Whitehead's Philosophical Development: A Critical History of the Background of Process and Reality

By Nathaniel Lawrence

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1956.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520345836

Book preview

WHITEHEAD’S PHILOSOPHICAL

DEVELOPMENT *

WHITEHEAD’S

PHILOSOPHICAL

DEVELOPMENT

A Critical History of the Background of PROCESS AND REALITY …

NATHANIEL LAWRENCE

With Foreword by Stephen C. Pepper

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS 1956 BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California Cambridge University Press London, England

COPYRIGHT, 1956, BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

Library of Congress Catalogue Card No.: 56-6989 Printed in the United States of America By the University of California Printing Department Designed by Marion Jackson

• • This study is dedicated to my wife, Mary Wood Lawrence, for reasons which will be clear to those who know scholarship or know her.

foreword

Whitehead is the great example among modern philosophers of a man who prizes comprehension above clarity. He is an example in both senses of the word. He is an instance strikingly exemplifying this cognitive evaluation; and he is a model for philosophers to consider and perhaps to emulate. His example is the more notable because he entered the cognitive field as a mathematician well aware of the ideals of rigor and clarity and respected for his contributions in this area. But when he became engrossed in the problem of understanding and adequately describing our world and our ways of knowing it, he encountered the dilemma which every serious philosopher must meet: that of either arbitrarily restricting the area of inquiry and the mode of inquiry to attain clarity, or else of allowing alternatives and in- determinacies and even contrarieties to enter in so as to attain fullness of comprehension.

The philosophic ideal is no doubt both clarity and comprehension—unless, by a stroke of definition, some philosopher seeks to exclude comprehension as unphilosophical! The example of Whitehead is particularly pertinent at this moment when the ideal of clarity is so much in fashion, and so starving the hunger for comprehension that a new eruption of cognitively irresponsible romantic theories is already upon us.

Hence, this introduction to Whitehead’s central work is most illuminating and most timely. In tracing the movement of Whitehead’s thought from his early works, where he sought to isolate an understanding of the nature of physics from considerations of human values and the typical problems of knowledge, through his intermediate works, where the need of total comprehension was more and more clearly revealed to him, Lawrence has performed a most valuable analysis. It is serving as more than a scholarly interpretation of an important man’s writings. It is serving as a reminder of a traditional task of philosophy that philosophers cannot with impunity ignore.

Only those who have struggled over Whitehead’s writings can fully appreciate the amount of clarification Lawrence has brought to an understanding of Whitehead. For although we applaud Whitehead’s pertinacity in seeking for maximum comprehension, no one can well deny that his thought becomes unusually obscure the further he proceeds. Lawrence shows how a great deal of this obscurity is due to the steady change of mind that Whitehead was passing through. It was the obscurity of an honest and growing thinker. Many of Whitehead’s inconsistencies then fall into place as views associated with successive stages of his thought. There was danger that Whitehead would cease to be read because of these superficial confusions. That would have been unfortunate, for he was without much question one of the great minds of the twentieth century. Lawrence’s careful and sympathetic exposition may do much to stimulate a more extensive reading of Whitehead. For this we should be grateful, for no one has become more keenly aware than Whitehead of the deep-lying issues that rend our modern world and of how they must be faced in order to be solved. Though few of us may follow his suggested solutions, all may profit from his record of his struggles to understand and from his

manifold insights. Stephen C. Pepper

Berkeley, California May, 1955 preface

An essay too long in the preparing often leaves its friends behind and often forgets them. And any essay has friends not known to its author. The names that come to mind as this foreword is written are many, but the list is not complete. Raphael Demos urged publication of the essay from the beginning, though he differed strongly and lucidly with some of its most basic convictions. Such balance of mind is rare among academics, and even rarer among students of Whitehead, who usually feel that they must either be disciples or destroyers.

Among those who read early drafts of this study, in part or in whole, and contributed to its improvement are John Wild and Donald Williams. Nearly half of a later draft was read by Harry and Lee Tiebout, both for form and for content, a deadly and cheerless task. From the time of his first acquaintance with this essay Stephen C. Pepper has provided sympathetic encouragement in its preparation, as also has C. I. Lewis, and both philosophers have saved me from embarrassing inadequacies. I am also immeasurably indebted to Professor Lewis as student to teacher.

