cite>Principia Philosophiae</cite></span>.
+There simply was not time for the century to
+space out nicely its notable events concerning men of
+genius.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>I cannot now enter upon a chronicle of the various
+stages of intellectual advance included within this
+epoch. It is too large a topic for one lecture, and
+would obscure the ideas which it is my purpose to
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_57'>57</span>develop. A mere rough catalogue of some names will
+be sufficient, names of men who published to the world
+important work within these limits of time: Francis
+Bacon, Harvey, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Pascal,
+Huyghens, Boyle, Newton, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz.
+I have limited the list to the sacred number of twelve,
+a number much too small to be properly representative.
+For example, there is only one Italian there,
+whereas Italy could have filled the list from its own
+ranks. Again Harvey is the only biologist, and also
+there are too many Englishmen. This latter defect
+is partly due to the fact that the lecturer is English,
+and that he is lecturing to an audience which, equally
+with him, owns this English century. If he had been
+Dutch, there would have been too many Dutchmen;
+if Italian, too many Italians; and if French, too many
+Frenchmen. The unhappy Thirty Years’ War was
+devastating Germany; but every other country looks
+back to this century as an epoch which witnessed some
+culmination of its genius. Certainly this was a great
+period of English thought; as at a later time Voltaire
+impressed upon France.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The omission of physiologists, other than Harvey,
+also requires explanation. There were, of course,
+great advances in biology within the century, chiefly
+associated with Italy and the University of Padua.
+But my purpose is to trace the philosophic outlook,
+derived from science and presupposed by science, and
+to estimate some of its effects on the general climate
+of each age. Now the scientific <a id='corr57.30'></a><span class='htmlonly'><ins class='correction' title='philosopy'>philosophy</ins></span><span class='epubonly'><a href='#c_57.30'><ins class='correction' title='philosopy'>philosophy</ins></a></span> of this age
+was dominated by physics; so as to be the most obvious
+rendering, in terms of general ideas, of the state of
+physical knowledge of that age and of the two succeeding
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_58'>58</span>centuries. As a matter of fact, these concepts are
+very unsuited to biology; and set for it an insoluble
+problem of matter and life and organism, with which
+biologists are now wrestling. But the science of living
+organisms is only now coming to a growth adequate to
+impress its conceptions upon philosophy. The last
+half century before the present time has witnessed unsuccessful
+attempts to impress biological notions upon
+the materialism of the seventeenth century. However
+this success be estimated, it is certain that the root
+ideas of the seventeenth century were derived from the
+school of thought which produced Galileo, Huyghens
+and Newton, and not from the physiologists of Padua.
+One unsolved problem of thought, so far as it derives
+from this period, is to be formulated thus: Given configurations
+of matter with locomotion in space as assigned
+by physical laws, to account for living organisms.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>My discussion of the epoch will be best introduced
+by a quotation from Francis Bacon, which forms the
+opening of Section (or ‘Century’) IX of his <cite>Natural
+History</cite>, I mean his <span lang="la" xml:lang="la"><cite>Silva Silvarum</cite></span>. We are told in
+the contemporary memoir by his chaplain, Dr. Rawley,
+that this work was composed in the last five years
+of his life, so it must be dated between 1620 and 1626.
+The quotation runs thus:</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>“It is certain that all bodies whatsoever, though
+they have no sense, yet they have perception; for when
+one body is applied to another, there is a kind of election
+to embrace that which is agreeable, and to exclude
+or expel that which is ingrate; and whether the body
+be alterant or altered, evermore a perception precedeth
+operation; for else all bodies would be like one
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_59'>59</span>to another. And sometimes this perception, in some
+kind of bodies, is far more subtile than sense; so that
+sense is but a dull thing in comparison of it: we see a
+weatherglass will find the least difference of the
+weather in heat or cold, when we find it not. And this
+perception is sometimes at a distance, as well as upon
+the touch; as when the loadstone draweth iron; or
+flame naphtha of Babylon, a great distance off. It is
+therefore a subject of a very noble enquiry, to enquire
+of the more subtile perceptions; for it is another key
+to open nature, as well as the sense; and sometimes
+better. And besides, it is a principal means of natural
+divination; for that which in these perceptions
+appeareth early, in the great effects cometh long
+after.”</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>There are a great many points of interest about this
+quotation, some of which will emerge into importance
+in succeeding lectures. In the first place, note the
+careful way in which Bacon discriminates between
+<em>perception</em>, or <em>taking account of</em>, on the one hand, and
+<em>sense</em>, or <em>cognitive experience</em>, on the other hand. In
+this respect Bacon is outside the physical line of
+thought which finally dominated the century. Later
+on, people thought of passive matter which was operated
+on externally by forces. I believe Bacon’s line
+of thought to have expressed a more fundamental
+truth than do the materialistic concepts which were
+then being shaped as adequate for physics. We are
+now so used to the materialistic way of looking at
+things, which has been rooted in our literature by the
+genius of the seventeenth century, that it is with some
+difficulty that we understand the possibility of another
+mode of approach to the problems of nature.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'><span class='pageno' id='Page_60'>60</span>In the particular instance of the quotation which
+I have just made, the whole passage and the context in
+which it is embedded, are permeated through and
+through by the experimental method, that is to say, by
+attention to ‘irreducible and stubborn facts’, and by
+the inductive method of eliciting general laws. Another
+unsolved problem which has been bequeathed
+to us by the seventeenth century is the rational justification
+of this method of Induction. The explicit
+realisation of the antithesis between the deductive rationalism
+of the scholastics and the inductive observational
+methods of the moderns must chiefly be ascribed
+to Bacon; though, of course, it was implicit in the
+mind of Galileo and of all the men of science of those
+times. But Bacon was one of the earliest of the whole
+group, and also had the most direct apprehension of
+the full extent of the intellectual revolution which was
+in progress. Perhaps the man who most completely
+anticipated both Bacon and the whole modern point
+of view was the artist Leonardo Da Vinci, who lived
+almost exactly a century before Bacon. Leonardo
+also illustrates the theory which I was advancing in
+my last lecture, that the rise of naturalistic art was an
+important ingredient in the formation of our scientific
+mentality. Indeed, Leonardo was more completely
+a man of science than was Bacon. The practice
+of naturalistic art is more akin to the practice of
+physics, chemistry and biology than is the practice
+of law. We all remember the saying of Bacon’s contemporary,
+Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation
+of the blood, that Bacon ‘wrote of science like a Lord
+Chancellor.’ But at the beginning of the modern
+period Da Vinci and Bacon stand together as illustrating
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_61'>61</span>the various strains which have combined to
+form the modern world, namely, legal mentality and
+the patient observational habits of the naturalistic
+artists.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In the passage which I have quoted from Bacon’s
+writings there is no explicit mention of the method
+of inductive reasoning. It is unnecessary for me to
+prove to you by any quotations that the enforcement
+of the importance of this method, and of the importance,
+to the welfare of mankind, of the secrets of nature
+to be thus discovered, was one of the main themes
+to which Bacon devoted himself in his writings. Induction
+has proved to be a somewhat more complex
+process than Bacon anticipated. He had in his mind
+the belief that with a sufficient care in the collection
+of instances the general law would stand out of itself.
+We know now, and probably Harvey knew then, that
+this is a very inadequate account of the processes
+which issue in scientific generalisations. But when
+you have made all the requisite deductions, Bacon
+remains as one of the great builders who constructed
+the mind of the modern world.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The special difficulties raised by induction emerged
+in the eighteenth century, as the result of Hume’s criticism.
+But Bacon was one of the prophets of the
+historical revolt, which deserted the method of
+unrelieved rationalism, and rushed into the other extreme
+of basing all fruitful knowledge upon inference
+from particular occasions in the past to particular
+occasions in the future. I do not wish to throw any
+doubt upon the validity of induction, when it has been
+properly guarded. My point is, that the very baffling
+task of applying reason to elicit the general characteristics
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_62'>62</span>of the immediate occasion, as set before us in
+direct cognition, is a necessary preliminary, if we are
+to justify induction; unless indeed we are content to
+base it upon our vague instinct that of course it is all
+right. Either there is something about the immediate
+occasion which affords knowledge of the past and the
+future, or we are reduced to utter scepticism as to
+memory and induction. It is impossible to over-emphasise
+the point that the key to the process of induction,
+as used either in science or in our ordinary
+life, is to be found in the right understanding of the
+immediate occasion of knowledge in its full concreteness.
+It is in respect to our grasp of the character of
+these occasions in their concreteness that the modern
+developments of physiology and of psychology are of
+critical importance. I shall illustrate this point in my
+subsequent lectures. We find ourselves amid insoluble
+difficulties when we substitute for this concrete occasion
+a mere abstract in which we only consider material
+objects in a flux of configurations in time and space.
+It is quite obvious that such objects can tell us only
+that they are where they are.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Accordingly, we must recur to the method of the
+school-divinity as explained by the Italian medievalists
+whom I quoted in the first lecture. We must
+observe the immediate occasion, and <em>use reason</em> to
+elicit a general description of its nature. Induction
+presupposes metaphysics. In other words, it rests
+upon an antecedent rationalism. You cannot have a
+rational justification for your appeal to history till
+your metaphysics has assured you that there <em>is</em> a history
+to appeal to; and likewise your conjectures as to
+the future presuppose some basis of knowledge that
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_63'>63</span>there <em>is</em> a future already subjected to some determinations.
+The difficulty is to make sense of either of these
+ideas. But unless you have done so, you have made
+nonsense of induction.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>You will observe that I do not hold Induction to be
+in its essence the derivation of general laws. It is the
+divination of some characteristics of a particular future
+from the known characteristics of a particular
+past. The wider assumption of general laws holding
+for all cognisable occasions appears a very unsafe
+addendum to attach to this limited knowledge. All
+we can ask of the present occasion is that it shall determine
+a particular community of occasions, which
+are in some respects mutually qualified by reason of
+their inclusion within that same community. That
+community of occasions considered in physical science
+is the set of happenings which fit on to each other—as
+we say—in a common space-time, so that we can
+trace the transitions from one to the other. Accordingly,
+we refer to <em>the</em> common space-time indicated in
+our immediate occasion of knowledge. Inductive reasoning
+proceeds from the particular occasion to the
+particular community of occasions, and from the particular
+community to relations between particular occasions
+within that community. Until we have taken
+into account other scientific concepts, it is impossible
+to carry the discussion of induction further than this
+preliminary conclusion.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The third point to notice about this quotation from
+Bacon is the purely qualitative character of the statements
+made in it. In this respect Bacon completely
+missed the tonality which lay behind the success of
+seventeenth century science. Science was becoming,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_64'>64</span>and has remained, primarily quantitative. Search for
+measurable elements among your phenomena, and
+then search for relations between these measures of
+physical quantities. Bacon ignores this rule of science.
+For example, in the quotation given he speaks of action
+at a distance; but he is thinking qualitatively and
+not quantitatively. We cannot ask that he should anticipate
+his younger contemporary Galileo, or his
+distant successor Newton. But he gives no hint that
+there should be a search for quantities. Perhaps he
+was misled by the current logical doctrines which had
+come down from Aristotle. For, in effect, these doctrines
+said to the physicist ‘<em>classify</em>’ when they should
+have said ‘<em>measure</em>.’</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>By the end of the century physics had been founded
+on a satisfactory basis of measurement. The final and
+adequate exposition was given by Newton. The common
+measurable element of <em>mass</em> was discerned as
+characterising all bodies in different amounts. Bodies
+which are apparently identical in substance, shape,
+and size have very approximately the same mass: the
+closer the identity, the nearer the equality. The force
+acting on a body, whether by touch or by action at a
+distance, was [in effect] defined as being equal to the
+mass of the body multiplied by the rate of change of
+the body’s velocity, so far as this rate of change is
+produced by that force. In this way the force is discerned
+by its effect on the motion of the body. The
+question now arises whether this conception of the
+magnitude of a force leads to the discovery of simple
+quantitative laws involving the alternative determination
+of forces by circumstances of the configuration of
+substances and of their physical characters. The Newtonian
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_65'>65</span>conception has been brilliantly successful in
+surviving this test throughout the whole modern
+period. Its first triumph was the law of gravitation.
+Its cumulative triumph has been the whole development
+of dynamical astronomy, of engineering, and
+of physics.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>This subject of the formation of the three laws of
+motion and of the law of gravitation deserves critical
+attention. The whole development of thought
+occupied exactly two generations. It commenced with
+Galileo and ended with Newton’s <span lang="la" xml:lang="la"><cite>Principia</cite></span>; and
+Newton was born in the year that Galileo died. Also
+the lives of Descartes and Huyghens fall within the
+period occupied by these great terminal figures. The
+issue of the combined labours of these four men has
+some right to be considered as the greatest single intellectual
+success which mankind has achieved. In
+estimating its size, we must consider the completeness
+of its range. It constructs for us a vision of the material
+universe, and it enables us to calculate the minutest
+detail of a particular occurrence. Galileo took
+the first step in hitting on the right line of thought.
+He noted that the critical point to attend to was not
+the motion of bodies but the changes of their motions.
+Galileo’s discovery is formularised by Newton in his
+first law of motion:—“Every body continues in its
+state of rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line,
+except so far as it may be compelled by force to
+change that state.”</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>This formula contains the repudiation of a belief
+which had blocked the progress of physics for two
+thousand years. It also deals with a fundamental
+concept which is essential to scientific theory; I mean,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_66'>66</span>the concept of an ideally isolated system. This conception
+embodies a fundamental character of things,
+without which science, or indeed any knowledge on
+the part of finite intellects, would be impossible. The
+‘isolated’ system is not a solipsist system, apart from
+which there would be nonentity. It is isolated as
+within the universe. This means that there are truths
+respecting this system which require reference only to
+the remainder of things by way of a uniform systematic
+scheme of relationships. Thus the conception of an
+isolated system is not the conception of substantial independence
+from the remainder of things, but of freedom
+from casual contingent dependence upon detailed
+items within the rest of the universe. Further, this
+freedom from casual dependence is required only in
+respect to certain abstract characteristics which attach
+to the isolated system, and not in respect to the system
+in its full concreteness.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The first law of motion asks what is to be said of
+a dynamically isolated system so far as concerns its
+motion as a whole, abstracting from its orientation and
+its internal arrangement of parts. Aristotle said that
+you must conceive such a system to be at rest. Galileo
+added that the state of rest is only a particular case,
+and that the general statement is ‘either in a state of
+rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line.’ Accordingly,
+an Aristotelean would conceive the forces
+arising from the reaction of alien bodies as being
+quantitatively measurable in terms of the velocity they
+sustain, and as directively determined by the direction
+of that velocity; while the Galilean would direct attention
+to the magnitude of the acceleration and to its
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_67'>67</span>direction. This difference is illustrated by contrasting
+Kepler and Newton. They both speculated as to
+the forces sustaining the planets in their orbits. Kepler
+looked for tangential forces pushing the planets
+along, whereas Newton looked for radial forces diverting
+the directions of the planets’ motions.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Instead of dwelling upon the mistake which Aristotle
+made, it is more profitable to emphasise the justification
+which he had for it, if we consider the obvious
+facts of our experience. All the motions which
+enter into our normal everyday experience cease unless
+they are evidently sustained from the outside.
+Apparently, therefore, the sound empiricist must devote
+his attention to this question of the sustenance of
+motion. We here hit upon one of the dangers of unimaginative
+empiricism. The seventeenth century exhibits
+another example of this same danger; and, of
+all people in the world, Newton fell into it. Huyghens
+had produced the wave theory of light. But this
+theory failed to account for the most obvious facts
+about light as in our ordinary experience, namely, that
+shadows cast by obstructing objects are defined by
+rectilinear rays. Accordingly, Newton rejected this
+theory and adopted the corpuscular theory which
+completely explained shadows. Since then both theories
+have had their periods of triumph. At the present
+moment the scientific world is seeking for a combination
+of the two. These examples illustrate the
+danger of refusing to entertain an idea because of its
+failure to explain one of the most obvious facts in the
+subject matter in question. If you have had your attention
+directed to the novelties in thought in your
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_68'>68</span>own lifetime, you will have observed that almost all
+really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness
+when they are first produced.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Returning to the laws of motion, it is noticeable
+that no reason was produced in the seventeenth century
+for the Galilean as distinct from the Aristotelian
+position. It was an ultimate fact. When in the course
+of these lectures we come to the modern period, we
+shall see that the theory of relativity throws complete
+light on this question; but only by rearranging
+our whole ideas as to space and time.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>It remained for Newton to direct attention to <em>mass</em>
+as a physical quantity inherent in the nature of a material
+body. Mass remained permanent during all
+changes of motion. But the proof of the permanence
+of mass amid chemical transformations had to wait for
+Lavoisier, a century later. Newton’s next task was to
+find some estimate of the magnitude of the alien force
+in terms of the mass of the body and of its acceleration.
+He here had a stroke of luck. For, from the point of
+view of a mathematician, the simplest possible law,
+namely the product of the two, proved to be the successful
+one. Again the modern relativity theory modifies
+this extreme simplicity. But luckily for science the
+delicate experiments of the physicists of to-day were
+not then known, or even possible. Accordingly, the
+world was given the two centuries which it required
+in order to digest Newton’s laws of motion.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Having regard to this triumph, can we wonder that
+scientists placed their ultimate principles upon a materialistic
+basis, and thereafter ceased to worry about
+philosophy? We shall grasp the course of thought, if
+we understand exactly what this basis is, and what
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_69'>69</span>difficulties it finally involves. When you are criticising
+the philosophy of an epoch, do not chiefly direct
+your attention to those intellectual positions which its
+exponents feel it necessary explicitly to defend. There
+will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents
+of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously
+presuppose. Such assumptions appear so
+obvious that people do not know what they are assuming
+because no other way of <a id='corr69.9'></a><span class='htmlonly'><ins class='correction' title='puttings'>putting</ins></span><span class='epubonly'><a href='#c_69.9'><ins class='correction' title='puttings'>putting</ins></a></span> things has
+ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain
+limited number of types of philosophic systems
+are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the
+philosophy of the epoch.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>One such assumption underlies the whole philosophy
+of nature during the modern period. It is embodied
+in the conception which is supposed to express
+the most concrete aspect of nature. The Ionian philosophers
+asked, What is nature made of? The answer
+is couched in terms of stuff, or matter, or material,—the
+particular name chosen is indifferent—which
+has the property of simple location in space and
+time, or, if you adopt the more modern ideas, in space-time.
+What I mean by matter, or material, is anything
+which has this property of <em>simple location</em>. By
+simple location I mean one major characteristic which
+refers equally both to space and to time, and other
+minor characteristics which are diverse as between
+space and time.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The characteristic common both to space and time
+is that material can be said to be <em>here</em> in space and
+<em>here</em> in time, or <em>here</em> in space-time, in a perfectly definite
+sense which does not require for its explanation
+any reference to other regions of space-time. Curiously
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_70'>70</span>enough this character of simple location holds whether
+we look on a region of space-time as determined absolutely
+or relatively. For if a region is merely a way
+of indicating a certain set of relations to other entities,
+then this characteristic, which I call simple location,
+is that material can be said to have just these relations
+of position to the other entities without requiring
+for its explanation any reference to other regions constituted
+by analogous relations of position to the same
+entities. In fact, as soon as you have settled, however
+you do settle, what you mean by a definite place in
+space-time, you can adequately state the relation of a
+particular material body to space-time by saying that
+it is just there, in that place; and, so far as simple location
+is concerned, there is nothing more to be said on
+the subject.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>There are, however, some subordinate explanations
+to be made which bring in the minor characteristics
+which I have already mentioned. First, as regards
+time, if material has existed during any period, it has
+equally been in existence during any portion of that
+period. In other words, dividing the time does not divide
+the material. Secondly, in respect to space,
+dividing the volume does divide the material. Accordingly,
+if material exists throughout a volume,
+there will be less of that material distributed through
+any definite half of that volume. It is from this property
+that there arises our notion of density at a point
+of space. Anyone who talks about density is not assimilating
+time and space to the extent that some extremists
+of the modern school of relativists very rashly
+desire. For the division of time functions, in respect
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_71'>71</span>to material, quite differently from the division of
+space.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Furthermore, this fact that the material is indifferent
+to the division of time leads to the conclusion that
+the lapse of time is an accident, rather than of the
+essence, of the material. The material is fully itself
+in any sub-period however short. Thus the transition
+of time has nothing to do with the character of the
+material. The material is equally itself at an instant
+of time. Here an instant of time is conceived as in
+itself without transition, since the temporal transition
+is the succession of instants.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The answer, therefore, which the seventeenth century
+gave to the ancient question of the Ionian thinkers,
+‘What is the world made of?’ was that the world
+is a succession of instantaneous configurations of matter,—or
+of material, if you wish to include stuff more
+subtle than ordinary matter, the ether for example.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>We cannot wonder that science rested content with
+this assumption as to the fundamental elements of nature.
+The great forces of nature, such as gravitation,
+were entirely determined by the configurations of
+masses. Thus the configurations determined their own
+changes, so that the circle of scientific thought was
+completely closed. This is the famous mechanistic
+theory of nature, which has reigned supreme ever
+since the seventeenth century. It is the orthodox creed
+of physical science. Furthermore, the creed justified
+itself by the pragmatic test. It worked. Physicists
+took no more interest in philosophy. They emphasized
+the anti-rationalism of the Historical Revolt. But
+the difficulties of this theory of materialistic mechanism
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_72'>72</span>very soon became apparent. The history of
+thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is
+governed by the fact that the world had got hold of a
+general idea which it could neither live with nor live
+without.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>This simple location of instantaneous material configurations
+is what Bergson has protested against, so
+far as it concerns time and so far as it is taken to be
+the fundamental fact of concrete nature. He calls it
+a distortion of nature due to the intellectual ‘spatialisation’
+of things. I agree with Bergson in his protest:
+but I do not agree that such distortion is a vice necessary
+to the intellectual apprehension of nature. I
+shall in subsequent lectures endeavour to show that
+this spatialisation is the expression of more concrete
+facts under the guise of very abstract logical constructions.
+There is an error; but it is merely the accidental
+error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete. It
+is an example of what I will call the ‘Fallacy of Misplaced
+Concreteness.’ This fallacy is the occasion of
+great confusion in philosophy. It is not necessary for
+the intellect to fall into the trap, though in this example
+there has been a very general tendency to do so.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>It is at once evident that the concept of simple location
+is going to make great difficulties for induction.
+For, if in the location of configurations of matter
+throughout a stretch of time there is no inherent reference
+to any other times, past or future, it immediately
+follows that nature within any period does not
+refer to nature at any other period. Accordingly, induction
+is not based on anything which can be observed
+as inherent in nature. Thus we cannot look to
+nature for the justification of our belief in any law
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_73'>73</span>such as the law of gravitation. In other words, the
+order of nature cannot be justified by the mere observation
+of nature. For there is nothing in the present
+fact which inherently refers either to the past or
+to the future. It looks, therefore, as though memory,
+as well as induction, would fail to find any justification
+within nature itself.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>I have been anticipating the course of future
+thought, and have been repeating Hume’s argument.
+This train of thought follows so immediately from
+the consideration of simple location, that we cannot
+wait for the eighteenth century before considering it.
+The only wonder is that the world did in fact wait
+for Hume before noting the difficulty. Also it illustrates
+the anti-rationalism of the scientific public that,
+when Hume did appear, it was only the religious implications
+of his philosophy which attracted attention.
+This was because the clergy were in principle rationalists,
+whereas the men of science were content with a
+simple faith in the order of nature. Hume himself
+remarks, no doubt scoffingly, ‘Our holy religion is
+founded on faith.’ This attitude satisfied the Royal
+Society but not the Church. It also satisfied Hume
+and has satisfied subsequent empiricists.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>There is another presupposition of thought which
+must be put beside the theory of simple location. I
+mean the two correlative categories of Substance and
+quality. There is, however this difference. There
+were different theories as to the adequate description
+of the status of space. But whatever its status, no one
+had any doubt but that the connection with space enjoyed
+by entities, which are said to be in space, is that
+of simple location. We may put this shortly by saying
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_74'>74</span>that it was tacitly assumed that space is the locus
+of simple locations. Whatever is in space is <span lang="la" xml:lang="la"><i>simpliciter</i></span>
+in some definite portion of space. But in respect
+to substance and quality the leading minds of the seventeenth
+century were definitely perplexed; though,
+with their usual genius, they at once constructed a
+theory which was adequate for their immediate purposes.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Of course, substance and quality, as well as simple
+location, are the most natural ideas for the human
+mind. It is the way in which we think of things, and
+without these ways of thinking we could not get our
+ideas straight for daily use. There is no doubt about
+this. The only question is, How concretely are we
+thinking when we consider nature under these conceptions?
+My point will be, that we are presenting ourselves
+with simplified editions of immediate matters
+of fact. When we examine the primary elements of
+these simplified editions, we shall find that they are in
+truth only to be justified as being elaborate logical
+constructions of a high degree of abstraction. Of
+course, as a point of individual psychology, we get at
+the ideas by the rough and ready method of suppressing
+what appear to be irrelevant details. But when
+we attempt to justify this suppression of irrelevance,
+we find that, though there are entities left corresponding
+to the entities we talk about, yet these entities are
+of a high degree of abstraction.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Thus I hold that substance and quality afford another
+instance of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
+Let us consider how the notions of substance and
+quality arise. We observe an object as an entity with
+certain characteristics. Furthermore, each individual
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_75'>75</span>entity is apprehended through its characteristics. For
+example, we observe a body; there is something about
+it which we note. Perhaps, it is hard, and blue, and
+round, and noisy. We observe something which possesses
+these qualities: apart from these qualities we do
+not observe anything at all. Accordingly, the entity
+is the substratum, or substance, of which we predicate
+qualities. Some of the qualities are essential, so that
+apart from them the entity would not be itself; while
+other qualities are accidental and changeable. In
+respect to material bodies, the qualities of having a
+quantitative mass, and of simple location somewhere,
+were held by John Locke at the close of the seventeenth
+century to be essential qualities. Of course, the
+location was changeable, and the unchangeability of
+mass was merely an experimental fact except for some
+extremists.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>So far, so good. But when we pass to blueness and
+noisiness a new situation has to be faced. In the first
+place, the body may not be always blue, or noisy. We
+have already allowed for this by our theory of accidental
+qualities, which for the moment we may
+accept as adequate. But in the second place, the seventeenth
+century exposed a real difficulty. The great
+physicists elaborated transmission theories of light
+and sound, based upon their materialistic views of
+nature. There were two hypotheses as to light: either
+it was transmitted by the vibratory waves of a materialistic
+ether, or—according to Newton—it was transmitted
+by the motion of incredibly small corpuscles
+of some subtle matter. We all know that the wave
+theory of Huyghens held the field during the nineteenth
+century, and that at present physicists are endeavouring
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_76'>76</span>to explain some obscure circumstances
+attending radiation by a combination of both theories.
+But whatever theory you choose, there is no light or
+colour as a fact in external nature. There is merely
+motion of material. Again, when the light enters your
+eyes and falls on the retina, there is merely motion of
+material. Then your nerves are affected and your
+brain is affected, and again this is merely motion of
+material. The same line of argument holds for sound,
+substituting waves in the air for waves in the ether,
+and ears for eyes.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>We then ask in what sense are blueness and noisiness
+qualities of the body. By analogous reasoning, we also
+ask in what sense is its scent a quality of the rose.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Galileo considered this question, and at once
+pointed out that, apart from eyes, ears, or noses, there
+would be no colours, sounds, or smells. Descartes and
+Locke elaborated a theory of primary and secondary
+qualities. For example, Descartes in his ‘Sixth Meditation’
+says:<a id='r4' /><a href='#f4' class='c013'><sup>[4]</sup></a> “And indeed, as I perceive different
+sorts of colours, sounds, odours, tastes, heat, hardness,
+etc., I safely conclude that there are in the bodies
+from which the diverse perceptions of the senses proceed,
+certain varieties corresponding to them, although,
+perhaps, not in reality like them;....”</p>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f4'>
+<p class='c001'><a href='#r4'>4</a>. Translation by Professor John Veitch.</p>
+</div>
+<p class='c001'>Also in his <cite>Principles of Philosophy</cite>, he says:
+“That by our senses we know nothing of external objects
+beyond their figure [or situation], magnitude,
+and motion.”</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Locke, writing with a knowledge of Newtonian
+dynamics, places mass among the primary qualities
+of bodies. In short, he elaborates a theory of primary
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_77'>77</span>and secondary qualities in accordance with the
+state of physical science at the close of the seventeenth
+century. The primary qualities are the essential
+qualities of substances whose spatio-temporal relationships
+constitute nature. The orderliness of these relationships
+<a id='corr77.6'></a><span class='htmlonly'><ins class='correction' title='constitute'>constitutes</ins></span><span class='epubonly'><a href='#c_77.6'><ins class='correction' title='constitute'>constitutes</ins></a></span> nature. The orderliness of these
+relationships constitutes the order of nature. The occurrences
+of nature are in some way apprehended by
+minds, which are associated with living bodies. Primarily,
+the mental apprehension is aroused by the occurrences
+in certain parts of the correlated body, the
+occurrences in the brain, for instance. But the mind
+in apprehending also experiences sensations which,
+properly speaking, are qualities of the mind alone.
+These sensations are projected by the mind so as to
+clothe appropriate bodies in external nature. Thus
+the bodies are perceived as with qualities which in
+reality do not belong to them, qualities which in fact
+are purely the offspring of the mind. 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. Nature is a
+dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the
+hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>However you disguise it, this is the practical outcome
+of the characteristic scientific philosophy which
+closed the seventeenth century.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In the first place, we must note its astounding efficiency
+as a system of concepts for the organisation of
+scientific research. In this respect, it is fully worthy
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_78'>78</span>of the genius of the century which produced it. It
+has held its own as the guiding principle of scientific
+studies ever since. It is still reigning. Every university
+in the world organises itself in accordance with
+it. No alternative system of organising the pursuit of
+scientific truth has been suggested. It is not only reigning,
+but it is without a rival.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>And yet—it is quite unbelievable. This conception
+of the universe is surely framed in terms of high abstractions,
+and the paradox only arises because we
+have mistaken our abstractions for concrete realities.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>No picture, however generalised, of the achievements
+of scientific thought in this century can omit the
+advance in mathematics. Here as elsewhere the genius
+of the epoch made itself evident. Three great
+Frenchmen, Descartes, Desargues, Pascal, initiated
+the modern period in geometry. Another Frenchman,
+Fermat, laid the foundations of modern analysis, and
+all but perfected the methods of the differential calculus.
+Newton and Leibniz, between them, actually
+did create the differential calculus as a practical
+method of mathematical reasoning. When the century
+ended, mathematics as an instrument for application
+to physical problems was well established in something
+of its modern proficiency. Modern pure mathematics,
+if we except geometry, was in its infancy, and
+had given no signs of the astonishing growth it was to
+make in the nineteenth century. But the mathematical
+physicist had appeared, bringing with him the
+type of mind which was to rule the scientific world in
+the next century. It was to be the age of ‘Victorious
+Analysis.’</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The seventeenth century had finally produced a
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_79'>79</span>scheme of scientific thought framed by mathematicians,
+for the use of mathematicians. The great characteristic
+of the mathematical mind is its capacity for
+dealing with abstractions; and for eliciting from them
+clear-cut demonstrative trains of reasoning, entirely
+satisfactory so long as it is those abstractions which
+you want to think about. The enormous success of
+the scientific abstractions, yielding on the one hand
+<em>matter</em> with its <em>simple location</em> in space and time, and
+on the other hand <em>mind</em>, perceiving, suffering, reasoning,
+but not interfering, has foisted onto philosophy
+the task of accepting them as the most concrete rendering
+of fact.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Thereby, modern philosophy has been ruined. It
+has oscillated in a complex manner between three extremes.
+There are the dualists, who accept matter
+and mind as on equal basis, and the two varieties of
+monists, those who put mind inside matter, and those
+who put matter inside mind. But this juggling with
+abstractions can never overcome the inherent confusion
+introduced by the ascription of <em>misplaced concreteness</em>
+to the scientific scheme of the seventeenth
+century.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_80'>80</span>
+  <h2 class='c006'>CHAPTER IV <br /> <br /> THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'>In so far as the intellectual climates of different
+epochs can be contrasted, the eighteenth century in
+Europe was the complete antithesis to the Middle
+Ages. The contrast is symbolised by the difference between
+the cathedral of Chartres and the Parisian salons,
+where D’Alembert conversed with Voltaire. The
+Middle Ages were haunted with the desire to rationalise
+the infinite: the men of the eighteenth century
+rationalised the social life of modern communities,
+and based their sociological theories on an appeal to
+the facts of nature. The earlier period was the age of
+faith, based upon reason. In the later period, they let
+sleeping dogs lie: it was the age of reason, based upon
+faith. To illustrate my meaning:—St. Anselm would
+have been distressed if he had failed to find a convincing
+argument for the existence of God, and on this
+argument he based his edifice of faith, whereas Hume
+based his <cite>Dissertation on the Natural History of
+Religion</cite> upon his faith in the order of nature. In
+comparing these epochs it is well to remember that
+reason can err, and that faith may be misplaced.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In my previous lecture I traced the evolution, during
+the seventeenth century, of the scheme of scientific
+ideas which has dominated thought ever since. It
+involves a fundamental duality, with <em>material</em> on the
+one hand, and on the other hand <em>mind</em>. In between
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_81'>81</span>there lie the concepts of life, organism, function, instantaneous
+reality, interaction, order of nature,
+which collectively form the Achilles heel of the whole
+system.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>I also expressed my conviction that if we desired
+to obtain a more fundamental expression of the concrete
+character of natural fact, the element in this
+scheme which we should first criticise is the concept
+of <em>simple location</em>. In view therefore of the importance
+which this idea will assume in these lectures, I
+will repeat the meaning which I have attached to this
+phrase. To say that a bit of matter has <em>simple location</em>
+means that, in expressing its spatio-temporal relations,
+it is adequate to state that it is where it is, in a
+definite finite region of space, and throughout a definite
+finite duration of time, apart from any essential
+reference of the relations of that bit of matter to other
+regions of space and to other durations of time. Again,
+this concept of simple location is independent of the
+controversy between the absolutist and the relativist
+views of space or of time. So long as any theory of
+space, or of time, can give a meaning, either absolute
+or relative, to the idea of a definite region of space,
+and of a definite duration of time, the idea of simple
+location has a perfectly definite meaning. This idea
+is the very foundation of the seventeenth century
+scheme of nature. Apart from it, the scheme is incapable
+of expression. I shall argue that among the
+primary elements of nature as apprehended in our
+immediate experience, there is no element whatever
+which possesses this character of simple location. It
+does not follow, however, that the science of the seventeenth
+century was simply wrong. I hold that by a
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_82'>82</span>process of constructive abstraction we can arrive at
+abstractions which are the simply-located bits of material,
+and at other abstractions which are the minds
+included in the scientific scheme. Accordingly, the
+real error is an example of what I have termed: The
+Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The advantage of confining attention to a definite
+group of abstractions, is that you confine your thoughts
+to clear-cut definite things, with clear-cut definite relations.
+Accordingly, if you have a logical head, you
+can deduce a variety of conclusions respecting the relationships
+between these abstract entities. Furthermore,
+if the abstractions are well-founded, that is to
+say, if they do not abstract from everything that is important
+in experience, the scientific thought which
+confines itself to these abstractions will arrive at a
+variety of important truths relating to our experience
+of nature. We all know those clear-cut trenchant intellects,
+immovably encased in a hard shell of abstractions.
+They hold you to their abstractions by the
+sheer grip of personality.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The disadvantage of exclusive attention to a group
+of abstractions, however well-founded, is that, by the
+nature of the case, you have abstracted from the remainder
+of things. In so far as the excluded things
+are important in your experience, your modes of
+thought are not fitted to deal with them. You cannot
+think without abstractions; accordingly, it is of the
+utmost importance to be vigilant in critically revising
+your <em>modes</em> of abstraction. It is here that philosophy
+finds its niche as essential to the healthy progress
+of society. It is the critic of abstractions. A civilisation
+which cannot burst through its current abstractions
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_83'>83</span>is doomed to sterility after a very limited period
+of progress. An active school of philosophy is quite
+as important for the locomotion of ideas, as is an active
+school of railway engineers for the locomotion of
+fuel.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Sometimes it happens that the service rendered by
+philosophy is entirely obscured by the astonishing success
+of a scheme of abstractions in expressing the dominant
+interests of an epoch. This is exactly what happened
+during the eighteenth century. <span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"><i>Les philosophes</i></span>
+were not philosophers. They were men of genius,
+clear-headed and acute, who applied the seventeenth
+century group of scientific abstractions to the analysis
+of the unbounded universe. Their triumph, in respect
+to the circle of ideas mainly interesting to their
+contemporaries, was overwhelming. Whatever did
+not fit into their scheme was ignored, derided, disbelieved.
+Their hatred of Gothic architecture symbolises
+their lack of sympathy with dim perspectives.
+It was the age of reason, healthy, manly, upstanding
+reason; but, of one-eyed reason, deficient in its vision
+of depth. We cannot overrate the debt of gratitude
+which we owe to these men. For a thousand years
+Europe had been a prey to intolerant, intolerable visionaries.
+The common sense of the eighteenth century,
+its grasp of the obvious facts of human suffering,
+and of the obvious demands of human nature, acted on
+the world like a bath of moral cleansing. Voltaire
+must have the credit, that he hated injustice, he hated
+cruelty, he hated senseless repression, and he hated
+hocus-pocus. Furthermore, when he saw them, he
+knew them. In these supreme virtues, he was typical
+of his century, on its better side. But if men cannot
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_84'>84</span>live on bread alone, still less can they do so on disinfectants.
+The age had its limitations; yet we cannot
+understand the passion with which some of its main
+positions are still defended, especially in the schools
+of science, unless we do full justice to its positive
+achievements. The seventeenth century scheme of concepts
+was proving a perfect instrument for research.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>This triumph of materialism was chiefly in the
+sciences of rational dynamics, physics, and chemistry.
+So far as dynamics and physics were concerned,
+progress was in the form of direct developments of the
+main ideas of the previous epoch. Nothing fundamentally
+new was introduced, but there was an immense
+detailed development. Special case after special
+case was unravelled. It was as though the very
+Heavens were being opened, on a set plan. In the second
+half of the century, Lavoisier practically founded
+chemistry on its present basis. He introduced into
+it the principle that no material is lost or gained in
+any chemical transformations. This was the last success
+of materialistic thought, which has not ultimately
+proved to be double-edged. Chemical science now
+only waited for the atomic theory, in the next century.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In this century the notion of the mechanical explanation
+of all the processes of nature finally hardened
+into a dogma of science. The notion won through on
+its merits by reason of an almost miraculous series of
+triumphs achieved by the mathematical physicists,
+culminating in the <span lang="fr" xml:lang="fr"><cite>Méchanique Analytique</cite></span> of Lagrange,
+which was published in 1787. Newton’s
+<span lang="la" xml:lang="la"><cite>Principia</cite></span> was published in 1687, so that exactly one
+hundred years separates the two great books. This
+century contains the first period of mathematical physics
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_85'>85</span>of the modern type. The publication of Clerk
+Maxwell’s <cite>Electricity and Magnetism</cite> in 1873 marks
+the close of the second period. Each of these three
+books introduces new horizons of thought affecting
+everything which comes after them.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In considering the various topics to which mankind
+has bent its systematic thought, it is impossible not
+to be struck with the unequal distribution of ability
+among the different fields. In almost all subjects there
+are a few outstanding names. For it requires genius
+to create a subject as a distinct topic for thought. But
+in the case of many topics, after a good beginning very
+relevant to its immediate occasion, the subsequent development
+appears as a weak series of flounderings, so
+that the whole subject gradually loses its grip on the
+evolution of thought. It was far otherwise with mathematical
+physics. The more you study this subject, the
+more you will find yourself astonished by the almost
+incredible triumphs of intellect which it exhibits. The
+great mathematical physicists of the eighteenth and
+first few years of the nineteenth century, most of them
+French, are a case in point: Maupertuis, Clairaut,
+D’Alembert, Lagrange, Laplace, Fourier, form a series
+of names, such that each recalls to mind some
+achievement of the first rank. When Carlyle, as the
+mouthpiece of the subsequent Romantic Age, scoffingly
+terms the period the Age of Victorious Analysis,
+and mocks at Maupertuis as a ‘sublimish
+gentleman in a white periwig,’ he only exhibits the
+narrow side of the Romanticists whom he is then
+voicing.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>It is impossible to explain intelligently, in a short
+time and without technicalities, the details of the progress
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_86'>86</span>made by this school. I will, however, endeavour
+to explain the main point of a joint achievement of
+Maupertuis and Lagrange. Their results, in conjunction
+with some subsequent mathematical methods due
+to two great German mathematicians of the first half
+of the nineteenth century, Gauss and Riemann, have
+recently proved themselves to be the preparatory work
+necessary for the new ideas which Herz and Einstein
+have introduced into mathematical physics. Also they
+inspired some of the best ideas in Clerk Maxwell’s
+treatise, already mentioned in this lecture.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>They aimed at discovering something more fundamental
+and more general than Newton’s laws of motion
+which were discussed in the previous lecture.
+They wanted to find some wider ideas, and in the case
+of Lagrange some more general means of mathematical
+exposition. It was an ambitious enterprise, and
+they were completely successful. Maupertuis lived
+in the first half of the eighteenth century, and Lagrange’s
+active life lay in its second half. We find in
+Maupertuis a tinge of the theologic age which preceded
+his birth. He started with the idea that the
+whole path of a material particle between any limits
+of time must achieve some perfection worthy of the
+providence of God. There are two points of interest
+in this motive principle. In the first place, it illustrates
+the thesis which I was urging in my first lecture
+that the way in which the medieval church had impressed
+on Europe the notion of the detailed providence
+of a rational personal God was one of the factors
+by which the trust in the order of nature had
+been generated. In the second place, though we are
+now all convinced that such modes of thought are of
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_87'>87</span>no direct use in detailed scientific enquiry, Maupertuis’
+success in this particular case shows that almost
+any idea which jogs you out of your current abstractions
+may be better than nothing. In the present case
+what the idea in question did for Maupertuis was to
+lead him to enquire what general property of the path
+as a whole could be deduced from Newton’s laws of
+motion. Undoubtedly this was a very sensible procedure
+whatever one’s theological notions. Also his
+general idea led him to conceive that the property
+found would be a quantitative sum, such that any
+slight deviation from the path would increase it. In
+this supposition he was generalising Newton’s first
+law of motion. For an isolated particle takes the
+shortest route with uniform velocity. So Maupertuis
+conjectured that a particle travelling through a field
+of force would realise the least possible amount of
+some quantity. He discovered such a quantity and
+called it the integral action between the time limits
+considered. In modern phraseology it is the sum
+through successive small lapses of time of the difference
+between the kinetic and potential energies of the
+particle at each successive instant. This action, therefore,
+has to do with the interchange between the energy
+arising from motion and the energy arising from
+position. Maupertuis had discovered the famous
+theorem of least action. Maupertuis was not quite of
+the first rank in comparison with such a man as Lagrange.
