Science and the modern world · Alfred North Whitehead
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.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.