The major indebtedness is to Whitehead himself, whose qualities as teacher and philosopher should not be measured by the limitations of this study. There may seem to be an irony in the claim that an essay which includes destructive criticism of Whitehead is indebted to him. Whitehead himself, however, summarized his critique of Einstein with the remark that the worst homage we can pay to genius is to accept uncritically formulations of truths which we owe to it. A student who does not differ from his teacher has learned little from him.

introduction

PART ONE

perception: the relation between mind and nature

the furniture of the universe

the doctrine of events

the doctrine of objects

the method of extensive abstraction

cause, error, and law

Summary

PART TWO

10 The scope of natural philosophy

11 The relation between mind and nature

the furniture of the universe

13 The doctrine of events

14 The doctrine of objects

15 The theory of relativity

16 cause and law

17 Summary

PART THREE

the scope of philosophy

the organic universe

21 actual occasions

simple location, interconnectedness, and truth

causality and freedom

conclusion: prospects

Index

introduction

Among the philosophical works that have appeared in the twentieth century Alfred North Whitehead’s Gifford Lectures, Process and Reality, occupy a unique position. Probably no work by a man of Whitehead’s caliber has caused so much perplexity, not to say dismay, in the ranks of professional philosophers; at the same time probably no philosopher of this century has so attracted the respect and admiration of a variety of competent men both in philosophy and in other fields as has Whitehead. His writings have reached many men; they often deal with high-level abstraction; they frequently treat in an authoritative manner of matters dear to the hearts of specialists. For these and other reasons Whitehead has earned himself several well-known disciples and any number of exasperated critics. On the other hand, so great is the diversity of opinion about Whitehead’s philosophy that the common image we receive from reading all of his commentators is but a thin representation of the original. Thus, although Whitehead has many expositors and critics, there can be no substitute for reading the original text.

Although direct acquaintance with the text is a necessary condition for understanding Process and Reality, it is clearly not the sufficient condition. Some sort of education and preparation is certainly necessary as well. As an example, we should not expect a competent engineer or economist to make so much headway through Process and Reality, however stimulating he might find it, as would a trained philosopher prepared to anticipate many of the problems with which Whitehead deals. Preparation of some kind is surely needed in order adequately to read Whitehead’s magnum opus, but the question—hardly even raised by either Whitehead’s critics or his followers—is: What sort of preparation and how much? There has been a widespread and unwarranted assumption that a reasonable amount of philosophical training constitutes sufficient preparation and license for appraising Whitehead’s philosophy. This assumption is not only unwarranted; it is, in my opinion, wholly in error. The correlative assumption that one need not acquaint oneself with the works produced by Whitehead before Process and Reality in order to read that work competently is also in error. This error underlies most of the criticism of Whitehead, both approbative and destructive.1

The present essay has a single goal: to provide a foundation from which Whitehead’s Process and Reality can be profitably studied or sympathetically approached. Such a venture is possible only with some command of the works that preceded it. Process and Reality did not appear full-blown, without herald. Rather, it represents the culmination of years of philosophical speculation, years scattered with the published landmarks that indicate points along the route of Whitehead’s philosophical thought. To most philosophers an attempt to read Kant’s third Critique without having read its two predecessors would seem ludicrous. To try to read Process and Reality without expending considerable care on Whitehead’s earlier works, of which it is the great expansion and revision, would be fully as difficult.

The study of the early works reveals that Whitehead’s development as a philosopher is a series of successive attempts to deal with the problems raised by his own previous analysis and speculation. Throughout this study two basic strands of Whitehead’s thought will be exposed as sharply as possible. In Process and

Reality these two strands are the trunks from which many diverse branches divide. The resulting modifications are so deftly interwoven that the twofold root of Whitehead’s philosophical view is not at all obvious. In the early works these two elements stand out much more clearly.

For the sake of convenience I shall provide names and tentative definitions for these two strands of thought. I shall call them the realistic strand and the conceptualistic strand. Roughly, the realistic strand is that which insists on the independence from the perceiver of certain elements or aspects of elements that appear in our experience, despite the fact that these elements are related to the perceiver merely in being perceived by him. The conceptualistic strand is that which emphasizes the contributing role played by the perceiver in bringing to experience meaning, interpretation, significance, and classification: in a word, concepts.