+In his hands and in those of his immediate
+successors, his principle did not assume any dominating
+importance. Lagrange put the same question on
+a wider basis so as to make its answer relevant to
+actual procedure in the development of dynamics.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_88'>88</span>His Principle of Virtual Work as applied to systems
+in motion is in effect Maupertuis’ principle conceived
+as applying at each instant of the path of the system.
+But Lagrange saw further than Maupertuis. He
+grasped that he had gained a method of stating dynamical
+truths in a way which is perfectly indifferent
+to the particular methods of measurement employed
+in fixing the positions of the various parts of the system.
+Accordingly, he went on to deduce equations
+of motion which are equally applicable whatever
+quantitative measurements have been made, provided
+that they are adequate to fix positions. The beauty
+and almost divine simplicity of these equations is such
+that these formulae are worthy to rank with those
+mysterious symbols which in ancient times were held
+directly to indicate the Supreme Reason at the base of
+all things. Later Herz—inventor of electromagnetic
+waves—based mechanics on the idea of every particle
+traversing the shortest path open to it under the circumstances
+constraining its motion; and finally Einstein,
+by the use of the geometrical theories of Gauss
+and Riemann, showed that these circumstances could
+be construed as being inherent in the character of
+space-time itself. Such, in barest outline, is the story
+of dynamics from Galileo to Einstein.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Meanwhile Galvani and Volta lived and made their
+electric discoveries; and the biological sciences slowly
+gathered their material, but still waited for dominating
+ideas. Psychology, also, was beginning to disengage
+itself from its dependence on general philosophy.
+This independent growth of psychology was the ultimate
+result of its invocation by John Locke as a critic
+of metaphysical licence. All the sciences dealing with
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_89'>89</span>life were still in an elementary observational stage, in
+which classification and direct description were dominant.
+So far the scheme of abstractions was adequate
+to the occasion.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In the realm of practice, the age which produced
+enlightened rulers, such as the Emperor Joseph of the
+House of Hapsburg, Frederick the Great, Walpole,
+the great Lord Chatham, George Washington, cannot
+be said to have failed. Especially when to these rulers,
+it adds the invention of parliamentary cabinet
+government in England, of federal presidential government
+in the United States, and of the humanitarian
+principles of the French Revolution. Also in technology
+it produced the steam-engine, and thereby
+ushered in a new era of civilisation. Undoubtedly, as
+a practical age the eighteenth century was a success.
+If you had asked one of the wisest and most typical
+of its ancestors, who just saw its commencement, I
+mean John Locke, what he expected from it, he would
+hardly have pitched his hopes higher than its actual
+achievements.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In developing a criticism of the scientific scheme
+of the eighteenth century, I must first give my main
+reason for ignoring nineteenth century idealism—I
+am speaking of the philosophic idealism which finds
+the ultimate meaning of reality in mentality that is
+fully cognitive. This idealistic school, as hitherto
+developed, has been too much divorced from the scientific
+outlook. It has swallowed the scientific scheme
+in its entirety as being the only rendering of the facts
+of nature, and has then explained it as being an idea
+in the ultimate mentality. In the case of absolute
+idealism, the world of nature is just one of the ideas,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_90'>90</span>somehow differentiating the unity of the Absolute:
+in the case of pluralistic idealism involving monadic
+mentalities, this world is the greatest common measure
+of the various ideas which differentiate the various
+mental unities of the various monads. But,
+however you take it, these idealistic schools have conspicuously
+failed to connect, in any organic fashion,
+the fact of nature with their idealistic philosophies.
+So far as concerns what will be said in these lectures,
+your ultimate outlook may be realistic or idealistic.
+My point is that a further stage of provisional realism
+is required in which the scientific scheme is recast,
+and founded upon the ultimate concept of <em>organism</em>.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In outline, my procedure is to start from the analysis
+of the status of space and of time, or in modern
+phraseology, the status of space-time. There are two
+characters of either. Things are separated by space,
+and are separated by time: but they are also together
+in space, and together in time, even if they be not contemporaneous.
+I will call these characters the
+‘<em>separative</em>’ and the ‘<em>prehensive</em>’ characters of space-time.
+There is yet a third character of space-time.
+Everything which is in space receives a definite limitation
+of some sort, so that in a sense it has just that
+shape which it does have and no other, also in some
+sense it is just in this place and in no other. Analogously
+for time, a thing endures during a certain period,
+and through no other period. I will call this the
+‘<em>modal</em>’ character of space-time. It is evident that
+the modal character taken by itself gives rise to the
+idea of simple location. But it must be conjoined
+with the separative and prehensive characters.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>For simplicity of thought, I will first speak of space
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_91'>91</span>only, and will afterwards extend the same treatment to
+time.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The volume is the most concrete element of space.
+But the separative character of space, analyses a volume
+into sub-volumes, and so on indefinitely. Accordingly,
+taking the separative character in isolation, we
+should infer that a volume is a mere multiplicity of
+non-voluminous elements, of points in fact. But it is
+the unity of volume which is the ultimate fact of experience,
+for example, the voluminous space of this
+hall. This hall as a mere multiplicity of points is a
+construction of the logical imagination.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Accordingly, the prime fact is the prehensive unity
+of volume, and this unity is mitigated or limited by
+the separated unities of the innumerable contained
+parts. We have a prehensive unity, which is yet held
+apart as an aggregate of contained parts. But the
+prehensive unity of the volume is not the unity of a
+mere logical aggregate of parts. The parts form an
+ordered aggregate, in the sense that each part is something
+from the standpoint of every other part, and
+also from the same standpoint every other part is
+something in relation to it. Thus if A and B and C
+are volumes of space, B has an aspect from the standpoint
+of A, and so has C, and so has the relationship
+of B and C. This aspect of B from A is of the essence
+of A. The volumes of space have no independent
+existence. They are only entities as within the
+totality; you cannot extract them from their environment
+without destruction of their very essence.
+Accordingly, I will say that the aspect of B from A
+is the <em>mode</em> in which B enters into the composition of
+A. This is the modal character of space, that the prehensive
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_92'>92</span>unity of A is the prehension into unity of the
+aspects of all other volumes from the standpoint of A.
+The shape of a volume is the formula from which the
+totality of its aspects can be derived. Thus the shape
+of a volume is more abstract than its aspects. It is
+evident that I can use Leibniz’s language, and say that
+every volume mirrors in itself every other volume in
+space.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Exactly analogous considerations hold with respect
+to durations in time. An instant of time, without duration,
+is an imaginative logical construction. Also each
+duration of time mirrors in itself all temporal durations.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>But in two ways I have introduced a false simplicity.
+In the first place, I should have conjoined space
+and time, and conducted my explanation in respect
+to four-dimensional regions of space-time. I have
+nothing to add in the way of explanation. In your
+minds, substitute such four-dimensional regions for
+the spatial volumes of the previous explanations.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Secondly, my explanation has involved itself in a
+vicious circle. For I have made the prehensive unity
+of the region A to consist of the prehensive unification
+of the modal presences in A of other regions. This
+difficulty arises because space-time cannot in reality
+be considered as a self-subsistent entity. It is an abstraction,
+and its explanation requires reference to
+that from which it has been extracted. Space-time is
+the specification of certain general characters of events
+and of their mutual ordering. This recurrence to concrete
+fact brings me back to the eighteenth century,
+and indeed to Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_93'>93</span>We have to consider the development in those
+epochs, of the criticism of the reigning scientific
+scheme.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>No epoch is homogeneous; whatever you may have
+assigned as the dominant note of a considerable period,
+it will always be possible to produce men, and
+great men, belonging to the same time, who exhibit
+themselves as antagonistic to the tone of their age.
+This is certainly the case with the eighteenth century.
+For example, the names of John Wesley and of
+Rousseau must have occurred to you while I was
+drawing the character of that time. But I do not
+want to speak of them, or of others. The man, whose
+ideas I must consider at some length, is Bishop Berkeley.
+Quite at the commencement of the epoch, he
+made all the right criticisms, at least in principle. It
+would be untrue to say that he produced no effect. He
+was a famous man. The wife of George II was one
+of the few queens who, in any country, have been
+clever enough, and wise enough, to patronise learning
+judiciously; accordingly, Berkeley was made a bishop,
+in days when bishops in Great Britain were relatively
+far greater men than they are now. Also, what was
+more important than his bishopric, Hume studied
+him, and developed one side of his philosophy in a
+way which might have disturbed the ghost of the
+great ecclesiastic. Then Kant studied Hume. So, to
+say that Berkeley was uninfluential during the century,
+would certainly be absurd. But all the same, he
+failed to affect the main stream of scientific thought.
+It flowed on as if he had never written. Its general
+success made it impervious to criticism, then and since.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_94'>94</span>The world of science has always remained perfectly
+satisfied with its peculiar abstractions. They work,
+and that is sufficient for it.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The point before us is that this scientific field of
+thought is now, in the twentieth century, too narrow
+for the concrete facts which are before it for analysis.
+This is true even in physics, and is more especially
+urgent in the biological sciences. Thus, in order to
+understand the difficulties of modern scientific thought
+and also its reactions on the modern world, we should
+have in our minds some conception of a wider field of
+abstraction, a more concrete analysis, which shall
+stand nearer to the complete concreteness of our intuitive
+experience. Such an analysis should find in
+itself a niche for the concepts of matter and spirit,
+as abstractions in terms of which much of our physical
+experience can be interpreted. It is in the search
+for this wider basis for scientific thought that Berkeley
+is so important. He launched his criticism shortly
+after the schools of Newton and Locke had completed
+their work, and laid his finger exactly on the weak
+spots which they had left. I do not propose to consider
+either the subjective idealism which has been
+derived from him, or the schools of development
+which trace their descent from Hume and Kant respectively.
+My point will be that—whatever the final
+metaphysics you may adopt—there is another line of
+development embedded in Berkeley, pointing to
+the analysis which we are in search of. Berkeley overlooked
+it, partly by reason of the over-intellectualism
+of philosophers, and partly by his haste to have recourse
+to an idealism with its objectivity grounded in
+the mind of God. You will remember that I have
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_95'>95</span>already stated that the key of the problem lies in the
+notion of simple location. Berkeley, in effect, criticises
+this notion. He also raises the question, What
+do we mean by things being realised in the world of
+nature?</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In Sections 23 and 24 of his <cite>Principles of Human
+Knowledge</cite>, Berkeley gives his answer to this latter
+question. I will quote some detached sentences from
+those Sections:</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>“23. But, say you, surely there is nothing easier
+than for me to imagine trees, for instance, in a park,
+or books existing in a closet, and nobody by to perceive
+them. I answer, you may so, there is no difficulty
+in it; but what is all this, I beseech you, more
+than framing in your mind certain ideas which you
+call books and trees, and at the same time omitting
+to frame the idea of any one that may perceive
+them?...”</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>“When we do our utmost to conceive the existence
+of external bodies, we are all the while only contemplating
+our own ideas. But the mind <em>taking no notice
+of itself</em>, is deluded to think it can and does conceive
+bodies existing unthought of or without the mind,
+though at the same time they are apprehended by or
+exist in itself....”</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>“24. It is very obvious, upon the least inquiry into
+our thoughts, to know whether it be possible for us to
+understand what is meant by the <em>absolute existence of
+sensible objects in themselves, or without the mind</em>.
+To me it is evident those words mark out either a
+direct contradiction, or else nothing at all....”</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Again there is a very remarkable passage in Section
+10, of the fourth Dialogue of Berkeley’s <cite>Alciphron</cite>.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_96'>96</span>I have already quoted it, at greater length, in my <cite>Principles
+of Natural Knowledge</cite>:</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>“<i>Euphranor.</i> Tell me, Alciphron, can you discern
+the doors, window and battlements of that same castle?</p>
+
+<p class='c001'><i>Alciphron.</i> I cannot. At this distance it seems only
+a small round tower.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'><i>Euph.</i> But I, who have been at it, know that it is
+no small round tower, but a large square building with
+battlements and turrets, which it seems you do not see.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'><i>Alc</i>. What will you infer from thence?</p>
+
+<p class='c001'><i>Euph.</i> I would infer that the very object which
+you strictly and properly perceive by sight is not that
+thing which is several miles distant.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'><i>Alc.</i> Why so?</p>
+
+<p class='c001'><i>Euph.</i> Because a little round object is one thing,
+and a great square object is another. Is it not so?...”</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Some analogous examples concerning a planet and
+a cloud are then cited in the dialogue, and this passage
+finally concludes with:</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>“<i>Euphranor.</i> Is it not plain, therefore, that neither
+the castle, the planet, nor the cloud, <i>which you see
+here</i>, are those real ones which you suppose exist at a
+distance?”</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>It is made explicit in the first passage, already
+quoted, that Berkeley himself adopts an extreme idealistic
+interpretation. For him mind is the only absolute
+reality, and the unity of nature is the unity of
+ideas in the mind of God. Personally, I think that
+Berkeley’s solution of the metaphysical problem raises
+difficulties not less than those which he points out as
+arising from a realistic interpretation of the scientific
+scheme. There is, however, another possible line of
+thought, which enables us to adopt anyhow an attitude
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_97'>97</span>of provisional realism, and to widen the scientific
+scheme in a way which is useful for science
+itself.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>I recur to the passage from Francis Bacon’s <cite>Natural
+History</cite>, already quoted in the previous lecture:</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>“It is certain that all bodies whatsoever, though
+they have no sense, yet they have perception: ...
+and whether the body be alterant or altered, evermore
+a perception precedeth operation; for else all bodies
+would be alike one to another....”</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Also in the previous lecture I construed <em>perception</em>
+(as used by Bacon) as meaning <em>taking account</em> of the
+essential character of the thing perceived, and I construed
+<em>sense</em> as meaning <em>cognition</em>. We certainly do
+take account of things of which at the time we have no
+explicit cognition. We can even have a cognitive
+memory of the taking account, without having had a
+contemporaneous cognition. Also, as Bacon points
+out by his statement, “... for else all bodies would
+be alike one to another,” it is evidently some element
+of the essential character which we take account of,
+namely something on which diversity is founded and
+not mere bare logical diversity.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The word ‘<em>perceive</em>’ is, in our common usage, shot
+through and through with the notion of cognitive apprehension.
+So is the word ‘<em>apprehension</em>’, even with
+the adjective <em>cognitive</em> omitted. I will use the word
+‘<em>prehension</em>’ for <em>uncognitive apprehension</em>: by this I
+mean <em>apprehension</em> which may or or may not be cognitive.
+Now take Euphranor’s last remark:</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>“Is it not plain, therefore, that neither the castle, the
+planet, nor the cloud, <em>which you see here</em>, are those
+real ones which you suppose exist at distance?” Accordingly,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_98'>98</span>there is a prehension, <em>here</em> in this place, of
+things which have a reference to <em>other</em> places.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Now go back to Berkeley’s sentences, quoted from
+his <cite>Principles of Human Knowledge</cite>. He contends
+that what constitutes the realisation of natural entities
+is the being perceived within the unity of mind.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>We can substitute the concept, that the realisation is
+a gathering of things into the unity of a prehension;
+and that what is thereby realised is the prehension,
+and not the things. This unity of a prehension defines
+itself as a <em>here</em> and a <em>now</em>, and the things so gathered
+into the grasped unity have essential reference to other
+places and other times. For Berkeley’s <em>mind</em>, I substitute
+a process of prehensive unification. In order
+to make intelligible this concept of the progressive
+realisation of natural occurrences, considerable expansion
+is required, and confrontation with its actual implications
+in terms of concrete experience. This will
+be the task of the subsequent lectures. In the first
+place, note that the idea of simple location has gone.
+The things which are grasped into a realised unity,
+here and now, are not the castle, the cloud, and the
+planet simply in themselves; but they are the
+castle, the cloud, and the planet from the standpoint,
+in space and time, of the prehensive unification.
+In other words, it is the perspective of
+the castle over there from the standpoint of
+the unification here. It is, therefore, aspects of the
+castle, the cloud, and the planet which are grasped into
+unity here. You will remember that the idea of perspectives
+is quite familiar in philosophy. It was introduced
+by Leibniz, in the notion of his monads
+mirroring perspectives of the universe. I am using
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_99'>99</span>the same notion, only I am toning down his monads
+into the unified events in space and time. In some
+ways, there is a greater analogy with Spinoza’s modes;
+that is why I use the terms ‘<em>mode</em>’ and ‘<em>modal</em>.’ In the
+analogy with Spinoza, his one substance is for me the
+one underlying activity of realisation individualising
+itself in an interlocked plurality of modes. Thus,
+concrete fact is process. Its primary analysis is into
+underlying activity of prehension, and into realised
+prehensive events. Each event is an individual matter
+of fact issuing from an individualisation of the substrate
+activity. But individualisation does not mean
+substantial independence.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>An entity of which we become aware in sense perception
+is the terminus of our act of perception. I
+will call such an entity, a ‘<em>sense-object</em>’. For example,
+green of a definite shade is a sense-object; so is
+a sound of definite quality and pitch; and so is a
+definite scent; and a definite quality of touch. The
+way in which such an entity is related to space during
+a definite lapse of time is complex. I will say
+that a sense-object has ‘<em>ingression</em>’ into space-time.
+The cognitive perception of a sense-object is the
+awareness of the prehensive unification (into a standpoint
+A) of various modes of various sense-objects,
+including the sense-object in question. The standpoint
+A is, of course, a region of space-time; that is to
+say, it is a volume of space through a duration of time.
+But as one entity, this standpoint is a unit of realised
+experience. A mode of a sense-object at A (as abstracted
+from the sense-object whose relationship to A
+the mode is conditioning) is the aspect from A of
+some other region B. Thus the sense-object is present
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_100'>100</span>in A with the mode of location in B. Thus if green be
+the sense-object in question, green is not simply at A
+where it is being perceived, nor is it simply at B where
+it is perceived as located; but it is present at A with
+the mode of location in B. There is no particular
+mystery about this. You have only got to look into
+a mirror and to see the image in it of some green
+leaves behind your back. For you at A there will be
+green; but not green simply at A where you are. The
+green at A will be green with the mode of having location
+at the image of the leaf behind the mirror. Then
+turn round and look at the leaf. You are now perceiving
+the green in the same way as you did before,
+except that now the green has the mode of being
+located in the actual leaf. I am merely describing
+what we do perceive: we are aware of green as being
+one element in a prehensive unification of sense-objects;
+each sense-object, and among them green,
+having its particular mode, which is expressible as
+location elsewhere. There are various types of modal
+location. For example, sound is voluminous: it fills
+a hall, and so sometimes does diffused colour. But
+the modal location of a colour may be that of being
+the remote boundary of a volume, as for example the
+colours on the walls of a room. Thus primarily space-time
+is the locus of the modal ingression of sense-objects.
+This is the reason why space and time (if
+for simplicity we disjoin them) are given in their entireties.
+For each volume of space, or each lapse of
+time, includes in its essence aspects of all volumes of
+space, or of all lapses of time. The difficulties of
+philosophy in respect to space and time are founded
+on the error of considering them as primarily the loci
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_101'>101</span>of simple locations. Perception is simply the cognition
+of prehensive unification; or more shortly, perception
+is cognition of prehension. The actual world
+is a manifold of prehensions; and a ‘prehension’ is a
+‘prehensive occasion’; and a prehensive occasion is the
+most concrete finite entity, conceived as what it is in
+itself and for itself, and not as from its aspect in the
+essence of another such occasion. Prehensive unification
+might be said to have simple location in its volume
+A. But this would be a mere tautology. For
+space and time are simply abstractions from the totality
+of prehensive unifications as mutually patterned in
+each other. Thus a prehension has simple location at
+the volume A in the same way as that in which a
+man’s face fits on to the smile which spreads over it.
+There is, so far as we have gone, more sense in saying
+that an act of perception has simple location; for it
+may be conceived as being simply at the cognised prehension.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>There are more entities involved in nature than the
+mere sense-objects, so far considered. But, allowing
+for the necessity of revision consequent on a more complete
+point of view, we can frame our answer to Berkeley’s
+question as to the character of the reality to be
+assigned to nature. He states it to be the reality of
+ideas in mind. A complete metaphysic which has attained
+to some notion of mind, and to some notion of
+ideas, may perhaps ultimately adopt that view. It is
+unnecessary for the purpose of these lectures to ask
+such a fundamental question. We can be content with
+a provisional realism in which nature is conceived as
+a complex of prehensive unifications. Space and time
+exhibit the general scheme of interlocked relations of
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_102'>102</span>these prehensions. You cannot tear any one of them
+out of its context. Yet each one of them within its
+context has all the reality that attaches to the whole
+complex. Conversely, the totality has the same reality
+as each prehension; for each prehension unifies the
+modalities to be ascribed, from its standpoint, to every
+part of the whole. A prehension is a process of unifying.
+Accordingly, nature is a process of expansive
+development, necessarily transitional from prehension
+to prehension. What is achieved is thereby passed
+beyond, but it is also retained as having aspects of itself
+present to prehensions which lie beyond it.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Thus nature is a structure of evolving processes.
+The reality is the process. It is nonsense to ask if the
+colour red is real. The colour red is ingredient in the
+process of realisation. The realities of nature are the
+prehensions in nature, that is to say, the events in
+nature.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Now that we have cleared space and time from the
+taint of simple location, we may partially abandon
+the awkward term prehension. This term was introduced
+to signify the essential unity of an event,
+namely, the event as one entity, and not as a mere assemblage
+of parts or of ingredients. It is necessary to
+understand that space-time is nothing else than a
+system of pulling together of assemblages into unities.
+But the word <em>event</em> just means one of these spatio-temporal
+unities. Accordingly, it may be used instead
+of the term ‘prehension’ as meaning the thing prehended.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>An event has contemporaries. This means that an
+event mirrors within itself the modes of its contemporaries
+as a display of immediate achievement. An
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_103'>103</span>event has a past. This means that an event mirrors
+within itself the modes of its predecessors, as memories
+which are fused into its own content. An event has a
+future. This means that an event mirrors within itself
+such aspects as the future throws back onto the present,
+or, in other words, as the present has determined concerning
+the future. Thus an event has anticipation:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b c014'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>“The prophetic soul</div>
+      <div class='line'>Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.” [cvii]</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c015'>These conclusions are essential for any form of realism.
+For there is in the world for our cognisance,
+memory of the past, immediacy of realisation, and indication
+of things to come.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In this sketch of an analysis more concrete than that
+of the scientific scheme of thought, I have started from
+our own psychological field, as it stands for our cognition.
+I take it for what it claims to be: the self-knowledge
+of our bodily event. I mean the total
+event, and not the inspection of the details of the body.
+This self-knowledge discloses a prehensive unification
+of modal presences of entities beyond itself. I generalise
+by the use of the principle that this total bodily
+event is on the same level as all other events, except
+for an unusual complexity and stability of inherent
+pattern. The strength of the theory of materialistic
+mechanism has been the demand, that no arbitrary
+breaks be introduced into nature, to eke out the collapse
+of an explanation. I accept this principle. But
+if you start from the immediate facts of our psychological
+experience, as surely an empiricist should begin,
+you are at once led to the organic conception of nature
+of which the description has been commenced in this
+lecture.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'><span class='pageno' id='Page_104'>104</span>It is the defect of the eighteenth century scientific
+scheme that it provides none of the elements which
+compose the immediate psychological experiences of
+mankind. Nor does it provide any elementary trace
+of the organic unity of a whole, from which the organic
+unities of electrons, protons, molecules, and living
+bodies can emerge. According to that scheme,
+there is no reason in the nature of things why portions
+of material should have any physical relations to each
+other. Let us grant that we cannot hope to be able to
+discern the laws of nature to be necessary. But we
+can hope to see that it is necessary that there should be
+an order of nature. The concept of the order of
+nature is bound up with the concept of nature as
+the locus of organisms in process of development.</p>
+
+<div class='quote'>
+
+<p class='c001'><span class='sc'>Note.</span> In connection with the latter portion of this chapter a
+sentence from Descartes’ ‘Reply to Objections ... against the
+Meditations’ is interesting:—“Hence the idea of the sun will be
+the sun itself existing in the mind, not indeed formally, as it exists
+in the sky, but objectively, <i>i.e.</i>, in the way in which objects are wont
+to exist in the mind; and this mode of being is truly much less
+perfect than that in which things exist outside the mind, but it is
+not on that account mere nothing, as I have already said.” [Reply
+to Objections I, Translation by Haldane and Ross, vol. ii, p. 10.]
+I find difficulty in reconciling this theory of ideas (with which I
+agree) with other parts of the Cartesian philosophy.</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_105'>105</span>
+  <h2 class='c006'>CHAPTER V <br /> <br /> THE ROMANTIC REACTION</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'>My last lecture described the influence upon the eighteenth
+century of the narrow and efficient scheme of
+scientific concepts which it had inherited from its
+predecessor. That scheme was the product of a mentality
+which found the Augustinian theology extremely
+congenial. The Protestant Calvinism and the
+Catholic Jansenism exhibited man as helpless to co-operate
+with Irresistible Grace: the contemporary
+scheme of science exhibited man as helpless to co-operate
+with the irresistable mechanism of nature.
+The mechanism of God and the mechanism of matter
+were the monstrous issues of limited metaphysics and
+clear logical intellect. Also the seventeenth century
+had genius, and cleared the world of muddled thought.
+The eighteenth century continued the work of clearance,
+with ruthless efficiency. The scientific scheme
+has lasted longer than the theological scheme. Mankind
+soon lost interest in Irresistible Grace; but it
+quickly appreciated the competent engineering which
+was due to science. Also in the first quarter of the
+eighteenth century, George Berkeley launched his
+philosophical criticism against the whole basis of the
+system. He failed to disturb the dominant current
+of thought. In my last lecture I developed a parallel
+line of argument, which would lead to a system of
+thought basing nature upon the concept of organism,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_106'>106</span>and not upon the concept of matter. In the present
+lecture, I propose in the first place to consider how the
+concrete educated thought of men has viewed this
+opposition of mechanism and organism. It is in literature
+that the concrete outlook of humanity receives
+its expression. Accordingly it is to literature that we
+must look, particularly in its more concrete forms,
+namely in poetry and in drama, if we hope to discover
+the inward thoughts of a generation.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>We quickly find that the Western peoples exhibit
+on a colossal scale a peculiarity which is popularly
+supposed to be more especially characteristic of the
+Chinese. Surprise is often expressed that a Chinaman
+can be of two religions, a Confucian for some occasions
+and a Buddhist for other occasions. Whether
+this is true of China I do not know; nor do I know
+whether, if true, these two attitudes are really inconsistent.
+But there can be no doubt that an analogous
+fact is true of the West, and that the two attitudes involved
+are inconsistent. A scientific realism, based on
+mechanism, is conjoined with an unwavering belief
+in the world of men and of the higher animals as being
+composed of self-determining organisms. This radical
+inconsistency at the basis of modern thought accounts
+for much that is half-hearted and wavering in our
+civilisation. It would be going too far to say that it
+distracts thought. It enfeebles it, by reason of the
+inconsistency lurking in the background. After all,
+the men of the Middle Ages were in pursuit of an
+excellency of which we have nearly forgotten the
+existence. They set before themselves the ideal of the
+attainment of a harmony of the understanding. We
+are content with superficial orderings from diverse
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_107'>107</span>arbitrary starting points. For instance, the enterprises
+produced by the individualistic energy of the European
+peoples presupposes physical actions directed to
+final causes. But the science which is employed in
+their development is based on a philosophy which asserts
+that physical causation is supreme, and which
+disjoins the physical cause from the final end. It is
+not popular to dwell on the absolute contradiction
+here involved. It is the fact, however you gloze it
+over with phrases. Of course, we find in the eighteenth
+century Paley’s famous argument, that mechanism
+presupposes a God who is the author of nature. But
+even before Paley put the argument into its final form,
+Hume had written the retort, that the God whom you
+will find will be the sort of God who makes that
+mechanism. In other words, that mechanism can, at
+most, presuppose a mechanic, and not merely <em>a</em> mechanic
+but <em>its</em> mechanic. The only way of mitigating
+mechanism is by the discovery that it is not
+mechanism.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>When we leave apologetic theology, and come to
+ordinary literature, we find, as we might expect, that
+the scientific outlook is in general simply ignored. So
+far as the mass of literature is concerned, science might
+never have been heard of. Until recently nearly all
+writers have been soaked in classical and renaissance
+literature. For the most part, neither philosophy nor
+science interested them, and their minds were trained
+to ignore it.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>There are exceptions to this sweeping statement;
+and, even if we confine ourselves to English literature,
+they concern some of the greatest names; also the
+indirect influence of science has been considerable.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'><span class='pageno' id='Page_108'>108</span>A side light on this distracting inconsistency in modern
+thought is obtained by examining some of those
+great serious poems in English literature, whose general
+scale gives them a didactic character. The relevant
+poems are Milton’s <cite>Paradise Lost</cite>, Pope’s <cite>Essay
+on Man</cite>, Wordsworth’s <cite>Excursion</cite>, Tennyson’s <cite>In Memoriam</cite>.
+Milton, though he is writing after the Restoration,
+voices the theological aspect of the earlier
+portion of his century, untouched by the influence of
+the scientific materialism. Pope’s poem represents the
+effect on popular thought of the intervening sixty
+years which includes the first period of assured triumph
+for the scientific movement. Wordsworth in
+his whole being expresses a conscious reaction against
+the mentality of the eighteenth century. This mentality
+means nothing else than the acceptance of the
+scientific ideas at their full face value. Wordsworth
+was not bothered by any intellectual antagonism. What
+moved him was a moral repulsion. He felt that something
+had been left out, and that what had been left
+out comprised everything that was most important.
+Tennyson is the mouthpiece of the attempts of the
+waning romantic movement in the second quarter of
+the nineteenth century to come to terms with science.
+By this time the two elements in modern thought had
+disclosed their fundamental divergence by their jarring
+interpretations of the course of nature and the
+life of man. Tennyson stands in this poem as the
+perfect example of the distraction which I have already
+mentioned. There are opposing visions of the
+world, and both of them command his assent by appeals
+to ultimate intuitions from which there seems
+no escape. Tennyson goes to the heart of the difficulty.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_109'>109</span>It is the problem of mechanism which appalls
+him,</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b c014'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>“‘The stars,’ she whispers, ‘blindly run.’”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c015'>This line states starkly the whole philosophic problem
+implicit in the poem. Each molecule blindly runs.
+The human body is a collection of molecules. Therefore,
+the human body blindly runs, and therefore there
+can be no individual responsibility for the actions of
+the body. If you once accept that the molecule is definitely
+determined to be what it is, independently of
+any determination by reason of the total organism of
+the body, and if you further admit that the blind run
+is settled by the general mechanical laws, there can be
+no escape from this conclusion. But mental experiences
+are derivative from the actions of the body, including
+of course its internal behaviour. Accordingly,
+the sole function of the mind is to have at least some
+of its experiences settled for it, and to add such others
+as may be open to it independently of the body’s motions,
+internal and external.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>There are then two possible theories as to the mind.
+You can either deny that it can supply for itself any
+experiences other than those provided for it by the
+body, or you can admit them.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>If you refuse to admit the additional experiences,
+then all individual moral responsibility is swept away.
+If you do admit them, then a human being may be responsible
+for the state of his mind though he has no
+responsibility for the actions of his body. The enfeeblement
+of thought in the modern world is illustrated
+by the way in which this plain issue is avoided
+in Tennyson’s poem. There is something kept in the
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_110'>110</span>background, a skeleton in the cupboard. He touches
+on almost every religious and scientific problem, but
+carefully avoids more than a passing allusion to this
+one.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>This very problem was in full debate at the date of
+the poem. John Stuart Mill was maintaining his doctrine
+of determinism. In this doctrine volitions are
+determined by motives, and motives are expressible in
+terms of antecedent conditions including states of mind
+as well as states of the body.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>It is obvious that this doctrine affords no escape
+from the dilemma presented by a thoroughgoing
+mechanism. For if the volition affects the state of the
+body, then the molecules in the body do not blindly
+run. If the volition does not affect the state
+of the body, the mind is still left in its uncomfortable
+position.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Mill’s doctrine is generally accepted, especially
+among scientists, as though in some way it allowed
+you to accept the extreme doctrine of materialistic
+mechanism, and yet mitigated its unbelievable consequences.
+It does nothing of the sort. Either the bodily
+molecules blindly run, or they do not. If they do
+blindly run, the mental states are irrelevant in discussing
+the bodily actions.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>I have stated the arguments concisely, because in
+truth the issue is a very simple one. Prolonged discussion
+is merely a source of confusion. The question
+as to the metaphysical status of molecules does not
+come in. The statement that they are mere formulae
+has no bearing on the argument. For presumably the
+formulae mean something. If they mean nothing,
+the whole mechanical doctrine is likewise without
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_111'>111</span>meaning, and the question drops. But if the formulae
+mean anything, the argument applies to exactly what
+they do mean. The traditional way of evading the
+difficulty—other than the simple way of ignoring it—is
+to have recourse to some form of what is now termed
+‘vitalism.’ This doctrine is really a compromise. It
+allows a free run to mechanism throughout the whole
+of inanimate nature, and holds that the mechanism is
+partially mitigated within living bodies. I feel that
+this theory is an unsatisfactory compromise. The gap
+between living and dead matter is too vague and problematical
+to bear the weight of such an arbitrary assumption,
+which involves an essential dualism somewhere.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The doctrine which I am maintaining is that the
+whole concept of materialism only applies to very
+abstract entities, the products of logical discernment.
+The concrete enduring entities are organisms, so that
+the plan of the <em>whole</em> influences the very characters
+of the various subordinate organisms which enter into
+it. In the case of an animal, the mental states enter
+into the plan of the total organism and thus modify
+the plans of the successive subordinate organisms until
+the ultimate smallest organisms, such as electrons, are
+reached. Thus an electron within a living body is
+different from an electron outside it, by reason of the
+plan of the body. The electron blindly runs either
+within or without the body; but it runs within the
+body in accordance with its character within the body;
+that is to say, in accordance with the general plan of
+the body, and this plan includes the mental state. But
+this principle of modification is perfectly general
+throughout nature, and represents no property peculiar
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_112'>112</span>to living bodies. In subsequent lectures it will be
+explained that this doctrine involves the abandonment
+of the traditional scientific materialism, and the substitution
+of an alternative doctrine of organism.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>I shall not discuss Mill’s determinism, as it lies
+outside the scheme of these lectures. The foregoing
+discussion has been directed to secure that either determinism
+or free will shall have some relevance, unhampered
+by the difficulties introduced by materialistic
+mechanism, or by the compromise of vitalism. I
+would term the doctrine of these lectures, the theory
+of <em>organic mechanism</em>. In this theory, the molecules
+may blindly run in accordance with the general laws,
+but the molecules differ in their intrinsic characters
+according to the general organic plans of the situations
+in which they find themselves.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The discrepancy between the materialistic mechanism
+of science and the moral intuitions, which are presupposed
+in the concrete affairs of life, only gradually
+assumed its true importance as the centuries advanced.
+The different tones of the successive epochs to which
+the poems, already mentioned, belong are curiously reflected
+in their opening passages. Milton ends his
+introduction with the prayer,</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b c014'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>“That to the height of this great argument</div>
+      <div class='line'>I may assert eternal Providence,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And justify the ways of God to men.”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c015'>To judge from many modern writers on Milton, we
+might imagine that the <cite>Paradise Lost</cite> and the <cite>Paradise
+Regained</cite> were written as a series of experiments in
+blank verse. This was certainly not Milton’s view of
+his work. To ‘justify the ways of God to men’ was
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_113'>113</span>very much his main object. He recurs to the same
+idea in the <cite>Samson Agonistes</cite>,</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b c014'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>“Just are the ways of God</div>
+      <div class='line'>And justifiable to men;”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c015'>We note the assured volume of confidence, untroubled
+by the coming scientific avalanche. The actual date
+of the publication of the <cite>Paradise Lost</cite> lies just beyond
+the epoch to which it belongs. It is the swansong
+of a passing world of untroubled certitude.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>A comparison between Pope’s <cite>Essay on Man</cite> and
+the <cite>Paradise Lost</cite> exhibits the change of tone in English
+thought in the fifty or sixty years which separate
+the age of Milton from the age of Pope. Milton addresses
+his poem to God, Pope’s poem is addressed to
+Lord Bolingbroke,</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b c014'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>“Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things</div>
+      <div class='line'>To low ambition and the pride of kings.</div>
+      <div class='line'>Let us (since life can little more supply</div>
+      <div class='line'>Than just to look about us and to die)</div>
+      <div class='line'>Expatiate free o’er all this scene of man;</div>
+      <div class='line'>A mighty maze! but not without a plan;”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c016'>Compare the jaunty assurance of Pope,</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b c014'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>“A mighty maze! but not without a plan.”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c016'>with Milton’s</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b c014'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>“Just are the ways of God</div>
+      <div class='line'>And justifiable to men;”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c016'>But the real point to notice is that Pope as well as
+Milton was untroubled by the great perplexity which
+haunts the modern world. The clue which Milton
+followed was to dwell on the ways of God in dealings
+with man. Two generations later we find Pope
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_114'>114</span>equally confident that the enlightened methods of
+modern science provided a plan adequate as a map
+of the ‘mighty maze.’</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Wordsworth’s <cite>Excursion</cite> is the next English poem
+on the same subject. A prose preface tells us that it is a
+fragment of a larger projected work, described as ‘A
+philosophical poem containing views of Man, Nature,
+and Society.’</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Very characteristically the poem begins with the
+line,</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b c014'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>“’Twas summer, and the sun had mounted high:”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c016'>Thus the romantic reaction started neither with God
+nor with Lord Bolingbroke, but with nature. We are
+here witnessing a conscious reaction against the whole
+tone of the eighteenth century. That century approached
+nature with the abstract analysis of science,
+whereas Wordsworth opposes to the scientific abstractions
+his full concrete experience.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>A generation of religious revival and of scientific
+advance lies between the <cite>Excursion</cite> and Tennyson’s
+<cite>In Memoriam</cite>. The earlier poets had solved the perplexity
+by ignoring it. That course was not open to
+Tennyson. Accordingly his poem begins thus:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b c014'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>“Strong Son of God, immortal Love,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Whom we, that have not seen Thy face,</div>
+      <div class='line'>By faith, and faith alone, embrace,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Believing where we cannot prove;”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c016'>The note of perplexity is struck at once. The nineteenth
+century has been a perplexed century, in a sense
+which is not true of any of its predecessors of the modern
+period. In the earlier times there were opposing
+camps, bitterly at variance on questions which they
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_115'>115</span>deemed fundamental. But, except for a few stragglers,
+either camp was whole-hearted. The importance of
+Tennyson’s poem lies in the fact that it exactly expressed
+the character of its period. Each individual
+was divided against himself. In the earlier times, the
+deep thinkers were the clear thinkers,—Descartes,
+Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz. They knew exactly what
+they meant and said it. In the nineteenth century, some
+of the deeper thinkers among theologians and philosophers
+were muddled thinkers. Their assent was
+claimed by incompatible doctrines; and their efforts
+at reconciliation produced inevitable confusion.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Matthew Arnold, even more than Tennyson, was
+the poet who expressed this mood of individual distraction
+which was so characteristic of this century.
+Compare with <cite>In Memoriam</cite> the closing lines of Arnold’s
+<cite>Dover Beach</cite>:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b c014'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>“And we are here as on a darkling plain</div>
+      <div class='line'>Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Where ignorant armies clash by night.”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c016'>Cardinal Newman in his <span lang="la" xml:lang="la"><cite>Apologia pro Vitâ Suâ</cite></span> mentions
+it as a peculiarity of Pusey, the great Anglican
+ecclesiastic, “He was haunted by no intellectual perplexities.”
+In this respect Pusey recalls Milton, Pope,
+Wordsworth, as in contrast with Tennyson, Clough,
+Matthew Arnold, and Newman himself.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>So far as concerns English literature we find, as
+might be anticipated, the most interesting criticism
+of the thoughts of science among the leaders of the
+romantic reaction which accompanied and succeeded
+the epoch of the French Revolution. In English literature,
+the deepest thinkers of this school were Coleridge,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_116'>116</span>Wordsworth, and Shelley. Keats is an example
+of literature untouched by science. We may neglect
+Coleridge’s attempt at an explicit philosophical formulation.
+It was influential in his own generation; but
+in these lectures it is my object only to mention those
+elements of the thought of the past which stand for
+all time. Even with this limitation, only a selection is
+possible. For our purposes Coleridge is only important
+by his influence on Wordsworth. Thus Wordsworth
+and Shelley remain.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Wordsworth was passionately absorbed in nature.
+It has been said of Spinoza, that he was drunk with
+God. It is equally true that Wordsworth was drunk
+with nature. But he was a thoughtful, well-read
+man, with philosophical interests, and sane even to
+the point of prosiness. In addition, he was a
+genius. He weakens his evidence by his dislike of
+science. We all remember his scorn of the poor man
+whom he somewhat hastily accuses of peeping and
+botanising on his mother’s grave. Passage after passage
+could be quoted from him, expressing this repulsion.
+In this respect, his characteristic thought
+can be summed up in his phrase, ‘We murder to dissect.’</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In this latter passage, he discloses the intellectual
+basis of his criticism of science. He alleges against
+science its absorption in abstractions. His consistent
+theme is that the important facts of nature elude the
+scientific method. It is important therefore to ask,
+what Wordsworth found in nature that failed to receive
+expression in science. I ask this question in the interest
+of science itself; for one main position in these
+lectures is a protest against the idea that the abstractions
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_117'>117</span>of science are irreformable and unalterable. Now
+it is emphatically not the case that Wordsworth hands
+over inorganic matter to the mercy of science, and
+concentrates on the faith that in the living organism
+there is some element that science cannot analyse. Of
+course he recognises, what no one doubts, that in some
+sense living things are different from lifeless things.
+But that is not his main point. It is the brooding
+presence of the hills which haunts him. His theme
+is nature <span lang="la" xml:lang="la"><i>in solido</i></span>, that is to say, he dwells on that
+mysterious presence of surrounding things, which imposes
+itself on any separate element that we set up
+as an individual for its own sake. He always grasps
+the whole of nature as involved in the tonality of
+the particular instance. That is why he laughs with
+the daffodils, and finds in the primrose “thoughts too
+deep for terms.”</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Wordsworth’s greatest poem is, by far, the first
+book of <cite>The Prelude</cite>. It is pervaded by this sense
+of the haunting presences of nature. A series of magnificent
+passages, too long for quotation, express this
+idea. Of course, Wordsworth is a poet writing a
+poem, and is not concerned with dry philosophical
+statements. But it would hardly be possible to express
+more clearly a feeling for nature, as exhibiting
+entwined prehensive unities, each suffused with modal
+presences of others:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b c014'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>“Ye Presences of Nature in the sky</div>
+      <div class='line'>And on the earth! Ye Visions of the hills!</div>
+      <div class='line'>And Souls of lonely places! can I think</div>
+      <div class='line'>A vulgar hope was yours when ye employed</div>
+      <div class='line'>Such ministry, when ye through many a year</div>
+      <div class='line'>Haunting me thus among my boyish sports,</div>
+      <div class='line'><span class='pageno' id='Page_118'>118</span>On caves and trees, upon the woods and hills,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Impressed upon all forms the characters</div>
+      <div class='line'>Of danger or desire; and thus did make</div>
+      <div class='line'>The surface of the universal earth</div>
+      <div class='line'>With triumph and delight, with hope and fear,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Work like a sea?...”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c015'>In thus citing Wordsworth, the point which I wish
+to make is that we forget how strained and paradoxical
+is the view of nature which modern science imposes
+on our thoughts. Wordsworth, to the height
+of genius, expresses the concrete facts of our apprehension,
+facts which are distorted in the scientific
+analysis. Is it not possible that the standardised concepts
+of science are only valid within narrow limitations,
+perhaps too narrow for science itself?</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Shelley’s attitude to science was at the opposite pole
+to that of Wordsworth. He loved it, and is never
+tired of expressing in poetry the thoughts which it
+suggests. It symbolises to him joy, and peace, and
+illumination. What the hills were to the youth of
+Wordsworth, a chemical laboratory was to Shelley.
