Adventures of Ideas

Adventires of Ideas

Alfred North Whitehead

THE FREE PRESS

A Division of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.

New York

Collier Macnillan Publishers

London

Preface

The title of this book, Adventures of Ideas, bears two meanings. both applicable to the subject-matter. One meaning is the effect of certain ideas in promoting the slow drift of mankind towards civil-ization. This is the Adventure of Ideas in the history of mankind. The other meaning is is the author’s adventure in framing a specilative scheme of ideas which shall be explanatory of the historical adventure.

The book is in fact a study of the concept of civilization, and an endeavour to understand how it is that civilized beings arise. One point. emphasized throughout. is the importance of Adventure for the promotion and preservation of civilization. The three books ?Science and The Modern World, Process and Redity, Adventures of Ideas ?are an endeavour to express a way of understanding the nature of things, and to point out how that way of understanding is illustrated by a survey of the mutations of human experience. Each book can be read separately but they supplement each other's omissions or compressions.

The books that have chiefly influenced my general way of looking at this historical topic are Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Cardinal Newman's Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Paul Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent, Henry Osborn Taylor’s The Mediaeval Mind, Leslie Stephen's English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, and various well-known collections of letters. While on the subject of literature, I venture to commend to the notice of those interested in an earlier development of English Thought, and also in good literature, the sermons of the Elizabethan and Jacobean divines. Also H. O. Taylor's Thought and Expression in the Sixteenth Century presents the currents and cross-currents of thought in those times. The twentieth century, so far as it has yet advanced, bears some analogy to that Predecessor in European history, both in clash of thought and in clash of political interest. In Part II, dealing with Cosmology, I have made constant use of two books published by the Oxford University Press in 1928, namely, A Commentory on Plato's Timaus, by Professor A. E. Taylor of the University of Edinburgh, and The Greek Atomists and Epicurus, by Dr. Cyril Bailey, Tutor of Balliol College, Oxford. Use has already been made of some parts of the book in response to invitations which I had the honour to receive. The main substance of Chapters I, II, III, VII, VIII was delivered as the four Mary Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College, during the session 1929-30: they have not been hitherto published. Also Chapter IX, Science and Philosophy- not previously published- was delivered as the Davies Lacture in Philosophy, at the Institute of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University, March, 1932. Chapter VI, Foresight, was delivered as a lecture at the Harvard Business School, and by the request of Dean W. B. Donham was published as a preface to his book, Business Adrift, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., New York, 1931. Also Chapter XVI, Objects and Subjects, was delivered as the presidential address to the eastern division of the American Philosophical Association, at New Haven, December, 1931; and has since been published in The Philosophicd Review, Vol. XLI, 1932. Longmans, Green, and Company, New York. Some unpublished lectures, delivered at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, in 1926, embodied a preliminary sketch of the topic of this book. They were concerned with the two levels of ideas which are required for successful civilization, namely, particularized ideas of low generality. and philosophic ideas of high generality. The former set are required to reap the fruit of the type of civilization immediately attained; the latter set are required to guide the adventure toward novelty, and to secure the immediate realization of the worth of such ideal aim. I am indebted to my wife for many ideas fundamental to the discussion; and also for the great labour of revision of the successive drafts of the various chapters.

ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

Harvard University

September, 1932

Contents

PREFACE vii

PART I

SOCIOLOGICAL

I. INTRODUCTION 3

II. THE HUMAN SOUL 10

III THE HUMANITARIAN IDEAL 26

IV ASPECTS OF FREEDOM 43

V FROM FORCE TO PERSUASION 69

VI FORESIGHT 87

EPILOGUE 100

PART II

COSMOLOGICAL

VII LAWS OF NATURE 103

VIII COSMOLOCIES 119

IX SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 140

X THE NEW REFORMATION 160

PART III

PHILOSOPHICAL

XI OBJECTS AND SUBJECTS 175

XII PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE 191

XIII THE GROUPING OF OCCASIONS 201

XVI APPEARANCE AND REALITY 209

XV PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 220

PART IV

CIVILIZATION

XVL.Truth 241

XVII. BEAUTY 252

XVIII ADVENTURE 273

XX PEACE 284

INDEX OF PROPER NAME 299

INDEX OF TERMS 302

PART 1

Sociological

CHAPTER I

Introduction

SECTION I. In its widest possible extension the title of this book Adventures of Ideas might be taken as a synonym for The History of The Human Race, in respect to its wide variety of mental experiences. In this sense of the title, the Human Race must experience its own history. It cannot be written in its total variety.