The study of the early works not only reveals these two fundamental strands of Whitehead’s thought and thereby gives us valuable assistance in the interpretation of Process and Reality, but also serves us in two other ways. (1) It presents Whitehead’s views in the period of inception, when the scope of his interests was smaller than it was in Process and Reality, and when the presentation of his views was correspondingly less difficult to penetrate. (2) It shows that the treatment of epistemological problems occupied Whitehead’s attention from the time of his first speculations in the philosophy of science.

To be specific, this book has a thesis. The thesis is as follows: Whitehead, by reason of his occupation with mathematical theory, came to be interested in developing systematically the philosophical foundations of the physical sciences. His efforts, especially because he wished to purge science of all idealist or related episte- mologies, exposed a host of problems. Attempted solutions of these problems required him to broaden the scope of his investigations to include much more than the immediate problems of the philosophy of science. Topics expressly declared to be irrelevant to the philosophy of science at the outset of Whitehead⁹s philosophical development later become intimately related to it. More over, accounts of the relation between mind and nature that are rejected in some specific formulation reappear in a new guise, as Whitehead⁹s development continues.

One point about the character of this essay should be made clear, however. This examination of Whitehead’s philosophy is not intended to expedite destructive criticism through exposing contradictory assertions in Whitehead’s writings. The value of such a procedure, were it applied to the mature effort of Process and Reality, would be questionable. It is wholly out of place in an examination of the development of Whitehead’s philosophy. Evaluation perhaps requires such caustic measures, but evaluation is a secondary aim when one is concerned with laying a foundation for the comprehension of a man’s views. Premature evaluation is an anesthetic to comprehension. Critical examination, of course, requires analysis, and the products of analysis are often notions whose mutual incompatibility has been disguised in any one of a number of ways. When there seems to be no way of escaping the discovered incompatibility, the analyst is required to take specific notice of it. But the thesis of this essay includes the theme that the persistent recurrence of the conflict between realism and conceptualism actually fostered and promoted Whitehead⁹s development as a philosopher. As for any final evaluation, it should be made with respect to Process and Reality. Since the present essay is a propaedeutic for the reading of Process and Reality and does not include a detailed analysis of that work itself, anything like a final evaluation of Whitehead’s epistemology is impertinent.2

The advisability of the developmental approach to Whitehead’s work does not rest solely on the value of this method as employed in the study of other philosophers. There is internal warrant in Whitehead’s works themselves for such a procedure. This warrant takes two forms, which will be briefly stated here.

1) There is a steady and continuous shift of interest in White head’s philosophy from the time of his first major philosophical work, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, to the appearance of his last, Modes of Thought. During the two decades bounded by these works (1919—1938), a profound change arose in Whitehead’s thought. The shift is from an attempted isolation of the problems of the philosophy of natural science from those of other fields of philosophical enquiry to an inclusion of these problems in the larger field of cosmology, and finally to a refocusing of attention in the larger field, this time on the notion of value. The shift is of course one of emphasis. The earliest works on natural science recognize the existence of a problem of value, but seek to exclude it from relevance to the field of natural philosophy. Thus, for instance, in The Concept of Nature, Whitehead says, The values of nature are perhaps the key to the metaphysical synthesis of existence. But such a synthesis is exactly what I am not attempting.⁸ With the publication of Science and the Modern World, however, Whitehead has abandoned this resolution; here he says, ‘Value’ is the word I use for the intrinsic reality of an event.*

In shifting the emphasis of his philosophical investigation Whitehead did not, of course, abandon all of the topics that formerly engaged his attention. Several elements in his thought remain relatively constant throughout the expansion of his philosophy. The disillusionment with the ideal of exactness, for instance, is no afterthought. The last words of the Ingersoll Lecture on Immortality (1941) are The exactness [of logic] is a fake.3 But in his treatment of congruence in The Principles of Natural Knowledge, at the very outset of his philosophical speculations, Whitehead had asserted: … complete accuracy is never obtained, and the ideal of accuracy shows that the meaning is not derived from the measurement.4 As further evidence of the persistence of early interests, despite a shift of emphasis, we may note that even Process and Reality contains, as part of its larger synthesis, a further amendment and reorientation of the fourdimensional geometry which plays so important a part in the content of the two early works on natural science.