+It is unfortunate that Shelley’s literary critics have,
+in this respect, so little of Shelley in their own mentality.
+They tend to treat as a casual oddity of Shelley’s
+nature what was, in fact, part of the main structure
+of his mind, permeating his poetry through and
+through. If Shelley had been born a hundred years
+later, the twentieth century would have seen a Newton
+among chemists.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>For the sake of estimating the value of Shelley’s
+evidence it is important to realise this absorption of
+his mind in scientific ideas. It can be illustrated by
+lyric after lyric. I will choose one poem only, the
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_119'>119</span>fourth act of his <cite>Prometheus Unbound</cite>. The Earth
+and the Moon converse together in the language of accurate
+science. Physical experiments guide his imagery.
+For example, the Earth’s exclamation,</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b c014'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>“The vaporous exultation not to be confined!”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c016'>is the poetic transcript of ‘the expansive force of
+gases,’ as it is termed in books on science. Again, take
+the Earth’s stanza,</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b c014'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>“I spin beneath my pyramid of night,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Which points into the heavens,—dreaming delight,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Murmuring victorious joy in my enchanted sleep;</div>
+      <div class='line'>As a youth lulled in love-dreams faintly sighing,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Under the shadow of his beauty lying,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Which round his rest a watch of light and warmth doth keep.”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c015'>This stanza could only have been written by someone
+with a definite geometrical diagram before his
+inward eye—a diagram which it has often been my
+business to demonstrate to mathematical classes. As
+evidence, note especially the last line which gives
+poetical imagery to the light surrounding night’s
+pyramid. This idea could not occur to anyone without
+the diagram. But the whole poem and other
+poems are permeated with touches of this kind.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Now the poet, so sympathetic with science, so absorbed
+in its ideas, can simply make nothing of the
+doctrine of secondary qualities which is fundamental
+to its concepts. For Shelley nature retains its beauty
+and its colour. Shelley’s nature is in its essence a
+nature of organisms, functioning with the full content
+of our perceptual experience. We are so used to
+ignoring the implications of orthodox scientific doctrine,
+that it is difficult to make evident the criticism
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_120'>120</span>upon it which is thereby implied. If anybody could
+have treated it seriously, Shelley would have done so.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Furthermore Shelley is entirely at one with Wordsworth
+as to the interfusing of the Presence in nature.
+Here is the opening stanza of his poem entitled <cite>Mont
+Blanc</cite>:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b c014'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>“The everlasting universe of Things</div>
+      <div class='line'>Flows through the Mind, and rolls its rapid waves,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—</div>
+      <div class='line'>Now lending splendour, where from secret springs</div>
+      <div class='line'>The source of human thought its tribute brings</div>
+      <div class='line'>Of waters,—with a sound but half its own,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Such as a feeble brook will oft assume</div>
+      <div class='line'>In the wild woods, among the Mountains lone,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river</div>
+      <div class='line'>Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c015'>Shelley has written these lines with explicit reference
+to some form of idealism, Kantian or Berkeleyan
+or Platonic. But however you construe him, he is
+here an emphatic witness to a prehensive unification
+as constituting the very being of nature.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Berkeley, Wordsworth, Shelley are representative
+of the intuitive refusal seriously to accept the abstract
+materialism of science.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>There is an interesting difference in the treatment of
+nature by Wordsworth and by Shelley, which brings
+forward the exact questions we have got to think about.
+Shelley thinks of nature as changing, dissolving,
+transforming as it were at a fairy’s touch. The leaves
+fly before the West Wind</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b c014'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>“Like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c015'>In his poem <cite>The Cloud</cite> it is the transformations of
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_121'>121</span>water which excite his imagination. The subject of
+the poem is the endless, eternal, elusive change of
+things:</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b c014'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>“I change but I cannot die.”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c015'>This is one aspect of nature, its elusive change: a
+change not merely to be expressed by locomotion, but
+a change of inward character. This is where Shelley
+places his emphasis, on the change of what cannot die.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Wordsworth was born among hills; hills mostly
+barren of trees, and thus showing the minimum of
+change with the seasons. He was haunted by the
+enormous permanences of nature. For him change is
+an incident which shoots across a background of endurance,</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b c014'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>“Breaking the silence of the seas</div>
+      <div class='line'>Among the farthest Hebrides.”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c015'>Every scheme for the analysis of nature has to face
+these two facts, <em>change</em> and <em>endurance</em>. There is yet
+a third fact to be placed by it, <em>eternality</em>, I will call it.
+The mountain endures. But when after ages it has
+been worn away, it has gone. If a replica arises, it is
+yet a new mountain. A colour is eternal. It haunts
+time like a spirit. It comes and it goes. But where
+it comes, it is the same colour. It neither survives nor
+does it live. It appears when it is wanted. The mountain
+has to time and space a different relation from
+that which colour has. In the previous lecture, I was
+chiefly considering the relation to space-time of things
+which, in my sense of the term, are eternal. It was
+necessary to do so before we can pass to the consideration
+of the things which endure.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Also we must recollect the basis of our procedure.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_122'>122</span>I hold that philosophy is the critic of abstractions.
+Its function is the double one, first of harmonising
+them by assigning to them their right relative status
+as abstractions, and secondly of completing them by
+direct comparison with more concrete intuitions of
+the universe, and thereby promoting the formation of
+more complete schemes of thought. It is in respect to
+this comparison that the testimony of great poets is of
+such importance. Their survival is evidence that they
+express deep intuitions of mankind penetrating into
+what is universal in concrete fact. Philosophy is not
+one among the sciences with its own little scheme of
+abstractions which it works away at perfecting and
+improving. It is the survey of sciences, with the special
+objects of their harmony, and of their completion.
+It brings to this task, not only the evidence of the separate
+sciences, but also its own appeal to concrete experience.
+It confronts the sciences with concrete fact.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The literature of the nineteenth century, especially
+its English poetic literature, is a witness to the discord
+between the aesthetic intuitions of mankind and the
+mechanism of science. Shelley brings vividly before
+us the elusiveness of the eternal objects of sense as they
+haunt the change which infects underlying organisms.
+Wordsworth is the poet of nature as being the field of
+enduring permanences carrying within themselves a
+message of tremendous significance. The eternal objects
+are also there for him,</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b c014'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>“The light that never was, on sea or land.”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c015'>Both Shelley and Wordsworth emphatically bear witness
+that nature cannot be divorced from its aesthetic
+values; and that these values arise from the cumulation,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_123'>123</span>in some sense, of the brooding presence of the
+whole onto its various parts. Thus we gain from the
+poets the doctrine that a philosophy of nature must
+concern itself at least with these five notions: change,
+value, eternal objects, endurance, organism, interfusion.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>We see that the literary romantic movement at
+the beginning of the nineteenth century, just as much
+as Berkeley’s philosophical idealistic movement a
+hundred years earlier, refused to be confined within
+the materialistic concepts of the orthodox scientific
+theory. We know also that when in these lectures we
+come to the twentieth century, we shall find a movement
+in science itself to reorganise its concepts, driven
+thereto by its own intrinsic development.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>It is, however, impossible to proceed until we have
+settled whether this refashioning of ideas is to be
+carried out on an objectivist basis or on a subjectivist
+basis. By a subjectivist basis I mean the belief that
+the nature of our immediate experience is the outcome
+of the perceptive peculiarities of the subject enjoying
+the experience. In other words, I mean that
+for this theory what is perceived is not a partial
+vision of a complex of things generally independent
+of that act of cognition; but that it merely is the expression
+of the individual peculiarities of the cognitive
+act. Accordingly what is common to the multiplicity
+of cognitive acts is the ratiocination connected
+with them. Thus, though there is a common world of
+thought associated with our sense-perceptions, there
+is no common world to think about. What we do
+think about is a common conceptual world applying
+indifferently to our individual experiences which are
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_124'>124</span>strictly personal to ourselves. Such a conceptual world
+will ultimately find its complete expression in the
+equations of applied mathematics. This is the extreme
+subjectivist position. There is of course the
+half-way house of those who believe that our perceptual
+experience does tell us of a common objective
+world; but that the things perceived are merely the
+outcome for us of this world, and are not <em>in themselves</em>
+elements in the common world itself.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Also there is the objectivist position. This creed is
+that the actual elements perceived by our senses are <em>in
+themselves</em> the elements of a common world; and that
+this world is a complex of things, including indeed
+our acts of cognition, but transcending them. According
+to this point of view the things experienced are to
+be distinguished from our knowledge of them. So
+far as there is dependence, the <em>things</em> pave the way for
+the <em>cognition</em>, rather than <em>vice versa</em>. But the point
+is that the actual things experienced enter into a common
+world which transcends knowledge, though it
+includes knowledge. The intermediate subjectivists
+would hold that the things experienced only indirectly
+enter into the common world by reason of
+their dependence on the subject who is cognising. The
+objectivist holds that the things experienced and the
+cognisant subject enter into the common world on
+equal terms. In these lectures I am giving the outline
+of what I consider to be the essentials of an objectivist
+philosophy adapted to the requirement of science and
+to the concrete experience of mankind. Apart from
+the detailed criticism of the difficulties raised by subjectivism
+in any form, my broad reasons for distrusting
+it are three in number. One reason arises from
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_125'>125</span>the direct interrogation of our perceptive experience.
+It appears from this interrogation that we are <em>within</em>
+a world of colours, sounds, and other sense-objects, related
+in space and time to enduring objects such as
+stones, trees, and human bodies. We seem to be ourselves
+elements of this world in the same sense as are
+the other things which we perceive. But the subjectivist,
+even the moderate intermediate subjectivist,
+makes this world, as thus described, depend on us, in
+a way which directly traverses our naïve experience.
+I hold that the ultimate appeal is to naïve experience
+and that is why I lay such stress on the evidence of
+poetry. My point is, that in our sense-experience we
+know away from and beyond our own personality;
+whereas the subjectivist holds that in such experience
+we merely know about our own personality. Even
+the intermediate subjectivist places our personality between
+the world we know of and the common world
+which he admits. The world we know of is for him
+the internal strain of our personality under the stress
+of the common world which lies behind.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>My second reason for distrusting subjectivism is
+based on the particular content of experience. Our
+historical knowledge tells us of ages in the past when,
+so far as we can see, no living being existed on earth.
+Again it also tells us of countless star-systems, whose
+detailed history remains beyond our ken. Consider
+even the moon and the earth. What is going on
+within the interior of the earth, and on the far side of
+the moon! Our perceptions lead us to infer that there
+is something happening in the stars, something happening
+within the earth, and something happening
+on the far side of the moon. Also they tell us that in
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_126'>126</span>remote ages there were things happening. But all
+these things which it appears certainly happened, are
+either unknown in detail, or else are reconstructed by
+inferential evidence. In the face of this content of
+our personal experience, it is difficult to believe that
+the experienced world is an attribute of our own personality.
+My third reason is based upon the instinct for
+action. Just as sense-perception seems to give knowledge
+of what lies beyond individuality, so action seems
+to issue in an instinct for self-transcendence. The activity
+passes beyond self into the known transcendent
+world. It is here that final ends are of importance.
+For it is not activity urged from behind, which passes
+out into the veiled world of the intermediate subjectivist.
+It is activity directed to determinate ends in
+the known world; and yet it is activity transcending
+self and it is activity within the known world. It
+follows therefore that the world, as known, transcends
+the subject which is cognisant of it.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The subjectivist position has been popular among
+those who have been engaged in giving a philosophical
+interpretation to the recent theories of relativity in
+physical science. The dependence of the world of
+sense on the individual percipient seems an easy mode
+of expressing the meanings involved. Of course, with
+the exception of those who are content with themselves
+as forming the entire universe, solitary amid nothing,
+everyone wants to struggle back to some sort of objectivist
+position. I do not understand how a common
+world of thought can be established in the absence of
+a common world of sense. I will not argue this point
+in detail; but in the absence of a transcendence of
+thought, or a transcendence of the world of sense, it
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_127'>127</span>is difficult to see how the subjectivist is to divest himself
+of his solitariness. Nor does the intermediate subjectivist
+appear to get any help from his unknown
+world in the background.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The distinction between realism and idealism does
+not coincide with that between objectivism and subjectivism.
+Both realists and idealists can start from
+an objective standpoint. They may both agree that
+the world disclosed in sense-perception is a common
+world, transcending the individual percipient. But
+the objective idealist, when he comes to analyse what
+the reality of this world involves, finds that cognitive
+mentality is in some way inextricably concerned in
+every detail. This position the realist denies. Accordingly
+these two classes of objectivists do not part
+company till they have arrived at the ultimate problem
+of metaphysics. There is a great deal which they
+share in common. This is why, in my last lecture, I
+said that I adopted a position of provisional realism.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In the past, the objectivist position has been distorted
+by the supposed necessity of accepting the classical
+scientific materialism, with its doctrine of simple
+location. This has necessitated the doctrine of secondary
+and primary qualities. Thus the secondary
+qualities, such as the sense-objects, are dealt with
+on subjectivist principles. This is a half-hearted position
+which falls an easy prey to subjectivist criticism.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>If we are to include the secondary qualities in the
+common world, a very drastic reorganisation of our
+fundamental concepts is necessary. It is an evident
+fact of experience that our apprehensions of the external
+world depend absolutely on the occurrences
+within the human body. By playing appropriate
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_128'>128</span>tricks on the body a man can be got to perceive, or
+not to perceive, almost anything. Some people express
+themselves as though bodies, brains, and nerves
+were the only real things in an entirely imaginary
+world. In other words, they treat bodies on objectivist
+principles, and the rest of the world on subjectivist
+principles. This will not do; especially, when we
+remember that it is the experimenter’s perception of
+another person’s body which is in question as evidence.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>But we have to admit that the body is the organism
+whose states regulate our cognisance of the world. The
+unity of the perceptual field therefore must be a unity
+of bodily experience. In being aware of the bodily
+experience, we must thereby be aware of aspects of the
+whole spatio-temporal world as mirrored within the
+bodily life. This is the solution of the problem which
+I gave in my last lecture. I will not repeat myself
+now, except to remind you that my theory involves
+the entire abandonment of the notion that simple location
+is the primary way in which things are involved
+in space-time. In a certain sense, everything is everywhere
+at all times. For every location involves an
+aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every
+spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>If you try to imagine this doctrine in terms of our
+conventional views of space and time, which presuppose
+simple location, it is a great paradox. But if
+you think of it in terms of our naïve experience, it is
+a mere transcript of the obvious facts. You are in a
+certain place perceiving things. Your perception
+takes place where you are, and is entirely dependent
+on how your body is functioning. But this functioning
+of the body in one place, exhibits for your cognisance
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_129'>129</span>an aspect of the distant environment, fading
+away into the general knowledge that there are things
+beyond. If this cognisance conveys knowledge of a
+transcendent world, it must be because the event which
+is the bodily life unifies in itself aspects of the universe.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>This is a doctrine extremely consonant with the
+vivid expression of personal experience which we find
+in the nature-poetry of imaginative writers such as
+Wordsworth or Shelley. The brooding, immediate
+presences of things are an obsession to Wordsworth.
+What the theory does do is to edge cognitive mentality
+away from being the necessary substratum of the
+unity of experience. That unity is now placed in the
+unity of an event. Accompanying this unity, there
+may or there may not be cognition.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>At this point we come back to the great question
+which was posed before us by our examination of the
+evidence afforded by the poetic insight of Wordsworth
+and Shelley. This single question has expanded into
+a group of questions. What are enduring things, as
+distinguished from the eternal objects, such as colour
+and shape? How are they possible? What is their
+status and meaning in the universe? It comes to this:
+What is the status of the enduring stability of the
+order of nature? There is the summary answer,
+which refers nature to some greater reality standing
+behind it. This reality occurs in the history
+of thought under many names, The Absolute, Brahma,
+The Order of Heaven, God. The delineation of final
+metaphysical truth is no part of this lecture. My
+point is that any summary conclusion jumping from
+our conviction of the existence of such an order of
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_130'>130</span>nature to the easy assumption that there is an ultimate
+reality which, in some unexplained way, is to be
+appealed to for the removal of perplexity, constitutes
+the great refusal of rationality to assert its rights. We
+have to search whether nature does not in its very
+being show itself as self-explanatory. By this I mean,
+that the sheer statement, of what things are, may contain
+elements explanatory of why things are. Such
+elements may be expected to refer to depths beyond
+anything which we can grasp with a clear apprehension.
+In a sense, all explanation must end in an ultimate
+arbitrariness. My demand is, that the ultimate
+arbitrariness of matter of fact from which our formulation
+starts should disclose the same general principles
+of reality, which we dimly discern as stretching
+away into regions beyond our explicit powers of discernment.
+Nature exhibits itself as exemplifying a
+philosophy of the evolution of organisms subject to
+determinate conditions. Examples of such conditions
+are the dimensions of space, the laws of nature, the
+determinate enduring entities, such as atoms and electrons,
+which exemplify these laws. But the very nature
+of these entities, the very nature of their spatiality
+and temporality, should exhibit the arbitrariness of
+these conditions as the outcome of a wider evolution
+beyond nature itself, and within which nature is but
+a limited mode.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>One all-pervasive fact, inherent in the very character
+of what is real is the transition of things, the
+passage one to another. This passage is not a mere
+linear procession of discrete entities. However we
+fix a determinate entity, there is always a narrower
+determination of something which is presupposed in
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_131'>131</span>our first choice. Also there is always a wider determination
+into which our first choice fades by transition
+beyond itself. The general aspect of nature is
+that of evolutionary expansiveness. These unities,
+which I call events, are the emergence into actuality
+of something. How are we to characterise the something
+which thus emerges? The name ‘<em>event</em>’ given
+to such a unity, draws attention to the inherent transitoriness,
+combined with the actual unity. But this
+abstract word cannot be sufficient to characterise what
+the fact of the reality of an event is in itself. A moment’s
+thought shows us that no one idea can in itself
+be sufficient. For every idea which finds its significance
+in each event must represent something which
+contributes to what realisation is in itself. Thus no one
+word can be adequate. But conversely, nothing must
+be left out. Remembering the poetic rendering of
+our concrete experience, we see at once that the element
+of value, of being valuable, of having value, of
+being an end in itself, of being something which is for
+its own sake, must not be omitted in any account of an
+event as the most concrete actual something. ‘Value’
+is the word I use for the intrinsic reality of an event.
+Value is an element which permeates through and
+through the poetic view of nature. We have only to
+transfer to the very texture of realisation in itself that
+value which we recognise so readily in terms of human
+life. This is the secret of Wordsworth’s worship of
+nature. Realization therefore is in itself the attainment
+of value. But there is no such thing as mere
+value. Value is the outcome of limitation. The definite
+finite entity is the selected mode which is the shaping
+of attainment; apart from such shaping into
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_132'>132</span>individual matter of fact there is no attainment. The
+mere fusion of all that there is would be the nonentity
+of indefiniteness. The salvation of reality is its obstinate,
+irreducible, matter-of-fact entities, which are
+limited to be no other than themselves. Neither
+science, nor art, nor creative action can tear itself
+away from obstinate, irreducible, limited facts. The
+endurance of things has its significance in the self-retention
+of that which imposes itself as a definite attainment
+for its own sake. That which endures is
+limited, obstructive, intolerant, infecting its environment
+with its own aspects. But it is not self-sufficient.
+The aspects of all things enter into its very nature.
+It is only itself as drawing together into its own limitation
+the larger whole in which it finds itself. Conversely
+it is only itself by lending its aspects to this
+same environment in which it finds itself. The problem
+of evolution is the development of enduring harmonies
+of enduring shapes of value, which merge
+into higher attainments of things beyond themselves.
+Aesthetic attainment is interwoven in the texture of
+realisation. The endurance of an entity represents the
+attainment of a limited aesthetic success, though if we
+look beyond it to its external effects, it may represent
+an aesthetic failure. Even within itself, it may represent
+the conflict between a lower success and a higher
+failure. The conflict is the presage of disruption.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The further discussion of the nature of enduring
+objects and of the conditions they require will be
+relevant to the consideration of the doctrine of evolution
+which dominated the latter half of the nineteenth
+century. The point which in this lecture I have
+endeavoured to make clear is that the nature-poetry of
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_133'>133</span>the romantic revival was a protest on behalf of the
+organic view of nature, and also a protest against the
+exclusion of value from the essence of matter of fact.
+In this aspect of it, the romantic movement may be
+conceived as a revival of Berkeley’s protest which had
+been launched a hundred years earlier. The romantic
+reaction was a protest on behalf of value.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_134'>134</span>
+  <h2 class='c006'>CHAPTER VI <br /> <br /> THE NINETEENTH CENTURY</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'>My previous lecture was occupied with the comparison
+of the nature-poetry of the romantic movement
+in England with the materialistic scientific philosophy
+inherited from the eighteenth century. It noted the
+entire disagreement of the two movements of thought.
+The lecture also continued the endeavour to outline
+an objectivist philosophy, capable of bridging the
+gap between science and that fundamental intuition of
+mankind which finds its expression in poetry and its
+practical exemplification in the presuppositions of
+daily life. As the nineteenth century passed on, the
+romantic movement died down. It did not die away,
+but it lost its clear unity of tidal stream, and dispersed
+itself into many estuaries as it coalesced with other
+human interests. The faith of the century was derived
+from three sources: one source was the romantic
+movement, showing itself in religious revival, in art,
+and in political aspiration: another source was the
+gathering advance of science which opened avenues of
+thought: the third source was the advance in technology
+which completely changed the conditions of
+human life.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Each of these springs of faith had its origin in the
+previous period. The French Revolution itself was
+the first child of romanticism in the form in which it
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_135'>135</span>tinged Rousseau. James Watt obtained his patent for
+his steam-engine in 1769. The scientific advance was
+the glory of France and of French influence, throughout
+the same century.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Also even during this earlier period, the streams
+interacted, coalesced, and antagonised each other. But
+it was not until the nineteenth century that the threefold
+movement came to that full development and
+peculiar balance characteristic of the sixty years following
+the battle of Waterloo.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>What is peculiar and new to the century, differentiating
+it from all its predecessors, is its technology.
+It was not merely the introduction of some great isolated
+inventions. It is impossible not to feel that
+something more than that was involved. For example,
+writing was a greater invention than the steam-engine.
+But in tracing the continuous history of the growth of
+writing we find an immense difference from that of
+the steam-engine. We must, of course, put aside minor
+and sporadic anticipations of both; and confine attention
+to the periods of their effective elaboration. The
+scale of time is so absolutely disparate. For the steam-engine,
+we may give about a hundred years; for writing,
+the time period is of the order of a thousand years.
+Further, when writing was finally popularised, the
+world was not then expecting the next step in technology.
+The process of change was slow, unconscious,
+and unexpected.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In the nineteenth century, the process became quick,
+conscious, and expected. The earlier half of the century
+was the period in which this new attitude to
+change was first established and enjoyed. It was a
+peculiar period of hope, in the sense in which, sixty
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_136'>136</span>or seventy years later, we can now detect a note of
+disillusionment, or at least of anxiety.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The greatest invention of the nineteenth century
+was the invention of the method of invention. A new
+method entered into life. In order to understand our
+epoch, we can neglect all the details of change, such
+as railways, telegraphs, radios, spinning machines,
+synthetic dyes. We must concentrate on the method
+in itself; that is the real novelty, which has broken up
+the foundations of the old civilisation. The prophecy
+of Francis Bacon has now been fulfilled; and man,
+who at times dreamt of himself as a little lower than
+the angels, has submitted to become the servant and
+the minister of nature. It still remains to be seen
+whether the same actor can play both parts.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The whole change has arisen from the new scientific
+information. Science, conceived not so much in
+its principles as in its results, is an obvious storehouse
+of ideas for utilisation. But, if we are to understand
+what happened during the century, the analogy of a
+mine is better than that of a storehouse. Also, it is a
+great mistake to think that the bare scientific idea is
+the required invention, so that it has only to be picked
+up and used. An intense period of imaginative design
+lies between. One element in the new method is just
+the discovery of how to set about bridging the gap
+between the scientific ideas, and the ultimate product.
+It is a process of disciplined attack upon one difficulty
+after another.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The possibilities of modern technology were first in
+practice realised in England, by the energy of a prosperous
+middle class. Accordingly, the industrial revolution
+started there. But the Germans explicitly realised
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_137'>137</span>the methods by which the deeper veins in the
+mine of science could be reached. They abolished
+haphazard methods of scholarship. In their technological
+schools and universities progress did not have
+to wait for the occasional genius, or the occasional
+lucky thought. Their feats of scholarship during the
+nineteenth century were the admiration of the world.
+This discipline of knowledge applies beyond technology
+to pure science, and beyond science to general
+scholarship. It represents the change from amateurs
+to professionals.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>There have always been people who devoted their
+lives to definite regions of thought. In particular,
+lawyers and the clergy of the Christian churches form
+obvious examples of such specialism. But the full
+self-conscious realisation of the power of professionalism
+in knowledge in all its departments, and of the way
+to produce the professionals, and of the importance of
+knowledge to the advance of technology, and of the
+methods by which abstract knowledge can be connected
+with technology, and of the boundless possibilities
+of technological advance,—the realisation of
+all these things was first completely attained in the
+nineteenth century; and among the various countries,
+chiefly in Germany.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In the past human life was lived in a bullock cart;
+in the future it will be lived in an aeroplane; and the
+change of speed amounts to a difference in quality.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The transformation of the field of knowledge,
+which has been thus effected, has not been wholly a
+gain. At least, there are dangers implicit in it, although
+the increase of efficiency is undeniable. The
+discussion of various effects on social life arising from
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_138'>138</span>the new situation is reserved for my last lecture. For
+the present it is sufficient to note that this novel situation
+of disciplined progress is the setting within
+which the thought of the century developed.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In the period considered four great novel ideas were
+introduced into theoretical science. Of course, it is
+possible to show good cause for increasing my list far
+beyond the number <em>four</em>. But I am keeping to ideas
+which, if taken in their broadest signification, are vital
+to modern attempts at reconstructing the foundations
+of physical science.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Two of these ideas are antithetical, and I will consider
+them together. We are not concerned with details,
+but with ultimate influences on thought. One
+of the ideas is that of a field of physical activity pervading
+all space, even where there is an apparent
+vacuum. This notion had occurred to many people,
+under many forms. We remember the medieval axiom,
+nature abhors a vacuum. Also, Descartes’ vortices
+at one time, in the seventeenth century, seemed
+as if established among scientific assumptions. Newton
+believed that gravitation was caused by something
+happening in a medium. But, on the whole, in the
+eighteenth century nothing was made of any of these
+ideas. The passage of light was explained in Newton’s
+fashion by the flight of minute corpuscles, which of
+course left room for a vacuum. Mathematical physicists
+were far too busy deducing the consequences of
+the theory of gravitation to bother much about the
+causes; nor did they know where to look, if they had
+troubled themselves over the question. There were
+speculations, but their importance was not great. Accordingly,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_139'>139</span>when the nineteenth century opened, the
+notion of physical occurrences pervading all space
+held no effective place in science. It was revived from
+two sources. The undulatory theory of light triumphed,
+thanks to Thomas Young and Fresnel. This
+demands that there shall be something throughout
+space which can undulate. Accordingly, the ether
+was produced, as a sort of all pervading subtle material.
+Again the theory of electromagnetism finally,
+in Clerk Maxwell’s hands, assumed a shape in
+which it demanded that there should be electromagnetic
+occurrences throughout all space. Maxwell’s
+complete theory was not shaped until the eighteen-seventies.
+But it had been prepared for by many
+great men, Ampère, Oersted, Faraday. In accordance
+with the current materialistic outlook, these electromagnetic
+occurrences also required a material in
+which to happen. So again the ether was requisitioned.
+Then Maxwell, as the immediate first-fruits
+of his theory, demonstrated that the waves of light
+were merely waves of his electromagnetic occurrences.
+Accordingly, the theory of electromagnetism swallowed
+up the theory of light. It was a great simplification,
+and no one doubts its truth. But it had one
+unfortunate effect so far as materialism was concerned.
+For, whereas quite a simple sort of elastic ether sufficed
+for light when taken by itself, the electromagnetic
+ether has to be endowed with just those properties
+necessary for the production of the electromagnetic
+occurrences. In fact, it becomes a mere name
+for the material which is postulated to underlie these
+occurrences. If you do not happen to hold the metaphysical
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_140'>140</span>theory which makes you postulate such an
+ether, you can discard it. For it has no independent
+vitality.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Thus in the seventies of the last century, some main
+physical sciences were established on a basis which
+presupposed the idea of <em>continuity</em>. On the other
+hand, the idea of <em>atomicity</em> had been introduced by
+John Dalton, to complete Lavoisier’s work on the
+foundation of chemistry. This is the second great
+notion. Ordinary matter was conceived as atomic:
+electromagnetic effects were conceived as arising from
+a continuous field.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>There was no contradiction. In the first place, the
+notions are antithetical; but, apart from special embodiments,
+are not logically contradictory. Secondly,
+they were applied to different regions of science, one
+to chemistry, and the other to electromagnetism.
+And, as yet, there were but faint signs of coalescence
+between the two.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The notion of matter as atomic has a long history.
+Democritus and Lucretius will at once occur to your
+minds. In speaking of these ideas as novel, I merely
+mean <em>relatively novel</em>, having regard to the settlement
+of ideas which formed the efficient basis of
+science throughout the eighteenth century. In considering
+the history of thought, it is necessary to distinguish
+the real stream, determining a period, from
+ineffectual thoughts casually entertained. In the
+eighteenth century every well-educated man read Lucretius,
+and entertained ideas about atoms. But John
+Dalton made them efficient in the stream of science;
+and in this function of efficiency atomicity was a new
+idea.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'><span class='pageno' id='Page_141'>141</span>The influence of atomicity was not limited to chemistry.
+The living cell is to biology what the electron
+and the proton are to physics. Apart from cells and
+from aggregates of cells there are no biological phenomena.
+The cell theory was introduced into biology
+contemporaneously with, and independently of, Dalton’s
+atomic theory. The two theories are independent
+exemplifications of the same idea of ‘atomism.’ The
+biological cell theory was a gradual growth, and a
+mere list of dates and names illustrates the fact that
+the biological sciences, as effective schemes of thought,
+are barely one hundred years old. Bichât in 1801
+elaborated a tissue theory: Johannes Müller in 1835
+described ‘cells’ and demonstrated facts concerning
+their nature and relations: Schleiden in 1838 and
+Schwann in 1839 finally established their fundamental
+character. Thus by 1840 both biology and chemistry
+were established on an atomic basis. The final triumph
+of atomism had to wait for the arrival of electrons
+at the end of the century. The importance of
+the imaginative background is illustrated by the fact
+that nearly half a century after Dalton had done his
+work, another chemist, Louis Pasteur, carried over
+these same ideas of atomicity still further into the
+region of biology. The cell theory and Pasteur’s work
+were in some respects more revolutionary than that of
+Dalton. For they introduced the notion of <em>organism</em>
+into the world of minute beings. There had been a
+tendency to treat the atom as an ultimate entity, capable
+only of external relations. This attitude of mind
+was breaking down under the influence of Mendeleef’s
+periodic law. But Pasteur showed the decisive importance
+of the idea of organism at the stage of infinitesimal
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_142'>142</span>magnitude. The astronomers had shown
+us how big is the universe. The chemists and biologists
+teach us how small it is. There is in modern
+scientific practice a famous standard of length. It is
+rather small: to obtain it, you must divide a centimetre
+into one hundred million parts, and take one
+of them. Pasteur’s organisms are a good deal bigger
+than this length. In connection with atoms, we now
+know that there are organisms for which such distances
+are uncomfortably great.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The remaining pair of new ideas to be ascribed to
+this epoch are both of them connected with the notion
+of transition or change. They are the doctrine of the
+conservation of energy, and the doctrine of evolution.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The doctrine of energy has to do with the notion
+of quantitative permanence underlying change. The
+doctrine of evolution has to do with the emergence of
+novel organisms as the outcome of change. The theory
+of energy lies in the province of physics. The theory
+of evolution lies mainly in the province of biology,
+although it had previously been touched upon by Kant
+and Laplace in connection with the formation of suns
+and planets.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The convergent effect of the new power for scientific
+advance, which resulted from these four ideas,
+transformed the middle period of the century into an
+orgy of scientific triumph. Clear-sighted men, of the
+sort who are so clearly wrong, now proclaimed that
+the secrets of the physical universe were finally
+disclosed. If only you ignored everything which refused
+to come into line, your powers of explanation
+were unlimited. On the other side, muddle-headed
+men muddled themselves into the most indefensible
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_143'>143</span>positions. Learned dogmatism, conjoined with ignorance
+of the crucial facts, suffered a heavy defeat from
+the scientific advocates of new ways. Thus to the excitement
+derived from technological revolution, there
+was now added the excitement arising from the vistas
+disclosed by scientific theory. Both the material and
+the spiritual bases of social life were in process of
+transformation. When the century entered upon its
+last quarter, its three sources of inspiration, the romantic,
+the technological, and the scientific had done
+their work.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Then, almost suddenly, a pause occurred; and in
+its last twenty years the century closed with one of
+the dullest stages of thought since the time of the First
+Crusade. It was an echo of the eighteenth century,
+lacking Voltaire and the reckless grace of the French
+aristocrats. The period was efficient, dull, and half-hearted.
+It celebrated the triumph of the professional
+man.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>But looking backwards upon this time of pause, we
+can now discern signs of change. In the first place,
+the modern conditions of systematic research prevent
+absolute stagnation. In every branch of science, there
+was effective progress, indeed rapid progress, although
+it was confined somewhat strictly within the
+accepted ideas of each branch. It was an age of successful
+scientific orthodoxy, undisturbed by much
+thought beyond the conventions.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In the second place, we can now see that the adequacy
+of scientific materialism as a scheme of thought
+for the use of science was endangered. The conservation
+of energy provided a new type of quantitative
+permanence. It is true that energy could be construed
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_144'>144</span>as something subsidiary to matter. But, anyhow,
+the notion of <em>mass</em> was losing its unique preeminence
+as being the one final permanent quantity.
+Later on, we find the relations of mass and energy inverted;
+so that mass now becomes the name for a
+quantity of energy considered in relation to some of its
+dynamical effects. This train of thought leads to the
+notion of energy being fundamental, thus displacing
+matter from that position. But energy is merely the
+name for the quantitative aspect of a structure of happenings;
+in short, it depends on the notion of the
+functioning of an organism. The question is, can we
+define an organism without recurrence to the concept
+of matter in simple location? We must, later on, consider
+this point in more detail.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The same relegation of matter to the background
+occurs in connection with the electromagnetic fields.
+The modern theory presupposes happenings in that
+field which are divorced from immediate dependence
+upon matter. It is usual to provide an ether as a substratum.
+But the ether does not really enter into the
+theory. Thus again the notion of material loses its
+fundamental position. Also, the atom is transforming
+itself into an organism; and finally the evolution
+theory is nothing else than the analysis of the conditions
+for the formation and survival of various types
+of organisms. In truth, one most significant fact of
+this later period is the advance in biological sciences.
+These sciences are essentially sciences concerning organisms.
+During the epoch in question, and indeed
+also at the present moment, the prestige of the more
+perfect scientific form belongs to the physical sciences.
+Accordingly, biology apes the manners of physics. It
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_145'>145</span>is orthodox to hold, that there is nothing in biology
+but what is physical mechanism under somewhat complex
+circumstances.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>One difficulty in this position is the present confusion
+as to the foundational concepts of physical science.
+This same difficulty also attaches to the opposed doctrine
+of vitalism. For, in this later theory, the fact
+of mechanism is accepted—I mean, mechanism based
+upon materialism—and an additional vital control is
+introduced to explain the actions of living bodies. It
+cannot be too clearly understood that the various
+physical laws which appear to apply to the behaviour
+of atoms are not mutually consistent as at present
+formulated. The appeal to mechanism on behalf of
+biology was in its origin an appeal to the well-attested
+self-consistent physical concepts as expressing the basis
+of all natural phenomena. But at present there is no
+such system of concepts.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Science is taking on a new aspect which is neither
+purely physical, nor purely biological. It is becoming
+the study of organisms. Biology is the study of
+the larger organisms; whereas physics is the study of
+the smaller organisms. There is another difference
+between the two divisions of science. The organisms
+of biology include as ingredients the smaller organisms
+of physics; but there is at present no evidence
+that the smaller of the physical organisms can be analysed
+into component organisms. It may be so. But
+anyhow we are faced with the question as to whether
+there are not primary organisms which are incapable
+of further analysis. It seems very unlikely that there
+should be any infinite regress in nature. Accordingly,
+a theory of science which discards materialism must
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_146'>146</span>answer the question as to the character of these primary
+entities. There can be only one answer on this
+basis. We must start with the event as the ultimate
+unit of natural occurrence. An event has to do with
+all that there is, and in particular with all other events.
+This interfusion of events is effected by the aspects
+of those eternal objects, such as colours, sounds, scents,
+geometrical characters, which are required for nature
+and are not emergent from it. Such an eternal
+object will be an ingredient of one event under the
+guise, or aspect, of qualifying another event. There
+is a reciprocity of aspects, and there are patterns of
+aspects. Each event corresponds to two such patterns;
+namely, the pattern of aspects of other events
+which it grasps into its own unity, and the pattern of
+its aspects which other events severally grasp into their
+unities. Accordingly, a non-materialistic philosophy
+of nature will identify a primary organism as being
+the emergence of some particular pattern as grasped
+in the unity of a real event. Such a pattern will also
+include the aspects of the event in question as grasped
+in other events, whereby those other events receive a
+modification, or partial determination. There is thus
+an intrinsic and an extrinsic reality of an event,
+namely, the event as in its own prehension, and the
+event as in the prehension of other events. The concept
+of an organism includes, therefore, the concept
+of the interaction of organisms. The ordinary scientific
+ideas of transmission and continuity are, relatively
+speaking, details concerning the empirically observed
+characters of these patterns throughout space and
+time. The position here maintained is that the relationships
+of an event are internal, so far as concerns
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_147'>147</span>the event itself; that is to say, that they are constitutive
+of what the event is in itself.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Also in the previous lecture, we arrived at the notion
+that an actual event is an achievement for its own
+sake, a grasping of diverse entities into a value by
+reason of their real togetherness in that pattern, to the
+exclusion of other entities. It is not the mere logical
+togetherness of merely diverse things. For in that case,
+to modify Bacon’s words, “all eternal objects would
+be alike one to another.” This reality means that each
+intrinsic essence, that is to say, what each eternal object
+is in itself, becomes relevant to the one limited
+value emergent in the guise of the event. But values
+differ in importance. Thus though each event is
+necessary for the community of events, the weight of
+its contribution is determined by something intrinsic
+in itself. We have now to discuss what that property
+is. Empirical observation shows that it is the property
+which we may call indifferently <em>retention</em>, <em>endurance</em>
+or <em>reiteration</em>. This property amounts to the recovery,
+on behalf of value amid the transitoriness of
+reality, of the self-identity which is also enjoyed by
+the primary eternal objects. The reiteration of a particular
+shape (or formation) of value within an event
+occurs when the event as a whole repeats some shape
+which is also exhibited by each one of a succession of
+its parts. Thus however you analyse the event according
+to the flux of its parts through time, there is the
+same thing-for-its-own-sake standing before you. Thus
+the event, in its own intrinsic reality, mirrors in itself,
+as derived from its own parts, aspects of the same patterned
+value as it realises in its complete self. It thus
+realises itself under the guise of an enduring individual
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_148'>148</span>entity, with a life history contained within itself.
+Furthermore, the extrinsic reality of such an event, as
+mirrored in other events, takes this same form of an
+enduring individuality; only in this case, the individuality
+is implanted as a reiteration of aspects of itself
+in the alien events composing the environment.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The total temporal duration of such an event bearing
+an enduring pattern, constitutes its specious present.
+Within this specious present the event realises
+itself as a totality, and also in so doing realises itself
+as grouping together a number of aspects of its own
+temporal parts. One and the same pattern is realised
+in the total event, and is exhibited by each of these
+various parts through an aspect of each part grasped
+into the togetherness of the total event. Also, the earlier
+life-history of the same pattern is exhibited by its
+aspects in this total event. There is, thus, in this event
+a memory of the antecedent life-history of its own
+dominant pattern, as having formed an element of
+value in its own antecedent environment. This concrete
+prehension, from within, of the life-history of
+an enduring fact is analysable into two abstractions, of
+which one is the enduring entity which has emerged
+as a real matter of fact to be taken account of by other
+things, and the other is the individualised embodiment
+of the underlying energy of realisation.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The consideration of the general flux of events leads
+to this analysis into an underlying eternal energy in
+whose nature there stands an envisagement of the
+realm of all eternal objects. Such an envisagement is
+the ground of the individualised thoughts which
+emerge as thought-aspects grasped within the life-history
+of the subtler and more complex enduring patterns.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_149'>149</span>Also in the nature of the eternal activity there
+must stand an envisagement of all values to be obtained
+by a real togetherness of eternal objects, as
+envisaged in ideal situations. Such ideal situations,
+apart from any reality, are devoid of intrinsic value,
+but are valuable as elements in purpose. The individualised
+prehension into individual events of aspects
+of these ideal situations takes the form of individualised
+thoughts, and as such has intrinsic value. Thus
+value arises because there is now a real togetherness
+of the ideal aspects, as in thought, with the actual
+aspects, as in process of occurrence. Accordingly no
+value is to be ascribed to the underlying activity as
+divorced from the matter-of-fact events of the real
+world.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Finally, to sum up this train of thought, the underlying
+activity, as conceived apart from the fact of
+realisation, has three types of envisagement. These
+are: first, the envisagement of eternal objects; secondly,
+the envisagement of possibilities of value in
+respect to the synthesis of eternal objects; and lastly,
+the envisagement of the actual matter of fact which
+must enter into the total situation which is achievable
+by the addition of the future. But in abstraction
+from actuality, the eternal activity is divorced from
+value. For the actuality is the value. The individual
+perception arising from enduring objects will vary in
+its individual depth and width according to the way
+in which the pattern dominates its own route. It
+may represent the faintest ripple differentiating the
+general substrate energy; or, in the other extreme, it
+may rise to conscious thought, which includes poising
+before self-conscious judgment the abstract possibilities
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_150'>150</span>of value inherent in various situations of ideal togetherness.
