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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Science and the Modern World," Alfred North Whitehead presents a profound exploration of the relationship between scientific developments and the philosophical implications that arise within contemporary society. Through a masterful combination of analytic rigor and poetic nuance, Whitehead critiques the mechanistic worldview that has dominated scientific thought since the Enlightenment. He argues for a more organic understanding of reality, intertwining the scientific and metaphysical realms, thereby reshaping our comprehension of the universe and humanity's place within it. This work positions itself within the broader literary context of early 20th-century philosophical inquiry, responding to the emerging challenges of modernity and the consequences of rapid scientific advancement. Alfred North Whitehead was a mathematician and philosopher whose thought evolved significantly over his lifetime, reflecting his engagement with the intellectual currents of his era. His transition from a focus on mathematics to a broader philosophical inquiry illustrates his keen awareness of the limitations of purely mechanistic perspectives. Whitehead's experiences at Cambridge, coupled with his collaborative work in both the sciences and liberal arts, profoundly influenced the writing of this text, aiming to reconcile scientific thought with a more holistic worldview. Readers seeking to navigate the complexities of modernity through the lens of philosophy will find "Science and the Modern World" an indispensable text. Whitehead's innovative ideas challenge entrenched notions of science and offer a fresh perspective on how we understand existence in an ever-evolving world. This book is essential for those interested in the interconnections between science, philosophy, and the human experience. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Science and the modern world
Table of Contents
Introduction
Modern civilization sails on a sea of scientific triumphs while wondering what compass can still guide its meaning. Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World confronts that tension with a lucid historical and philosophical inquiry into how scientific ideas reshaped culture, thought, and everyday life. It invites readers to consider not only what science discovers but also what its methods overlook. With patient analysis and sweeping reach, the book asks how a society built upon abstraction can recover a vision of experience that includes value, purpose, and creativity. The result is a work that probes both the promise and the costs of modernity.
This book is a classic because it crystallizes a turning point in intellectual history and remains a touchstone for debates about science and culture. Its endurance stems from the clarity with which it narrates the rise of modern science and the courage with which it challenges reductionist assumptions. Whitehead’s prose, disciplined yet imaginative, helped define a tradition of reflective writing that bridges philosophy, history, and cultural criticism. Generations of scholars have returned to it for its panoramic narrative and its carefully reasoned proposals. As a landmark statement of process thought, it shaped conversations that extended well beyond academic philosophy.
Alfred North Whitehead, a mathematician and philosopher best known for coauthoring Principia Mathematica and later pioneering process philosophy, wrote Science and the Modern World from the vantage of a career spanning logic, physics, and metaphysics. The book originated in the Lowell Lectures he delivered in 1925, at a time when relativity and emerging quantum theory were transforming the scientific landscape. Published that same year, it distilled his concerns about the cultural effects of scientific abstraction. Whitehead, then teaching in the United States, sought an audience wider than specialists, writing for readers who sensed both the exhilaration and disorientation of scientific modernity.
The content of the book combines intellectual history with philosophical critique. Whitehead traces the development of scientific ideas from classical and medieval sources through the breakthroughs of the seventeenth century and onward. He highlights how methods devised for precision and prediction gave extraordinary power to modern societies, while also encouraging habits of thought that bracketed experience, value, and purpose. Rather than reject science, he reconstructs its place within a broader view of reality. The chapters interweave case studies, conceptual analysis, and cultural reflection, showing how scientific achievements both depended on and transformed the imaginative frameworks of their age.
Whitehead’s purpose is to renew a vision of science that honors the fullness of experience without sacrificing rigor. He challenges the mechanistic worldview that reduces nature to inert matter and treats perception, value, and creativity as secondary. In its place, he sketches an organic philosophy in which relationships, processes, and qualities matter as much as quantities. The goal is not to undermine scientific practice but to clarify its abstractions and re-situate them within a richer account of reality. By doing so, he offers a way to reconcile technical success with humane understanding, encouraging dialogue across disciplines and traditions.
Formally, the book proceeds with a historian’s respect for context and a philosopher’s eye for first principles. Whitehead excavates the conceptual moves that made modern science possible, then tests their limits. He pays careful attention to how metaphors, models, and methodological choices shape what we consider real. The style is contemplative and exacting, favoring arguments built from concrete examples and gradual distinctions. Readers encounter not a system imposed from on high, but a patient reconstruction of ideas as they emerge from practice. Throughout, Whitehead invites critical engagement rather than dogmatic assent, modeling the intellectual virtues he commends.