2) In addition to the continuous shift of interest in Whitehead’s philosophy as evidenced by the character of his works, there is explicit recognition by Whitehead himself that he is fully aware of his development as a philosopher. Of The Principles of Natural Knowledge he says, in the preface, It raises more difficulties than those which it professes to settle.5 But as early as 1924 the preface to the second edition of that work states that Whitehead hopes in the immediate future to embody the standpoint of these volumes in a more complete metaphysical study.6 What does Whitehead mean by a more complete metaphysical study? The answer to this question is found in the preface to Process and Reality, which seems even then, in 1924, to have been distantly envisaged: "At the end, in so far as the enterprise has been successful, there should be no problem of space-time, or of episte- mology, or of causality, left over for discussion."7 Now the primary concern of the two early works on natural science is the topic mentioned first in the above citation, the relationship between the spatiotemporal continuum and the objects and events that are diversifications of it. Necessarily, however, the topic of perception, which can not be excluded from philosophical treatments of space and time, leads on to considerations of epistemology and causality. Such considerations, together with Whitehead’s growing recognition of the importance of a theory of value for the philosophy of nature, characterize the expansion of White head’s thought as it progresses from a philosophy of nature to a full-fledged cosmology.

An examination, therefore, both of what Whitehead says and of what he does seems to warrant the conviction that there is significance to be discovered in the developmental approach to his work. The array of novel ideas and unfamiliar terms, and a complex as well as occasionally confusing method in Process and Reality present a formidable problem for the would-be critic or analyst. The task of dissection and discussion must proceed on some simplified basis, or else it will bog down in endless detail, with a resulting general loss of clarity in the over-all pattern. In my opinion the clearest approach to Whitehead’s work in Process and Reality is by way of the earlier speculation upon which it is founded and of which it is the admitted culmination. The chronological treatment of Whitehead’s philosophy is not to be regarded as a mere history, therefore, but rather as a genuine introduction, a method of approach to a complex problem, beginning with a treatment of the problem in its most elementary form.

For the purposes of this essay Whitehead’s development will be divided (somewhat arbitrarily) into three periods:8

1) The early philosophy of science, 1919—1922

2) The transition, 1925-1927

3) The mature cosmology, 1929-1938

Each of the three periods delineated in the above classification is represented by three core works. They are, respectively, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, The Concept of Nature, and The Principle of Relativity; Science and the Modern World, Religion in the Making, and Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect; Process and Reality, Adventures of Ideas, and Modes of Thought. Our study will be concerned with the first two periods and consequently with the first six named works. It will be divided into three parts. Part I will be devoted to The Principles of Natural Knowledge and The Concept of Nature.

Part II is an appendix to Part I, treating of The Principle of Relativity and of an article written at the same time called Uniformity and Contingency. Part III will be a study of the transitional period including Science and the Modern World, Religion in the Making, and Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect. The division is so arranged because The Principle of Relativity is itself a transitional work (characterized by a rather special vocabulary, for instance) between what I have called the early period and the transitional period.

A word remains to be said about the manner in which this examination of Whitehead is presented.

Whitehead’s own method of presentation is not linear. That is, it is not a set of orderly deductions from first principles, with an exhaustive analysis of each step in the deduction. Nor is it a procedure of confirmations of important hypotheses by the amassing of empirical arguments. It is in some degree a mixture of the two methods, but it is not a mixture that results in any familiar logic of order. As opposed to a linear exposition Whitehead’s exhibition is more radial. Whitehead spotlights the structure of his thinking again and again, each time from a different angle. To read Whitehead is to be taken to a series of elevated lookouts and shown the main outlines of the same vista. There is repetition of topic with successive shifts in emphasis. This is as true of the early works as it is of Modes of Thought. It is also true of Process and Reality, although more semblance of conventional order has been imposed upon that work than upon the others, by reason of the categorial scheme presented in the opening pages. It is, however, in Process and Reality that Whitehead becomes quite explicit about the method of philosophy, which is present in his other works but not accounted for:

Thus the unity of treatment is to be looked for in the gradual development of the scheme, in meaning and in relevance, and not in the successive treatment of particular topics. For example, the doctrines of time, of space, of perception, and of causality are recurred to again and again, as the cosmology develops. In each recurrence, these topics throw some new light on the scheme, or receive some new elucidation.9