+The intermediate cases will group round
+the individual perception as envisaging (without self-consciousness)
+that one immediate possibility of attainment
+which represents the closest analogy to its
+own immediate past, having regard to the actual aspects
+which are there for prehension. The laws of
+physics represent the harmonised adjustment of development
+which results from this unique principle
+of determination. Thus dynamics is dominated by
+a principle of least action, whose detailed character
+has to be learnt from observation.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The atomic material entities which are considered
+in physical science are merely these individual enduring
+entities, conceived in abstraction from everything
+except what concerns their mutual interplay in determining
+each other’s historical routes of life-history.
+Such entities are partially formed by the inheritance
+of aspects from their own past. But they are also
+partially formed by the aspects of other events forming
+their environments. The laws of physics are the
+laws declaring how the entities mutually react among
+themselves. For physics these laws are arbitrary, because
+that science has abstracted from what the entities
+are in themselves. We have seen that this fact
+of what the entities are in themselves is liable to modification
+by their environments. Accordingly, the assumption
+that no modification of these laws is to be
+looked for in environments, which have any striking
+difference from the environments for which the laws
+have been observed to hold, is very unsafe. The
+physical entities may be modified in very essential
+ways, so far as these laws are concerned. It is even
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_151'>151</span>possible that they may be developed into individualities
+of more fundamental types, with wider embodiment
+of envisagement. Such envisagement might
+reach to the attainment of the poising of alternative
+values with exercise of choice lying outside the physical
+laws, and expressible only in terms of purpose.
+Apart from such remote possibilities, it remains an
+immediate deduction that an individual entity, whose
+own life-history is a part within the life-history of
+some larger, deeper, more complete pattern, is liable to
+have aspects of that larger pattern dominating its own
+being, and to experience modifications of that larger
+pattern reflected in itself as modifications of its own
+being. This is the theory of organic mechanism.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>According to this theory the evolution of laws of
+nature is concurrent with the evolution of enduring
+pattern. For the general state of the universe, as it
+now is, partly determines the very essences of the
+entities whose modes of functioning these laws express.
+The general principle is that in a new environment
+there is an evolution of the old entities into new forms.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>This rapid outline of a thoroughgoing organic
+theory of nature enables us to understand the chief
+requisites of the doctrine of evolution. The main
+work, proceeding during this pause at the end of the
+nineteenth century, was the absorption of this doctrine
+as guiding the methodology of all branches of science.
+By a blindness which is almost judicial as being a
+penalty affixed to hasty, superficial thinking, many
+religious thinkers opposed the new doctrine; although,
+in truth, a thoroughgoing evolutionary philosophy
+is inconsistent with materialism. The aboriginal
+stuff, or material, from which a materialistic philosophy
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_152'>152</span>starts is incapable of evolution. This material
+is in itself the ultimate substance. Evolution, on the
+materialistic theory, is reduced to the rôle of being
+another word for the description of the changes of
+the external relations between portions of matter.
+There is nothing to evolve, because one set of external
+relations is as good as any other set of external relations.
+There can merely be change, purposeless and
+unprogressive. But the whole point of the modern
+doctrine is the evolution of the complex organisms
+from antecedent states of less complex organisms. The
+doctrine thus cries aloud for a conception of organism
+as fundamental for nature. It also requires an underlying
+activity—a substantial activity—expressing itself
+in individual embodiments, and evolving in achievements
+of organism. The organism is a unit of emergent
+value, a real fusion of the characters of eternal
+objects, emerging for its own sake.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Thus in the process of analysing the character of
+nature in itself, we find that the emergence of organisms
+depends on a selective activity which is akin
+to purpose. The point is that the enduring organisms
+are now the outcome of evolution; and that, beyond
+these organisms, there is nothing else that endures.
+On the materialistic theory, there is material—such
+as matter or electricity—which endures. On the organic
+theory, the only endurances are structures of
+activity, and the structures are evolved.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Enduring things are thus the outcome of a temporal
+process; whereas eternal things are the elements required
+for the very being of the process. We can give
+a precise definition of endurance in this way: Let
+an event A be pervaded by an enduring structural
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_153'>153</span>pattern. Then A can be exhaustively subdivided into
+a temporal succession of events. Let B be any part
+of A, which is obtained by picking out any one of the
+events belonging to a series which thus subdivides A.
+Then the enduring pattern is a pattern of aspects
+within the complete pattern prehended into the unity
+of A, and it is also a pattern within the complete pattern
+prehended into the unity of any temporal slice of
+A, such as B. For example, a molecule is a pattern
+exhibited in an event of one minute, and of any second
+of that minute. It is obvious that such an enduring
+pattern may be of more, or of less, importance. It
+may express some slight fact connecting the underlying
+activities thus individualised; or it may express
+some very close connection. If the pattern which
+endures is merely derived from the direct aspects of
+the external environment, mirrored in the standpoints
+of the various parts, then the endurance is an extrinsic
+fact of slight importance. But if the enduring pattern
+is wholly derived from the direct aspects of the
+various temporal sections of the event in question, then
+the endurance is an important intrinsic fact. It expresses
+a certain unity of character uniting the underlying
+individualised activities. There is then an
+enduring object with a certain unity for itself and for
+the rest of nature. Let us use the term physical endurance
+to express endurance of this type. Then
+physical endurance is the process of continuously inheriting
+a certain identity of character transmitted
+throughout a historical route of events. This character
+belongs to the whole route, and to every event
+of the route. This is the exact property of material.
+If it has existed for ten minutes, it has existed during
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_154'>154</span>every minute of the ten minutes, and during every
+second of every minute. Only if you take <em>material</em>
+to be fundamental, this property of endurance is an
+arbitrary fact at the base of the order of nature; but
+if you take <em>organism</em> to be fundamental, this property
+is the result of evolution.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>It looks at first sight, as if a physical object, with
+its process of inheritance from itself, were independent
+of the environment. But such a conclusion is
+not justified. For let B and C be two successive slices
+in the life of such an object, such that C succeeds B.
+Then the enduring pattern in C is inherited from B,
+and from other analogous antecedent parts of its life.
+It is transmitted through B to C. But what is transmitted
+to C is the complete pattern of aspects derived
+from such events as B. These complete patterns include
+the influence of the environment on B, and on
+the other antecedent parts of the life of the object.
+Thus the complete aspects of the antecedent life are
+inherited as the partial pattern which endures
+throughout all the various periods of the life. Thus
+a favourable environment is essential to the maintenance
+of a physical object.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Nature, as we know it, comprises enormous permanences.
+There are the permanences of ordinary
+matter. The molecules within the oldest rocks known
+to geologists may have existed unchanged for over a
+thousand million years, not only unchanged in themselves,
+but unchanged in their relative dispositions to
+each other. In that length of time the number of
+pulsations of a molecule vibrating with the frequency
+of yellow sodium light would be about 16.3 × 10<sup>22</sup> =
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_155'>155</span>163,000 × (10<sup>6</sup>)³. Until recently, an atom was apparently
+indestructible. We know better now. But
+the indestructible atom has been succeeded by the apparently
+indestructible electron and the indestructible
+proton.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Another fact to be explained is the great similarity
+of these practically indestructible objects. All electrons
+are very similar to each other. We need not
+outrun the evidence, and say that they are identical;
+but our powers of observation cannot detect any differences.
+Analogously, all hydrogen nuclei are
+alike. Also we note the great numbers of these analogous
+objects. There are throngs of them. It seems
+as though a certain similarity were a favourable condition
+for endurance. Common sense also suggests
+this conclusion. If organisms are to survive, they
+must work together.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Accordingly, the key to the mechanism of evolution
+is the necessity for the evolution of a favourable
+environment, conjointly with the evolution of any
+specific type of enduring organisms of great permanence.
+Any physical object which by its influence
+deteriorates its environment, commits suicide.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>One of the simplest ways of evolving a favourable
+environment concurrently with the development of
+the individual organism, is that the influence of each
+organism on the environment should be favourable
+to the <em>endurance</em> of other organisms of the same type.
+Further, if the organism also favours the <em>development</em>
+of other organisms of the same type, you have
+then obtained a mechanism of evolution adapted to
+produce the observed state of large multitudes of
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_156'>156</span>analogous entities, with high powers of endurance.
+For the environment automatically develops with the
+species, and the species with the environment.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The first question to ask is, whether there is any
+direct evidence for such a mechanism for the evolution
+of enduring organisms. In surveying nature, we
+must remember that there are not only basic organisms
+whose ingredients are merely aspects of eternal
+objects. There are also organisms of organisms.
+Suppose for the moment and for the sake of simplicity,
+we assume, without any evidence, that electrons and
+hydrogen nuclei are such basic organisms. Then the
+atoms, and the molecules, are organisms of a higher
+type, which also represent a compact definite organic
+unity. But when we come to the larger aggregations
+of matter, the organic unity fades into the background.
+It appears to be but faint and elementary. It is there;
+but the pattern is vague and indecisive. It is a mere
+aggregation of effects. When we come to living beings,
+the definiteness of pattern is recovered, and the
+organic character again rises into prominence. Accordingly,
+the characteristic laws of inorganic matter
+are mainly the statistical averages resulting from
+confused aggregates. So far are they from throwing
+light on the ultimate nature of things, that they blur
+and obliterate the individual characters of the individual
+organisms. If we wish to throw light upon the
+facts relating to organisms, we must study either the
+individual molecules and electrons, or the individual
+living beings. In between we find comparative confusion.
+Now the difficulty of studying the individual
+molecule is that we know so little about its life history.
+We cannot keep an individual under continuous
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_157'>157</span>observation. In general, we deal with them in
+large aggregates. So far as individuals are concerned,
+sometimes with difficulty a great experimenter throws,
+so to speak, a flash light on one of them, and just
+observes one type of instantaneous effect. Accordingly,
+the history of the functioning of individual
+molecules, or electrons, is largely hidden from us.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>But in the case of living beings, we can trace the
+history of individuals. We now find exactly the
+mechanism which is here demanded. In the first
+place, there is the propagation of the species from
+members of the same species. There is also the careful
+provision of the favourable environment for the
+endurance of the family, the race, or the seed in the
+fruit.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>It is evident, however, that I have explained the
+evolutionary mechanism in terms which are far too
+simple. We find associated species of living things,
+providing for each other a favourable environment.
+Thus just as the members of the same species mutually
+favour each other, so do members of associated
+species. We find the rudimentary fact of association
+in the existence of the two species, electrons
+and hydrogen nuclei. The simplicity of the dual
+association, and the apparent absence of competition
+from other antagonistic species accounts for the massive
+endurance which we find among them.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>There are thus two sides to the machinery involved
+in the development of nature. On one side, there is
+a given environment with organisms adapting themselves
+to it. The scientific materialism of the epoch
+in question emphasised this aspect. From this point
+of view, there is a given amount of material, and only
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_158'>158</span>a limited number of organisms can take advantage
+of it. The givenness of the environment dominates
+everything. Accordingly, the last words of science
+appeared to be the Struggle for Existence, and Natural
+Selection. Darwin’s own writings are for all
+time a model of refusal to go beyond the direct evidence,
+and of careful retention of every possible hypothesis.
+But those virtues were not so conspicuous
+in his followers, and still less in his camp-followers.
+The imagination of European sociologists and publicists
+was stained by exclusive attention to this aspect
+of conflicting interests. The idea prevailed that there
+was a peculiar strong-minded realism in discarding
+ethical considerations in the determination of the conduct
+of commercial and national interests.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The other side of the evolutionary machinery, the
+neglected side, is expressed by the word <em>creativeness</em>.
+The organisms can create their own environment.
+For this purpose, the single organism is almost helpless.
+The adequate forces require societies of <a id='corr157.20'></a><span class='htmlonly'><ins class='correction' title='co-operating'>coöperating</ins></span><span class='epubonly'><a href='#c_157.20'><ins class='correction' title='co-operating'>coöperating</ins></a></span>
+organisms. But with such coöperation and
+in proportion to the effort put forward, the environment
+has a plasticity which alters the whole ethical
+aspect of evolution.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In the immediate past, and at present, a muddled
+state of mind is prevalent. The increased plasticity
+of the environment for mankind, resulting from the
+advances in scientific technology, is being construed in
+terms of habits of thought which find their justification
+in the theory of a fixed environment.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The riddle of the universe is not so simple. There
+is the aspect of permanence in which a given type of
+attainment is endlessly repeated for its own sake; and
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_159'>159</span>there is the aspect of transition to other things,—it
+may be of higher worth, and it may be of lower worth.
+Also there are its aspects of struggle and of friendly
+help. But romantic ruthlessness is no nearer to real
+politics, than is romantic self-abnegation.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_160'>160</span>
+  <h2 class='c006'>CHAPTER VII <br /> <br /> RELATIVITY</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'>In the previous lectures of this course we have considered
+the antecedent conditions which led up to
+the scientific movement, and have traced the progress
+of thought from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.
+In the nineteenth century this history falls into
+three parts, so far as it is to be grouped around science.
+These <a id='corr160.8'></a><span class='htmlonly'><ins class='correction' title='divisons'>divisions</ins></span><span class='epubonly'><a href='#c_160.8'><ins class='correction' title='divisons'>divisions</ins></a></span> are, the contact between the romantic
+movement and science, the development of
+technology and physics in the earlier part of the
+century, and lastly the theory of evolution combined
+with the general advance of the biological sciences.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The dominating note of the whole period of three
+centuries is that the doctrine of materialism afforded
+an adequate basis for the concepts of science. It was
+practically unquestioned. When undulations were
+wanted, an ether was supplied, in order to perform
+the duties of an undulatory material. To show the
+full assumption thus involved, I have sketched in outline
+an alternative doctrine of an organic theory of
+nature. In the last lecture it was pointed out that
+the biological developments, the doctrine of evolution,
+the doctrine of energy, and the molecular theories
+were rapidly undermining the adequacy of the orthodox
+materialism. But until the close of the century
+no one drew that conclusion. Materialism reigned
+supreme.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'><span class='pageno' id='Page_161'>161</span>The note of the present epoch is that so many complexities
+have developed regarding material, space,
+time, and energy, that the simple security of the old
+orthodox assumptions has vanished. It is obvious
+that they will not do as Newton left them, or even
+as Clerk Maxwell left them. There must be a reorganization.
+The new situation in the thought of to-day
+arises from the fact that scientific theory is outrunning
+common sense. The settlement as inherited
+by the eighteenth century was a triumph of organised
+common sense. It had got rid of medieval phantasies,
+and of Cartesian vortices. As a result it gave full
+reign to its anti-rationalistic tendencies derived from
+the historical revolt of the Reformation period. It
+grounded itself upon what every plain man could see
+with his own eyes, or with a microscope of moderate
+power. It measured the obvious things to be measured,
+and it generalised the obvious things to be generalised.
+For example, it generalised the ordinary
+notions of weight and massiveness. The eighteenth
+century opened with the quiet confidence that at last
+nonsense had been got rid of. To-day we are at the
+opposite pole of thought. Heaven knows what seeming
+nonsense may not to-morrow be demonstrated
+truth. We have recaptured some of the tone of the
+early nineteenth century, only on a higher imaginative
+level.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The reason why we are on a higher imaginative
+level is not because we have finer imagination, but
+because we have better instruments. In science, the
+most important thing that has happened during the
+last forty years is the advance in instrumental design.
+This advance is partly due to a few men of genius
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_162'>162</span>such as Michelson and the German opticians. It is
+also due to the progress of technological processes of
+manufacture, particularly in the region of metallurgy.
+The designer has now at his disposal a variety of material
+of differing physical properties. He can thus
+depend upon obtaining the material he desires; and
+it can be ground to the shapes he desires, within very
+narrow limits of tolerance. These instruments have
+put thought onto a new level. A fresh instrument
+serves the same purpose as foreign travel; it shows
+things in unusual combinations. The gain is more
+than a mere addition; it is a transformation. The
+advance in experimental ingenuity is, perhaps, also
+due to the larger proportion of national ability which
+now flows into scientific pursuits. Anyhow, whatever
+be the cause, subtle and ingenious experiments
+have abounded within the last generation. The result
+is, that a great deal of information has been accumulated
+in regions of nature very far removed from the
+ordinary experience of mankind.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Two famous experiments, one devised by Galileo
+at the outset of the scientific movement, and the other
+by Michelson with the aid of his famous interferometer,
+first carried out in 1881, and repeated in 1887
+and 1905, illustrate the assertions I have made. Galileo
+dropped heavy bodies from the top of the leaning
+tower of Pisa, and demonstrated that bodies of different
+weights, if released simultaneously, would reach
+the earth together. So far as experimental skill, and
+delicacy of apparatus were concerned, this experiment
+could have been made at any time within the
+preceding five thousand years. The ideas involved
+merely concerned weight and speed of travel, ideas
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_163'>163</span>which are familiar in ordinary life. The whole set
+of ideas might have been familiar to the family of
+King Minos of Crete, as they dropped pebbles into
+the sea from high battlements rising from the shore.
+We cannot too carefully realise that science started
+with the organisation of ordinary experiences. It
+was in this way that it coalesced so readily with the
+anti-rationalistic bias of the historical revolt. It
+was not asking for ultimate meanings. It confined
+itself to investigating the connections regulating the
+succession of obvious occurrences.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Michelson’s experiment could not have been made
+earlier than it was. It required the general advance
+in technology, and Michelson’s experimental genius.
+It concerns the determination of the earth’s motion
+through the ether, and it assumes that light consists
+of waves of vibration advancing at a fixed rate
+through the ether in any direction. Also, of course,
+the earth is moving through the ether, and Michelson’s
+apparatus is moving with the earth. In the centre of
+the apparatus a ray of light is divided so that one
+half-ray goes in one direction <em>along</em> the apparatus
+through a given distance, and is reflected back to the
+centre by a mirror in the apparatus. The other half-ray
+goes the same distance <em>across</em> the apparatus in a
+direction at right angles to the former ray, and it also
+is reflected back to the centre. These reunited rays
+are then reflected onto a screen in the apparatus. If
+precautions are taken, you will see interference bands;
+namely bands of blackness where the crests of the
+waves of one ray have filled up the troughs of the
+other rays, owing to a minute difference in the lengths
+of paths of the two half-rays, up to certain parts
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_164'>164</span>of the screens. These differences in length will be
+affected by the motion of the earth. For it is the
+lengths of the paths in the ether which count. Thus,
+since the apparatus is moving with the earth, the path
+of one half-ray will be disturbed by the motion in a
+different manner from the path of the other half-ray.
+Think of yourself as moving in a railway carriage,
+first along the train and then across the train;
+and mark out your paths on the railway track which in
+this analogy corresponds to the ether. Now the motion
+of the earth is very slow compared to that of
+light. Thus in the analogy you must think of the
+train almost at a standstill, and of yourself as moving
+very quickly.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In the experiment this effect of the earth’s motion
+would affect the positions on the screen of the interference
+bands. Also if you turn the apparatus round,
+through a right-angle, the effect of the earth’s motion
+on the two half-rays will be interchanged, and the
+positions of the interference bands would be shifted.
+We can calculate the small shift which should result
+owing to the earth’s motion round the sun. Also to
+this effect, we have to add that due to the sun’s motion
+through the ether. The delicacy of the instrument
+can be tested, and it can be proved that these
+effects of shifting are large enough to be observed by
+it. Now the point is, that nothing was observed.
+There was no shifting as you turned the instrument
+round.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The conclusion is either that the earth is always
+stationary in the ether, or that there is something
+wrong with the fundamental principles on which the
+interpretation of the experiment relies. It is obvious
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_165'>165</span>that, in this experiment, we are very far away from
+the thoughts and the games of the children of King
+Minos. The ideas of an ether, of waves in it, of
+interference, of the motion of the earth through the
+ether, and of Michelson’s interferometer, are remote
+from ordinary experience. But remote as they are,
+they are simple and obvious compared to the accepted
+explanation of the nugatory result of the experiment.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The ground of the explanation is that the ideas of
+space and of time employed in science are too simple-minded,
+and must be modified. This conclusion is a
+direct challenge to common sense, because the earlier
+science had only refined upon the ordinary notions of
+ordinary people. Such a radical reorganization of
+ideas would not have been adopted, unless it had
+also been supported by many other observations which
+we need not enter upon. Some form of the relativity
+theory seems to be the simplest way of explaining a
+large number of facts which otherwise would each
+require some <span lang="la" xml:lang="la"><i>ad hoc</i></span> explanation. The theory, therefore,
+does not merely depend upon the experiments
+which led to its origination.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The central point of the explanation is that every
+instrument, such as Michelson’s apparatus as used in
+the experiment, necessarily records the velocity of
+light as having one and the same definite speed relatively
+to it. I mean that an interferometer in a
+comet and an interferometer on the earth would necessarily
+bring out the velocity of light, relatively to
+themselves, as at the same value. This is an obvious
+paradox, since the light moves with a definite velocity
+through the ether. Accordingly two bodies, the
+earth and the comet, moving with unequal velocities
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_166'>166</span>through the ether, might be expected to have different
+velocities relatively to rays of light. For example,
+consider two cars on a road, moving at ten and twenty
+miles an hour respectively, and being passed by another
+car at fifty miles an hour. The rapid car will
+pass one of the two cars at the relative velocity of
+forty miles per hour, and the other at the rate of
+thirty miles per hour. The allegation as to light is
+that, if we substituted a ray of light for the rapid
+car, the velocity of the light along the roadway would
+be exactly the same as its velocity relatively to either
+of the two cars which it overtakes. The velocity of
+light is immensely large, being about three hundred
+thousand kilometres per second. We must have notions
+as to space and time such that just this velocity
+has this peculiar character. It follows that all our
+notions of relative velocity must be recast. But
+these notions are the immediate outcome of our habitual
+notions as to space and time. So we come back
+to the position, that there has been something overlooked
+in the current expositions of what we mean
+by space and of what we mean by time.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Now our habitual fundamental assumption is that
+there is a unique meaning to be given to space and
+a unique meaning to be given to time, so that whatever
+meaning is given to spatial relations in respect
+to the instrument on the earth, the same meaning
+must be given to them in respect to the instrument on
+the comet, and the same meaning for an instrument at
+rest in the ether. In the theory of relativity, this is
+denied. As far as concerns space, there is no difficulty
+in agreeing, if you think of the obvious facts of relative
+motion. But even here the change in meaning has to
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_167'>167</span>go further than would be sanctioned by common sense.
+Also the same demand is made for time; so that the
+relative dating of events and the lapses of time between
+them are to be reckoned as different for the
+instrument on the earth, for the instrument in the
+comet, and for the instrument at rest in the ether.
+This is a greater strain on our credulity. We need
+not probe the question further than the conclusion
+that for the earth and for the comet spatiality and
+temporality are each to have different meanings amid
+different conditions, such as those presented by the
+earth and the comet. Accordingly velocity has different
+meanings for the two bodies. Thus the modern
+scientific assumption is that if anything has the speed
+of light by reference to any one meaning of space
+and time, then it has the same speed according to any
+other meaning of space and time.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>This is a heavy blow at the classical scientific materialism,
+which presupposes a definite present instant
+at which all matter is simultaneously real. In the
+modern theory there is no such unique present instant.
+You can find a meaning for the notion of the simultaneous
+instant throughout all nature, but it will be
+a different meaning for different notions of temporality.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>There has been a tendency to give an extreme subjectivist
+interpretation to this new doctrine. I mean
+that the relativity of space and time has been construed
+as though it were dependent on the choice of
+the observer. It is perfectly legitimate to bring in
+the observer, if he facilitates explanations. But it is
+the observer’s body that we want, and not his mind.
+Even this body is only useful as an example of a
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_168'>168</span>very familiar form of apparatus. On the whole, it
+is better to concentrate attention on Michelson’s interferometer,
+and to leave Michelson’s body and
+Michelson’s mind out of the picture. The question
+is, why did the interferometer have black bands on
+its screen, and why did not these bands slightly shift
+as the instrument turned. The new relativity associates
+space and time with an intimacy not hitherto contemplated;
+and presupposes that their separation in
+concrete fact can be achieved by alternative modes
+of abstraction, yielding alternative meanings. But
+each mode of abstraction is directing attention to
+something which is in nature; and thereby is isolating
+it for the purpose of contemplation. The fact relevant
+to experiment, is the relevance of the interferometer
+to just one among the many alternative systems of
+these spatio-temporal relations which hold between
+natural entities.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>What we must now ask of philosophy is to give
+us an interpretation of the status in nature of space
+and time, so that the possibility of alternative meanings
+is preserved. These lectures are not suited for
+the elaboration of details; but there is no difficulty in
+pointing out where to look for the origin of the discrimination
+between space and time. I am presupposing
+the organic theory of nature, which I have
+outlined as a basis for a thoroughgoing objectivism.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>An event is the grasping into unity of a pattern of
+aspects. The effectiveness of an event beyond itself
+arises from the aspects of itself which go to form
+the prehended unities of other events. Except for
+the systematic aspects of geometrical shape, this effectiveness
+is trivial, if the mirrored pattern attaches
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_169'>169</span>merely to the event as one whole. If the pattern
+endures throughout the successive parts of the event,
+and also exhibits itself in the whole, so that the event
+is the life history of the pattern, then in virtue of
+that enduring pattern the event gains in external effectiveness.
+For its own effectiveness is reënforced
+by the analogous aspects of all its successive parts.
+The event constitutes a patterned value with a permanence
+inherent throughout its own parts; and by
+reason of this inherent endurance the event is important
+for the modification of its environment.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>It is in this endurance of pattern that time differentiates
+itself from space. The pattern is spatially
+<em>now</em>; and this temporal determination constitutes
+its relation to each partial event. For it is reproduced
+in this temporal succession of these spatial
+parts of its own life. I mean that this particular
+rule of temporal order allows the pattern to be reproduced
+in each temporal slice of its history. So to
+speak, each enduring object discovers in nature and
+requires from nature a principle discriminating space
+from time. Apart from the fact of an enduring pattern
+this principle might be there, but it would be
+latent and trivial. Thus the importance of space as
+against time, and of time as against space, has developed
+with the development of enduring organisms.
+Enduring objects are significant of a differentiation of
+space from time in respect to the patterns ingredient
+within events; and conversely the differentiation of
+space from time in the patterns ingredient within
+events expresses the patience of the community of
+events for enduring objects. There might be the community
+without objects, but there could not be the
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_170'>170</span>enduring objects without the community with its
+peculiar patience for them.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>It is very necessary that this point should not be
+misunderstood. Endurance means that a pattern
+which is exhibited in the prehension of one event is
+also exhibited in the prehension of those of its parts
+which are discriminated by a certain rule. It is not
+true that any part of the whole event will yield the
+same pattern as does the whole. For example, consider
+the total bodily pattern exhibited in the life of
+a human body during one minute. One of the thumbs
+during the same minute is part of the whole bodily
+event. But the pattern of this part is the pattern
+of the thumb, and is not the pattern of the whole
+body. Thus endurance requires a definite rule for
+obtaining the parts. In the above example, we know
+at once what the rule is: You must take the life of
+the whole body during any portion of that same minute;
+for example, during a second or a tenth of a
+second. In other words, the meaning of endurance
+presupposes a meaning for the lapse of time within
+the spatio-temporal continuum.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The question now arises whether all enduring objects
+discover the same principle of differentiation
+of space from time; or even whether at different stages
+of its own life-history one object may not vary in its
+spatio-temporal discrimination. Up till a few years
+ago, everyone unhesitatingly assumed that there was
+only one such principle to be discovered. Accordingly,
+in dealing with one object, time would have
+exactly the same meaning in reference to endurance
+as in dealing with the endurance of another object.
+It would also follow then that spatial relations would
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_171'>171</span>have one unique meaning. But now it seems that the
+observed effectiveness of objects can only be explained
+by assuming that objects in a state of motion relatively
+to each other are utilising, for their endurance, meanings
+of space and of time which are not identical from
+one object to another. Every enduring object is to
+be conceived as at rest in its own proper space, and in
+motion throughout any space defined in a way which
+is not that inherent in its peculiar endurance. If
+two objects are mutually at rest, they are utilising
+the same meanings of space and of time for the purposes
+of expressing their endurance; if in relative motion,
+the spaces and times differ. It follows that, if
+we can conceive a body at one stage of its life history
+as in motion relatively to itself at another stage, then
+the body at these two stages is utilising diverse meanings
+of space, and correlatively diverse meanings of
+time.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In an organic philosophy of nature there is nothing
+to decide between the old hypothesis of the uniqueness
+of the time discrimination and the new hypothesis
+of its multiplicity. It is purely a matter for evidence
+drawn from observations.<a id='r5' /><a href='#f5' class='c013'><sup>[5]</sup></a></p>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f5'>
+<p class='c001'><a href='#r5'>5</a>. <i>Cf.</i> my <cite>Principles of Natural Knowledge</cite>, Sec. 52:3.</p>
+</div>
+<p class='c001'>In an earlier lecture, I said that an event had contemporaries.
+It is an interesting question whether,
+on the new hypothesis, such a statement can be made
+without the qualification of a reference to a definite
+space-time system. It is possible to do so, in the sense
+that in <em>some</em> time-system or other the two events are
+simultaneous. In other time-systems the two contemporary
+events will not be simultaneous, though they
+may overlap. Analogously one event will precede another
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_172'>172</span>without qualification, if in <em>every</em> time-system
+this precedence occurs. It is evident that if we start
+from a given event A, other events in general are
+divided into two sets, namely, those which without
+qualification are contemporaneous with A and those
+which either precede or succeed A. But there will
+be a set left over, namely, those events which bound
+the two sets. There we have a critical case. You
+will remember that we have a critical velocity to
+account for, namely the theoretical velocity of light
+<span lang="la" xml:lang="la"><i>in vacuo</i></span>.<a id='r6' /><a href='#f6' class='c013'><sup>[6]</sup></a> Also you will remember that the utilisation
+of different spatio-temporal systems means the
+relative motion of objects. When we analyse this
+critical relation of a special set of events to any given
+event A, we find the explanation of the critical velocity
+which we require. I am suppressing all details. It
+is evident that exactness of statement must be introduced
+by the introduction of points, and lines, and
+instants. Also that the origin of geometry requires
+discussion; for example, the measurement of lengths,
+the straightness of lines, and the flatness of planes, and
+perpendicularity. I have endeavoured to carry out
+these investigations in some earlier books, under the
+heading of the theory of extensive abstraction; but
+they are too technical for the present occasion.</p>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f6'>
+<p class='c001'><a href='#r6'>6</a>. This is not the velocity of light in a gravitational field or in a
+medium of molecules and electrons.</p>
+</div>
+<p class='c001'>If there be no one definite meaning to the geometrical
+relations of distance, it is evident that the law of
+gravitation needs restatement. For the formula expressing
+that law is that two particles attract each other
+in proportion to the product of their masses and the
+inverse square of their distances. This enunciation
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_173'>173</span>tacitly assumes that there is one definite meaning to be
+ascribed to the instant at which the attraction is considered,
+and also one definite meaning to be ascribed
+to <em>distance</em>. But distance is a purely spatial notion,
+so that in the new doctrine, there are an indefinite
+number of such meanings according to the space-time
+system which you adopt. If the two particles are relatively
+at rest, then we might be content with the space-time
+systems which they are both utilising. Unfortunately
+this suggestion gives no hint as to procedure
+when they are not mutually at rest. It is, therefore,
+necessary to reformulate the law in a way which does
+not presuppose any particular space-time system. Einstein
+has done this. Naturally the result is more complicated.
+He introduced into mathematical physics
+certain methods of pure mathematics which render
+the formulae independent of the particular systems
+of measurement adopted. The new formula introduces
+various small effects which are absent in Newton’s
+law. But for the major effects Newton’s law
+and Einstein’s law agree. Now these extra effects
+of Einstein’s law serve to explain irregularities of the
+planet Mercury’s orbit which by Newton’s law were
+inexplicable. This is a strong confirmation of the new
+theory. Curiously enough, there is more than one
+alternative formula, based on the new theory of multiple
+space-time systems, having the property of embodying
+Newton’s law and in addition of explaining
+the peculiarities of Mercury’s motion. The only
+method of selection between them is to wait for experimental
+evidence respecting those effects on which
+the formulae differ. Nature is probably quite indifferent
+to the aesthetic preferences of mathematicians.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'><span class='pageno' id='Page_174'>174</span>It only remains to add that Einstein would probably
+reject the theory of multiple space-time systems which
+I have been expounding to you. He would interpret
+his formula in terms of contortions in space-time
+which alter the invariance theory for measure properties,
+and of the proper times of each historical
+route. His mode of statement has the greater mathematical
+simplicity, and only allows of one law of
+gravitation, excluding the alternatives. But, for myself,
+I cannot reconcile it with the given facts of our
+experience as to simultaneity, and spatial arrangement.
+There are also other difficulties of a more abstract
+character.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The theory of the relationship between events at
+which we have now arrived is based first upon the
+doctrine that the relatednesses of an event are all internal
+relations, so far as concerns that event, though
+not necessarily so far as concerns the other relata. For
+example, the eternal objects, thus involved, are externally
+related to events. This internal relatedness is
+the reason why an event can be found only just where
+it is and how it is,—that is to say, in just one definite
+set of relationships. For each relationship enters into
+the essence of the event; so that, apart from that relationship,
+the event would not be itself. This is what
+is meant by the very notion of internal relations. It
+has been usual, indeed universal, to hold that spatio-temporal
+relationships are external. This doctrine
+is what is here denied.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The conception of internal relatedness involves the
+analysis of the event into two factors, one the underlying
+substantial activity of individualisation, and the
+other the complex of aspects—that is to say, the complex
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_175'>175</span>of relatednesses as entering into the essence of the
+given event—which are unified by this individualised
+activity. In other words, the concept of internal relations
+requires the concept of substance as the activity
+synthesising the relationships into its emergent character.
+The event is what it is, by reason of the unification
+in itself of a multiplicity of relationships. The
+general scheme of these mutual relationships is an
+abstraction which presupposes each event as an independent
+entity, which it is not, and asks what remnant
+of these formative relationships is then left in the guise
+of external relationships. The scheme of relationships
+as thus impartially expressed becomes the scheme of a
+complex of events variously related as wholes to parts
+and as joint parts within some one whole. Even here,
+the internal relationship forces itself on our attention;
+for the part evidently is constitutive of the whole.
+Also an isolated event which has lost its status in any
+complex of events is equally excluded by the very
+nature of an event. So the whole is evidently constitutive
+of the part. Thus the internal character of
+the relationship really shows through this impartial
+scheme of abstract external relations.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>But this exhibition of the actual universe as extensive
+and divisible has left out the distinction between
+space and time. It has in fact left out the process of
+realisation, which is the adjustment of the synthetic
+activities by virtue of which the various events become
+their realised selves. This adjustment is thus the adjustment
+of the underlying active substances whereby
+these substances exhibit themselves as the individualisations
+or modes of Spinoza’s one substance. This adjustment
+is what introduces temporal process.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'><span class='pageno' id='Page_176'>176</span>Thus, in some sense, time, in its character of the
+adjustment of the process of synthetic realisation, extends
+<a id='corr176.3'></a><span class='htmlonly'><ins class='correction' title='beyonds'>beyond</ins></span><span class='epubonly'><a href='#c_176.3'><ins class='correction' title='beyonds'>beyond</ins></a></span> the spatio-temporal continuum of nature.<a id='r7' /><a href='#f7' class='c013'><sup>[7]</sup></a>
+There is no necessity that temporal process, in
+this sense, should be constituted by one single series
+of linear succession. Accordingly, in order to satisfy
+the present demands of scientific hypothesis, we introduce
+the metaphysical hypothesis that this is not the
+case. We do assume (basing ourselves upon direct
+observation), however, that temporal process of realisation
+can be analysed into a group of linear serial
+processes. Each of these linear series is a space-time
+system. In support of this assumption of definite serial
+processes, we appeal: (1) to the immediate presentation
+through the senses of an extended universe
+beyond ourselves and <em>simultaneous</em> with ourselves, (2)
+to the intellectual apprehension of a meaning to the
+question which asks what is <em>now immediately happening</em>
+in regions beyond the cognisance of our senses,
+(3) to the analysis of what is involved in the <em>endurance</em>
+of emergent objects. This endurance of objects
+involves the display of a pattern as now realised. This
+display is the display of a pattern as inherent in an
+event, but also as exhibiting a temporal slice of nature
+as lending aspects to eternal objects (or, equally, of
+eternal objects as lending aspects to events). The
+pattern is spatialised in a whole duration for the benefit
+of the event into whose essence the pattern enters.
+The event is part of the duration, <i>i.e.</i>, is part of what
+is exhibited in the aspects inherent in itself; and conversely
+the duration is the whole of nature simultaneous
+with the event, in that sense of simultaneity. Thus
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_177'>177</span>an event in realising itself displays a pattern, and this
+pattern requires a definite duration determined by a
+definite meaning of simultaneity. Each such meaning
+of simultaneity relates the pattern as thus displayed to
+one definite space-time system. The actuality of the
+space-time systems is constituted by the <a id='corr177.6'></a><span class='htmlonly'><ins class='correction' title='realization'>realisation</ins></span><span class='epubonly'><a href='#c_177.6'><ins class='correction' title='realization'>realisation</ins></a></span> of
+pattern; but it is inherent in the general scheme of
+events as constituting its patience for the temporal
+process of realisation.</p>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f7'>
+<p class='c001'><a href='#r7'>7</a>. <i>Cf.</i> my <cite>Concept of Nature</cite>, Ch. III.</p>
+</div>
+<p class='c001'>Notice that the pattern requires a duration involving
+a definite lapse of time, and not merely an instantaneous
+moment. Such a moment is more abstract, in
+that it merely denotes a certain relation of contiguity
+between the concrete events. Thus a duration is spatialised;
+and by ‘spatialised’ is meant that the duration
+is the field for the realised pattern constituting the
+character of the event. A duration, as the field of the
+pattern realised in the actualisation of one of its contained
+events, is an epoch, <i>i.e.</i>, an arrest. Endurance
+is the repetition of the pattern in successive events.
+Thus endurance requires a succession of durations,
+each exhibiting the pattern. In this account ‘time’
+has been separated from ‘extension’ and from the ‘divisibility’
+which arises from the character of spatio-temporal
+<a id='corr177.25'></a><span class='htmlonly'><ins class='correction' title='‘of'>extension’</ins></span><span class='epubonly'><a href='#c_177.25'><ins class='correction' title='‘of'>extension’</ins></a></span>. Accordingly we must not proceed
+to conceive time as another form of extensiveness.
+Time is sheer succession of epochal durations.
+But the entities which succeed each other in this account
+are durations. The duration is that which is
+required for the realisation of a pattern in the given
+event. Thus the divisibility and extensiveness is
+within the given duration. The epochal duration is
+not realised <span lang="la" xml:lang="la"><i>via</i></span> its <em>successive</em> divisible parts, but is
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_178'>178</span>given <em>with</em> its parts. In this way, the objection which
+Zeno might make to the joint validity of two passages
+from Kant’s <cite>Critique of Pure Reason</cite> is met by abandoning
+the earlier of the two passages. I refer to
+passages from the section ‘Of the Axioms of Intuition’;
+the earlier from the subsection on <i>Extensive
+Quantity</i>, and the latter from the subsection on <i>Intensive
+Quantity</i> where considerations respecting quantity
+in general, extensive and intensive, are summed up.
+The earlier passage runs thus:<a id='r8' /><a href='#f8' class='c013'><sup>[8]</sup></a></p>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f8'>
+<p class='c001'><a href='#r8'>8</a>. Max Müller’s translation.</p>
+</div>
+<p class='c001'>“I call an extensive quantity that in which the representation
+of the whole is rendered possible by the
+representation of its parts, <em>and therefore necessarily
+preceded by it</em>.<a id='r9' /><a href='#f9' class='c013'><sup>[9]</sup></a> I cannot represent to myself any line,
+however small it may be, without drawing it in
+thought, that is, without producing all its parts one
+after the other, starting from a given point, and thus,
+first of all, drawing its intuition. The same applies to
+every, even the smallest portion of time. I can only
+think in it the successive progress from one moment to
+another, thus producing in the end, by all the portions
+of time, and their addition, a definite quantity of
+time.”</p>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f9'>
+<p class='c001'><a href='#r9'>9</a>. Italics mine, and also in the second passage.</p>
+</div>
+<p class='c001'>The second passage runs thus:</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>“This peculiar property of quantities that no part
+of them is the smallest possible part (no part indivisible)
+is called continuity. Time and space are quanta
+continua, because there is no part of them that is not
+enclosed between limits (points and moments), <em>no
+part that is not itself again a space or a time. Space
+consists of spaces only, time of times. Points and moments
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_179'>179</span>are only limits</em>, mere places of limitation, and as
+places <em>presupposing always</em> those intuitions which they
+are meant to limit or to determine. Mere places or
+parts that might be given before space or time, could
+never be compounded into space or time.”</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>I am in complete agreement with the second extract
+if ‘time and space’ is the extensive continuum; but
+it is inconsistent with its predecessor. For Zeno would
+object that a vicious infinite regress is involved. Every
+part of time involves some smaller part of itself, and
+so on. Also this series regresses backwards ultimately
+to nothing; since the initial moment is without duration
+and merely marks the relation of contiguity to an
+earlier time. Thus time is impossible, if the two extracts
+are both adhered to. I accept the later, and
+reject the earlier, passage. Realisation is the becoming
+of time in the field of extension. Extension is the
+complex of events, <span lang="la" xml:lang="la"><i>quâ</i></span> their potentialities. In realisation
+the potentiality becomes actuality. But the
+potential pattern requires a duration; and the duration
+must be exhibited as an epochal whole, by the realisation
+of the pattern. Thus time is the succession of elements
+in themselves divisible and contiguous. A
+duration, in becoming temporal, thereby incurs realisation
+in respect to some enduring object. Temporalisation
+is realisation. Temporalisation is not another
+continuous process. It is an atomic succession.
+Thus time is atomic (<i>i.e.</i>, epochal), though what is
+temporalised is divisible. This doctrine follows from
+the doctrine of events, and of the nature of enduring
+objects. In the next chapter we must consider its
+relevance to the quantum theory of recent science.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>It is to be noted that this doctrine of the epochal
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_180'>180</span>character of time does not depend on the modern doctrine
+of relativity, and holds equally—and indeed,
+more simply—if this doctrine be abandoned. It does
+depend on the analysis of the intrinsic character of an
+event, considered as the most concrete finite entity.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In reviewing this argument, note first that the second
+quotation from Kant, on which it is based, does not
+depend on any peculiar Kantian doctrine. The latter
+of the two is in agreement with Plato as against
+Aristotle.<a id='r10' /><a href='#f10' class='c013'><sup>[10]</sup></a> In the second place, the argument assumes
+that Zeno understated his argument. He should have
+urged it against the current notion of time in itself,
+and not against motion, which involves relations
+between time and space. For, what becomes has duration.