Throughout this book I propose to consider critically the sort of history which ideas can have in the life of humanity, and to illustrate my thesis by an appeal to some well-known examples. The particular topics chosen for illustration will be dictated by the arbitrary limitations of my own knowledge. and by the consideration of their general interest and importance in our modern life. Also for our purpose in the book the notion of History includes the present and the future together with the past, affording a mutual elucidation and wrapped in common interest. For the facts in detail we shall be dependent upon that great band of critical scholars whose labours today, and for the past three centuries, lay upon mankind the obligation to deepest reverence.

Theories are built upon facts; and conversely the reports upon facts are shot through and through with theoretical interpretation. Direct visual observation is concerned with the vision of coloured shapes in motion 'questionable shapes'. Direct aural observation is concerned with auditions of sounds. But some contemporary observer of such shapes and noises, for example, some envoy resident at a foreign Court, interpreting the so-called 'bare' facts, states that 'he interviewed the minister of state,who manifested considerable emotion and explained with great clearness the measures with which he would meet the impending crisis'. in such ways contemporary evidence is contemporary interpretation, including the assumption of data other than these bare sensa. In some subsequent age the critical scholar in accordance with his own theoretical judgments selects from bygone contemporary observations: he criticizes the contemporary observers, and gives his own interpretations of the contemporary evidence. We thus arrive at 'pure history', according to the faith of the schooi of history prevalent in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

This notion of historians, of history devoid of aesthetic prejudice, of history devoid of any reliance on metaphysical principles and cosmological generalizations, is a figment of the imagination. The belief in it can only occur to minds steeped in provinciality, the provinciality of an epoch, of a race, of a school of learning, of a trend of interest, minds unable to divine their own unspoken limitations. The historian in his description of the past depends on his own judgment as to what constitutes the importance of human life. Even when he has rigorously confined himself to one selected aspect, political or cultural, he still depends on some decision as to what con-stitutes the culmination of that phase of human experience and as to what constitutes its degradation. For example, Considering the political history of mankind, Hegel saw in the prussian state of his date its culmination: a generation later macaulay saw that culmination in the english constitutional system of his date. The whole judgment on thoughts and actions depend upon such implicit presuppositions. You cannot consider wisdom or folly, progress or decadence, except in relation to some standard of judgment, some end in view. Such standards, such ends, when widely diffused, constitute the driving force of ideas in the history of mankind. They also guide the composition of historical narrative.

In considering the history of ideas, I maintain that the notion of 'mere knowledge' is a high abstraction which we should dismiss from our minds. Knowledge is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose. Also we must remember that there are grades in the generality of ideas. Thus a general idea occurs in history in special forms determined by peculiar circumstances of race and of stage of civilization. The higher generalities rarely receive any accurate verbal expression. they are hinted at through their special forms appropriate to the age in question. Also the emotional accompaniments are partly due to the vague feeling of importance derived from the superior generality, and partly due to the special interest of special forms in which generalities make their appearance. Some people are stined by a flag, a national anthem; others by the vague feeling of the form of civilization which their country stands for. In most people the two origins of emotion are fused together.

Gibbon's history demonstrates a twofold tale. It tells of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire through a thousand years. We see the greatness of that empire at its height, its military organization, its provincial administration, its welter of races, the rise and clash of two religions, the passage of greek philosophy into Christian theology. Gibbon displays before us the greatness and the littleness of soldiers and of statesmen, of philosophers and of priests, the pathos, the heroism, the grossness of the general multitude of humanity. He shows us the happiness of mankind and the horrors which it has enduted. But throughout this history, it is Gibbon who speaks. He was the incarnation of the dominant spirit of his own times. In this way his volumes also tell another tale. They are a record of the mentality of the eighteenth century. They are at once a detailed history of the Roman Empire, and a demonstration of the general ideas of the silver age of the modern European Renaissance. This silver age, like its Roman counterpart seventeen hundred years earlier, was oblivious of its own imminent destruction by the impact of the age of Steam and of Democracy, the counterparts of the Barbarians and of the Christians. Thus Gibbon narrates the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and exemplifies the prelude to the Decline and Fall of his own type of culture.