The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation. The reason for the success of this method of imaginative rationalization is that, when the method of difference fails, factors which are constantly present may yet be observed under the influence of imaginative thought.10

The main import of these passages is plain. They suggest that the examination of Whitehead’s philosophy must proceed along somewhat similar lines: however we may attempt to exhaust a topic in one section of this study, it must crop up again, if only in a minor capacity, when related topics are considered. And this is indeed true. The reader will notice, however, that throughout the three parts of this essay the system of exposition is the same. Thus, in Part II, the actual order of topics is the same as in Part I; and in Part III, where Whitehead’s attention has expanded into a larger area, the familiar topics of the early period are presented in their new roles with as nearly the same order of treatment as is possible.

1 There are two notable exceptions. One is the long essay by Victor Lowe in the volume devoted to Whitehead in the Library of Living Philosophers series, entitled The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, ed. by P. A. Schilpp (2d ed.; Tudor Publishing Co., 1951). The other is the book entitled Whitehead?s Philosophy of Time, by W. W. Hammerschmidt, published by the King’s Crown Press (1947). These two are superior to other expositions and do take note of the evolutionary expansion of Whitehead’s philosophy. Neither of them, however, employs this fact as a central key to the understanding of Whitehead’s mature philosophy. Hammerschmidt comes nearer to doing so than does Lowe.

2 As a matter of fact, the difficulties that arise in Whitehead’s works before Process and Reality are not, I believe, fully solved in that treatise. But a final judgment on Process and Reality must rest upon a much more exhaustive analysis of it than has been thus far attempted. Such an analysis lies beyond the scope of this exposition*

3 The Concept of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 1920), p. 5. (This will hereafter be cited as CN.)

⁴ Science and the Modern World (The Macmillan Company, 1925), p. 136. (This will hereafter be cited as SMW.)

³ Immortality, The Harvard Divinity School Bulletin, vol. 39, no. 14 (1941-1942), 21.

4 An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (2d ed.; Cambridge

University Press, 1925), p. 56. (This will hereafter be cited as PNK.)

5 PNK, p. viii.

6 PNK, p. ix. It is interesting to notice in this connection a note appended to the second edition, part of which I quote here: The book is dominated by the idea... that the relation of extension has a unique preeminence and that everything can be got out of it. During the development of the theme, it gradually became evident that this is not the case, and cogredience... had to be introduced. But the true doctrine, that ‘process’ is the fundamental idea, was not in my mind with sufficient emphasis. Extension is derivative from process, and is required by it. (P. 202.)

7 Process and Reality (The Macmillan Company, 1929), p. vii; italics mine. (This will hereafter be cited as PR.)

8 It will be seen by those acquainted with the order of appearance of Whitehead’s works that the division excludes certain essays having to do with Whitehead’s philosophy of science. These essays, coming before 1919, exhibit no great systematic scope and would be useful for our purposes only if we were doing an exhaustive history.

9 PR, p. vii.

10 PR, p. 7; italics mine.

PART ONE

The Early Cosmology

the scope of natural philosophy

There are several features of The Principles of Natural Knowledge and The Concept of Nature that bind them together. In fact, the two works, separated in publication from one another by only one year, may safely be regarded as distinct approaches to the same general point of view. They overlap in several respects. Both are concerned with the Method of Extensive Abstraction; the problems of congruence, space, time, and motion; and the distinction between objects and events. In the former work the emphasis is on mathematical formulation and the problems of devising a comprehensive four-dimensional geometry. In the latter the emphasis has shifted considerably in the direction of a theory of perception. But there is no more disparity of viewpoint between the two books than there is between parts of the same book. They may therefore be treated together.