+But no duration can become until a smaller
+duration (part of the former) has antecedently come
+into being [Kant’s earlier statement]. The same argument
+applies to this smaller duration, and so on. Also
+the infinite regress of these durations converges to
+nothing—and even on the Aristotelian view there is
+no first moment. Accordingly time would be an irrational
+notion. Thirdly, in the epochal theory Zeno’s
+difficulty is met by conceiving temporalisation as the
+realisation of a complete organism. This organism is
+an event holding in its essence its spatio-temporal relationships
+(both within itself, and beyond itself)
+throughout the spatio-temporal continuum.</p>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f10'>
+<p class='c001'><a href='#r10'>10</a>. <i>Cf.</i> ‘Euclid in Greek,’ by Sir T. L. Heath, Camb. Univ. Press,
+in a note on Points.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_181'>181</span>
+  <h2 class='c006'>CHAPTER VIII <br /> <br /> THE QUANTUM THEORY</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'>The theory of relativity has justly excited a great
+amount of public attention. But, for all its importance,
+it has not been the topic which has chiefly absorbed
+the recent interest of physicists. Without question
+that position is held by the quantum theory. The
+point of interest in this theory is that, according to it,
+some effects which appear essentially capable of gradual
+increase or gradual diminution are in reality to be
+increased or decreased only by certain definite jumps.
+It is as though you could walk at three miles per hour
+or at four miles per hour, but not at three and a half
+miles per hour.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The effects in question are concerned with the radiation
+of light from a molecule which has been excited
+by some collision. Light consists of waves of vibration
+in the electromagnetic field. After a complete
+wave has passed a given point everything at that point
+is restored to its original state and is ready for the next
+wave which follows on. Picture to yourselves the
+waves on the ocean, and reckon from crest to crest of
+successive waves. The number of waves which pass a
+given point in one second is called the frequency of
+that system of waves. A system of light-waves of
+definite frequency corresponds to a definite colour in
+the spectrum. Now a molecule, when excited, vibrates
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_182'>182</span>with a certain number of definite frequencies. In
+other words, there are a definite set of modes of vibration
+of the molecule, and each mode of vibration has
+one definite frequency. Each mode of vibration can
+stir up in the electromagnetic field waves of its own
+frequency. These waves carry away the energy of the
+vibration; so that finally (when such waves are in
+being) the molecule loses the energy of its excitement
+and the waves cease. Thus a molecule can radiate
+light of certain definite colours, that is to say, of certain
+definite frequencies.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>You would think that each mode of vibration could
+be excited to any intensity, so that the energy carried
+away by light of that frequency could be of any
+amount. But this is not the case. There appear to be
+certain minimum amounts of energy which cannot be
+subdivided. The case is analogous to that of a citizen
+of the United States who, in paying his debts in
+the currency of his country, cannot subdivide a cent
+so as to correspond to some minute subdivision of the
+goods obtained. The cent corresponds to the minimum
+quantity of the light energy, and the goods obtained
+correspond to the energy of the exciting cause.
+This exciting cause is either strong enough to procure
+the emission of one cent of energy, or fails to procure
+the emission of any energy whatsoever. In any case
+the molecule will only emit an integral number of
+cents of energy. There is a further peculiarity which
+we can illustrate by bringing an Englishman onto the
+scene. He pays his debts in English currency, and his
+smallest unit is a farthing which differs in value from
+the cent. The farthing is in fact about half a cent,
+to a very rough approximation. In the molecule, different
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_183'>183</span>modes of vibration have different frequencies.
+Compare each mode to a nation. One mode corresponds
+to the United States, and another mode corresponds
+to England. One mode can only radiate its
+energy <a id='corr183.5'></a><span class='htmlonly'><ins class='correction' title='is'>in</ins></span><span class='epubonly'><a href='#c_183.5'><ins class='correction' title='is'>in</ins></a></span> an integral number of cents, so that a cent
+of energy is the least it can pay out; whereas the other
+mode can only radiate its energy in an integral number
+of farthings, so that a farthing of energy is the
+least that it can pay out. Also a rule can be found to
+tell us the relative value of the cent of energy of one
+mode to the farthing of energy of another mode. The
+rule is childishly simple: Each smallest coin of energy
+has a value in strict proportion to the frequency belonging
+to that mode. By this rule, and comparing
+farthings with cents, the frequency of an American
+would be about twice that of an Englishman. In other
+words, the American would do about twice as many
+things in a second as an Englishman. I must leave
+you to judge whether this corresponds to the reputed
+characters of the two nations. Also I suggest that
+there are merits attaching to both ends of the solar
+spectrum. Sometimes you want red light and sometimes
+violet light.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>There has been, I hope, no great difficulty in comprehending
+what the quantum theory asserts about
+molecules. The perplexity arises from the effort to
+fit the theory into the current scientific picture of
+what is going on in the molecule or atom.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>It has been the basis of the materialistic theory, that
+the happenings of nature are to be explained in terms
+of the locomotion of material. In accordance with
+this principle, the waves of light were explained in
+terms of the locomotion of a material ether, and the
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_184'>184</span>internal happenings of a molecule are now explained
+in terms of the locomotion of separate material parts.
+In respect to waves of light, the material ether has retreated
+to an indeterminate position in the background,
+and is rarely talked about. But the principle
+is unquestioned as regards its application to the atom.
+For example a neutral hydrogen atom is assumed
+to consist of at least two lumps of material; one lump
+is the nucleus consisting of a material called positive
+electricity, and the other is a single electron which is
+negative electricity. The nucleus shows signs of being
+complex, and of being subdivisible into smaller lumps,
+some of positive electricity and others electronic. The
+assumption is, that whatever vibration takes place in
+the atom is to be attributed to the vibratory locomotion
+of some bit of material, detachable from the remainder.
+The difficulty with the quantum theory is that,
+on this hypothesis, we have to picture the atom as providing
+a limited number of definite grooves, which are
+the sole tracks along which vibration can take place,
+whereas the classical scientific picture provides none
+of these grooves. The quantum theory wants trolley-cars
+with a limited number of routes, and the scientific
+picture provides horses galloping over prairies. The
+result is that the physical doctrine of the atom has got
+into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles
+of astronomy before Copernicus.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>On the organic theory of nature there are two sorts
+of vibrations which radically differ from each other.
+There is vibratory locomotion, and there is vibratory
+organic deformation; and the conditions for the two
+types of change are of a different character. In other
+words, there is vibratory locomotion of a given pattern
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_185'>185</span>as one whole, and there is vibratory change of
+pattern.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>A complete organism in the organic theory is what
+corresponds to a bit of material on the materialistic
+theory. There will be a primary genus, comprising
+a number of species of organisms, such that each primary
+organism, belonging to a species of the primary
+genus, is not decomposable into subordinate organisms.
+I will call any organism of the primary genus a primate.
+There may be different species of primates.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>It must be kept in mind that we are dealing with the
+abstractions of physics. Accordingly, we are not
+thinking of what a primate is in itself, as a pattern
+arising from the prehension of the concrete aspects;
+nor are we thinking of what a primate is for its environment,
+in respect to its concrete aspects prehended
+therein. We are thinking of these various aspects
+merely in so far as their effects on patterns and on locomotion
+are expressible in spatio-temporal terms.
+Accordingly, in the language of physics, the aspects
+of a primate are merely its contributions to the electromagnetic
+field. This is in fact exactly what we know
+of electrons and protons. An electron for us is merely
+the pattern of its aspects in its environment, so far as
+those aspects are relevant to the electromagnetic field.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Now in discussing the theory of relativity, we saw
+that the relative motion of two primates means simply
+that their organic patterns are utilising diverse space-time
+systems. If two primates do not continue either
+mutually at rest, or mutually in uniform relative motion,
+at least one of them is changing its intrinsic space-time
+system. The laws of motion express the conditions
+under which these changes of space-time systems
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_186'>186</span>are effected. The conditions for vibratory <em>locomotion</em>
+are founded upon these general laws of motion.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>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 can imagine
+the atomic nucleus as composed of a large number
+of primates of differing species, and perhaps with
+many primates of the same species, the whole association
+being such as to favour stability. An example
+of such an association is afforded by the association of
+a positive nucleus with negative electrons to obtain a
+neutral atom. The neutral atom is thereby shielded
+from any electric field which would otherwise produce
+changes in the space-time system of the atom.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The requirements of physics now suggest an idea
+which is very consonant with the organic philosophical
+theory. I put it in the form of a question: Has
+our organic theory of endurance been tainted by the
+materialistic theory in so far as it assumes without
+question that endurance must mean undifferentiated
+sameness throughout the life-history concerned? Perhaps
+you noticed that (in a previous chapter) I used
+the word ‘reiteration’ as a synonym of ‘endurance.’
+It obviously is not quite synonymous in its meaning;
+and now I want to suggest that <em>reiteration</em> where it
+differs from <em>endurance</em> is more nearly what the organic
+theory requires. The difference is very analogous
+to that between the Galileans and the Aristotelians:
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_187'>187</span>Aristotle said ‘rest’ where Galileo added ‘or uniform
+motion in a straight line.’ Thus in the organic
+theory, a pattern need not endure in undifferentiated
+sameness through time. The pattern may be essentially
+one of aesthetic contrasts requiring a lapse of time
+for its unfolding. A tune is an example of such a
+pattern. Thus the endurance of the pattern now means
+the reiteration of its succession of contrasts. This is
+obviously the most general notion of endurance on
+the organic theory, and ‘reiteration’ is perhaps the
+word which expresses it with most directness. But
+when we translate this notion into the abstractions of
+physics, it at once becomes the technical notion of
+‘vibration.’ This vibration is not the vibratory locomotion:
+it is the vibration of organic deformation.
+There are certain indications in modern physics that
+for the rôle of corpuscular organisms at the base of
+the physical field, we require vibratory entities. Such
+corpuscles would be the corpuscles detected as expelled
+from the nuclei of atoms, which then dissolve
+into waves of light. We may conjecture that such a
+corpuscular body has no great stability of endurance,
+when in isolation. Accordingly, an unfavourable environment
+leading to rapid changes in its proper
+space-time system, that is to say, an environment jolting
+it into violent accelerations, causes the corpuscles
+to go to pieces and dissolve into light-waves of the
+same period of vibration.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>A proton, and perhaps an electron, would be an
+association of such primates, superposed on each other,
+with their frequencies and spatial dimensions so arranged
+as to promote the stability of the complex organism,
+when jolted into accelerations of locomotion.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_188'>188</span>The conditions for stability would give the associations
+of periods possible for protons. The expulsion
+of a primate would come from a jolt which leads the
+proton either to settle down into an alternative association,
+or to generate a new primate by the aid of
+the energy received.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>A primate must be associated with a definite frequency
+of vibratory organic deformation so that when
+it goes to pieces it dissolves into light waves of the
+same frequency, which then carry off all its average
+energy. It is quite easy (as a particular hypothesis)
+to imagine stationary vibrations of the electromagnetic
+field of definite frequency, and directed radially to and
+from a centre, which, in accordance with the accepted
+electromagnetic laws, would consist of a vibratory
+spherical nucleus satisfying one set of conditions and
+a vibratory external field satisfying another set of conditions.
+This is an example of vibratory organic
+deformation. Further [on this particular hypothesis],
+there are two ways of determining the subsidiary conditions
+so as to satisfy the ordinary requirements of
+mathematical physics. The total energy, according
+to one of these ways, would satisfy the quantum condition;
+so that it consists of an integral number of
+units or cents, which are such that the cent of energy
+of any primate is proportional to its frequency. I
+have not worked out the conditions for stability or
+for a stable association. I have mentioned the particular
+hypothesis by way of showing by example that
+the organic theory of nature affords possibilities for
+the reconsideration of ultimate physical laws, which
+are not open to the opposed materialistic theory.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In this particular hypothesis of vibratory primates,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_189'>189</span>the Maxwellian equations are supposed to hold
+throughout all space, including the interior of a proton.
+They express the laws governing the vibratory
+production and absorption of energy. The whole process
+for each primate issues in a certain average energy
+characteristic of the primate, and proportional to its
+mass. In fact the energy is the mass. There are
+vibratory radial streams of energy, both without and
+within a primate. Within the primate, there are vibratory
+distributions of electric density. On the materialistic
+theory such density marks the presence of
+material: on the organic theory of vibration, it marks
+the vibratory production of energy. Such production
+is restricted to the interior of the primate.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>All science must start with some assumptions as to
+the ultimate analysis of the facts with which it deals.
+These assumptions are justified partly by their adherence
+to the types of occurrence of which we are
+directly conscious, and partly by their success in representing
+the observed facts with a certain generality,
+devoid of <span lang="la" xml:lang="la"><i>ad hoc</i></span> suppositions. The general theory of
+the vibration of primates, which I have outlined, is
+merely given as an example of the sort of possibilities
+which the organic theory leaves open for physical
+science. The point is that it adds the possibility of
+organic deformation to that of mere locomotion.
+Light waves form one great example of organic deformation.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>At any epoch the assumptions of a science are giving
+way, when they exhibit symptoms of the epicyclic state
+from which astronomy was rescued in the sixteenth
+century. Physical science is now exhibiting such symptoms.
+In order to reconsider its foundations, it must
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_190'>190</span>recur to a more concrete view of the character of real
+things, and must conceive its fundamental notions as
+abstractions derived from this direct intuition. It is
+in this way that it surveys the general possibilities of
+revision which are open to it.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The discontinuities introduced by the quantum
+theory require revision of physical concepts in order
+to meet them. In particular, it has been pointed out
+that some theory of discontinuous existence is required.
+What is asked from such a theory, is that
+an orbit of an electron can be regarded as a series of
+detached positions, and not as a continuous line.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The theory of a primate or a vibrating pattern,
+given above, together with the distinction between
+temporality and extensiveness in the previous chapter,
+yields exactly this result. It will be remembered that
+the continuity of the complex of events arises from the
+relationships of extensiveness; whereas the temporality
+arises from the realisation in a subject-event of a
+pattern which requires for its display that the whole
+of a duration be spatialised (<i>i.e.</i>, arrested), as given by
+its aspects in the event. Thus realization proceeds <span lang="la" xml:lang="la"><i>viâ</i></span>
+a succession of epochal durations; and the continuous
+transition, <i>i.e.</i>, the organic deformation, is within the
+duration which is already given. The vibratory organic
+deformation is in fact the reiteration of the pattern.
+One complete period defines the duration required for
+the complete pattern. Thus the primate is realised
+atomically in a succession of durations, each duration
+to be measured from one maximum to another.
+Accordingly, so far as the primate as one enduring
+whole entity is to be taken account of, it is to be assigned
+to these durations successively. If it is considered
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_191'>191</span>as one thing, its orbit is to be diagrammatically
+exhibited by a series of detached dots. Thus the locomotion
+of the primate is discontinuous in space and
+time. If we go below the quanta of time which are
+the successive vibratory periods of the primate, we
+find a succession of vibratory electromagnetic fields,
+each stationary in the space-time of its own duration.
+Each of these fields exhibits a single complete period
+of the electromagnetic vibration which constitutes
+the primate. This vibration is not to be thought of
+as the becoming of reality; it is what the primate is in
+one of its discontinuous realisations. Also the successive
+durations in which the primate is realised are contiguous;
+it follows that the life history of the primate
+can be exhibited as being the continuous development
+of occurrences in the electromagnetic field. But these
+occurrences enter into realisation as whole atomic
+blocks, occupying definite periods of time.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>There is no need to conceive that time is atomic in
+the sense that all patterns must be realised in the same
+successive durations. In the first place, even if the
+periods were the same in the case of two primates,
+the durations of realisation may not be the same. In
+other words, the two primates may be out of phase.
+Also if the periods are different, the atomism of any
+one duration of one primate is necessarily subdivided
+by the boundary moments of durations of the other
+primate.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The laws of the locomotion of primates express
+under what conditions any primate will change its
+space-time system.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>It is unnecessary to pursue this conception further.
+The justification of the concept of vibratory existence
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_192'>192</span>must be purely experimental. The point illustrated
+by this example is that the cosmological outlook,
+which is here adopted, is perfectly consistent with the
+demands for discontinuity which have been urged
+from the side of physics. Also if this concept of temporalisation
+as a successive realisation of epochal durations
+be adopted, the difficulty of Zeno is evaded. The
+particular form, which has been given here to this
+concept, is purely for that purpose of illustration and
+must necessarily require recasting before it can be
+adapted to the results of experimental physics.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_193'>193</span>
+  <h2 class='c006'>CHAPTER IX <br /> <br /> SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'>In the present lecture, it is my object to consider some
+reactions of science upon the stream of philosophic
+thought during the modern centuries with which we
+are concerned. I shall make no attempt to compress
+a history of modern philosophy within the limits of
+one lecture. We shall merely consider some contacts
+between science and philosophy, in so far as they lie
+within the scheme of thought which it is the purpose
+of these lectures to develop. For this reason the whole
+of the great German idealistic movement will be ignored,
+as being out of effective touch with its contemporary
+science so far as reciprocal modification
+of concepts is concerned. Kant, from whom this movement
+took its rise, was saturated with Newtonian
+physics, and with the ideas of the great French physicists—such
+as Clairaut,<a id='r11' /><a href='#f11' class='c013'><sup>[11]</sup></a> for instance—who developed
+the Newtonian ideas. But the philosophers who developed
+the Kantian school of thought, or who transformed
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_194'>194</span>it into Hegelianism, either lacked Kant’s background
+of scientific knowledge, or lacked his potentiality
+of becoming a great physicist if philosophy had
+not absorbed his main energies.</p>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f11'>
+<p class='c001'><a href='#r11'>11</a>. <i>Cf.</i> the curious evidence of Kant’s scientific reading in the
+<cite>Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Analytic, Second Analogy
+of Experience</cite>, where he refers to the phenomenon of capillary action.
+This is an unnecessarily complex illustration; a book resting
+on a table would have equally well sufficed. But the subject had
+just been adequately treated for the first time by Clairaut in an appendix
+to his <cite>Figure of the Earth</cite>. Kant evidently had read this
+appendix, and his mind was full of it.</p>
+</div>
+<p class='c001'>The origin of modern philosophy is analogous to
+that of science, and is contemporaneous. The general
+trend of its development was settled in the seventeenth
+century, partly at the hands of the same men who established
+the scientific principles. This settlement of
+purpose followed upon a transitional period dating
+from the fifteenth century. There was in fact a general
+movement of European mentality, which carried
+along with its stream, religion, science and philosophy.
+It may shortly be characterised as being the
+direct recurrence to the original sources of Greek inspiration
+on the part of men whose spiritual shape
+had been derived from inheritance from the Middle
+Ages. There was therefore no revival of Greek mentality.
+Epochs do not rise from the dead. The principles
+of aesthetics and of reason, which animated
+the Greek civilisation, were reclothed in a modern
+mentality. Between the two there lay other religions,
+other systems of law, other anarchies, and other racial
+inheritances, dividing the living from the dead.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Philosophy is peculiarly sensitive to such differences.
+For, whereas you can make a replica of an
+ancient statue, there is no possible replica of an ancient
+state of mind. There can be no nearer approximation
+than that which a masquerade bears to real
+life. There may be understanding of the past, but
+there is a difference between the modern and the ancient
+reactions to the same stimuli.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In the particular case of philosophy, the distinction
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_195'>195</span>in tonality lies on the surface. Modern philosophy
+is tinged with subjectivism, as against the objective
+attitude of the ancients. The same change is to
+be seen in religion. In the early history of the <a id='corr195.4'></a><span class='htmlonly'><ins class='correction' title='Christion'>Christian</ins></span><span class='epubonly'><a href='#c_195.4'><ins class='correction' title='Christion'>Christian</ins></a></span>
+Church, the theological interest centred in discussions
+on the nature of God, the meaning of the Incarnation,
+and apocalyptic <a id='corr195.7'></a><span class='htmlonly'><ins class='correction' title='forecastes'>forecasts</ins></span><span class='epubonly'><a href='#c_195.7'><ins class='correction' title='forecastes'>forecasts</ins></a></span> of the ultimate
+fate of the world. At the Reformation, the Church
+was torn asunder by dissension as to the individual
+experiences of believers in respect to justification. The
+individual subject of experience had been substituted
+for the total drama of all reality. Luther asked, ‘How
+am I justified?’; modern philosophers have asked,
+‘How do I have knowledge?’ The emphasis lies upon
+the subject of experience. This change of standpoint
+is the work of Christianity in its pastoral aspect of
+shepherding the company of believers. For century
+after century it insisted upon the infinite worth of the
+individual human soul. Accordingly, to the instinctive
+egotism of physical desires, it has superadded an
+instinctive feeling of justification for an egotism of
+intellectual outlook. Every human being is the natural
+guardian of his own importance. Without a
+doubt, this modern direction of attention emphasises
+truths of the highest value. For example, in the field
+of practical life, it has abolished slavery, and has impressed
+upon the popular imagination the primary
+rights of mankind.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Descartes, in his <cite>Discourse on Method</cite>, and in his
+<cite>Meditations</cite>, discloses with great clearness the general
+conceptions which have since influenced modern philosophy.
+There is a subject receiving experience: in
+the <cite>Discourse</cite> this subject is always mentioned in the
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_196'>196</span>first person, that is to say, as being Descartes himself.
+Descartes starts with himself as being a mentality,
+which in virtue of its consciousness of its own inherent
+presentations of sense and of thought, is thereby conscious
+of its own existence as a unit entity. The subsequent
+history of philosophy revolves round the Cartesian
+formulation of the primary datum. The ancient
+world takes its stand upon the drama of the
+Universe, the modern world upon the inward drama
+of the Soul. Descartes, in his <cite>Meditations</cite>, expressly
+grounds the existence of this inward drama upon the
+possibility of error. There may be no correspondence
+with objective fact, and thus there must be a soul with
+activities whose reality is purely derivative from
+itself. For example, here is a quotation<a id='r12' /><a href='#f12' class='c013'><sup>[12]</sup></a> from <cite>Meditation
+II</cite>: “But it will be said that these presentations
+are false, and that I am dreaming. Let it be so. At
+all events it is certain that I seem to see light, hear
+a noise, and feel heat; this cannot be false, and this is
+what in me is properly called perceiving (sentire),
+which is nothing else than thinking. From this I
+begin to know what I am with somewhat greater clearness
+and distinctness than heretofore.” Again in
+<cite>Meditation III</cite>: “...; for, as I before remarked, although
+the things which I perceive or imagine are
+perhaps nothing at all apart from me, I am nevertheless
+assured that those modes of consciousness which I
+call perceptions and imaginations, in as far only as
+they are modes of consciousness, exist in me.”</p>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f12'>
+<p class='c001'><a href='#r12'>12</a>. Quoted from Veitch’s translation.</p>
+</div>
+<p class='c001'>The objectivism of the medieval and the ancient
+worlds passed over into science. Nature is there conceived
+as for itself, with its own mutual reactions.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_197'>197</span>Under the recent influence of relativity, there has
+been a tendency towards subjectivist formulations.
+But, apart from this recent exception, nature, in
+scientific thought, has had its laws formulated without
+any reference to dependence on individual observers.
+There is, however, this difference between the
+older and the later attitudes towards science. The
+anti-rationalism of the moderns has checked any attempt
+to harmonise the ultimate concepts of science
+with ideas drawn from a more concrete survey of the
+whole of reality. The material, the space, the time,
+the various laws concerning the transition of material
+configurations, are taken as ultimate stubborn facts,
+not to be tampered with.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The effect of this antagonism to philosophy has been
+equally unfortunate both for philosophy and for
+science. In this lecture we are concerned with philosophy.
+Philosophers are rationalists. They are seeking
+to go behind stubborn and irreducible facts: they
+wish to explain in the light of universal principles
+the mutual reference between the various details entering
+into the flux of things. Also, they seek such
+principles as will eliminate mere arbitrariness; so that,
+whatever portion of fact is assumed or given, the existence
+of the remainder of things shall satisfy some
+demand of rationality. They demand meaning. In
+the words of Henry Sidgwick<a id='r13' /><a href='#f13' class='c013'><sup>[13]</sup></a>—“It is the primary
+aim of philosophy to unify completely, bring into clear
+coherence, all departments of rational thought, and
+this aim cannot be realised by any philosophy that
+leaves out of its view the important body of judgments
+and reasonings which form the subject matter of
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_198'>198</span>ethics.” Accordingly, the bias towards history on
+the part of the physical and social sciences with their
+refusal to rationalise below some ultimate mechanism,
+has pushed philosophy out of the effective currents
+of modern life. It has lost its proper rôle as a constant
+critic of partial formulations. It has retreated
+into the subjectivist sphere of mind, by reason of its
+expulsion by science from the objectivist sphere of
+matter. Thus the evolution of thought in the seventeenth
+century coöperated with the enhanced sense
+of individual personality derived from the Middle
+Ages. We see Descartes taking his stand upon his own
+ultimate mind, which his philosophy assures him of;
+and asking about its relations to the ultimate matter—exemplified,
+in the second <cite>Meditation</cite>, by the human
+body and a lump of wax—which his science assumes.
+There is Aaron’s rod, and the magicians’ serpents;
+and the only question for philosophy is, which swallows
+which; or whether, as Descartes thought, they
+all lived happily together. In this stream of thought
+are to be found Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant. Two
+great names lie outside this list, Spinoza and Leibniz.
+But there is a certain isolation of both of them in respect
+to their philosophical influence so far as science
+is concerned; as though they had strayed to extremes
+which lie outside the boundaries of safe philosophy,
+Spinoza by retaining older ways of thought, and Leibniz
+by the novelty of his monads.</p>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f13'>
+<p class='c001'><a href='#r13'>13</a>. <i>Cf.</i> <cite>Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir</cite>, Appendix I.</p>
+</div>
+<p class='c001'>The history of philosophy runs curiously parallel
+to that of science. In the case of both, the seventeenth
+century set the stage for its two successors. But with
+the twentieth century a new act commences. It is an
+exaggeration to attribute a general change in a climate
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_199'>199</span>of thought to any one piece of writing, or to any one
+author. No doubt Descartes only expressed definitely
+and in decisive form what was already in the air of
+his period. Analogously, in attributing to William
+James the inauguration of a new stage in philosophy,
+we should be neglecting other influences of his time.
+But, admitting this, there still remains a certain fitness
+in contrasting his essay, <cite>Does Consciousness Exist</cite>,
+published in 1904, with Descartes’ <cite>Discourse on
+Method</cite>, published in 1637. James clears the stage of
+the old paraphernalia; or rather he entirely alters its
+lighting. Take for example these two sentences from
+his essay: “To deny plumply that ‘consciousness’ exists
+seems so absurd on the face of it—for undeniably
+‘thoughts’ do exist—that I fear some readers will follow
+me no farther. Let me then immediately explain
+that I mean only to deny that the word stands for an
+entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does
+stand for a function.”</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The scientific materialism and the Cartesian Ego
+were both challenged at the same moment, one by
+science and the other by philosophy, as represented by
+William James with his psychological antecedents;
+and the double challenge marks the end of a period
+which lasted for about two hundred and fifty years.
+Of course, ‘matter’ and ‘consciousness’ both express
+something so evident in ordinary experience that any
+philosophy must provide some things which answer
+to their respective meanings. But the point is that,
+in respect to both of them, the seventeenth century
+settlement was infected with a presupposition which is
+now challenged. James denies that consciousness is
+an entity, but admits that it is a function. The discrimination
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_200'>200</span>between an entity and a function is therefore
+vital to the understanding of the challenge which
+James is advancing against the older modes of
+thought. In the essay in question, the character which
+James assigns to consciousness is fully discussed. But
+he does not unambiguously explain what he means by
+the notion of an entity, which he refuses to apply to
+consciousness. In the sentence which immediately
+follows the one which I have already quoted, he says:</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>“There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff or quality
+of being, contrasted with that of which material objects
+are made, out of which our thoughts of them are
+made; but there is a function in experience which
+thoughts perform, and for the performance of which
+this quality of being is invoked. That function is
+<em>knowing</em>. ‘Consciousness’ is supposed necessary to explain
+the fact that things not only are, but get reported,
+are known.”</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Thus James is denying that consciousness is a
+‘stuff.’</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The term ‘entity,’ or even that of ‘stuff,’ does not
+fully tell its own tale. The notion of ‘entity’ is so
+general that it may be taken to mean anything that
+can be thought about. You cannot think of mere
+nothing; and the something which is an object of
+thought may be called an entity. In this sense, a
+function is an entity. Obviously, this is not what James
+had in his mind.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In agreement with the organic theory of nature
+which I have been tentatively putting forward in these
+lectures, I shall for my own purposes construe James
+as denying exactly what Descartes asserts in his <cite>Discourse</cite>
+and his <cite>Meditations</cite>. Descartes discriminates
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_201'>201</span>two species of entities, <em>matter</em> and <em>soul</em>. The essence
+of matter is spatial extension; the essence of soul is its
+cogitation, in the full sense which Descartes assigns to
+the word ‘<span lang="la" xml:lang="la"><i>cogitare</i></span>.’ For example, in Section Fifty-three
+of Part I of his <cite>Principles of Philosophy</cite>, he
+enunciates: “That of every substance there is one principal
+attribute, as thinking of the mind, extension of
+the body.” In the earlier, Fifty-first Section, Descartes
+states: “By substance we can conceive nothing else
+than a thing which exists in such a way as to stand in
+need of nothing beyond itself in order to its existence.”
+Furthermore, later on, Descartes says: “For example,
+because any substance which ceases to endure ceases
+also to exist, duration is not distinct from substance
+except in thought;....” Thus we conclude that, for
+Descartes, minds and bodies exist in such a way as to
+stand in need of nothing beyond themselves individually
+(God only excepted, as being the foundation of
+all things); that both minds and bodies endure, because
+without endurance they would cease to exist;
+that spatial extension is the essential attribute of
+bodies; and that cogitation is the essential attribute of
+minds.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>It is difficult to praise too highly the genius exhibited
+by Descartes in the complete sections of his <cite>Principles</cite>
+which deal with these questions. It is worthy
+of the century in which he writes, and of the clearness
+of the French intellect. Descartes in his distinction
+between time and duration, and in his way of grounding
+time upon motion, and in his close relation between
+matter and extension, anticipates, as far as it
+was possible at his epoch, modern notions suggested
+by the doctrine of relativity, or by some aspects of
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_202'>202</span>Bergson’s doctrine of the generation of things. But
+the fundamental principles are so set out as to presuppose
+independently existing substances with simple
+location in a community of temporal durations, and,
+in the case of bodies, with simple location in the community
+of spatial extensions. Those principles lead
+straight to the theory of a materialistic, mechanistic nature,
+surveyed by cogitating minds. After the close
+of the seventeenth century, science took charge of the
+materialistic nature, and philosophy took charge of the
+cogitating minds. Some schools of philosophy admitted
+an ultimate dualism; and the various idealistic
+schools claimed that nature was merely the chief example
+of the cogitations of minds. But all schools
+admitted the Cartesian analysis of the ultimate elements
+of nature. I am excluding Spinoza and Leibniz
+from these statements as to the main stream of modern
+philosophy, as derivative from Descartes; though of
+course they were influenced by him, and in their turn
+influenced philosophers. I am thinking mainly of
+the effective contacts between science and philosophy.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>This <a id='corr202.21'></a><span class='htmlonly'><ins class='correction' title='divison'>division</ins></span><span class='epubonly'><a href='#c_202.21'><ins class='correction' title='divison'>division</ins></a></span> of territory between science and philosophy
+was not a simple business; and in fact it illustrated
+the weakness of the whole cut-and-dried presupposition
+upon which it rested. We are aware of
+nature as an interplay of bodies, colours, sounds, scents,
+tastes, touches and other various bodily feelings, displayed
+as in space, in patterns of mutual separation
+by intervening volumes, and of individual shape.
+Also the whole is a flux, changing with the lapse of
+time. This systematic totality is disclosed to us as
+one complex of things. But the seventeenth century
+dualism cuts straight across it. The objective world
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_203'>203</span>of science was confined to mere spatial material with
+simple location in space and time, and subjected to
+definite rules as to its locomotion. The subjective
+world of philosophy annexed the colours, sounds,
+scents, tastes, touches, bodily feelings, as forming the
+subjective content of the cogitations of the individual
+minds. Both worlds shared in the general flux; but
+time, as measured, is assigned by Descartes to the
+cogitations of the observer’s mind. There is obviously
+one fatal weakness to this scheme. The cogitations of
+mind exhibit themselves as holding up entities, such as
+colours for instance, before the mind as the termini
+of contemplation. But in this theory these colours are,
+after all, merely the furniture of the mind. Accordingly,
+the mind seems to be confined to its own private
+world of cogitations. The subject-object conformation
+of experience in its entirety lies within the mind
+as one of its private passions. This conclusion from
+the Cartesian data is the starting point from which
+Berkeley, Hume, and Kant developed their respective
+systems. And, antecedently to them, it was the
+point upon which Locke concentrated as being the
+vital question. Thus the question as to how any knowledge
+is obtained of the truly objective world of science
+becomes a problem of the first magnitude. Descartes
+states that the objective body is perceived by the intellect.
+He says (<cite>Meditation II</cite>): “I must, therefore,
+admit that I cannot even comprehend by imagination
+what the piece of wax is, and that it is the mind alone
+which perceives it. I speak of one piece in particular;
+for, as to wax in general, this is still more evident.
+But what is the piece of wax that can be perceived
+only by the mind?... The perception of it is
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_204'>204</span>neither an act of sight, of touch, nor of imagination,
+and never was either of these, though it might formerly
+seem so, but is simply an <em>intuition</em> (<span lang="la" xml:lang="la"><i>inspectio</i></span>) of
+the mind,....” It must be noted that the Latin word
+‘inspectio’ is associated in its classical use with the
+notion of theory as opposed to practice.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The two great preoccupations of modern philosophy
+now lie clearly before us. The study of mind divides
+into psychology, or the study of mental functionings
+as considered in themselves and in their mutual relations,
+and into epistemology, or the theory of the
+knowledge of a common objective world. In other
+words, there is the study of the cogitations, <span lang="la" xml:lang="la"><i>quâ</i></span> passions
+of the mind, and their study <span lang="la" xml:lang="la"><i>quâ</i></span> leading to an
+inspection (<em>intuition</em>) of an objective world. This is
+a very uneasy division, giving rise to a host of perplexities
+whose consideration has occupied the intervening
+centuries.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>As long as men thought in terms of physical notions
+for the objective world and of mentality for the
+subjective world, the setting out of the problem, as
+achieved by Descartes, sufficed as a starting point.
+But the balance has been upset by the rise of physiology.
+In the seventeenth century men passed from
+the study of physics to the study of philosophy. Towards
+the end of the nineteenth century, notably in
+Germany, men passed from the study of physiology to
+the study of psychology. The change in tone has been
+decisive. Of course, in the earlier period the intervention
+of the human body was fully considered, for
+example, by Descartes in Part V of the ‘<cite>Discourse on
+Method</cite>.’ But the physiological instinct had not been
+developed. In considering the human body, Descartes
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_205'>205</span>thought with the outfit of a physicist; whereas the
+modern psychologists are clothed with the mentalities
+of medical physiologists. The career of William
+James is an example of this change in standpoint. He
+also possessed the clear, incisive genius which could
+state in a flash the exact point at issue.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The reason why I have put Descartes and James in
+close juxtaposition is now evident. Neither philosopher
+finished an epoch by a final solution of a problem.
+Their great merit is of the opposite sort. They
+each of them open an epoch by their clear formulation
+of terms in which thought could profitably express
+itself at particular stages of knowledge, one for
+the seventeenth century, the other for the twentieth
+century. In this respect, they are both to be contrasted
+with St. Thomas Aquinas, who expressed the
+culmination of Aristotelian scholasticism.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In many ways neither Descartes nor James were
+the most characteristic philosophers of their respective
+epochs. I should be disposed to ascribe these
+positions to Locke and to Bergson respectively, at
+least so far as concerns their relations to the science
+of their times. Locke developed the lines of thought
+which kept philosophy on the move; for example he
+emphasized the appeal to psychology. He initiated
+the age of epoch-making enquiries into urgent problems
+of limited scope. Undoubtedly, in so doing, he
+infected philosophy with something of the anti-rationalism
+of science. But the very groundwork of a
+fruitful methodology is to start from those clear postulates
+which must be held to be ultimate so far as
+concerns the occasion in question. The criticism of
+such methodological postulates is thus reserved for
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_206'>206</span>another opportunity. Locke discovered that the philosophical
+situation bequeathed by Descartes involved
+the problems of epistemology and psychology.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Bergson introduced into philosophy the organic
+conceptions of physiological science. He has most
+completely moved away from the static materialism of
+the seventeenth century. His protest against spatialisation
+is a protest against taking the Newtonian conception
+of nature as being anything except a high
+abstraction. His so-called anti-intellectualism should
+be construed in this sense. In some respects he recurs
+to Descartes; but the recurrence is accompanied with
+an instinctive grasp of modern biology.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>There is another reason for associating Locke and
+Bergson. The germ of an organic theory of nature is
+to be found in Locke. His most recent expositor, Professor
+Gibson,<a id='r14' /><a href='#f14' class='c013'><sup>[14]</sup></a> states that Locke’s way of conceiving
+the identity of self-consciousness ‘like that of a living
+organism, involves a genuine transcending of the
+mechanical view of nature and of mind, embodied in
+the composition theory.’ But it is to be noticed that
+in the first place Locke wavers in his grasp of this
+position; and in the second place, what is more important
+still, he only applies his idea to self-consciousness.
+The physiological attitude has not yet established
+itself. The effect of physiology was to put mind back
+into nature. The neurologist traces first the effect of
+stimuli along the bodily nerves, then integration at
+nerve centres, and finally the rise of a projective reference
+beyond the body with a resulting motor efficacy
+in renewed nervous excitement. In biochemistry, the
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_207'>207</span>delicate adjustment of the chemical composition of the
+parts to the preservation of the whole organism is
+detected. Thus the mental cognition is seen as the
+reflective experience of a totality, reporting for itself
+what it is in itself as one unit occurrence. This unit
+is the integration of the sum of its partial happenings,
+but it is not their numerical aggregate. It has its
+own unity as an event. This total unity, considered
+as an entity for its own sake, is the prehension into
+unity of the patterned aspects of the universe of
+events. Its knowledge of itself arises from its own
+relevance to the things of which it prehends the
+aspects. It knows the world as a system of mutual
+relevance, and thus sees itself as mirrored in other
+things. These other things include more especially
+the various parts of its own body.</p>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f14'>
+<p class='c001'><a href='#r14'>14</a>. <i>Cf.</i> his book, <cite>Locke’s Theory of Knowledge and its Historical
+Relations</cite>, Camb. Univ. Press, 1917.</p>
+</div>
+<p class='c001'>It is important to discriminate the bodily pattern,
+which endures, from the bodily event, which is pervaded
+by the enduring pattern, and from the parts of
+the bodily event. The parts of the bodily event are
+themselves pervaded by their own enduring patterns,
+which form elements in the bodily pattern. The parts
+of the body are really portions of the environment of
+the total bodily event, but so related that their mutual
+aspects, each in the other, are peculiarly effective in
+modifying the pattern of either. This arises from
+the intimate character of the relation of whole to
+part. Thus the body is a portion of the environment
+for the part, and the part is a portion of the environment
+for the body; only they are peculiarly sensitive,
+each to modifications of the other. This sensitiveness
+is so arranged that the part adjusts itself to preserve
+the stability of the pattern of the body. It is a particular
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_208'>208</span>example of the favourable environment shielding
+the organism. The relation of part to whole has
+the special reciprocity associated with the notion of
+organism, in which the part is for the whole; but this
+relation reigns throughout nature and does not start
+with the special case of the higher organisms.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Further, viewing the question as a matter of chemistry,
+there is no need to construe the actions of each
+molecule in a living body by its exclusive particular
+reference to the pattern of the complete living organism.
+It is true that each molecule is affected by the
+aspect of this pattern as mirrored in it, so as to be
+otherwise than what it would have been if placed elsewhere.
+In the same way, under some circumstances
+an electron may be a sphere, and under other circumstances
+an egg-shaped volume. The mode of approach
+to the problem, so far as science is concerned, is merely
+to ask if molecules exhibit in living bodies properties
+which are not to be observed amid inorganic surroundings.
+In the same way, in a magnetic field soft iron
+exhibits magnetic properties which are in abeyance
+elsewhere. The prompt self-preservative actions of
+living bodies, and our experience of the physical actions
+of our bodies following the determinations of
+will, suggest the modification of molecules in the body
+as the result of the total pattern. It seems possible
+that there may be physical laws expressing the modification
+of the ultimate basic organisms when they
+form part of higher organisms with adequate compactness
+of pattern. It would, however, be entirely in
+consonance with the empirically observed action of
+environments, if the direct effects of aspects as between
+the whole body and its parts were negligible.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_209'>209</span>We should expect transmission. In this way the modification
+of total pattern would transmit itself by means
+of a series of modifications of a descending series of
+parts, so that finally the modification of the cell
+changes its aspect in the molecule, thus effecting a
+corresponding alteration in the molecule,—or in some
+subtler entity. Thus the question for physiology is the
+question of the physics of molecules in cells of different
+characters.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>We can now see the relation of psychology to physiology
+and to physics. The private psychological field
+is merely the event considered from its own standpoint.
+The unity of this field is the unity of the event.
+But it is the event as one entity, and not the event as
+a sum of parts. The relations of the parts, to each
+other and to the whole, are their aspects, each in the
+other. A body for an external observer is the aggregate
+of the aspects for him of the body as a whole, and
+also of the body as a sum of parts. For the external
+observer the aspects of shape and of sense-objects are
+dominant, at least for cognition. But we must also
+allow for the possibility that we can detect in ourselves
+direct aspects of the mentalities of higher organisms.
+The claim that the cognition of alien mentalities
+must necessarily be by means of indirect inferences
+from aspects of shape and of sense-objects is
+wholly unwarranted by this philosophy of organism.
+The fundamental principle is that whatever merges
+into actuality, implants its aspects in every individual
+event.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Further, even for self-cognition, the aspects of the
+parts of our own bodies partly take the form of aspects
+of shape, and of sense-objects. But that part of the
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_210'>210</span>bodily event, in respect to which the cognitive mentality
+is associated, is for itself the unit psychological
+field. Its ingredients are not referent to the event
+itself; they are aspects of what lies beyond that event.
+Thus the self-knowledge inherent in the bodily event
+is the knowledge of itself as a complex unity, whose
+ingredients involve all reality beyond itself, restricted
+under the limitation of its pattern of aspects. Thus
+we know ourselves as a function of unification of a
+plurality of things which are other than ourselves.
+Cognition discloses an event as being an activity, organising
+a real togetherness of alien things. But this
+psychological field does not depend on its cognition;
+so that this field is still a unit event as abstracted from
+its self-cognition.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Accordingly, consciousness will be the function of
+knowing. But what is known is already a prehension
+of aspects of the one real universe. These aspects
+are aspects of other events as mutually modifying,
+each the others. In the pattern of aspects they stand
+in their pattern of mutual relatedness.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The aboriginal data in terms of which the pattern
+weaves itself are the aspects of shapes, of sense-objects,
+and of other eternal objects whose self-identity is not
+dependent on the flux of things. Wherever such objects
+have ingression into the general flux, they interpret
+events, each to the other. They are here in the
+perceiver; but, as perceived by him, they convey for
+him something of the total flux which is beyond himself.
+The subject-object relation takes its origin in
+the double rôle of these eternal objects. They are
+modifications of the subject, but only in their character
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_211'>211</span>of conveying aspects of other subjects in the community
+of the universe. Thus no individual subject can
+have independent reality, since it is a prehension of
+limited aspects of subjects other than itself.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The technical phrase ‘subject-object’ is a bad term
+for the fundamental situation disclosed in experience.
+It is really reminiscent of the Aristotelian ‘subject-predicate.’
+It already presupposes the metaphysical
+doctrine of diverse subjects qualified by their private
+predicates. This is the doctrine of subjects with private
+worlds of experience. If this be granted, there
+is no escape from solipsism. The point is that the
+phrase ‘subject-object’ indicates a fundamental entity
+underlying the objects. Thus the ‘objects,’ as thus
+conceived, are merely the ghosts of Aristotelian predicates.
+The primary situation disclosed in cognitive
+experience is ‘ego-object amid objects.’ By this I
+mean that the primary fact is an impartial world transcending
+the ‘here-now’ which marks the ego-object,
+and transcending the ‘now’ which is the spatial world
+of simultaneous realisation. It is a world also including
+the actuality of the past, and the limited potentiality
+of the future, together with the complete world of
+abstract potentiality, the realm of eternal objects,
+which transcends, and finds exemplification in and
+comparison with, the actual course of realisation. The
+ego-object, as consciousness here-now, is conscious of
+its experient essence as constituted by its internal relatedness
+to the world of realities, and to the world of
+ideas. But the ego-object, in being thus constituted,
+is within the world of realities, and exhibits itself as
+an organism requiring the ingression of ideas for the
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_212'>212</span>purpose of this status among realities. This question
+of consciousness must be reserved for treatment on
+another occasion.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The point to be made for the purposes of the present
+discussion is that a philosophy of nature as organic
+must start at the opposite end to that requisite for a
+materialistic philosophy. The materialistic starting
+point is from independently existing substances, matter
+and mind. The matter suffers modifications of
+its external relations of locomotion, and the mind
+suffers modifications of its contemplated objects.
+There are, in this materialistic theory, two sorts of independent
+substances, each qualified by their appropriate
+passions. The organic starting point is from
+the analysis of process as the realisation of events disposed
+in an interlocked community. The event is
+the unit of things real. The emergent enduring pattern
+is the stabilisation of the emergent achievement
+so as to become a fact which retains its identity
+throughout the process. It will be noted that endurance
+is not primarily the property of enduring beyond
+itself, but of enduring within itself. I mean that endurance
+is the property of finding its pattern reproduced
+in the temporal parts of the total event. It is
+in this sense that a total event carries an enduring
+pattern. There is an intrinsic value identical for the
+whole and for its succession of parts. Cognition is
+the emergence, into some measure of individualised
+reality, of the general substratum of activity, poising
+before itself possibility, actuality, and purpose.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>It is equally possible to arrive at this organic conception
+of the world if we start from the fundamental
+notions of modern physics, instead of, as above, from
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_213'>213</span>psychology and physiology. In fact by reason of my
+own studies in mathematics and mathematical physics,
+I did in fact arrive at my convictions in this way.
+Mathematical physics presumes in the first place an
+electromagnetic field of activity pervading space and
+time. The laws which condition this field are nothing
+else than the conditions observed by the general activity
+of the flux of the world, as it individualises
+itself in the events. In physics, there is an abstraction.
+The science ignores what anything is in <a id='corr213.10'></a><span class='htmlonly'><ins class='correction' title='iself'>itself</ins></span><span class='epubonly'><a href='#c_213.10'><ins class='correction' title='iself'>itself</ins></a></span>.
+Its entities are merely considered in respect to their
+extrinsic reality, that is to say, in respect to their aspects
+in other things. But the abstraction reaches
+even further than that; for it is only the aspects in
+other things, as modifying the spatio-temporal specifications
+of the life histories of those other things, which
+count. The intrinsic reality of the observer comes in:
+I mean what the observer is for himself is appealed to.
+For example, the fact that he will see red or blue
+enters into scientific statements. But the red which
+the observer sees does not in truth enter into science.
+What is relevant is merely the bare diversity of the
+observer’s red experiences from all of his other experiences.
+Accordingly, the intrinsic character of the
+observer is merely relevant in order to fix the self-identical
+individuality of the physical entities. These
+entities are only considered as agencies in fixing the
+routes in space and in time of the life histories of
+enduring entities.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The phraseology of physics is derived from the
+materialistic ideas of the seventeenth century. But
+we find that, even in its extreme abstraction, what it
+is really presupposing is the organic theory of aspects
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_214'>214</span>as explained above. First, consider any event in
+empty space where the word ‘empty’ means devoid
+of electrons, or protons, or of any other form of electric
+charge. Such an event has three rôles in physics. In
+the first place, it is the actual scene of an adventure
+of energy, either as its <em>habitat</em> or as the locus of a
+particular stream of energy: anyhow, in this rôle the
+energy is there, either as located in space during the
+time considered, or as streaming through space.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In its second rôle, the event is a necessary link in
+the pattern of transmission, by which the character
+of every event receives some modification from the
+character of every other event.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In its third rôle, the event is the repository of a
+possibility, as to what would happen to an electric
+charge, either by way of deformation or of locomotion,
+if it should have happened to be there.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>If we modify our assumption by considering an
+event which includes in itself a portion of the life-history
+of an electric charge, then the analysis of its
+three rôles still remains; except that the possibility
+embodied in the third rôle is now transformed into
+an actuality. In this replacement of possibility by
+actuality, we obtain the distinction between empty and
+occupied events.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Recurring to the empty events, we note the deficiency
+in them of individuality of intrinsic content.
+Considering the first rôle of an empty event, as being
+a <em>habitat</em> of energy, we note that there is no individual
+discrimination of an individual bit of energy, either
+as statically located, or as an element in the stream.
+There is simply a quantitative determination of activity,
+without individualisation of the activity in itself.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_215'>215</span>This lack of individualisation is still more evident in
+the second and third rôles. An empty event is something
+in itself, but it fails to realise a stable individuality
+of content. So far as its content is concerned,
+the empty event is one realised element in a general
+scheme of organised activity.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Some qualification is required when the empty
+event is the scene of the transmission of a definite
+train of recurrent wave-forms. There is now a definite
+pattern which remains permanent in the event.
+We find here the first faint trace of enduring individuality.
+But it is individuality without the faintest
+capture of originality: for it is merely a permanence
+arising solely from the implication of the event in a
+larger scheme of patterning.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Turning now to the examination of an occupied
+event, the electron has a determinate individuality.
+It can be traced throughout its life-history through a
+variety of events. A collection of electrons, together
+with the analogous atomic charges of positive electricity,
+forms a body such as we ordinarily perceive.
+The simplest body of this kind is a molecule, and a
+set of molecules forms a lump of ordinary matter, such
+as a chair, or a stone. Thus a charge of electricity is
+the mark of individuality of content, as additional
+to the individuality of an event in itself. This individuality
+of content is the strong point of the materialistic
+doctrine.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>It can, however, be equally well explained on the
+theory of organism. When we look into the function
+of the electric charge, we note that its rôle is to mark
+the origination of a pattern which is transmitted
+through space and time. It is the key of some particular
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_216'>216</span>pattern. For example, the field of force in
+any event is to be constructed by attention to the adventures
+of electrons and protons, and so also are the
+streams and distributions of energy. Further, the
+electric waves find their origin in the vibratory adventures
+of these charges. Thus the transmitted pattern
+is to be conceived as the flux of aspects throughout
+space and time derived from the life history of
+the atomic charge. The individualisation of the
+charge arises by a conjunction of two characters, in
+the first place by the continued identity of its mode
+of functioning as a key for the determination of a
+diffusion of pattern; and, in the second place, by the
+unity and continuity of its life history.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>We may conclude, therefore, that the organic
+theory represents directly what physics actually does
+assume respecting its ultimate entities. We also notice
+the complete futility of these entities, if they are conceived
+as fully concrete individuals. So far as physics
+is concerned, they are wholly occupied in moving each
+other about, and they have no reality outside this
+function. In particular for physics, there is no intrinsic
+reality.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>It is obvious that the basing of philosophy upon the
+presupposition of organism must be traced back to
+Leibniz.<a id='r15' /><a href='#f15' class='c013'><sup>[15]</sup></a> His monads are for him the ultimately
+real entities. But he retained the Cartesian substances
+with their qualifying passions, as also equally
+expressing for him the final characterisation of real
+things. Accordingly for him there was no concrete
+reality of internal relations. He had therefore on
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_217'>217</span>his hands two distinct points of view. One was that
+the final real entity is an organising activity, fusing
+ingredients into a unity, so that this unity is the reality.
+The other point of view is that the final real entities
+are substances supporting qualities. The first point of
+view depends upon the acceptance of internal relations
+binding together all reality. The latter is inconsistent
+with the reality of such relations. To combine these
+two points of view, his monads were therefore windowless;
+and their passions merely mirrored the universe
+by the divine arrangement of a preëstablished
+harmony. This system thus presupposed an aggregate
+of independent entities. He did not discriminate
+the event, as the unit of experience, from the enduring
+organism as its stabilisation into importance, and
+from the cognitive organism as expressing an increased
+completeness of individualisation. Nor did
+he admit the many-termed relations, relating sense-data
+to various events in diverse ways. These many-termed
+relations are in fact the perspectives which
+Leibniz does admit, but only on the condition that
+they are purely qualities of the organising monads.
+The difficulty really arises from the unquestioned acceptance
+of the notion of simple location as fundamental
+for space and time, and from the acceptance
+of the notion of independent individual substance as
+fundamental for a real entity. The only road open
+to Leibniz was thus the same as that later taken by
+Berkeley [in a prevalent interpretation of his meaning],
+namely an appeal to a <span lang="la" xml:lang="la"><i>Deux ex machinâ</i></span> who
+was capable of rising superior to the difficulties of
+metaphysics.</p>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f15'>
+<p class='c001'><a href='#r15'>15</a>. <i>Cf.</i> Bertrand Russell, <cite>The Philosophy of Leibniz</cite>, for the suggestion
+of this line of thought.</p>
+</div>
+<p class='c001'>In the same way as Descartes introduced the tradition
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_218'>218</span>of thought which kept subsequent philosophy in
+some measure of contact with the scientific movement,
+so Leibniz introduced the alternative tradition that
+the entities, which are the ultimate actual things, are
+in some sense procedures of organisation. This tradition
+has been the foundation of the great achievements
+of German philosophy. Kant reflected the two
+traditions, one upon the other. Kant was a scientist,
+but the schools derivative from Kant have had but
+slight effect on the mentality of the scientific world.
+It should be the task of the philosophical schools of
+this century to bring together the two streams into
+an expression of the world-picture derived from science,
+and thereby end the divorce of science from the
+affirmations of our aesthetic and ethical experiences.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_219'>219</span>
+  <h2 class='c006'>CHAPTER X <br /> <br /> ABSTRACTION</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'>In the previous chapters I have been examining the
+reactions of the scientific movement upon the deeper
+issues which have occupied modern thinkers. No
+one man, no limited society of men, and no one epoch
+can think of everything at once. Accordingly for
+the sake of eliciting the various impacts of science
+upon thought, the topic has been treated historically.
+In this retrospect I have kept in mind that the ultimate
+issue of the whole story is the patent dissolution
+of the comfortable scheme of scientific materialism
+which has dominated the three centuries under
+review. Accordingly various schools of criticism of
+the dominant opinions have been stressed; and I have
+endeavoured to outline an alternative cosmological
+doctrine, which shall be wide enough to include what
+is fundamental both for science and for its critics.
+In this alternative scheme, the notion of material, as
+fundamental, has been replaced by that of organic
+synthesis. But the approach has always been from
+the consideration of the actual intricacies of scientific
+thought, and of the peculiar perplexities which it
+suggests.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In the present chapter, and in the immediately succeeding
+chapter, we will forget the peculiar problems
+of modern science, and will put ourselves at the standpoint
+of a dispassionate consideration of the nature
+of things, antecedently to any special investigation
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_220'>220</span>into their details. Such a standpoint is termed ‘metaphysical.’
+Accordingly those readers who find metaphysics,
+even in two slight chapters, irksome, will do
+well to proceed at once to the Chapter on ‘Religion
+and Science,’ which resumes the topic of the impact
+of science on modern thought.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>These metaphysical chapters are purely descriptive.
+Their justification is to be sought, (i) in our direct
+knowledge of the actual occasions which compose our
+immediate experience, and (ii) in their success as
+forming a basis for harmonising our systematised accounts
+of various types of experience, and (iii) in their
+success as providing the concepts in terms of which
+an epistemology can be framed. By (iii) I mean
+that an account of the general character of what we
+know must enable us to frame an account of how
+knowledge is possible as an adjunct within things
+known.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In any occasion of cognition, that which is known
+is an actual occasion of experience, as diversified<a id='r16' /><a href='#f16' class='c013'><sup>[16]</sup></a> by
+reference to a realm of entities which transcend that
+immediate occasion in that they have analogous or
+different connections with other occasions of experience.
+For example a definite shade of red may, in
+the immediate occasion, be implicated with the shape
+of sphericity in some definite way. But that shade
+of red, and that spherical shape, exhibit themselves
+as transcending that occasion, in that either of them
+has other relationships to other occasions. Also,
+apart from the actual occurrence of the same things
+in other occasions, every actual occasion is set within
+a realm of alternative interconnected entities. This
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_221'>221</span>realm is disclosed by all the untrue propositions which
+can be predicated significantly of that occasion. It is
+the realm of alternative suggestions, whose foothold
+in actuality transcends each actual occasion. The real
+relevance of untrue propositions for each actual occasion
+is disclosed by art, romance, and by criticism
+in reference to ideals. It is the foundation of the
+metaphysical position which I am maintaining that
+the understanding of actuality requires a reference
+to ideality. The two realms are intrinsically inherent
+in the total metaphysical situation. The truth that
+some proposition respecting an actual occasion is untrue
+may express the vital truth as to the aesthetic
+achievement. It expresses the ‘great refusal’ which
+is its primary characteristic. An event is decisive
+in proportion to the importance (for it) of its untrue
+propositions: their relevance to the event cannot be
+dissociated from what the event is in itself by way
+of achievement. These transcendent entities have been
+termed ‘universals.’ I prefer to use the term ‘eternal
+objects,’ in order to disengage myself from presuppositions
+which cling to the former term owing to
+its prolonged philosophical history. Eternal objects
+are thus, in their nature, abstract. By ‘abstract’ I
+mean that what an eternal object is in itself—that is
+to say, its essence—is comprehensible without reference
+to some one particular occasion of experience.
+To be abstract is to transcend particular concrete occasions
+of actual happening. But to transcend an
+actual occasion does not mean being disconnected
+from it. On the contrary, I hold that each eternal
+object has its own proper connection with each such
+occasion, which I term its mode of ingression into
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_222'>222</span>that occasion. Thus an eternal object is to be comprehended
+by acquaintance with (i) its particular
+individuality, (ii) its general relationships to other
+eternal objects as apt for realisation in actual occasions,
+and (iii) the general principle which expresses
+its ingression in particular actual occasions.</p>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f16'>
+<p class='c001'><a href='#r16'>16</a>. <i>Cf.</i> my <cite>Principles of Natural Knowledge</cite>, Ch. V, Sec. 13.</p>
+</div>
+<p class='c001'>These three headings express two principles. The
+first principle is that each eternal object is an individual
+which, in its own peculiar fashion, is what
+it is. This particular individuality is the individual
+essence of the object, and cannot be described otherwise
+than as being itself. Thus the individual essence
+is merely the essence considered in respect to its
+uniqueness. Further, the essence of an eternal object
+is merely the eternal object considered as adding its
+own unique contribution to each actual occasion. This
+unique contribution is identical for all such occasions
+in respect to the fact that the object in all modes of
+ingression is just its identical self. But it varies from
+one occasion to another in respect to the differences
+of its modes of ingression. Thus the metaphysical
+status of an eternal object is that of a possibility for
+an actuality. Every actual occasion is defined as to
+its character by how these possibilities are actualised
+for that occasion. Thus actualisation is a selection
+among possibilities. More accurately, it is a selection
+issuing in a gradation of possibilities in respect to
+their realisation in that occasion. This conclusion
+brings us to the second metaphysical principle: An
+eternal object, considered as an abstract entity, cannot
+be divorced from its reference to other eternal
+objects, and from its reference to actuality generally;
+though it is disconnected from its actual modes of ingression
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_223'>223</span>into definitive actual occasions. This principle
+is expressed by the statement that each eternal object
+has a ‘relational essence.’ This relational essence
+determines how it is possible for the object to have
+ingression into actual occasions.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In other words: If <i>A</i> be an eternal object, then
+what <i>A</i> is in itself involves <i>A’s</i> status in the universe,
+and <i>A</i> cannot be divorced from this status. In the
+essence of <i>A</i> there stands a determinateness as to the
+relationships of <i>A</i> to other eternal objects, and an
+indeterminateness as to the relationships of <i>A</i> to
+actual occasions. Since the relationships of <i>A</i> to other
+eternal objects stand determinately in the essence of
+<i>A</i>, it follows that they are internal relations. I mean
+by this that these relationships are constitutive of <i>A</i>;
+for an entity which stands in internal relations has
+no being as an entity not in these relations. In other
+words, once with internal relations, always with internal
+relations. The internal relationships of <i>A</i>
+conjointly form its significance.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Again an entity cannot stand in external relations
+unless in its essence there stands an indeterminateness
+which is its patience for such external relations. The
+meaning of the term ‘possibility’ as applied to <i>A</i> is
+simply that there stands in the essence of <i>A</i> a patience
+for relationships to actual occasions. The relationships
+of <i>A</i> to an actual occasion are simply how the
+eternal relationships of <i>A</i> to other eternal objects are
+graded as to their realisation in that occasion.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Thus the general principle which expresses <i>A’s</i>
+ingression in the particular actual occasion α is the indeterminateness
+which stands in the essence of <i>A</i> as
+to its ingression into α, and is the determinateness
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_224'>224</span>which stands in the essence of α as to the ingression
+of <i>Α</i> into α. Thus the synthetic prehension, which
+is α, is the solution of the indeterminateness of <i>Α</i> into
+the determinateness of α. Accordingly the relationship
+between <i>Α</i> and α is external as regards <i>Α</i>, and
+is internal as regards α. Every actual occasion α is
+the solution of all modalities into actual categorical
+ingressions: truth and falsehood take the place of
+possibility. The complete ingression of <i>Α</i> into α is
+expressed by all the true propositions which are about
+both <i>Α</i> and α, and also—it may be—about other things.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The determinate relatedness of the eternal object <i>Α</i>
+to every other eternal object is how <i>Α</i> is systematically
+and by the necessity of its nature related to every other
+eternal object. Such relatedness represents a possibility
+for realisation. But a relationship is a fact
+which concerns all the implicated relata, and cannot
+be isolated as if involving only one of the relata. Accordingly
+there is a general fact of systematic mutual
+relatedness which is inherent in the character of possibility.
+The realm of eternal objects is properly described
+as a ‘realm,’ because each eternal object has
+its status in this general systematic complex of mutual
+relatedness.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In respect to the ingression of <i>Α</i> into an actual
+occasion α, the mutual relationships of <i>Α</i> to other
+eternal objects, as thus graded in realisation, require
+for their expression a reference to the status of <i>Α</i>
+and of the other eternal objects in the spatio-temporal
+relationship. Also this status is not expressible (for
+this purpose) without a reference to the status of α
+and of other actual occasions in the same spatio-temporal
+relationship. Accordingly the spatio-temporal
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_225'>225</span>relationship, in terms of which the actual
+course of events is to be expressed, is nothing else
+than a selective limitation within the general systematic
+relationships among eternal objects. By ‘limitation,’
+as applied to the spatio-temporal continuum, I
+mean those matter-of-fact determinations—such as
+the three dimensions of space, and the four dimensions
+of the spatio-temporal continuum—which are
+inherent in the actual course of events, but which
+present themselves as arbitrary in respect to a more
+abstract possibility. The consideration of these general
+limitations at the base of actual things, as distinct
+from the limitations peculiar to each actual occasion,
+will be more fully resumed in the chapter on
+‘God.’</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Further, the status of all possibility in reference to
+actuality requires a reference to this spatio-temporal
+continuum. In any particular consideration of a
+possibility we may conceive this continuum to be
+transcended. But in so far as there is any definite
+reference to actuality, the definite <em>how</em> of transcendence
+of that spatio-temporal continuum is required.
+Thus primarily the spatio-temporal continuum
+is a locus of relational possibility, selected
+from the more general realm of systematic relationship.
+This limited locus of relational possibility
+expresses one limitation of possibility inherent in
+the general system of the process of realisation.
+Whatever possibility is generally coherent with that
+system falls within this limitation. Also whatever is
+abstractedly possible in relation to the general course
+of events—as distinct from the particular limitations
+introduced by particular occasions—pervades the
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_226'>226</span>spatio-temporal continuum in every alternative spatial
+situation and at all alternative times.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Fundamentally, the spatio-temporal continuum is
+the general system of relatedness of all possibilities,
+in so far as that system is limited by its relevance to
+the general fact of actuality. Also it is inherent in the
+nature of possibility that it should include this relevance
+to actuality. For possibility is that in which
+there stands achievability, abstracted from achievement.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>It has already been emphasised that an actual occasion
+is to be conceived as a limitation; and that this
+process of limitation can be still further characterised
+as a gradation. This characteristic of an actual occasion
+(α, say) requires further elucidation: An indeterminateness
+stands in the essence of any eternal object
+(<i>Α</i>, say). The actual occasion α synthesises in itself
+every eternal object; and, in so doing, it includes the
+<em>complete</em> determinate relatedness of <i>Α</i> to every other
+eternal object, or set of eternal objects. This synthesis
+is a limitation of realisation but <em>not</em> of content.
+Each relationship preserves its inherent self-identity.
+But grades of entry into this synthesis are inherent in
+each actual occasion, such as α. These grades can be
+expressed only as relevance of value. This relevance
+of value varies—as comparing different occasions—in
+grade from the inclusion of the individual essence
+of <i>Α</i> as an element in the aesthetic synthesis (in some
+grade of inclusion) to the lowest grade which is the
+exclusion of the individual essence of <i>Α</i> as an element
+in the aesthetic synthesis. In so far as it stands in
+this lowest grade, every determinate relationship of <i>Α</i>
+is merely ingredient in the occasion in respect to the
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_227'>227</span>determinate <em>how</em> this relationship is an unfulfilled
+alternative, not contributing any aesthetic value, except
+as forming an element in the systematic substratum
+of unfulfilled content. In a higher grade, it
+may remain unfulfilled, but be aesthetically relevant.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Thus <i>A</i>, conceived merely in respect to its relationships
+to other eternal objects, is ‘<i>A</i> conceived as
+<em>not-being</em>’; where ‘not-being’ means ‘abstracted from
+the determinate fact of inclusions in, and exclusions
+from, actual events.’ Also ‘<i>A</i> as <em>not-being</em> in respect
+to a definite occasion α’ means that <i>A</i> in all its determinate
+relationships is excluded from α. Again
+‘<i>A</i> as <em>being</em> in respect to α’ means that <i>A</i> in some of
+its determinate relationships is included in α. But
+there can be no occasion which includes <i>A</i> in all its
+determinate relationships; for some of these relationships
+are contraries. Thus, in regard to excluded
+relationships, <i>A</i> will be <em>not-being</em> in α, even when in
+regard to other relationships <i>A</i> will be <em>being</em> in α. In
+this sense, every occasion is a synthesis of <em>being</em> and
+<em>not-being</em>. Furthermore, though some eternal objects
+are synthesised in an occasion α merely <em>quâ not-being</em>,
+each eternal object which is synthesised <em>quâ
+being</em> is also synthesised <em>quâ not-being</em>. ‘<em>Being</em>’ here
+means ‘individually effective in the aesthetic synthesis.’
+Also the ‘aesthetic synthesis’ is the ‘experient
+synthesis’ viewed as self-creative, under the
+limitations laid upon it by its internal relatedness to
+all other actual occasions. We thus conclude—what
+has already been stated above—that the general fact
+of the synthetic prehension of all eternal objects into
+every occasion wears the double aspect of the indeterminate
+relatedness of each eternal object to occasions
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_228'>228</span>generally, and of its determinate relatedness to
+each particular occasion. This statement summarises
+the account of how external relations are possible. But
+the account depends upon disengaging the spatio-temporal
+continuum from its mere implication in actual
+occasions—according to the usual explanation—and
+upon exhibiting it in its origin from the general
+nature of abstract possibility, as limited by the general
+character of the actual course of events.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The difficulty which arises in respect to internal
+relations is to explain how any particular truth is
+possible. In so far as there are internal relations,
+everything must depend upon everything else. But if
+this be the case, we cannot know about anything till
+we equally know everything else. Apparently, therefore,
+we are under the necessity of saying everything
+at once. This supposed necessity is palpably untrue.
+Accordingly it is incumbent on us to explain how
+there can be internal relations, seeing that we admit
+finite truths.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Since actual occasions are selections from the realm
+of possibilities, the ultimate explanation of how actual
+occasions have the general character which they do
+have, must lie in an analysis of the general character
+of the realm of possibility.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The <em>analytical character</em> of the realm of eternal objects
+is the primary metaphysical truth concerning it.
+By this character it is meant that the status of any
+eternal object <i>A</i> in this realm is capable of analysis
+into an indefinite number of subordinate relationships
+of limited scope. For example if <i>B</i> and <i>C</i> are two
+other eternal objects, then there is some perfectly definite
+relationship <i>R(A, B, C)</i> which involves <i>A, B, C</i>
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_229'>229</span>only, as to require the mention of no other definite
+eternal objects in the capacity of relata. Of course,
+the relationship <i>R(A, B, C)</i> may involve subordinate
+relationships which are themselves eternal objects, and
+<i>R(A, B, C)</i> is also itself an eternal object. Also there
+will be other relationships which in the same sense
+involve only <i>A, B, C</i>. We have now to examine how,
+having regard to the internal relatedness of eternal
+objects, this limited relationship <i>R(A, B, C)</i> is
+possible.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The reason for the existence of finite relationships
+in the realm of eternal objects is that relationships of
+these objects among themselves are entirely unselective,
+and are systematically complete. We are discussing
+possibility; so that every relationship which is
+possible is thereby in the realm of possibility. Every
+such relationship of each eternal object is founded
+upon the perfectly definite status of that object as a
+relatum in the general scheme of relationships. This
+definite status is what I have termed the ‘relational
+essence’ of the object. This relational essence is determinable
+by reference to that object alone, and does
+not require reference to any other objects, except those
+which are specifically involved in its individual essence
+when that essence is complex (as will be explained
+immediately). The meaning of the words
+‘any’ and ‘some’ springs from this principle—that is
+to say, the meaning of the ‘variable’ in logic. The
+whole principle is that a particular determination can
+be made of the <em>how</em> of some definite relationship of a
+definite eternal object <i>A</i> to a definite finite number <i>n</i>
+of other eternal objects, <em>without</em> any determination of
+the other <i>n</i> objects, X₁, X₂, ... Xₙ, except that they
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_230'>230</span>have, each of them, the requisite status to play their
+respective parts in that multiple relationship. This
+principle depends on the fact that the relational essence
+of an eternal object is not unique to that object.
+The mere relational essence of each eternal object determines
+the complete uniform scheme of relational
+essences, since each object stands internally in all its
+possible relationships. Thus the realm of possibility
+provides a uniform scheme of relationships among
+finite sets of eternal objects; and all eternal objects
+stand in all such relationships, so far as the status of
+each permits.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Accordingly the relationships (as in possibility) do
+not involve the individual essences of the eternal objects;
+they involve <em>any</em> eternal objects as relata, subject
+to the proviso that these relata have the requisite
+relational essences. [It is this proviso which, automatically
+and by the nature of the case, limits the
+‘any’ of the phrase ‘any eternal objects.’] This principle
+is the principle of the <em>Isolation of Eternal Objects</em>
+in the realm of possibility. The eternal objects
+are isolated, because their relationships as possibilities
+are expressible without reference to their respective
+individual essences. 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 <em>superject</em> of informed value;
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_231'>231</span>value, as abstracted from any particular superject, is
+the abstract matter—the ὕλη—which is common to
+all actual occasions; and the synthetic activity which
+prehends valueless possibility into superjicient informed
+value is the substantial activity. This substantial
+activity is that which is omitted in any
+analysis of the static factors in the metaphysical situation.
+The analysed elements of the situation are the
+attributes of the substantial activity.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The difficulty inherent in the concept of finite internal
+relations among eternal objects is thus evaded
+by two metaphysical principles, (i) that the relationships
+of any eternal object <i>A</i>, considered as constitutive
+of <i>A</i>, merely involve other eternal objects as bare
+relata without reference to their individual essences,
+and (ii) that the divisibility of the general relationship
+of <i>A</i> into a multiplicity of finite relationships of
+<i>A</i> stands therefore in the essence of that eternal object.
+The second principle obviously depends upon the first.
+To understand <i>A</i> is to understand the <em>how</em> 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. This
+spatio-temporal scheme is, so to speak, the greatest common
+measure of the schemes of relationship (as limited
+by actuality) inherent in all the eternal objects.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_232'>232</span>By this it is meant that, <em>how</em> select relationships of an
+eternal object (<i>A</i>) are realised in any actual occasion,
+is always explicable by expressing the status of <i>A</i> in
+respect to this spatio-temporal scheme, and by expressing
+in this scheme the relationship of the actual occasion
+to other actual occasions. A definite finite relationship
+involving the definite eternal objects of a
+limited set of such objects is itself an eternal object:
+it is those eternal objects as in that relationship. I will
+call such an eternal object ‘complex.’ The eternal
+objects which are the relata in a complex eternal object
+will be called the ‘components’ of that eternal
+object. Also if any of these relata are themselves complex,
+their components will be called ‘derivative components’
+of the original complex object. Also the
+components of derivative components will also be
+called derivative components of the original object.
+Thus the complexity of an eternal object means its
+analysability into a relationship of component eternal
+objects. Also the analysis of the general scheme of
+relatedness of eternal objects means its exhibition as
+a multiplicity of complex eternal objects. An eternal
+object, such as a definite shade of green, which cannot
+be analysed into a relationship of components, will be
+called ‘simple.’</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>We can now explain how the analytical character
+of the realm of eternal objects allows of an analysis
+of that realm into grades.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In the lowest grade of eternal objects are to be
+placed those objects whose individual essences are
+simple. This is the grade of zero complexity. Next
+consider any set of such objects, finite or infinite as
+to the number of its members. For example, consider
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_233'>233</span>the set of three eternal objects <i>A, B, C</i>, of which none
+is complex. Let us write <i>R(A, B, C)</i> for some definite
+possible relatedness of <i>A, B, C</i>. To take a simple example,
+<i>A, B, C</i> may be three definite colours with the
+spatio-temporal relatedness to each other of three
+faces of a regular tetrahedron, anywhere at any time.
+Then <i>R(A, B, C)</i> is another eternal object of the lowest
+complex grade. Analogously there are eternal objects
+of successively higher grades. In respect to any
+complex eternal object, <i>S(D₁, D₂, ... Dₙ)</i>, the
+eternal objects <i>D₁, ... Dₙ</i>, whose individual essences
+are constitutive of the individual essence of
+<i>S(D₁, ... Dₙ)</i>, are called the components of
+<i>S(D₁, ... Dₙ)</i>. It is obvious that the grade of complexity
+to be ascribed to <i>S(D₁, ... Dₙ)</i> is to be
+taken as one above the highest grade of complexity
+to be found among its components.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>There is thus an analysis of the realm of possibility
+into simple eternal objects, and into various grades of
+complex eternal objects. A complex eternal object
+is an abstract situation. There is a double sense of
+‘abstraction,’ in regard to the abstraction of <em>definite</em>
+eternal objects, <i>i.e.</i>, non-mathematical abstraction.
+There is abstraction from actuality, and abstraction
+from possibility. For example, <i>A</i> and <i>R(A, B, C)</i>
+are both abstractions from the realm of possibility.
+Note that <i>A</i> must mean <i>A</i> in all its possible relationships,
+and among them <i>R(A, B, C)</i>. Also <i>R(A, B, C)</i>
+means <i>R(A, B, C)</i> in all its relationships. But this
+meaning of <i>R(A, B, C)</i> excludes other relationships
+into which <i>A</i> can enter. Hence <i>A</i> as in <i>R(A, B, C)</i>
+is more abstract than <span lang="la" xml:lang="la"><i>A simpliciter</i></span>. Thus as we pass
+from the grade of simple eternal objects to higher and
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_234'>234</span>higher grades of complexity, we are indulging in
+higher grades of abstraction from the realm of possibility.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>We can now conceive the successive stages of a definite
+progress towards some assigned mode of abstraction
+from the realm of possibility, involving a progress
+(in thought) through successive grades of increasing
+complexity. I will call any such route of progress
+‘an abstractive hierarchy.’ Any abstractive hierarchy,
+finite or infinite, is based upon some definite group of
+simple eternal objects. This group will be called the
+‘base’ of the hierarchy. Thus the base of an abstractive
+hierarchy is a set of objects of zero complexity.
+The formal definition of an abstractive hierarchy is
+as follows:</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>An ‘abstractive hierarchy based upon <i>g</i>,’ where <i>g</i> is
+a group of simple eternal objects, is a set of eternal
+objects which satisfy the following conditions,</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>(i) the members of <i>g</i> belong to it, and are the only
+simple eternal objects in the hierarchy,</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>(ii) the components of any complex eternal object
+in the hierarchy are also members of the hierarchy,
+and</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>(iii) any set of eternal objects belonging to the
+hierarchy, whether all of the same grade or whether
+differing among themselves as to grade, are jointly
+among the components or derivative components of
+at least one eternal object which also belongs to the
+hierarchy.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>It is to be noticed that the components of an eternal
+object are necessarily of a lower grade of complexity
+than itself. Accordingly any member of such a hierarchy,
+which is of the first grade of complexity, can
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_235'>235</span>have as components only members of the group <i>g</i>;
+and any member of the second grade can have as components
+only members of the first grade, and members
+of <i>g</i>; and so on for the higher grades.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The third condition to be satisfied by an abstractive
+hierarchy will be called the condition of connexity.
+Thus an abstractive hierarchy springs from
+its base; it includes every successive grade from its
+base either indefinitely onwards, or to its maximum
+grade; and it is ‘connected’ by the reappearance (in a
+higher grade) of any set of its members belonging to
+lower grades, in the function of a set of components
+or derivative components of at least one member of
+the hierarchy.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>An abstractive hierarchy is called ‘finite’ if it stops
+at a finite grade of complexity. It is called ‘infinite’
+if it includes members belonging respectively to all
+degrees of complexity.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>It is to be noted that the base of an abstractive hierarchy
+may contain any number of members, finite or
+infinite. Further, the infinity of the number of the
+members of the base has nothing to do with the question
+as to whether the hierarchy be finite or infinite.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>A finite abstractive hierarchy will, by definition,
+possess a grade of maximum complexity. It is characteristic
+of this grade that a member of it is a component
+of no other eternal object belonging to any
+grade of the hierarchy. Also it is evident that this
+grade of maximum complexity must possess only one
+member; for otherwise the condition of connexity
+would not be satisfied. Conversely any complex
+eternal object defines a finite abstractive hierarchy to
+be discovered by a process of analysis. This complex
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_236'>236</span>eternal object from which we start will be called the
+‘vertex’ of the abstractive hierarchy: it is the sole
+member of the grade of maximum complexity. In
+the first stage of the analysis we obtain the components
+of the vertex. These components may be of varying
+complexity; but there must be among them at least
+one member whose complexity is of a grade one lower
+than that of the vertex. A grade which is one lower
+than that of a given eternal object will be called the
+‘proximate grade’ for that object. We take then those
+components of the vertex which belong to its proximate
+grade; and as the second stage we analyse them
+into their components. Among these components
+there must be some belonging to the proximate grade
+for the objects thus analysed. Add to them the components
+of the vertex which also belong to this grade
+of ‘second proximation’ from the vertex; and, at the
+third stage analyse as before. We thus find objects
+belonging to the grade of third proximation from the
+vertex; and we add to them the components belonging
+to this grade, which have been left over from the
+preceding stages of the analysis. We proceed in this
+way through successive stages, till we reach the grade
+of simple objects. This grade forms the base of the
+hierarchy.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>It is to be noted that in dealing with hierarchies
+we are entirely within the realm of possibility. Accordingly
+the eternal objects are devoid of real togetherness:
+they remain within their ‘isolation.’</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The logical instrument which Aristotle used for
+the analysis of actual fact into more abstract elements
+was that of classification into species and genera. This
+instrument has its overwhelmingly important application
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_237'>237</span>for science in its preparatory stages. But its
+use in metaphysical description distorts the true vision
+of the metaphysical situation. The use of the term
+‘universal’ is intimately connected with this Aristotelian
+analysis: the term has been broadened of late;
+but still it suggests that classificatory analysis. For
+this reason I have avoided it.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In any actual occasion α, there will be a group <i>g</i>
+of simple eternal objects which are ingredient in that
+group in the most concrete mode. This complete ingredience
+in an occasion, so as to yield the most complete
+fusion of individual essence with other eternal
+objects in the formation of the individual emergent
+occasion, is evidently of its own kind and cannot be defined
+in terms of anything else. But it has a peculiar
+characteristic which necessarily attaches to it. This
+characteristic is that there is an <em>infinite</em> abstractive
+hierarchy based upon <i>g</i> which is such that all its members
+are equally involved in this complete inclusion
+in α.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The existence of such an infinite abstractive hierarchy
+is what is meant by the statement that it is impossible
+to complete the description of an actual occasion
+by means of concepts. I will call this infinite abstractive
+hierarchy which is associated with α ‘the
+associated hierarchy of α.’ It is also what is meant
+by the notion of the connectedness of an actual occasion.
+This connectedness of an occasion is necessary
+for its synthetic unity and for its intelligibility. There
+is a connected hierarchy of concepts applicable to the
+occasion, including concepts of all degrees of complexity.
+Also in the actual occasion, the individual
+essences of the eternal objects involved in these complex
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_238'>238</span>concepts achieve an aesthetic synthesis, productive
+of the occasion as an experience for its own sake.
+This associated hierarchy is the shape, or pattern, or
+form, of the occasion in so far as the occasion is constituted
+of what enters into its full realisation.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Some confusion of thought has been caused by the
+fact that abstraction from possibility runs in the opposite
+direction to an abstraction from actuality, so
+far as degree of abstractness is concerned. For evidently
+in describing an actual occasion α, we are
+nearer to the total concrete fact when we describe α
+by predicating of it some member of its associated
+hierarchy, which is of a high grade of complexity.
+We have then said more about α. Thus, with a high
+grade of complexity we gain in approach to the full
+concreteness of α, and with a low grade we lose in
+this approach. Accordingly the simple eternal objects
+represent the extreme of abstraction from an
+actual occasion; whereas simple eternal objects represent
+the minimum of abstraction from the realm of
+possibility. It will, I think, be found that, when a
+high degree of abstraction is spoken of, abstraction
+from the realm of possibility is what is usually meant—in
+other words, an elaborate logical construction.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>So far I have merely been considering an actual
+occasion on the side of its full concreteness. It is this
+side of the occasion in virtue of which it is an event in
+nature. But a natural event, in this sense of the term,
+is only an abstraction from a complete actual occasion.
+A complete occasion includes that which in
+cognitive experience takes the form of memory, anticipation,
+imagination, and thought. These elements
+in an experient occasion are also modes of inclusion
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_239'>239</span>of complex eternal objects in the synthetic prehension,
+as elements in the emergent value. They differ from
+the concreteness of full inclusion. In a sense this difference
+is inexplicable; for each mode of inclusion
+is of its own kind, not to be explained in terms of anything
+else. But there is a common difference which
+discriminates these modes of inclusion from the full
+concrete ingression which has been discussed. This
+<span lang="la" xml:lang="la"><i>differentia</i></span> is <em>abruptness</em>. By ‘abruptness’ I mean that
+what is remembered, or anticipated, or imagined, or
+thought, is exhausted by a finite complex concept. In
+each case there is one finite eternal object prehended
+within the occasion as the vertex of a finite hierarchy.
+This breaking off from an actual illimitability is what
+in any occasion marks off that which is termed mental
+from that which belongs to the physical event to which
+the mental functioning is referred.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In general there seems to be some loss of vividness
+in the apprehension of the eternal objects concerned:
+for example, Hume speaks of ‘faint copies.’ But this
+faintness seems to be a very unsafe ground for differentiation.
+Often things realised in thought are more
+vivid than the same things in inattentive physical experience.
+But the things apprehended as mental are
+always subject to the condition that we come to a stop
+when we attempt to explore ever higher grades of
+complexity in their realised relationships. We always
+find that we have thought of just this—whatever it
+may be—and of no more. There is a limitation which
+breaks off the finite concept from the higher grades of
+illimitable complexity.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Thus an actual occasion is a prehension of one infinite
+hierarchy (its associated hierarchy) together
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_240'>240</span>with various finite hierarchies. The synthesis into
+the occasion of the infinite hierarchy is according to
+its specific mode of realisation, and that of the finite
+hierarchies is according to various other specific modes
+of realisation. There is one metaphysical principle
+which is essential for the rational coherence of this
+account of the general character of an experient occasion.
+I call this principle, ‘The Translucency of
+Realisation.’ By this I mean that any eternal object
+is just itself in whatever mode of realisation it is involved.
+There can be no distortion of the individual
+essence without thereby producing a different eternal
+object. In the essence of each eternal object there
+stands an indeterminateness which expresses its indifferent
+patience for any mode of ingression into any actual
+occasion. Thus in cognitive experience, there
+can be the cognition of the same eternal object as in
+the same occasion having ingression with implication
+in more than one grade of realisation. Thus the translucency
+of realisation, and the possible multiplicity of
+modes of ingression into the same occasion, together
+form the foundation for the correspondence theory of
+truth.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In this account of an actual occasion in terms of
+its connection with the realm of eternal objects, we
+have gone back to the train of thought in our second
+chapter, where the nature of mathematics was discussed.
+The idea, ascribed to Pythagoras, has been
+amplified, and put forward as the first chapter in
+metaphysics. The next chapter is concerned with the
+puzzling fact that there is an actual course of events
+which is in itself a limited fact, in that metaphysically
+speaking it might have been otherwise. But other
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_241'>241</span>metaphysical investigations are omitted; for example,
+epistemology, and the classification of some elements
+in the unfathomable wealth of the field of possibility.
+This last topic brings metaphysics in sight of the special
+topics of the various sciences.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_242'>242</span>
+  <h2 class='c006'>CHAPTER XI <br /> <br /> GOD</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'>Aristotle found it necessary to complete his metaphysics
+by the introduction of a Prime Mover—God.
+This, for two reasons, is an important fact in the history
+of metaphysics. In the first place if we are to
+accord to anyone the position of the greatest metaphysician,
+having regard to genius of insight, to general
+equipment in knowledge, and to the stimulus of his
+metaphysical ancestry, we must choose Aristotle. Secondly,
+in his consideration of this metaphysical question
+he was entirely dispassionate; and he is the last
+European metaphysician of first rate importance for
+whom this claim can be made. After Aristotle, ethical
+and religious interests began to influence metaphysical
+conclusions. The Jews dispersed, first willingly
+and then forcibly, and the Judaic-Alexandrian school
+arose. Then Christianity closely followed by Mahometanism,
+intervened. The Greek gods who surrounded
+Aristotle were subordinate metaphysical entities, well
+within nature. Accordingly on the subject of his
+Prime Mover, he would have no motive, except to
+follow his metaphysical train of thought whithersoever
+it led him. It did not lead him very far towards
+the production of a God available for religious purposes.