I

One of the more prominent features of these works is that they seek to limit the study of nature to an examination of what is observed. An attempt is made to exclude questions about the knowing mind from relevance to the field of the known insofar as the field of the known is understood to be the theater of nature. The attempt is not persistently maintained. In both books, passages of considerable length and earnestness treat of the relationship of mind to nature in a way indicating their intimacy. It may be said that these passages appear in parts of each book which lie outside the realm of what can strictly be called natural philosophy, and that they are therefore exempt from the charge of violating the prescribed boundaries. This is undoubtedly true, but we shall also see that some of these violations appear precisely when Whitehead is trying to be most scientific.1

Had Whitehead succeeded in the attempt to purge nature of thought, it is unlikely that his philosophy would have matured much beyond the point he reached in the two volumes we are now examining. Fortunately, epistemological problems proved too lively to be hidden from view. They appear even in these early works. At the expense of being untrue to his self-imposed limitations of topic, Whitehead is repeatedly required by the nature of the task he has set for himself, that of outlining the principles of the philosophy of natural science, to make observations primarily concerned with epistemology. Epistemological problems finally become, in Process and Reality, one of the three main topics with which the work is concerned.2 But the foundation of Whitehead’s epistemological views is laid in the early works on natural science, despite his occasional intention to dismiss the problems surrounding the relations between mind and nature.

There ensues a battle between consistency and completeness which extends into the elaborate cosmology of Process and Reality. The initial problems appear in The Principles of Natural Knowledge and The Concept of Nature. Let us turn to them to discover the origins of Whitehead’s maturer views.

II

The field of his interests Whitehead calls the philosophy of natural science. The philosophy of natural science is concerned only with nature, and nature is what is given in sense perception. Whitehead is at some pains to exclude mind and thought as topics for natural science. In The Concept of Nature he says:

Again I will make a further simplification, and confine attention to the natural sciences, that is, to the sciences whose subject-matter is nature. By postulating a common subject- matter for this group of sciences, a unifying philosophy of natural science has been thereby presupposed.

… Natural science is the science of nature. But—What is nature?

Nature is that which we observe in perception through the senses. In this sense-perception we are aware of something which is not thought and which is self-contained for thought. This property… means that nature can be thought of as a closed system whose mutual relations do not require the expression of the fact that they are thought about.³

In The Principles of Natural Knowledge Whitehead says he is concerned only with Nature, that is, with the object of perceptual knowledge. …* By perceptual knowledge Whitehead does not mean merely what is in sensation, for he later says,

This confusion [that which arises from limiting a philosophy to the ultimate datum of material in space and time] cannot be avoided by any kind of theory in which nature is conceived simply as a complex of one kind of inter-related elements such as either persistent things, or events, or sense- data.⁵

³ Pp. 2-3.

⁴ P. vii.

*PNK, p. 15.

It seems equally clear, however, that one is not to look to the perceiver for an explanation of the difference between sensation and perception, for the passage quoted above from the preface to The Principles of Natural Knowledge continues in this fashion:

… and not with the synthesis of the knower with the known. This distinction is exactly that which separates natural philosophy from metaphysics. Accordingly none of our perplexities as to Nature will be solved by having recourse to the consideration that there is a mind knowing it.⁰

Whitehead, as much as any modern physicist, has insisted that the presuppositions of Newtonian mechanics be reexamined and generally overhauled. It is interesting that he accepts one of the keystones of classical physics: the assumption that nature as a system of facts merely awaits investigation by minds whose sole functions are those of observation, analysis, and generalization.

We shall see that Whitehead nevertheless has recourse to a theory of mind which is sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, and that the limits of nature are not the limits of what we observe in perception through the senses.3

Ill

If Whitehead had persisted in the rigid enforcement of the crippling and archaic preconception that problems of knowledge have no place in the study of nature, there is no need to suppose that his services to the advancement of scientific thought would have been at an end. The development of scientific theory has proceeded (though with some difficulty) through the efforts of men who have rejected some but not all of the premises of Newton’s mechanics. It is not likely, however, that Whitehead would have added materially to constructive philosophical thought had he not relaxed the restrictions that he places on the investigation of nature.

No one, save a few professional fanatics, could be displeased if it were possible to exclude problems of epistemology from the field of natural science. Were it possible to do so, the task of the natural scientist, insofar as he concerns himself with fundamental notions, would be appreciably simplified. All attempts at such a simplification, however, have failed; and it is to Whitehead’s credit, rather than his discredit, that he finds it necessary to abandon his bold position. The beginnings of this retreat, as we shall discover, are present even in the two works now under consideration. The retreat is presaged by the admission in the preface to The Principles of Natural Knowledge that the book settles some difficulties but raises more. It should be urged, of course, that if all philosophers were held to the letter of every strong statement employed to illustrate a point of view, philosophy would quickly degenerate into a series of squabbles of the sort that clutter the pages of contemporary periodicals.