+It may be doubted whether any properly general
+metaphysics can ever, without the illicit introduction
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_243'>243</span>of other considerations, get much further than
+Aristotle. But his conclusion does represent a first
+step without which no evidence on a narrower experiential
+basis can be of much avail in shaping the
+conception. For nothing, within any limited type of
+experience, can give intelligence to shape our ideas
+of any entity at the base of all actual things, unless
+the general character of things requires that there be
+such an entity.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The phrase, Prime Mover, warns us that Aristotle’s
+thought was enmeshed in the details of an erroneous
+physics and an erroneous cosmology. In Aristotle’s
+physics special causes were required to sustain the motions
+of material things. These could easily be fitted
+into his system, provided that the general cosmic motions
+could be sustained. For then in relation to the
+general working system, each thing could be provided
+with its true end. Hence the necessity for a Prime
+Mover who sustains the motions of the spheres on
+which depend the adjustment of things. To-day we
+repudiate the Aristotelian physics and the Aristotelian
+cosmology, so that the exact form of the above argument
+manifestly fails. But if our general metaphysics
+is in any way similar to that outlined in the previous
+chapter, an analogous metaphysical problem arises
+which can be solved only in an analogous fashion. In
+the place of Aristotle’s God as Prime Mover, we require
+God as the Principle of Concretion. This position
+can be substantiated only by the discussion
+of the general implication of the course of actual
+occasions,—that is to say, of the process of realisation.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>We conceive actuality as in essential relation to an
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_244'>244</span>unfathomable possibility. Eternal objects inform actual
+occasions with hierarchic patterns, included and
+excluded in every variety of discrimination. 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. It is my task in this chapter
+to describe the unity of actual occasions. The
+previous chapter centered its interest in the abstract:
+the present chapter deals with the concrete, <i>i.e.</i>, that
+which has grown together.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Consider an occasion α:—we have to enumerate
+how other actual occasions are in α, in the sense that
+their relationships with α are constitutive of the essence
+of α. What α is in itself, is that it is a unit
+of realised experience; accordingly we ask how other
+occasions are in the experience which is α. Also for
+the present I am excluding cognitive experience. The
+complete answer to this question is, that the relationships
+among actual occasions are as unfathomable in
+their variety of type as are those among eternal objects
+in the realm of abstraction. But there are fundamental
+types of such relationships in terms of which the
+whole complex variety can find its description.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>A preliminary for the understanding of these types
+of entry (of one occasion into the essence of another)
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_245'>245</span>is to note that they are involved in the modes of realisation
+of abstractive hierarchies, discussed in the
+previous chapter. The spatio-temporal relationships,
+involved in those hierarchies as realised in α, have
+all a definition in terms of α and of the occasions entrant
+in α. Thus the entrant occasions lend their
+aspects to the hierarchies, and thereby convert spatio-temporal
+modalities into categorical determinations;
+and the hierarchies lend their forms to the occasions
+and thereby limit the entrant occasions to being entrant
+only under those forms. Thus in the same way (as
+seen in the previous chapter) that every occasion is a
+synthesis of all eternal objects under the limitation of
+gradations of actuality, so every occasion is a synthesis
+of all occasions under the limitation of gradations of
+types of entry. Each occasion synthesises the totality
+of content under its own limitations of mode.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In respect to these types of internal relationship between
+α and other occasions, these other occasions (as
+constitutive of α) can be classified in many alternative
+ways. These are all concerned with different
+definitions of past, present, and future. It has been
+usual in philosophy to assume that these various definitions
+must necessarily be equivalent. The present
+state of opinion in physical science conclusively shows
+that this assumption is without metaphysical justification,
+even <a id='corr245.27'></a><span class='htmlonly'><ins class='correction' title='although'>though</ins></span><span class='epubonly'><a href='#c_245.27'><ins class='correction' title='although'>though</ins></a></span> any such discrimination may be
+found to be unnecessary for physical science. This
+question has already been dealt with in the chapter on
+Relativity. But the physical theory of relativity
+touches only the fringe of the various theories which
+are metaphysically tenable. It is important for my
+argument to insist upon the unbounded freedom
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_246'>246</span>within which the actual is a unique categorical determination.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Every actual occasion exhibits itself as a process:
+it is a becomingness. In so disclosing itself, it places
+itself as one among a multiplicity of other occasions,
+without which it could not be itself. It also defines
+itself as a particular individual achievement, focussing
+in its limited way an unbounded realm of eternal
+objects.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Any one occasion α issues from other occasions
+which collectively form its <em>past</em>. It displays for itself
+other occasions which collectively form its <em>present</em>.
+It is in respect to its associated hierarchy, as displayed
+in this immediate present, that an occasion finds its
+own originality. It is that display which is its own
+contribution to the output of actuality. It may be
+conditioned, and even completely determined by the
+past from which it issues. But its display in the present
+under those conditions is what directly emerges
+from its prehensive activity. The occasion α also
+holds within itself an indetermination in the form of
+a future, which has partial determination by reason of
+its inclusion in α and also has determinate spatio-temporal
+relatedness to α and to actual occasions of the
+past from α and of the present for α.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>This future is a synthesis in α of eternal objects as
+not-being and as requiring the passage from α to
+other individualisations (with determinate spatio-temporal
+relations to α) in which not-being becomes
+being.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>There is also in α what, in the previous chapter, I
+have termed the ‘abrupt’ realisation of finite eternal
+objects. This abrupt realisation requires <em>either</em> a reference
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_247'>247</span>of the basic objects of the finite hierarchy to
+determinate occasions other than α (as their situations),
+in past, present, future; <em>or</em> requires a realisation
+of these eternal objects in determinate relationships,
+but under the aspect of exemption from inclusion in
+the spatio-temporal scheme of relatedness between actual
+occasions. This abrupt synthesis of eternal objects
+in each occasion is the inclusion in actuality of
+the analytical character of the realm of eternality.
+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 prehends into each occasion
+the full sweep of eternal relatedness. I term this
+abrupt realisation the ‘graded envisagement’ which
+each occasion prehends 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. It is the source of error, of truth, of
+art, of ethics, and of religion. By it, fact is confronted
+with alternatives.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>This general concept, of an event as a process whose
+outcome is a unit of experience, points to the analysis
+of an event into (i) substantial activity, (ii) conditioned
+potentialities which are there for synthesis, and
+(iii) the achieved outcome of the synthesis. The unity
+of all actual occasions forbids the analysis of substantial
+activities into independent entities. Each individual
+activity is nothing but the mode in which the
+general activity is individualised by the imposed conditions.
+The envisagement which enters into the synthesis
+is also a character which conditions the synthesising
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_248'>248</span>activity. The general activity is not an entity
+in the sense in which occasions or eternal objects are
+entities. It is a general metaphysical character which
+underlies all occasions, in a particular mode for each
+occasion. There is nothing with which to compare it:
+it is Spinoza’s one infinite substance. Its attributes
+are its character of individualisation into a multiplicity
+of modes, and the realm of eternal objects which
+are variously synthesised in these modes. Thus eternal
+possibility and modal differentiation into individual
+multiplicity are the attributes of the one substance. In
+fact each general element of the metaphysical situation
+is an attribute of the substantial activity.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Yet another element in the metaphysical situation
+is disclosed by the consideration that the general attribute
+of modality is limited. This element must
+rank as an attribute of the substantial activity. In its
+nature each mode is limited, so as not to be other
+modes. But, beyond these limitations of particulars,
+the general modal individualisation is limited in two
+ways: In the first place it is an actual course of
+events, which might be otherwise so far as concerns
+eternal possibility, but <em>is</em> that course. This limitation
+takes three forms, (i) the special logical relations
+which all events must conform to, (ii) the selection of
+relationships to which the events do conform, and (iii)
+the particularity which infects the course even within
+those general relationships of logic and causation.
+Thus this first limitation is a limitation of antecedent
+selection. So far as the general metaphysical situation
+is concerned, there might have been an indiscriminate
+modal pluralism apart from logical or other
+limitation. But there could not then have been these
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_249'>249</span>modes, for each mode represents a synthesis of actualities
+which are limited to conform to a standard.
+We here come to the second way of limitation. Restriction
+is the price of value. There cannot be value
+without antecedent standards of value, to discriminate
+the acceptance or rejection of what is before the envisaging
+mode of activity. Thus there is an antecedent
+limitation among values, introducing contraries,
+grades, and oppositions.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>According to this argument the fact that there is a
+process of actual occasions, and the fact that the occasions
+are the emergence of values which require such
+limitation, both require that the course of events should
+have developed amid an antecedent limitation composed
+of conditions, particularisation, and standards
+of value.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Thus as a further element in the metaphysical situation,
+there is required a principle of limitation. Some
+particular <em>how</em> is necessary, and some particularisation
+in the <em>what</em> of matter of fact is necessary. The
+only alternative to this admission, is to deny the reality
+of actual occasions. Their apparent irrational limitation
+must be taken as a proof of illusion and we must
+look for reality behind the scene. If we reject this
+alternative behind the scene, we must provide a
+ground for limitation which stands among the attributes
+of the substantial activity. This attribute
+provides the limitation for which no reason can be
+given: for all reason flows from it. God is the ultimate
+limitation, and His existence is the ultimate
+irrationality. For no reason can be given for just
+that limitation which it stands in His nature to impose.
+God is not concrete, but He is the ground for
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_250'>250</span>concrete actuality. No reason can be given for the
+nature of God, because that nature is the ground of
+rationality.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In this argument the point to notice is, that what
+is metaphysically indeterminate has nevertheless to
+be categorically determinate. We have come to the
+limit of rationality. For there is a categorical limitation
+which does not spring from any metaphysical
+reason. There is a metaphysical need for a principle
+of determination, but there can be no metaphysical
+reason for what is determined. If there were such a
+reason, there would be no need for any further principle:
+for metaphysics would already have provided
+the determination. The general principle of empiricism
+depends upon the doctrine that there is a principle
+of concretion which is not discoverable by abstract
+reason. What further can be known about
+God must be sought in the region of particular experiences,
+and therefore rests on an empirical basis.
+In respect to the interpretation of these experiences,
+mankind have differed profoundly. He has been
+named respectively, Jehovah, Allah, Brahma, Father
+in Heaven, Order of Heaven, First Cause, Supreme
+Being, Chance. Each name corresponds to a system
+of thought derived from the experiences of those who
+have used it.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Among medieval and modern philosophers, anxious
+to establish the religious significance of God, an unfortunate
+habit has prevailed of paying to Him metaphysical
+compliments. He has been conceived as the
+foundation of the metaphysical situation with its ultimate
+activity. If this conception be adhered to, there
+can be no alternative except to discern in Him the
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_251'>251</span>origin of all evil as well as of all good. He is then
+the supreme author of the play, and to Him must
+therefore be ascribed its shortcomings as well as its
+success. If He be conceived as the supreme ground
+for limitation, it stands in His very nature to divide
+the Good from the Evil, and to establish Reason
+‘within her dominions supreme.’</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_252'>252</span>
+  <h2 class='c006'>CHAPTER XII <br /> <br /> RELIGION AND SCIENCE</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'>The difficulty in approaching the question of the relations
+between Religion and Science is, that its elucidation
+requires that we have in our minds some clear
+idea of what we mean by either of the terms, ‘religion’
+and ‘science.’ Also I wish to speak in the most general
+way possible, and to keep in the background any comparison
+of particular creeds, scientific or religious.
+We have got to understand the type of connection
+which exists between the two spheres, and then to
+draw some definite conclusions respecting the existing
+situation which at present confronts the world.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The <em>conflict</em> between religion and science is what
+naturally occurs to our minds when we think of this
+subject. It seems as though, during the last half-century,
+the results of science and the beliefs of religion
+had come into a position of frank disagreement,
+from which there can be no escape, except by abandoning
+either the clear teaching of science, or the
+clear teaching of religion. This conclusion has been
+urged by controversialists on either side. Not by all
+controversialists, of course, but by those trenchant
+intellects which every controversy calls out into the
+open.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The distress of sensitive minds, and the zeal for
+truth, and the sense of the importance of the issues,
+must command our sincerest sympathy. When we
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_253'>253</span>consider what religion is for mankind, and what science
+is, it is no exaggeration to say that the future
+course of history depends upon the decision of this
+generation as to the relations between them. We
+have here the two strongest general forces (apart from
+the mere impulse of the various senses) which influence
+men, and they seem to be set one against the
+other—the force of our religious intuitions, and the
+force of our impulse to accurate observation and
+logical deduction.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>A great English statesman once advised his countrymen
+to use large-scale maps, as a preservative against
+alarms, panics, and general misunderstanding of the
+true relations between nations. In the same way in
+dealing with the clash between permanent elements
+of human nature, it is well to map our history on a
+large scale, and to disengage ourselves from our immediate
+absorption in the present conflicts. When
+we do this, we immediately discover two great facts.
+In the first place, there has always been a conflict between
+religion and science; and in the second place,
+both religion and science have always been in a state
+of continual development. In the early days of
+Christianity, there was a general belief among Christians
+that the world was coming to an end in the lifetime
+of people then living. We can make only indirect
+inferences as to how far this belief was authoritatively
+proclaimed; but it is certain that it was widely
+held, and that it formed an impressive part of the
+popular religious doctrine. The belief proved itself
+to be mistaken, and Christian doctrine adjusted itself
+to the change. Again in the early Church individual
+theologians very confidently deduced from the Bible
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_254'>254</span>opinions concerning the nature of the physical universe.
+In the year A. D. 535, a monk named Cosmas<a id='r17' /><a href='#f17' class='c013'><sup>[17]</sup></a>
+wrote a book which he entitled, <cite>Christian Topography</cite>.
+He was a travelled man who had visited India
+and Ethiopia; and finally he lived in a monastery at
+Alexandria, which was then a great centre of culture.
+In this book, basing himself upon the direct meaning
+of Biblical texts as construed by him in a literal fashion,
+he denied the existence of the antipodes, and
+asserted that the world is a flat parallelogram whose
+length is double its breadth.</p>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f17'>
+<p class='c001'><a href='#r17'>17</a>. <i>Cf.</i> Lecky’s <cite>The Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe</cite>,
+Ch. III.</p>
+</div>
+<p class='c001'>In the seventeenth century the doctrine of the motion
+of the earth was condemned by a Catholic tribunal.
+A hundred years ago the extension of time
+demanded by geological science distressed religious
+people, Protestant and Catholic. And to-day the doctrine
+of evolution is an equal stumbling-block. These
+are only a few instances illustrating a general fact.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>But all our ideas will be in a wrong perspective if
+we think that this recurring perplexity was confined
+to contradictions between religion and science; and
+that in these controversies religion was always
+wrong, and that science was always right. The true
+facts of the case are very much more complex, and
+refuse to be summarised in these simple terms.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Theology itself exhibits exactly the same character
+of gradual development, arising from an aspect of
+conflict between its own proper ideas. This fact is
+a commonplace to theologians, but is often obscured
+in the stress of controversy. I do not wish to overstate
+my case; so I will confine myself to Roman
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_255'>255</span>Catholic writers. In the seventeenth century a learned
+Jesuit, Father Petavius, showed that the theologians
+of the first three centuries of Christianity made use
+of phrases and statements which since the fifth century
+would be condemned as heretical. Also Cardinal
+Newman devoted a treatise to the discussion of the
+development of doctrine. He wrote it before he became
+a great Roman Catholic ecclesiastic; but
+throughout his life, it was never retracted and continually
+reissued.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Science is even more changeable than theology.
+No man of science could subscribe without qualification
+to Galileo’s beliefs, or to Newton’s beliefs, or to
+all his own scientific beliefs of ten years ago.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In both regions of thought, additions, distinctions,
+and modifications have been introduced. So that
+now, even when the same assertion is made to-day as
+was made a thousand, or fifteen hundred years ago,
+it is made subject to limitations or expansions of
+meaning, which were not contemplated at the earlier
+epoch. We are told by logicians that a proposition
+must be either true or false, and that there is no
+middle term. But in practice, we may know that a
+proposition expresses an important truth, but that
+it is subject to limitations and qualifications which at
+present remain undiscovered. It is a general feature
+of our knowledge, that we are insistently aware of
+important truths; and yet that the only formulations
+of these truths which we are able to make presuppose
+a general standpoint of conceptions which may have
+to be modified. I will give you two illustrations,
+both from science: Galileo said that the earth moves
+and that the sun is fixed; the Inquisition said that the
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_256'>256</span>earth is fixed and the sun moves; and Newtonian astronomers,
+adopting an absolute theory of space, said
+that both the sun and the earth move. But now we
+say that any one of these three statements is equally
+true, provided that you have fixed your sense of ‘rest’
+and ‘motion’ in the way required by the statement
+adopted. At the date of Galileo’s controversy with
+the Inquisition, Galileo’s way of stating the facts was,
+beyond question, the fruitful procedure for the sake
+of scientific research. But in itself it was not more
+true than the formulation of the Inquisition. But
+at that time the modern concepts of relative motion
+were in nobody’s mind; so that the statements were
+made in ignorance of the qualifications required for
+their more perfect truth. Yet this question of the
+motions of the earth and the sun expresses a real fact
+in the universe; and all sides had got hold of important
+truths concerning it. But with the knowledge
+of those times, the truths appeared to be inconsistent.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Again I will give you another example taken from
+the state of modern physical science. Since the time
+of Newton and Huyghens in the seventeenth century
+there have been two theories as to the physical nature
+of light. Newton’s theory was that a beam of light
+consists of a stream of very minute particles, or
+corpuscles, and that we have the sensation of light
+when these corpuscles strike the retinas of our eyes.
+Huyghens’ theory was that light consists of very
+minute waves of trembling in an all-pervading ether,
+and that these waves are travelling along a beam of
+light. The two theories are contradictory. In the
+eighteenth century Newton’s theory was believed, in
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_257'>257</span>the nineteenth century Huyghens’ theory was believed.
+To-day there is one large group of phenomena which
+can be explained only on the wave theory, and another
+large group which can be explained only on the corpuscular
+theory. Scientists have to leave it at that,
+and wait for the future, in the hope of attaining some
+wider vision which reconciles both.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>We should apply these same principles to the questions
+in which there is a variance between science
+and religion. We would believe nothing in either
+sphere of thought which does not appear to us to
+be certified by solid reasons based upon the critical
+research either of ourselves or of competent authorities.
+But granting that we have honestly taken this
+precaution, a clash between the two on points of detail
+where they overlap should not lead us hastily
+to abandon doctrines for which we have solid evidence.
+It may be that we are more interested in
+one set of doctrines than in the other. But, if we
+have any sense of perspective and of the history
+of thought, we shall wait and refrain from mutual
+anathemas.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>We should wait: but we should not wait passively,
+or in despair. The clash is a sign that there are
+wider truths and finer perspectives within which a
+reconciliation of a deeper religion and a more subtle
+science will be found.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In one sense, therefore, the conflict between science
+and religion is a slight matter which has been
+unduly emphasised. A mere logical contradiction
+cannot in itself point to more than the necessity of
+some readjustments, possibly of a very minor character
+on both sides. Remember the widely different
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_258'>258</span>aspects of events which are dealt with in science
+and in religion respectively. Science is concerned
+with the general conditions which are observed to
+regulate physical phenomena; whereas religion is
+wholly wrapped up in the contemplation of moral
+and aesthetic values. On the one side there is the
+law of gravitation, and on the other the contemplation
+of the beauty of holiness. What one side sees,
+the other misses; and vice versa.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Consider, for example, the lives of John Wesley
+and of Saint Francis of Assisi. For physical science
+you have in these lives merely ordinary examples of
+the operation of the principles of physiological chemistry,
+and of the dynamics of nervous reactions: for
+religion you have lives of the most profound significance
+in the history of the world. Can you be
+surprised that, in the absence of a perfect and complete
+phrasing of the principles of science and of
+the principles of religion which apply to these specific
+cases, the accounts of these lives from these divergent
+standpoints should involve discrepancies? It would
+be a miracle if it were not so.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>It would, however, be missing the point to think
+that we need not trouble ourselves about the conflict
+between science and religion. In an intellectual age
+there can be no active interest which puts aside all
+hope of a vision of the harmony of truth. To acquiesce
+in discrepancy is destructive of candour, and of
+moral cleanliness. It belongs to the self-respect of
+intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final
+unravelment. If you check that impulse, you will
+get no religion and no science from an awakened
+thoughtfulness. The important question is, In what
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_259'>259</span>spirit are we going to face the issue? There we come
+to something absolutely vital.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>A clash of doctrines is not a disaster—it is an opportunity.
+I will explain my meaning by some illustrations
+from science. The weight of an atom of
+nitrogen was well known. Also it was an established
+scientific doctrine that the average weight of such
+atoms in any considerable mass will be always the
+same. Two experimenters, the late Lord Rayleigh and
+the late Sir William Ramsay, found that if they obtained
+nitrogen by two different methods, each equally
+effective for that purpose, they always observed a persistent
+slight difference between the average weights
+of the atoms in the two cases. Now I ask you,
+would it have been rational of these men to have
+despaired because of this conflict between chemical
+theory and scientific observation? Suppose that for
+some reason the chemical doctrine had been highly
+prized throughout some district as the foundation of
+its social order:—would it have been wise, would it
+have been candid, would it have been moral, to forbid
+the disclosure of the fact that the experiments produced
+discordant results? Or, on the other hand,
+should Sir William Ramsay and Lord Rayleigh have
+proclaimed that chemical theory was now a detected
+delusion? We see at once that either of these ways
+would have been a method of facing the issue in an
+entirely wrong spirit. What Rayleigh and Ramsay
+did do was this: They at once perceived that they
+had hit upon a line of investigation which would disclose
+some subtlety of chemical theory that had
+hitherto eluded observation. The discrepancy was
+not a disaster: it was an opportunity to increase the
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_260'>260</span>sweep of chemical knowledge. You all know the end
+of the story: finally argon was discovered, a new
+chemical element which had lurked undetected, mixed
+with the nitrogen. But the story has a sequel which
+forms my second illustration. This discovery drew
+attention to the importance of observing accurately
+minute differences in chemical substances as obtained
+by different methods. Further researches of the most
+careful accuracy were undertaken. Finally another
+physicist, F. W. Aston, working in the Cavendish
+Laboratory at Cambridge in England, discovered that
+even the same element might assume two or more distinct
+forms, termed <em>isotopes</em>, and that the law of the
+constancy of average atomic weight holds for each of
+these forms, but as between the different isotopes differs
+slightly. The research has effected a great stride
+in the power of chemical theory, far transcending in
+importance the discovery of argon from which it
+originated. The moral of these stories lies on the surface,
+and I will leave to you their application to the
+case of religion and science.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of a
+defeat: but in the evolution of real knowledge it
+marks the first step in progress towards a victory.
+This is one great reason for the utmost toleration of
+variety of opinion. Once and forever, this duty of
+toleration has been summed up in the words, ‘Let both
+grow together until the harvest.’ The failure of
+Christians to act up to this precept, of the highest
+authority, is one of the curiosities of religious history.
+But we have not yet exhausted the discussion of the
+moral temper required for the pursuit of truth. There
+are short cuts leading merely to an illusory success.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_261'>261</span>It is easy enough to find a theory, logically harmonious
+and with important applications in the region of
+fact, provided that you are content to disregard half
+your evidence. Every age produces people with clear
+logical intellects, and with the most praiseworthy
+grasp of the importance of some sphere of human experience,
+who have elaborated, or inherited, a scheme
+of thought which exactly fits those experiences which
+claim their interest. Such people are apt resolutely
+to ignore, or to explain away, all evidence which
+confuses their scheme with contradictory instances.
+What they cannot fit in is for them nonsense. An
+unflinching determination to take the whole evidence
+into account is the only method of preservation against
+the fluctuating extremes of fashionable opinion. This
+advice seems so easy, and is in fact so difficult to
+follow.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>One reason for this difficulty is that we cannot think
+first and act afterwards. From the moment of birth
+we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide
+it by taking thought. We have, therefore, in various
+spheres of experience to adopt those ideas which seem
+to work within those spheres. It is absolutely necessary
+to trust to ideas which are generally adequate,
+even though we know that there are subtleties and distinctions
+beyond our ken. Also apart from the necessities
+of action, we cannot even keep before our minds
+the whole evidence except under the guise of doctrines
+which are incompletely harmonised. 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_262'>262</span>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. They are
+transformed by the urge of critical reason, by the
+vivid evidence of emotional experience, and by the
+cold certainties of scientific perception. One fact is
+certain, you cannot keep them still. No generation
+can merely reproduce its ancestors. You may preserve
+the life in a flux of form, or preserve the form
+amid an ebb of life. But you cannot permanently
+enclose the same life in the same mould.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The present state of religion among the European
+races illustrates the statements which I have been
+making. The phenomena are mixed. There have
+been reactions and revivals. But on the whole, during
+many generations, there has been a gradual decay
+of religious influence in European civilisation. Each
+revival touches a lower peak than its predecessor, and
+each period of slackness a lower depth. The average
+curve marks a steady fall in religious tone. In some
+countries the interest in religion is higher than in
+others. But in those countries where the interest is
+relatively high, it still falls as the generations pass.
+Religion is tending to degenerate into a decent formula
+wherewith to embellish a comfortable life. A great
+historical movement on this scale results from the
+convergence of many causes. I wish to suggest two
+of them which lie within the scope of this chapter
+for consideration.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In the first place for over two centuries religion
+has been on the defensive, and on a weak defensive.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_263'>263</span>The period has been one of unprecedented intellectual
+progress. In this way a series of novel situations have
+been produced for thought. Each such occasion has
+found the religious thinkers unprepared. Something,
+which has been proclaimed to be vital, has finally,
+after struggle, distress, and anathema, been modified
+and otherwise interpreted. The next generation of
+religious apologists then congratulates the religious
+world on the deeper insight which has been gained.
+The result of the continued repetition of this undignified
+retreat, during many generations, has at last
+almost entirely destroyed the intellectual authority
+of religious thinkers. Consider this contrast: when
+Darwin or Einstein proclaim theories which modify
+our ideas, it is a triumph for science. We do not go
+about saying that there is another defeat for science,
+because its old ideas have been abandoned. We know
+that another step of scientific insight has been gained.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Religion will not regain its old power until it can
+face change in the same spirit as does science. Its
+principles may be eternal, but the expression of those
+principles requires continual development. This evolution
+of religion is in the main a disengagement of
+its own proper ideas from the adventitious notions
+which have crept into it by reason of the expression of
+its own ideas in terms of the imaginative picture of the
+world entertained in previous ages. Such a release
+of religion from the bonds of imperfect science is
+all to the good. It stresses its own genuine message.
+The great point to be kept in mind is that normally
+an advance in science will show that statements of
+various religious beliefs require some sort of modification.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_264'>264</span>It may be that they have to be expanded or
+explained, or indeed entirely restated. If the religion
+is a sound expression of truth, this modification will
+only exhibit more adequately the exact point which is
+of importance. This process is a gain. In so far,
+therefore, as any religion has any contact with physical
+facts, it is to be expected that the point of view of
+those facts must be continually modified as scientific
+knowledge advances. In this way, the exact relevance
+of these facts for religious thought will grow more
+and more clear. The progress of science must result
+in the unceasing modification of religious thought, to
+the great advantage of religion.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The religious controversies of the sixteenth and
+seventeenth centuries put theologians into a most unfortunate
+state of mind. They were always attacking
+and defending. They pictured themselves as the
+garrison of a fort surrounded by hostile forces. All
+such pictures express half-truths. That is why they
+are so popular. But they are dangerous. This particular
+picture fostered a pugnacious party spirit
+which really expresses an ultimate lack of faith. They
+dared not modify, because they shirked the task of
+disengaging their spiritual message from the associations
+of a particular imagery.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Let me explain myself by an example. In the early
+medieval times, Heaven was in the sky, and Hell was
+underground; volcanoes were the jaws of Hell. I do
+not assert that these beliefs entered into the official
+formulations: but they did enter into the popular
+understanding of the general doctrines of Heaven
+and Hell. These notions were what everyone thought
+to be implied by the doctrine of the future state. They
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_265'>265</span>entered into the explanations of the most influential
+exponents of Christian belief. For example, they
+occur in the <cite>Dialogues</cite> of Pope Gregory,<a id='r18' /><a href='#f18' class='c013'><sup>[18]</sup></a> the Great,
+a man whose high official position is surpassed only
+by the magnitude of his services to humanity. I am
+not saying what we ought to believe about the future
+state. But whatever be the right doctrine, in this
+instance the clash between religion and science,
+which has relegated the earth to the position of a
+second-rate planet attached to a second-rate sun, has
+been greatly to the benefit of the spirituality of religion
+by dispersing these medieval fancies.</p>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f18'>
+<p class='c001'><a href='#r18'>18</a>. <i>Cf.</i> Gregorovius’ <cite>History of Rome in the Middle Ages</cite>, Book
+III, Ch. III, Vol. II, English Trans.</p>
+</div>
+<p class='c001'>Another way of looking at this question of the
+evolution of religious thought is to note that any
+verbal form of statement which has been before the
+world for some time discloses ambiguities; and that
+often such ambiguities strike at the very heart of the
+meaning. The effective sense in which a doctrine has
+been held in the past cannot be determined by the
+mere logical analysis of verbal statements, made in
+ignorance of the logical trap. You have to take into
+account the whole reaction of human nature to the
+scheme of thought. This reaction is of a mixed character,
+including elements of emotion derived from
+our lower natures. It is here that the impersonal
+criticism of science and of philosophy comes to the
+aid of religious evolution. Example after example
+can be given of this motive force in development.
+For example, the logical difficulties inherent in the
+doctrine of the moral cleansing of human nature by
+the power of religion rent Christianity in the days
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_266'>266</span>of Pelagius and Augustine—that is to say, at the beginning
+of the fifth century. Echoes of that controversy
+still linger in theology.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>So far, my point has been this: that religion is the
+expression of one type of fundamental experiences of
+mankind: that religious thought develops into an increasing
+accuracy of expression, disengaged from adventitious
+imagery: that the interaction between religion
+and science is one great factor in promoting
+this development.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>I now come to my second reason for the modern
+fading of interest in religion. This involves the ultimate
+question which I stated in my opening sentences.
+We have to know what we mean by religion.
+The churches, in their presentation of their answers
+to this query, have put forward aspects of religion
+which are expressed in terms either suited to the emotional
+reactions of bygone times or directed to excite
+modern emotional interests of a nonreligious character.
+What I mean under the first heading is that
+religious appeal is directed partly to excite that instinctive
+fear of the wrath of a tyrant which was
+inbred in the unhappy populations of the arbitrary
+empires of the ancient world, and in particular to
+excite that fear of an all-powerful arbitrary tyrant
+behind the unknown forces of nature. This appeal to
+the ready instinct of brute fear is losing its force.
+It lacks any directness of response, because modern
+science and modern conditions of life have taught us
+to meet occasions of apprehension by a critical analysis
+of their causes and conditions. Religion is the reaction
+of human nature to its search for God. The presentation
+of God under the aspect of power awakens
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_267'>267</span>every modern instinct of critical reaction. This is
+fatal; for religion collapses unless its main positions
+command immediacy of assent. In this respect the
+old phraseology is at variance with the psychology of
+modern civilisations. This change in psychology is
+largely due to science, and is one of the chief ways in
+which the advance of science has weakened the hold
+of the old religious forms of expression. The nonreligious
+motive which has entered into modern religious
+thought is the desire for a comfortable organisation
+of modern society. Religion has been presented
+as valuable for the ordering of life. Its claims have
+been rested upon its function as a sanction to right
+conduct. Also the purpose of right conduct quickly
+degenerates into the formation of pleasing social relations.
+We have here a subtle degradation of religious
+ideas, following upon their gradual purification under
+the influence of keener ethical intuitions. Conduct is
+a by-product of religion—an inevitable by-product,
+but not the main point. Every great religious teacher
+has revolted against the presentation of religion as a
+mere sanction of rules of conduct. Saint Paul denounced
+the Law, and Puritan divines spoke of the
+filthy rags of righteousness. The insistence upon
+rules of conduct marks the ebb of religious fervour.
+Above and beyond all things, the religious life is not
+a research after comfort. I must now state, in all
+diffidence, what I conceive to be the essential character
+of the religious spirit.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Religion is the vision of something which stands
+beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate
+things; something which is real, and yet waiting
+to be realised; something which is a remote possibility,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_268'>268</span>and yet the greatest of present facts; something
+that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet
+eludes apprehension; something whose possession is
+the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something
+which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The immediate reaction of human nature to the
+religious vision is worship. Religion has emerged
+into human experience mixed with the crudest fancies
+of barbaric imagination. Gradually, slowly, steadily
+the vision recurs in history under nobler form and
+with clearer expression. It is the one element in
+human experience which persistently shows an upward
+trend. It fades and then recurs. But when it
+renews its force, it recurs with an added richness and
+purity of content. 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The vision claims nothing but worship; and worship
+is a surrender to the claim for assimilation, urged
+with the motive force of mutual love. The vision
+never overrules. It is always there, and it has the
+power of love presenting the one purpose whose fulfilment
+is eternal harmony. Such order as we find in
+nature is never force—it presents itself as the one
+harmonious adjustment of complex detail. Evil is
+the brute motive force of fragmentary purpose, disregarding
+the eternal vision. Evil is overruling, retarding,
+hurting. The power of God is the worship
+He inspires. That religion is strong which in its
+ritual and its modes of thought evokes an apprehension
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_269'>269</span>of the commanding vision. The worship of God
+is not a rule of safety—it is an adventure of the spirit,
+a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion
+comes with the repression of the high hope of
+adventure.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_270'>270</span>
+  <h2 class='c006'>CHAPTER XIII <br /> <br /> REQUISITES FOR SOCIAL PROGRESS</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'>It has been the purpose of these lectures to analyse
+the reactions of science in forming that background
+of instinctive ideas which control the activities of
+successive generations. Such a background takes the
+form of a certain vague philosophy as to the last word
+about things, when all is said. The three centuries,
+which form the epoch of modern science, have revolved
+round the ideas of <em>God</em>, <em>mind</em>, <em>matter</em>, and
+also of <em>space</em> and <em>time</em> in their characters of expressing
+<em>simple location</em> for matter. Philosophy has on
+the whole emphasised <em>mind</em>, and has thus been out of
+touch with science during the two latter centuries.
+But it is creeping back into its old importance owing
+to the rise of psychology and its alliance with physiology.
+Also, this rehabilitation of philosophy has been
+facilitated by the recent breakdown of the seventeenth
+century settlement of the principles of physical science.
+But, until that collapse, science seated itself
+securely upon the concepts of matter, space, time, and
+latterly, of energy. Also there were arbitrary laws
+of nature determining locomotion. They were empirically
+observed, but for some obscure reason were
+known to be universal. Anyone who in practice or
+theory disregarded them was denounced with unsparing
+vigour. This position on the part of scientists
+was pure bluff, if one may credit them with believing
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_271'>271</span>their own statements. For their current philosophy
+completely failed to justify the assumption that the
+immediate knowledge inherent in any present occasion
+throws any light either on its past, or its future.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>I have also sketched an alternative philosophy of
+science in which <em>organism</em> takes the place of <em>matter</em>.
+For this purpose, the mind involved in the materialist
+theory dissolves into a function of organism. The
+psychological field then exhibits what an event is in
+itself. Our bodily event is an unusually complex
+type of organism and consequently includes cognition.
+Further, space and time, in their most concrete signification,
+become the locus of events. An organism
+is the realisation of a definite shape of value. The
+emergence of some actual value depends on limitation
+which excludes neutralising cross-lights. Thus
+an event is a matter of fact which by reason of its
+limitation is a value for itself; but by reason of its
+very nature it also requires the whole universe in order
+to be itself.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Importance depends on endurance. Endurance is
+the retention through time of an achievement of
+value. What endures is identity of pattern, self-inherited.
+Endurance requires the favourable
+environment. The whole of science revolves round
+this question of enduring organisms.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The general influence of science at the present
+moment can be analysed under the headings: General
+Conceptions Respecting the Universe, Technological
+Applications, Professionalism in Knowledge, Influence
+of Biological Doctrines on the Motives of Conduct.
+I have endeavoured in the preceding lectures
+to give a glimpse of these points. It lies within the
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_272'>272</span>scope of this concluding lecture to consider the reaction
+of science upon some problems confronting
+civilised societies.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The general conceptions introduced by science into
+modern thought cannot be separated from the philosophical
+situation as expressed by Descartes. I mean
+the assumption of bodies and minds as independent
+individual substances, each existing in its own right
+apart from any necessary reference to each other.
+Such a conception was very concordant with the individualism
+which had issued from the moral discipline
+of the Middle Ages. But, though the easy reception
+of the idea is thus explained, the derivation in itself
+rests upon a confusion, very natural but none the less
+unfortunate. The moral discipline had emphasized
+the intrinsic value of the individual entity. This emphasis
+had put the notions of the individual and of its
+experiences into the foreground of thought. At this
+point the confusion commences. The emergent individual
+value of each entity is transformed into the independent
+substantial existence of each entity, which
+is a very different notion.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>I do not mean to say that Descartes made this logical,
+or rather illogical, transition, in the form of explicit
+reasoning. Far from it. What he did, was
+first to concentrate upon his own conscious experiences,
+as being facts within the independent world of
+his own mentality. He was led to speculate in this
+way by the current emphasis upon the individual value
+of his total self. He implicitly transformed this
+emergent individual value, inherent in the very fact of
+his own reality, into a private world of passions, or
+modes, of independent substance.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'><span class='pageno' id='Page_273'>273</span>Also the independence ascribed to bodily substances
+carried them away from the realm of values altogether.
+They degenerated into a mechanism entirely
+valueless, except as suggestive of an external ingenuity.
+The heavens had lost the glory of God. This state
+of mind is illustrated in the recoil of Protestantism
+from aesthetic effects dependent upon a material
+medium. It was taken to lead to an ascription of value
+to what is in itself valueless. This recoil was already
+in full strength antecedently to Descartes. Accordingly,
+the Cartesian scientific doctrine of bits of matter,
+bare of intrinsic value, was merely a formulation,
+in explicit terms, of a doctrine which was current before
+its entrance into scientific thought or Cartesian
+philosophy. Probably this doctrine was latent in the
+scholastic philosophy, but it did not lead to its consequences
+till it met with the mentality of northern
+Europe in the sixteenth century. But science, as
+equipped by Descartes, gave stability and intellectual
+status to a point of view which has had very mixed
+effects upon the moral presuppositions of modern communities.
+Its good effects arose from its efficiency as a
+method for scientific researches within those limited
+regions which were then best suited for exploration.
+The result was a general clearing of the European
+mind away from the stains left upon it by the hysteria
+of remote barbaric ages. This was all to the good, and
+was most completely exemplified in the eighteenth
+century.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>But in the nineteenth century, when society was
+undergoing transformation into the manufacturing
+system, the bad effects of these doctrines have been
+very fatal. The doctrine of minds, as independent
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_274'>274</span>substances, leads directly not merely to private worlds
+of experience, but also to private worlds of morals.
+The moral intuitions can be held to apply only to the
+strictly private world of psychological experience.
+Accordingly, self-respect, and the making the most of
+your own individual opportunities, together constituted
+the efficient morality of the leaders among the
+industrialists of that period. The western world is
+now suffering from the limited moral outlook of the
+three previous generations.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Also the assumption of the bare valuelessness of
+mere matter led to a lack of reverence in the treatment
+of natural or artistic beauty. Just when the urbanisation
+of the western world was entering upon its <a id='corr274.14'></a><span class='htmlonly'><ins class='correction' title='stake'>state</ins></span><span class='epubonly'><a href='#c_274.14'><ins class='correction' title='stake'>state</ins></a></span>
+of rapid development, and when the most delicate,
+anxious consideration of the aesthetic qualities of the
+new material environment was requisite, the doctrine
+of the irrelevance of such ideas was at its height. In
+the most advanced industrial countries, art was
+treated as a frivolity. A striking example of this state
+of mind in the middle of the nineteenth century is to
+be seen in London where the marvellous beauty of the
+estuary of the Thames, as it curves through the city,
+is wantonly defaced by the Charing Cross railway
+bridge, constructed apart from any reference to
+aesthetic values.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The two evils are: one, the ignoration of the true
+relation of each organism to its environment; and the
+other, the habit of ignoring the intrinsic worth of the
+environment which must be allowed its weight in any
+consideration of final ends.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Another great fact confronting the modern world is
+the discovery of the method of training professionals,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_275'>275</span>who specialise in particular regions of thought and
+thereby progressively add to the sum of knowledge
+within their respective limitations of subject. In consequence
+of the success of this professionalising of
+knowledge, there are two points to be kept in mind,
+which differentiate our present age from the past.
+In the first place, the rate of progress is such that
+an individual human being, of ordinary length of life,
+will be called upon to face novel situations which find
+no parallel in his past. The fixed person for the fixed
+duties, who in older societies was such a godsend, in
+the future will be a public danger. In the second
+place, the modern professionalism in knowledge
+works in the opposite direction so far as the intellectual
+sphere is concerned. The modern chemist is
+likely to be weak in zoology, weaker still in his general
+knowledge of the Elizabethan drama, and completely
+ignorant of the principles of rhythm in English
+versification. It is probably safe to ignore his
+knowledge of ancient history. Of course I am speaking
+of general tendencies; for chemists are no worse
+than engineers, or mathematicians, or classical scholars.
+Effective knowledge is professionalised knowledge,
+supported by a restricted acquaintance with
+useful subjects subservient to it.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>This situation has its dangers. It produces minds in
+a groove. Each profession makes progress, but it is
+progress in its own groove. Now to be mentally in
+a groove is to live in contemplating a given set of abstractions.
+The groove prevents straying across country,
+and the abstraction abstracts from something to
+which no further attention is paid. But there is no
+groove of abstractions which is adequate for the comprehension
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_276'>276</span>of human life. Thus in the modern
+world, the celibacy of the medieval learned class has
+been replaced by a celibacy of the intellect which is
+divorced from the concrete contemplation of the complete
+facts. Of course, no one is merely a mathematician,
+or merely a lawyer. People have lives outside
+their professions or their businesses. But the point
+is the restraint of serious thought within a groove.
+The remainder of life is treated superficially, with
+the imperfect categories of thought derived from one
+profession.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The dangers arising from this aspect of professionalism
+are great, particularly in our democratic
+societies. The directive force of reason is weakened.
+The leading intellects lack balance. They see this
+set of circumstances, or that set; but not both sets together.
+The task of <a id='corr276.17'></a><span class='htmlonly'><ins class='correction' title='coödination'>coördination</ins></span><span class='epubonly'><a href='#c_276.17'><ins class='correction' title='coödination'>coördination</ins></a></span> is left to those who
+lack either the force or the character to succeed in
+some definite career. In short, the specialised functions
+of the community are performed better and more
+progressively, but the generalised direction lacks
+vision. The progressiveness in detail only adds to
+the danger produced by the feebleness of coördination.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>This criticism of modern life applies throughout,
+in whatever sense you construe the meaning of a community.
+It holds if you apply it to a nation, a city, a
+district, an institution, a family, or even to an individual.
+There is a development of particular abstractions,
+and a contraction of concrete appreciation. The
+whole is lost in one of its aspects. It is not necessary
+for my point that I should maintain that our directive
+wisdom, either as individuals or as communities, is
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_277'>277</span>less now than in the past. Perhaps it has slightly improved.
+But the novel pace of progress requires a
+greater force of direction if disasters are to be
+avoided. The point is that the discoveries of the nineteenth
+century were in the direction of professionalism,
+so that we are left with no expansion of wisdom
+and with greater need of it.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Wisdom is the fruit of a balanced development. It
+is this balanced growth of individuality which it
+should be the aim of education to secure. The most
+useful discoveries for the immediate future would
+concern the furtherance of this aim without detriment
+to the necessary intellectual professionalism.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>My own criticism of our traditional educational
+methods is that they are far too much occupied with
+intellectual analysis, and with the acquirement of
+formularised information. What I mean is, that we
+neglect to strengthen habits of concrete appreciation
+of the individual facts in their full interplay of
+emergent values, and that we merely emphasise abstract
+formulations which ignore this aspect of the
+interplay of diverse values.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In every country the problem of the balance of the
+general and specialist education is under consideration.
+I cannot speak with first-hand knowledge of any
+country but my own. I know that there, among practical
+educationalists, there is considerable dissatisfaction
+with the existing practice. Also, the adaptation
+of the whole system to the needs of a democratic community
+is very far from being solved. I do not think
+that the secret of the solution lies in terms of the antithesis
+between thoroughness in special knowledge and
+general knowledge of a slighter character. The make-weight
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_278'>278</span>which balances the thoroughness of the specialist
+intellectual training should be of a radically
+different kind from purely intellectual analytical
+knowledge. At present our education combines a
+thorough study of a few abstractions, with a slighter
+study of a larger number of abstractions. We are too
+exclusively bookish in our scholastic routine. The
+general training should aim at eliciting our concrete
+apprehensions, and should satisfy the itch of youth to
+be doing something. There should be some analysis
+even here, but only just enough to illustrate the ways
+of thinking in diverse spheres. In the Garden of Eden
+Adam saw the animals before he named them: in the
+traditional system, children named the animals before
+they saw them.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>There is no easy single solution of the practical difficulties
+of education. We can, however, guide ourselves
+by a certain simplicity in its general theory.
+The student should concentrate within a limited field.
+Such concentration should include all practical and intellectual
+acquirements requisite for that concentration.
+This is the ordinary procedure; and, in respect to it,
+I should be inclined even to increase the facilities for
+concentration rather than to diminish them. With the
+concentration there are associated certain subsidiary
+studies, such as languages for science. Such a scheme
+of professional training should be directed to a clear
+end congenial to the student. It is not necessary to
+elaborate the qualifications of these statements. Such
+a training must, of course, have the width requisite
+for its end. But its design should not be complicated
+by the consideration of other ends. This professional
+training can only touch one side of education. Its
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_279'>279</span>centre of gravity lies in the intellect, and its chief tool
+is the printed book. The centre of gravity of the
+other side of training should lie in intuition without
+an analytical divorce from the total environment. Its
+object is immediate apprehension with the minimum
+of eviscerating analysis. The type of generality,
+which above all is wanted, is the appreciation of variety
+of value. I mean an aesthetic growth. There
+is something between the gross specialised values of
+the mere practical man, and the thin specialised values
+of the mere scholar. Both types have missed something;
+and if you add together the two sets of values,
+you do not obtain the missing elements. What is
+wanted is an appreciation of the infinite variety of
+vivid values achieved by an organism in its proper
+environment. When you understand all about the
+sun and all about the atmosphere and all about the
+rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance
+of the sunset. There is no substitute for the direct
+perception of the concrete achievement of a thing in
+its actuality. We want concrete fact with a high light
+thrown on what is relevant to its preciousness.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>What I mean is art <a id='corr279.22'></a><span class='htmlonly'><ins class='correction' title='(and'>and</ins></span><span class='epubonly'><a href='#c_279.22'><ins class='correction' title='(and'>and</ins></a></span> aesthetic education. It
+is, however, art in such a general sense of the term
+that I hardly like to call it by that name. Art is a
+special example. What we want is to draw out habits
+of aesthetic apprehension. According to the metaphysical
+doctrine which I have been developing, to
+do so is to increase the depth of individuality. The
+analysis of reality indicates the two factors, activity
+emerging into individualised aesthetic value. Also
+the emergent value is the measure of the individualisation
+of the activity. We must foster the creative
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_280'>280</span>initiative towards the maintenance of objective values.
+You will not obtain the apprehension without the initiative,
+or the initiative without the apprehension.
+As soon as you get towards the concrete, you cannot
+exclude action. Sensitiveness without impulse spells
+decadence, and impulse without sensitiveness spells
+brutality. I am using the word “sensitiveness” in its
+most general signification, so as to include apprehension
+of what lies beyond oneself; that is to say, sensitiveness
+to all the facts of the case. Thus “art” in
+the general sense which I require is any selection by
+which the concrete facts are so arranged as to elicit
+attention to particular values which are realisable by
+them. For example, the mere disposing of the human
+body and the eyesight so as to get a good view of a
+sunset is a simple form of artistic selection. The habit
+of art is the habit of enjoying vivid values.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>But, in this sense, art concerns more than sunsets.
+A factory, with its machinery, its community of operatives,
+its social service to the general population, its
+dependence upon organising and designing genius, its
+potentialities as a source of wealth to the holders of
+its stock is an organism exhibiting a variety of vivid
+values. What we want to train is the habit of apprehending
+such an organism in its completeness. It is
+very arguable that the science of political economy, as
+studied in its first period after the death of Adam
+Smith (1790), did more harm than good. It destroyed
+many economic fallacies, and taught how to
+think about the economic revolution then in progress.
+But it riveted on men a certain set of abstractions
+which were disastrous in their influence on modern
+mentality. It de-humanised industry. This is only
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_281'>281</span>one example of a general danger inherent in modern
+science. Its methodological procedure is exclusive
+and intolerant, and rightly so. It fixes attention on a
+definite group of abstractions, neglects everything
+else, and elicits every scrap of information and theory
+which is relevant to what it has retained. This
+method is triumphant, provided that the abstractions
+are judicious. But, however triumphant, the triumph
+is within limits. The neglect of these limits leads to
+disastrous oversights. The anti-rationalism of science
+is partly justified, as a preservation of its useful
+methodology; it is partly mere irrational prejudice.
+Modern professionalism is the training of minds to
+conform to the methodology. The historical revolt
+of the seventeenth century, and the earlier reaction
+towards naturalism, were examples of transcending
+the abstractions which fascinated educated society in
+the Middle Ages. These early ages had an ideal of
+rationalism, but they failed in its pursuit. For they
+neglected to note that the methodology of reasoning
+requires the limitations involved in the abstract. Accordingly,
+the true rationalism must always transcend
+itself by recurrence to the concrete in search of inspiration.
+A self-satisfied rationalism is in effect a
+form of anti-rationalism. It means an arbitrary halt
+at a particular set of abstractions. This was the case
+with science.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_282'>282</span>integration 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.
+The character of existent reality is composed of organisms
+enduring through the flux of things. The
+low type of organisms have achieved a self-identity
+dominating their whole physical life. Electrons,
+molecules, crystals, belong to this type. They exhibit
+a massive and complete sameness. In the higher
+types, where life appears, there is greater complexity.
+Thus, though there is a complex, enduring pattern,
+it has retreated into deeper recesses of the total fact.
+In a sense, the self-identity of a human being is more
+abstract than that of a crystal. It is the life of the
+spirit. It relates rather to the individualisation of the
+creative activity; so that the changing circumstances
+received from the environment, are differentiated
+from the living personality, and are thought of as
+forming its perceived field. In truth, the field of
+perception and the perceiving mind are abstractions
+which, in the concrete, combine into the successive
+bodily events. The psychological field, as restricted
+to sense-objects and passing emotions, is the minor
+permanence, barely rescued from the nonentity of
+mere change; and the mind is the major permanence,
+permeating that complete field, whose endurance is
+the living soul. But the soul would wither without
+fertilisation from its transient experiences. The secret
+of the higher organisms lies in their two grades of
+permanences. By this means the freshness of the environment
+is absorbed into the permanence of the soul.
+The changing environment is no longer, by reason of
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_283'>283</span>its variety, an enemy to the endurance of the organism.
+The pattern of the higher organism has retreated into
+the recesses of the individualised activity. It has become
+a uniform way of dealing with circumstances;
+and this way is only strengthened by having a proper
+variety of circumstances to deal with.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>This fertilisation of the soul is the reason for the
+necessity of art. A static value, however serious and
+important, becomes unendurable by its appalling
+monotony of endurance. The soul cries aloud for release
+into change. It suffers the agonies of claustrophobia.
+The transitions of humour, wit, irreverence,
+play, sleep, and—above all—of art are necessary for
+it. Great art is the arrangement of the environment
+so as to provide for the soul vivid, but transient,
+values. Human beings require something which absorbs
+them for a time, something out of the routine
+which they can stare at. But you cannot subdivide
+life, except in the abstract analysis of thought. Accordingly,
+the great art is more than a transient refreshment.
+It is something which adds to the
+permanent richness of the soul’s self-attainment. It
+justifies itself both by its immediate enjoyment, and
+also by its discipline of the inmost being. Its discipline
+is not distinct from enjoyment, but by reason of
+it. It transforms the soul into the permanent realisation
+of values extending beyond its former self. This
+element of transition in art is shown by the restlessness
+exhibited in its history. An epoch gets saturated
+by the masterpieces of any one style. Something new
+must be discovered. The human being wanders on.
+Yet there is a balance in things. Mere change before
+the attainment of adequacy of achievement, either in
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_284'>284</span>quality or output, is destructive of greatness. But the
+importance of a living art, which moves on and yet
+leaves its permanent mark, can hardly be exaggerated.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>In regard to the aesthetic needs of civilised society
+the reactions of science have so far been unfortunate.
+Its materialistic basis has directed attention to <em>things</em>
+as opposed to <em>values</em>. The antithesis is a false one,
+if taken in a concrete sense. But it is valid at the
+abstract level of ordinary thought. This misplaced
+emphasis coalesced with the abstractions of political
+economy, which are in fact the abstractions in terms
+of which commercial affairs are carried on. Thus
+all thought concerned with social organisation expressed
+itself in terms of material things and of capital.
+Ultimate values were excluded. They were
+politely bowed to, and then handed over to the clergy
+to be kept for Sundays. A creed of competitive business
+morality was evolved, in some respects curiously
+high; but entirely devoid of consideration for the
+value of human life. The workmen were conceived
+as mere hands, drawn from the pool of labour. To
+God’s question, men gave the answer of Cain—“Am I
+my brother’s keeper?”; and they incurred Cain’s guilt.
+This was the atmosphere in which the industrial
+revolution was accomplished in England, and to a
+large extent elsewhere. The internal history of England
+during the last half century has been an endeavour
+slowly and painfully to undo the evils wrought in
+the first stage of the new epoch. It may be that civilisation
+will never recover from the bad climate which
+enveloped the introduction of machinery. This climate
+pervaded the whole commercial system of the
+progressive northern European races. It was partly
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_285'>285</span>the result of the aesthetic errors of Protestantism and
+partly the result of scientific materialism, and partly
+the result of the natural greed of mankind, and partly
+the result of the abstractions of political economy.
+An illustration of my point is to be found in Macaulay’s
+Essay criticising Southey’s <cite>Colloquies on Society</cite>.
+It was written in 1830. Now Macaulay was a very
+favourable example of men living at that date, or at
+any date. He had genius; he was kind-hearted, honourable,
+and a reformer. This is the extract:—“We
+are told, that our age has invented atrocities beyond
+the imagination of our fathers; that society has been
+brought into a state compared with which extermination
+would be a blessing; and all because the dwellings
+of cotton-spinners are naked and rectangular.
+Mr. Southey has found out a way he tells us, in which
+the effects of manufactures and agriculture may be
+compared. And what is this way? To stand on a
+hill, to look at a cottage and a factory, and to see
+which is the prettier.”</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Southey seems to have said many silly things in
+his book; but, so far as this extract is concerned, he
+could make a good case for himself if he returned to
+earth after the lapse of nearly a century. The evils
+of the early industrial system are now a commonplace
+of knowledge. The point which I am insisting
+on is the stone-blind eye with which even the best
+men of that time regarded the importance of aesthetics
+in a nation’s life. I do not believe that we have
+as yet nearly achieved the right estimate. A contributory
+cause, of substantial efficacy to produce this
+disastrous error, was the scientific creed that matter
+in motion is the one concrete reality in nature; so
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_286'>286</span>that aesthetic values form an adventitious, irrelevant
+addition.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>There is another side to this picture of the possibilities
+of decadence. At the present moment a discussion
+is raging as to the future of civilisation in the
+novel circumstances of rapid scientific and technological
+advance. The evils of the future have been
+diagnosed in various ways, the loss of religious faith,
+the malignant use of material power, the degradation
+attending a differential birth rate favouring the lower
+types of humanity, the suppression of aesthetic creativeness.
+Without doubt, these are all evils, dangerous
+and threatening. But they are not new. From
+the dawn of history, mankind has always been losing
+its religious faith, has always suffered from the malignant
+use of material power, has always suffered from
+the infertility of its best intellectual types, has always
+witnessed the periodical decadence of art. In the
+reign of the Egyptian king, Tutankhamen, there was
+raging a desperate religious struggle between Modernists
+and Fundamentalists; the cave pictures exhibit
+a phase of delicate aesthetic achievement as superseded
+by a period of comparative vulgarity; the religious
+leaders, the great thinkers, the great poets and
+authors, the whole clerical caste in the Middle Ages,
+have been notably infertile; finally, if we attend to
+what actually has happened in the past, and disregard
+romantic visions of democracies, aristocracies, kings,
+generals, armies, and merchants, material power has
+generally been wielded with blindness, obstinacy and
+selfishness, often with brutal malignancy. And yet,
+mankind has progressed. Even if you take a tiny oasis
+of peculiar excellence, the type of modern man who
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_287'>287</span>would have most chance of happiness in ancient
+Greece at its best period is probably (as now) an
+average professional heavy-weight boxer, and not an
+average Greek scholar from Oxford or Germany.
+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.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>But, after all, there have been real periods of decadence;
+and at the present time, as at other epochs,
+society is decaying, and there is need for preservative
+action. Professionals are not new to the world. But
+in the past, professionals have formed unprogressive
+castes. The point is that professionalism has now
+been mated with progress. The world is now faced
+with a self-evolving system, which it cannot stop.
+There are dangers and advantages in this situation.
+It is obvious that the gain in material power affords
+opportunity for social betterment. If mankind can
+rise to the occasion, there lies in front a golden age of
+beneficent creativeness. But material power in itself
+is ethically neutral. It can equally well work in the
+wrong direction. The problem is not how to produce
+great men, but how to produce great societies. The
+great society will put up the men for the occasions.
+The materialistic philosophy emphasised the given
+quantity of material, and thence derivatively the given
+nature of the environment. It thus operated most
+unfortunately upon the social conscience of mankind.
+For it directed almost exclusive attention to the aspect
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_288'>288</span>of struggle for existence in a fixed environment. To a
+large extent the environment is fixed, and to this extent
+there is a struggle for existence. It is folly to
+look at the universe through rose-tinted spectacles.
+We must admit the struggle. The question is, who is
+to be eliminated. In so far as we are educators, we
+have to have clear ideas upon that point; for it settles
+the type to be produced and the practical ethics to
+be inculcated.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>But during the last three generations, the exclusive
+direction of attention to this aspect of things has been
+a disaster of the first magnitude. The watchwords of
+the nineteenth century have been, struggle for existence,
+competition, class warfare, commercial antagonism
+between nations, military warfare. The struggle
+for existence has been construed into the gospel of hate.
+The full conclusion to be drawn from a philosophy of
+evolution is fortunately of a more balanced character.
+Successful organisms modify their environment. Those
+organisms are successful which modify their environments
+so as to assist each other. This law is exemplified
+in nature on a vast scale. For example, the
+North American Indians accepted their environment,
+with the result that a scanty population barely succeeded
+in maintaining themselves over the whole
+continent. The European races when they arrived in
+the same continent pursued an opposite policy. They
+at once coöperated in modifying their environment.
+The result is that a population more than twenty times
+that of the Indian population now occupies the same
+territory, and the continent is not yet full. Again,
+there are associations of different species which mutually
+<a id='corr288.33'></a><span class='htmlonly'><ins class='correction' title='coöoperate'>coöperate</ins></span><span class='epubonly'><a href='#c_288.33'><ins class='correction' title='coöoperate'>coöperate</ins></a></span>. This differentiation of species is
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_289'>289</span>exhibited in the simplest physical entities, such as the
+association between electrons and positive nuclei, and
+in the whole realm of animate nature. The trees in a
+Brazilian forest depend upon the association of various
+species of organisms, each of which is mutually
+dependent on the other species. A single tree by
+itself is dependent upon all the adverse chances of
+shifting circumstances. The wind stunts it: the variations
+in temperature check its foliage: the rains
+denude its soil: its leaves are blown away and are
+lost for the purpose of fertilisation. You may obtain
+individual specimens of fine trees either in exceptional
+circumstances, or where human cultivation has intervened.
+But in nature the normal way in which trees
+flourish is by their association in a forest. Each tree
+may lose something of its individual perfection of
+growth, but they mutually assist each other in preserving
+the conditions for survival. The soil is preserved
+and shaded; and the microbes necessary for
+its fertility are neither scorched, nor frozen, nor
+washed away. A forest is the triumph of the organisation
+of mutually dependent species. Further a
+species of microbes which kills the forest, also exterminates
+itself. Again the two sexes exhibit the
+same advantage of differentiation. In the history of
+the world, the prize has not gone to those species
+which specialised in methods of violence, or even in
+defensive armour. In fact, nature began with producing
+animals encased in hard shells for defence
+against the ills of life. It also experimented in size.
+But smaller animals, without external armour, warm-blooded,
+sensitive, and alert, have cleared these monsters
+off the face of the earth. Also, the lions and
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_290'>290</span>tigers are not the successful species. There is something
+in the ready use of force which defeats its own
+object. Its main defect is that it bars <a id='corr290.3'></a><span class='htmlonly'><ins class='correction' title='coöoperation'>coöperation</ins></span><span class='epubonly'><a href='#c_290.3'><ins class='correction' title='coöoperation'>coöperation</ins></a></span>.
+Every organism requires an environment of friends,
+partly to shield it from violent changes, and partly
+to supply it with its wants. The Gospel of Force is
+incompatible with a social life. By <em>force</em>, I mean
+<em>antagonism</em> in its most general sense.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Almost equally dangerous is the Gospel of Uniformity.
+The differences between the nations and
+races of mankind are required to preserve the conditions
+under which higher development is possible.
+One main factor in the upward trend of animal life
+has been the power of wandering. Perhaps this is
+why the armour-plated monsters fared badly. They
+could not wander. Animals wander into new conditions.
+They have to adapt themselves or die. 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. A diversification among human
+communities is essential for the provision of the incentive
+and material for the Odyssey of the human
+spirit. 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_291'>291</span>admiration. We must not expect, however, all the
+virtues. We should even be satisfied if there is something
+odd enough to be interesting.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Modern science has imposed on humanity the necessity
+for wandering. Its progressive thought and its
+progressive technology make the transition through
+time, from generation to generation, a true migration
+into uncharted seas of adventure. The very benefit of
+wandering is that it is dangerous and needs skill to
+avert evils. We must expect, therefore, that the
+future will disclose dangers. 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. The
+prosperous middle classes, who ruled the nineteenth
+century, placed an excessive value upon placidity of
+existence. They refused to face the necessities for
+social reform imposed by the new industrial system,
+and they are now refusing to face the necessities for
+intellectual reform imposed by the new knowledge.
+The middle class pessimism over the future of the
+world comes from a confusion between civilisation
+and security. In the immediate future there will be
+less security than in the immediate past, less stability.
+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.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>I have endeavoured in these lectures to give a record
+of a great adventure in the region of thought. It
+was shared in by all the races of western Europe. It
+developed with the slowness of a mass movement.
+Half a century is its unit of time. The tale is the
+epic of an episode in the manifestation of reason.
+It tells how a particular direction of reason emerges
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_292'>292</span>in a race by the long preparation of antecedent epochs,
+how after its birth its subject-matter gradually unfolds
+itself, how it attains its triumphs, how its influence
+moulds the very springs of action of mankind,
+and finally how at its moment of supreme success its
+limitations disclose themselves and call for a renewed
+exercise of the creative imagination. The moral of
+the tale is the power of reason, its decisive influence
+on the life of humanity. The great conquerors, from
+Alexander to Caesar, and from Caesar to Napoleon,
+influenced profoundly the lives of subsequent generations.
+But the total effect of this influence shrinks to
+insignificance, if compared to the entire transformation
+of human habits and human mentality produced
+by the long line of men of thought from Thales to the
+present day, men individually powerless, but ultimately
+the rulers of the world.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_293'>293</span>
+  <h2 class='c006'>INDEX</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c010'>The numbers refer to pages; and ‘<i>e.s.</i>’ stands for ‘<i>et seqq.</i>’, where the
+reference is to the succeeding pages of the chapter in question.</p>
+
+<ul class='index'>
+  <li class='c017'>Abruptness (in Ingression), <a href='#Page_239'>239</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Absolute, The, <a href='#Page_129'>129</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Abstract, <a href='#Page_221'>221</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Abstraction, <a href='#Page_233'>233</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Abstraction (in Mathematics), <a href='#Page_28'>28</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Abstractive Hierarchy, <a href='#Page_234'>234</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Acceleration, <a href='#Page_66'>66</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Actualisation, <a href='#Page_222'>222</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Adam Smith, <a href='#Page_280'>280</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Aeschylus, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Alexander, S., <i><a href='#PREFACE'>preface</a></i>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Algebra, <a href='#Page_42'>42</a>, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Alva, <a href='#Page_2'>2</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Ampère, <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Analytical Character (Eternal Objects), <a href='#Page_228'>228</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Anselm, St., <a href='#Page_80'>80</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>‘Any,’ 229.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Aquinas, Thomas, <a href='#Page_12'>12</a>, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_205'>205</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Arabic Arithmetical Notation, <a href='#Page_42'>42</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Archimedes, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Arguments (of functions), <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Aristotle, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_41'>41</a>, <a href='#Page_42'>42</a>; <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_180'>180</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>; <a href='#Page_236'>236</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Arnold, Matthew, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Art, <a href='#Page_279'>279</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Art, Medieval, <a href='#Page_18'>18</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Aspect, <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>; <a href='#Page_146'>146</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Associated Hierarchy, <a href='#Page_237'>237</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Aston, F. W., <a href='#Page_260'>260</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Atom, <a href='#Page_140'>140</a>, <a href='#Page_144'>144</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Augustine, Saint, <a href='#Page_266'>266</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class='index c000'>
+  <li class='c017'>Bacon, Francis, <a href='#Page_11'>11</a>; <a href='#Page_56'>56</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_136'>136</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Bacon, Roger, <a href='#Page_7'>7</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Base of Abstractive Hierarchy, <a href='#Page_235'>235</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Being, <a href='#Page_227'>227</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Belisarius, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Benedict, Saint, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'><span class='pageno' id='Page_294'>294</span>Bergson, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>; <a href='#Page_202'>202</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Berkeley, George, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>, <a href='#Page_120'>120</a>, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Bichât, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Biology, <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>, <a href='#Page_144'>144</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Bonaventure, Saint, <a href='#Page_12'>12</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Boyle, Robert, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Brown University, <i><a href='#PREFACE'>Preface</a></i>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Bruno, Giordano, <a href='#Page_1'>1</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Byzantine Empire, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class='index c000'>
+  <li class='c017'>Carlyle, <a href='#Page_85'>85</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Cervantes, <a href='#Page_56'>56</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Change, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Chaucer, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>China, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>, <a href='#Page_106'>106</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Clairaut, <a href='#Page_85'>85</a>, <a href='#Page_193'>193</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Classification, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Clough, A. H., <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Cognition, <a href='#Page_97'>97</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Coleridge, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Columbus, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_49'>49</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Complex Eternal Objects, <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Components, <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Conic Sections, <a href='#Page_42'>42</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Connexity (of a Hierarchy), <a href='#Page_235'>235</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Connectedness (of an occasion), <a href='#Page_237'>237</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Conservation of Energy, <a href='#Page_142'>142</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Continuity, <a href='#Page_140'>140</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Copernicus, <a href='#Page_1'>1</a>, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_56'>56</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Cosmas, <a href='#Page_254'>254</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Cromwell, Oliver, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class='index c000'>
+  <li class='c017'>D’Alembert, <a href='#Page_80'>80</a>, <a href='#Page_85'>85</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Dalton, John, <a href='#Page_140'>140</a>, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Da Vinci, Leonardo, <a href='#Page_60'>60</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Darwin, <a href='#Page_263'>263</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Democritus, <a href='#Page_140'>140</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Demos, R., <i><a href='#PREFACE'>Preface</a></i>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Density, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>, <a href='#Page_189'>189</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'><span class='pageno' id='Page_295'>295</span>Desargues, <a href='#Page_78'>78</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Descartes, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>; <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_56'>56</a>, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>; <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>; <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>; <a href='#Page_195'>195</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_272'>272</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Determinism, <a href='#Page_110'>110</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Differential Calculus, <a href='#Page_78'>78</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Discontinuous Existence, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>; <a href='#Page_190'>190</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Distance, <a href='#Page_173'>173</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Divinity, Scholastic, <a href='#Page_17'>17</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Divisibility, <a href='#Page_177'>177</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class='index c000'>
+  <li class='c017'>Education, <a href='#Page_277'>277</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Egyptians, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Einstein, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a>, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>; <a href='#Page_173'>173</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_263'>263</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Electron, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_111'>111</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_185'>185</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Empty Events, <a href='#Page_214'>214</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Endurance, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a>; <a href='#Page_147'>147</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_169'>169</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_186'>186</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Endurance, Vibratory, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Energy, Physical, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Environment, <a href='#Page_155'>155</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Envisagement, <a href='#Page_148'>148</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Epochs, <a href='#Page_177'>177</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Epochal Durations, <a href='#Page_192'>192</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Essence, <a href='#Page_175'>175</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Eternal Objects, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_146'>146</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_221'>221</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Ether, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Euripides, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Event, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>; <a href='#Page_168'>168</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Evolution, <a href='#Page_130'>130</a>; <a href='#Page_142'>142</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Exhaustion, Method of, <a href='#Page_42'>42</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Extension, <a href='#Page_177'>177</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Extensive Quantity, <a href='#Page_178'>178</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>External Relations, <a href='#Page_223'>223</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Extrinsic Reality, <a href='#Page_146'>146</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class='index c000'>
+  <li class='c017'>Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Faraday, <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Fate, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Fermat, <a href='#Page_78'>78</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Finite Abstractive Hierarchy, <a href='#Page_235'>235</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Form, <a href='#Page_230'>230</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Force, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Fourier, <a href='#Page_85'>85</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Francis of Assisi, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Frederick, the Great, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Frequency, <a href='#Page_181'>181</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Fresnel, <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Frost, Robert, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'><span class='pageno' id='Page_296'>296</span>Future, <a href='#Page_245'>245</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+</ul>
+<ul class='index c000'>
+  <li class='c017'>Galileo, <a href='#Page_2'>2</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>; <a href='#Page_56'>56</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>; <a href='#Page_255'>255</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Galvani, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Gauss, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Geometry, <a href='#Page_31'>31</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>George II, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Germany, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Gibson, <a href='#Page_206'>206</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>God, <a href='#Page_17'>17</a>, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_129'>129</a>; <a href='#Page_242'>242</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Gradation of Envisagement, <a href='#Page_247'>247</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Gravitation, <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>, <a href='#Page_172'>172</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Greece, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Gregorovius, <a href='#Page_265'>265</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Giotto, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Gregory, The Great, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>, <a href='#Page_265'>265</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class='index c000'>
+  <li class='c017'>Harvey, <a href='#Page_56'>56</a>, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Heath, Sir T. L., <a href='#Page_180'>180</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Hegel, <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Herz, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Historical Revolt, <a href='#Page_11'>11</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_150'>150</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Hooker, Richard, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Hume, <a href='#Page_5'>5</a>, <a href='#Page_47'>47</a>, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>; <a href='#Page_80'>80</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_107'>107</a>, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Huyghens, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>; <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class='index c000'>
+  <li class='c017'>Idealism, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>; <a href='#Page_127'>127</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Immediate Occasion, <a href='#Page_36'>36</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Individual Essence, <a href='#Page_222'>222</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Induction, <a href='#Page_34'>34</a>; <a href='#Page_60'>60</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Infinite Abstractive Hierarchy, <a href='#Page_235'>235</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Ingression, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_222'>222</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Integral Calculus, <a href='#Page_42'>42</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Internal Relations, <a href='#Page_175'>175</a>; <a href='#Page_223'>223</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Intrinsic Reality, <a href='#Page_146'>146</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Invention, <a href='#Page_136'>136</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Ionian Philosophers, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Irresistible Grace, <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Isolated Systems, <a href='#Page_66'>66</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Isolation of Eternal Objects, <a href='#Page_230'>230</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Isotopes, <a href='#Page_260'>260</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Italy, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class='index c000'>
+  <li class='c017'>James, Henry, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>James, William, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>; <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Joseph, Hapsburgh Emperor, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Justinian, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class='index c000'>
+  <li class='c017'>Kant, <a href='#Page_47'>47</a>; <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>, <a href='#Page_142'>142</a>, <a href='#Page_178'>178</a>; <a href='#Page_193'>193</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Kepler, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class='index c000'>
+  <li class='c017'><span class='pageno' id='Page_297'>297</span>Lagrange, <a href='#Page_84'>84</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Laplace, <a href='#Page_85'>85</a>, <a href='#Page_142'>142</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Lavoisier, <a href='#Page_84'>84</a>, <a href='#Page_146'>146</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Law, Roman, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Laws of Nature, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>, <a href='#Page_150'>150</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Least Action, <a href='#Page_87'>87</a>, <a href='#Page_150'>150</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Lecky, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_254'>254</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Leibniz, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>, <a href='#Page_48'>48</a>, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>; <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Life, <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Limitation, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Lloyd Morgan, <i><a href='#PREFACE'>Preface</a></i>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Location, Simple, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_81'>81</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_95'>95</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Locke, John, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <a href='#Page_47'>47</a>; <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Locomotion, Vibratory, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Logic, Abstract, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Logic, Scholastic, <a href='#Page_17'>17</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Lucretius, <a href='#Page_140'>140</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class='index c000'>
+  <li class='c017'>Macaulay, <a href='#Page_285'>285</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Milton, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Mind, <a href='#Page_79'>79</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Mass, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_144'>144</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Mathematics, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>; <a href='#Page_28'>28</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Mathematics, Applied, <a href='#Page_34'>34</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Matter, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>, <a href='#Page_144'>144</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Matter (philosophical), <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Maupertuis, <a href='#Page_85'>85</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Max Müller, <a href='#Page_178'>178</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Maxwell, Clerk, <a href='#Page_85'>85</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_161'>161</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Mechanical Explanation, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Mechanism, <a href='#Page_107'>107</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Mechanistic Theory, <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Memory, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Mersenne, <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Michelson, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Mill, John Stuart, <a href='#Page_110'>110</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Modal Character of Space, <a href='#Page_90'>90</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Modal Limitation, <a href='#Page_248'>248</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Mode, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Moral Responsibility, <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Motion, Laws of, <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Müller, Johannes, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class='index c000'>
+  <li class='c017'>Narses, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Natural Selection, <a href='#Page_158'>158</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Naturalism in Art, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Newman, John Henry, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_255'>255</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'><span class='pageno' id='Page_298'>298</span>Newton, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>; <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_84'>84</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_161'>161</a>; <a href='#Page_255'>255</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Not-Being, <a href='#Page_227'>227</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class='index c000'>
+  <li class='c017'>Objectivism, <a href='#Page_124'>124</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Occasions, Community of, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Occupied Events, <a href='#Page_215'>215</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Oersted, <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Order of Nature, <a href='#Page_5'>5</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_39'>39</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Organic Mechanism, <a href='#Page_112'>112</a>, <a href='#Page_151'>151</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Organism, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>, <a href='#Page_90'>90</a>; <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_111'>111</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_145'>145</a>; <a href='#Page_185'>185</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class='index c000'>
+  <li class='c017'>Padua, University of, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>, <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Paley, <a href='#Page_107'>107</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Papacy, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Pascal, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>, <a href='#Page_78'>78</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Past, <a href='#Page_245'>245</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Pasteur, Louis, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Pelagius, <a href='#Page_266'>266</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Perception, <a href='#Page_101'>101</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Periodic Law (Mendeleëf), <a href='#Page_141'>141</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Periodicity, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Perspective, <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Petavius, <a href='#Page_255'>255</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Philosophy, <a href='#Page_122'>122</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Physical Field, <a href='#Page_138'>138</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Physics, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Plato, <a href='#Page_10'>10</a>; <a href='#Page_41'>41</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_180'>180</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Pope, Alexander, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Possibility, <a href='#Page_223'>223</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Prehension, <a href='#Page_97'>97</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Prehensive Character of Space, <a href='#Page_90'>90</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Present, <a href='#Page_245'>245</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Primary Qualities, <a href='#Page_76'>76</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Primate, <a href='#Page_185'>185</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Prime Mover, <a href='#Page_242'>242</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Primordial Element, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Process, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Professionalism, <a href='#Page_271'>271</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Proton, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_185'>185</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Psychology, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>, <a href='#Page_103'>103</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Pusey, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Pythagoras, <a href='#Page_39'>39</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_240'>240</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class='index c000'>
+  <li class='c017'>Quality, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Quantum Theory, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>; <a href='#Page_181'>181</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+</ul>
+<ul class='index c000'>
+  <li class='c017'>Rationalism, <a href='#Page_12'>12</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Ramsay, Sir William, <a href='#Page_259'>259</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'><span class='pageno' id='Page_299'>299</span>Rawley, Dr., <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Rayleigh, Lord, <a href='#Page_259'>259</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Realism, <a href='#Page_127'>127</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Reformation, <a href='#Page_11'>11</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Reiteration, <a href='#Page_147'>147</a>; <a href='#Page_186'>186</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Relational Essence, <a href='#Page_223'>223</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Relativity, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>; <a href='#Page_165'>165</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Retention, <a href='#Page_147'>147</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Riemann, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Romans, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Roman Law, <a href='#Page_20'>20</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Rome, <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Rousseau, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>, <a href='#Page_135'>135</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Royal Society, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Russell, Bertrand, <a href='#Page_216'>216</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class='index c000'>
+  <li class='c017'>Sarpi, Paul, <a href='#Page_12'>12</a>, <a href='#Page_26'>26</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Schleiden, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Schwann, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Scientific Materialism, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Scientific Movement, <a href='#Page_11'>11</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Secondary Qualities, <a href='#Page_76'>76</a>, <a href='#Page_127'>127</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Seneca, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Sense-Object, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Separative Character of Space, <a href='#Page_90'>90</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Shakespeare, <a href='#Page_56'>56</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Shape, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Shelley, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Sidgwick, Henry, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Simple Eternal Objects, <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Simple Location, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_81'>81</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_95'>95</a>; <a href='#Page_127'>127</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_217'>217</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Simultaneity, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>‘Some,’ <a href='#Page_229'>229</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Southey, <a href='#Page_285'>285</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Space, Physical, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Spatialisation, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Page_175'>175</a>, <a href='#Page_206'>206</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Specious Present, <a href='#Page_148'>148</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Spinoza, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>, <a href='#Page_175'>175</a>, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>, <a href='#Page_248'>248</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Sophocles, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Standpoint, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Stoicism, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Struggle for Existence, <a href='#Page_158'>158</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'><span class='pageno' id='Page_300'>300</span>Subjectivism, <a href='#Page_123'>123</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Substance, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_175'>175</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Substantial Activity, <a href='#Page_152'>152</a>, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>, <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Superject, <a href='#Page_230'>230</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Synthetic Prehension, <a href='#Page_224'>224</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+</ul>
+<ul class='index c000'>
+  <li class='c017'>Technology, <a href='#Page_135'>135</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Temporalisation, <a href='#Page_179'>179</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Tennyson, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Time, <a href='#Page_169'>169</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Tragedy, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Translucency of Realisation, <a href='#Page_240'>240</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Trent, Council of, <a href='#Page_12'>12</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Trigonometry, <a href='#Page_42'>42</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>True Propositions, <a href='#Page_224'>224</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class='index c000'>
+  <li class='c017'>Unknowns (in Mathematics), <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Universals, <a href='#Page_221'>221</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Untrue Propositions, <a href='#Page_221'>221</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class='index c000'>
+  <li class='c017'>Value, <a href='#Page_123'>123</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_226'>226</a>, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Variable, The, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_229'>229</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Vasco da Gama, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Velocity, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_165'>165</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Vertex of Abstractive Hierarchy, <a href='#Page_236'>236</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Vesalius, <a href='#Page_1'>1</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Vibration, <a href='#Page_186'>186</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Vibratory Organic Deformation, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+  <li class='c017'>Virtual Work, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Vitalism, <a href='#Page_111'>111</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_145'>145</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Volta, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Voltaire, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>; <a href='#Page_80'>80</a>, <i>e.s.</i>; <a href='#Page_143'>143</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class='index c000'>
+  <li class='c017'>Walpole, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Washington, George, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Watt, James, <a href='#Page_135'>135</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Wesley, John, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Whitman, Walt, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>.</li>
+  <li class='c017'>Wordsworth, <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>; <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, <i>e.s.</i></li>
+</ul>
+<ul class='index c000'>
+  <li class='c017'>Young, Thomas, <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class='index c000'>
+  <li class='c017'>Zeno, <a href='#Page_178'>178</a>, <a href='#Page_179'>179</a>, <a href='#Page_192'>192</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<div class='pbb'>
+ <hr class='pb c000' />
+</div>
+<p class='c001'><a id='endnote'></a></p>
+<div class='tnotes'>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+  <div class='nf-center'>
+    <div><span class='large'>Transcriber’s Note</span></div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c001'>The printer employed the diaeresis in words like ‘coördination’ or
+‘coöperation’. On p. 157, the first syllable of ‘coöperating’ fell
+on the line break, and the word was hyphenated as ‘co-operating’, since
+the diaeresis was not needed. The word has been joined here and the
+diaeresis employed as ‘coöperating’.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>The following words appear both with and without a hyphen: to-day,
+non-entity, half-way, inter-connected, non-entity.</p>
+
+<p class='c001'>Errors deemed most likely to be the printer’s have been corrected, and
+are noted here. The references are to the page and line in the original.</p>
+
+<table class='table1' summary=''>
+<colgroup>
+<col width='8%' />
+<col width='73%' />
+<col width='17%' />
+</colgroup>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c008'><a id='c_20.10'></a><a href='#corr20.10'>20.10</a></td>
+    <td class='c008'>restraining g[i/o]vernment.</td>
+    <td class='c018'>Replaced.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c008'><a id='c_21.31'></a><a href='#corr21.31'>21.31</a></td>
+    <td class='c008'>is kept in contact w[ti/it]h</td>
+    <td class='c018'>Transposed.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c008'><a id='c_57.30'></a><a href='#corr57.30'>57.30</a></td>
+    <td class='c008'>Now the scientific philosop[h]y</td>
+    <td class='c018'>Inserted.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c008'><a id='c_69.9'></a><a href='#corr69.9'>69.9</a></td>
+    <td class='c008'>no other way of putting[s] things</td>
+    <td class='c018'>Removed.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c008'><a id='c_77.6'></a><a href='#corr77.6'>77.6</a></td>
+    <td class='c008'>these relationships constitute[s] nature.</td>
+    <td class='c018'>Added.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c008'><a id='c_157.20'></a><a href='#corr157.20'>157.20</a></td>
+    <td class='c008'>societies of c[o-/ö]perating organisms.</td>
+    <td class='c018'>Replaced.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c008'><a id='c_160.8'></a><a href='#corr160.8'>160.8</a></td>
+    <td class='c008'>These divis[i]ons are</td>
+    <td class='c018'>Inserted.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c008'><a id='c_176.3'></a><a href='#corr176.3'>176.3</a></td>
+    <td class='c008'>extends beyond[s] the spatio-temporal continuum</td>
+    <td class='c018'>Removed.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c008'><a id='c_177.6'></a><a href='#corr177.6'>177.6</a></td>
+    <td class='c008'>by the reali[z/s]ation of pattern</td>
+    <td class='c018'>Consistency.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c008'><a id='c_177.25'></a><a href='#corr177.25'>177.25</a></td>
+    <td class='c008'>character of spatio-temporal [of ]extension</td>
+    <td class='c018'>Removed.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c008'><a id='c_183.5'></a><a href='#corr183.5'>183.5</a></td>
+    <td class='c008'>radiate its energy i[s/n] an integral number</td>
+    <td class='c018'>Replaced.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c008'><a id='c_195.4'></a><a href='#corr195.4'>195.4</a></td>
+    <td class='c008'>history of the Christi[o/a]n Church</td>
+    <td class='c018'>Replaced.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c008'><a id='c_195.7'></a><a href='#corr195.7'>195.7</a></td>
+    <td class='c008'>apocalyptic forecast[e]s</td>
+    <td class='c018'>Removed.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c008'><a id='c_202.21'></a><a href='#corr202.21'>202.21</a></td>
+    <td class='c008'>This divis[i]on of territory</td>
+    <td class='c018'>Inserted.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c008'><a id='c_213.10'></a><a href='#corr213.10'>213.10</a></td>
+    <td class='c008'>what anything is in i[t]self.</td>
+    <td class='c018'>Inserted.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c008'><a id='c_245.27'></a><a href='#corr245.27'>245.27</a></td>
+    <td class='c008'>even [al]though any such discrimination</td>
+    <td class='c018'>Removed.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c008'><a id='c_274.14'></a><a href='#corr274.14'>274.14</a></td>
+    <td class='c008'>its sta[k/t]e of rapid development</td>
+    <td class='c018'>Replaced.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c008'><a id='c_276.17'></a><a href='#corr276.17'>276.17</a></td>
+    <td class='c008'>The task of coö[r]dination is left</td>
+    <td class='c018'>Inserted.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c008'><a id='c_279.22'></a><a href='#corr279.22'>279.22</a></td>
+    <td class='c008'>What I mean is art [(]and aesthetic education.</td>
+    <td class='c018'>Removed.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c008'><a id='c_288.33'></a><a href='#corr288.33'>288.33</a></td>
+    <td class='c008'>mutually coö[o]perate.</td>
+    <td class='c018'>Removed.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class='c008'><a id='c_290.3'></a><a href='#corr290.3'>290.3</a></td>
+    <td class='c008'>it bars coö[o]peration.</td>
+    <td class='c018'>Removed.</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+</div>
+
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author	nfenwick <nfenwick@pglaf.org>	2025-02-02 19:59:59 -0800
committer	nfenwick <nfenwick@pglaf.org>	2025-02-02 19:59:59 -0800
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