In any event we shall remark again that the investigation of what is given in sense-perception is too narrow a field for Whitehead’s natural philosophy. His more forceful assertions about the limitations of his topic are modified again and again. The modifications constitute the origins of Whitehead’s career as a philosopher, for they are produced as concessions to the increasingly philosophical character of the problems he considers in the course of his investigations. They are testimonies to Whitehead’s awakened recognition that the study of natural science has no natural boundaries. Such modifications are so plain that discovery of them can hardly constitute cause for the rejection of his point of view. The point of view includes the modifications.

These modifications must, however, be examined. They show a restless and self-questioning mind at work. They throw light on the development-to-come of more complex and more comprehensive ideas. The investigation of nature as Whitehead conceives it is both narrower than the above citations suggest, and broader. It is narrower in that nature as yielding up the rich sensory data of sounds, colors, and the like, is occasionally pushed into the background, in order to examine nature as exhibiting events qualified and interrelated by spatial and temporal characteristics.

At the same time the scope of Whitehead’s investigations is broader than that of immediate sense-perception examined for its extensional features. These modifications of the above-mentioned limits of the study of natural philosophy fall roughly into four classes: (1) modifications associated with observations on the method of natural philosophy, including remarks about the status of the perceiving mind with respect to nature, the nature of sense- perceptions, and the role of concepts (these topics will be considered in chapter 2); (2) modifications connected with what I have called the Furniture of the Universe, that is, with the doctrine of events and objects (these are discussed in chapters 3, 4, and 5); (3) modifications connected with the construction of an empirical basis for geometrical concepts (these are discussed in chapter 6); and (4) modifications appearing in a group of brief and somewhat disconnected adventures in arriving at a scientific meaning for the concept of cause (these will be considered below in chapter 7).

In fairness to Whitehead it should be noticed that observations discussed in chapter 2 are not, as merely being present in the discussion of natural science, strictly exceptions to the previously defined limits of natural philosophy. They are, rather, observations necessarily outside the subject matter of natural philosophy, serving to make clear the limits of that subject matter. They contain, however, the seeds of disruption of the conventionally defined boundary of natural science. They appear under the guise of remarks about what shall be omitted from the study of nature. But they entail observations that eventually admit the significance of mind and thought in the structure of natural science.

We turn to the general topic of perception.

1 See, for instance, CNt chap. vi, where Objects which are not posited by sense- awareness may be known to the intellect. (P. 125.)

2 P. vii.

3 P. vii.

¹³ For instance, consider the full context of an already cited passage: Objects which are not posited by sense-awareness may be known to the intellect. For example, relations between objects and relations between relations may be factors in nature not disclosed in sense-awareness but known by logical inference as necessarily in being. Thus objects for our knowledge may be merely logical abstractions. (CN, pp. 125—126.)

perception: the relation between mind and nature

This chapter deals with the foundations of Whitehead’s early theory of perception. The theory will be dealt with from two points of view: from the side of sense-perception and sense- awareness, and from the side of the percipient event. These two sides are, of course, aspects of the same theory of perception and are not wholly separable.

In sections i and ii we shall deal with Whitehead’s treatment of perception in terms of sense-perception and sense-awareness. In the course of developing a critical summary of Whitehead’s views we shall examine four possible meanings of Whitehead’s assertion that nature is closed to mind. We shall attempt to discern , as well, how much relevance thought and a theory of thought have for the subject of natural knowledge.

In sections iii and iv we shall treat Whitehead’s early episte- mology as he develops it in terms of the percipient event. The discussion of the meaning of the statement that nature is closed to mind will be continued, and it will be seen that none of the suggested interpretations of that statement is wholly consistent with other assertions made by Whitehead.

Throughout the four sections we shall consider various statements about nature. We shall see that this term has three meanings which Whitehead uses interchangeably. The ambiguity of the word nature as Whitehead uses it is one feature of the basic ambiguity in his treatment of the relation between mind and nature.

It should be clearly understood that the discovery of apparent inconsistencies in what Whitehead says is not an attempt to reject the whole of his early epistemology. Such action would be both unfair and premature. It