Its influence has been wide and durable. Science and the Modern World helped establish the foundations of process philosophy, informing later developments in process theology and environmental thought. It has been engaged by philosophers of science and historians seeking to understand how scientific concepts inhabit culture. Contemporary thinkers such as Isabelle Stengers have revisited Whitehead to rethink scientific practice, while scholars across fields continue to mine his account of abstraction and experience. The book’s interdisciplinary reach also made it a resource for social theory and cultural studies, where questions about modernity’s gains and losses remain urgent.
One of the book’s enduring contributions is its analysis of abstraction: the recognition that the very tools enabling scientific mastery can conceal aspects of reality that matter for human life. Whitehead argues that modern knowledge must be self-aware about its methods, lest it mistake its simplified models for the world itself. He emphasizes the role of imagination and aesthetics in discovery, challenging the notion that science proceeds by calculation alone. This sensitivity to method and meaning helps readers think about how facts relate to values, and how the sciences and the humanities might cooperate rather than compete.
For contemporary readers living amid data-driven decision-making and accelerating technologies, Whitehead’s themes feel freshly pertinent. Questions about the place of ethics in research, the cultural effects of innovation, and the ecological consequences of industrial power echo throughout the text. The book offers intellectual resources for navigating these issues without nostalgia or technophobia. It encourages a balanced posture: admiration for scientific achievement, coupled with vigilance about the limits of abstraction. In public debates about expertise, policy, and education, Whitehead’s insistence on integrating knowledge with lived experience remains a valuable compass.
Although written for general readers, the book presumes curiosity and patience. Its arguments unfold cumulatively, beginning with historical sketches and advancing to more speculative proposals. Those new to philosophy will find the narrative of scientific development a helpful guide, while seasoned readers can engage the subtleties of its metaphysical suggestions. The prose rewards careful attention, especially where Whitehead delineates how concepts function within practice. Footnotes are few; examples carry the weight of exposition. The overarching invitation is clear: to think with science rather than against it, while refusing to let any single method monopolize reality.
Situated in the ferment of the early twentieth century, the book converses with the upheavals of its time: the reconfiguration of space and time by relativity, the probabilistic turn in physics, and the reassessment of cultural certainties after industrial and political transformations. Whitehead’s response was neither reactionary nor credulous. He sought a philosophical stance that could accommodate novelty without surrendering coherence. In this, the book occupies a notable place in modern letters, exemplifying a mode of writing that treats scientific revolutions as occasions for renewed reflection on art, ethics, religion, and social life—domains often thought to lie beyond the lab bench.
Science and the Modern World endures because it offers both diagnosis and possibility. It names the habits of thought that narrowed modern experience and proposes a more generous framework in which science, value, and creativity can coexist. Readers come away with a deepened sense of the stakes of method, a respect for the history of ideas, and a hope that knowledge can be integrated without being uniform. Its central themes—process, relation, imagination, and responsibility—remain vital. As a guide to thinking clearly within complexity, Whitehead’s classic continues to challenge, steady, and inspire the modern mind.
Synopsis
Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World, drawn from his 1925 Lowell Lectures, surveys how modern science arose and how it reshaped thought, culture, and institutions. The book combines historical narrative with philosophical analysis to examine science’s methods, its conceptual foundations, and its wider consequences. Whitehead’s guiding aim is to reconnect specialized discoveries with general ideas that can orient a civilization. He presents science both as a source of intellectual power and as a set of abstractions requiring careful interpretation. The opening establishes the need for a coherent cosmology capable of including scientific knowledge, human experience, and the values that animate social life.
He begins with a historical sketch of Western conceptions of nature, from Greek and medieval thought through the Scientific Revolution. The rise of exact measurement and mathematical law in the work of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton produced a powerful mechanistic image of the universe. This view emphasized matter in motion and privileged primary qualities like extension and mass, while relegating color, sound, and value to the mind. The bifurcation of nature, alongside dualisms of mind and body, organized inquiry but also narrowed what counted as real. Whitehead traces how this framework amplified scientific success and set the agenda for modern philosophy.
Whitehead then analyzes scientific method as a practice of abstraction. Observation is organized by concepts, and mathematics functions as a language for expressing general relations. He introduces the idea of symbolic generalization to describe how formulas and diagrams extend perception and coordinate experiments. At the same time, he stresses limits: abstractions are useful selections, not the full concrete world. The "fallacy of misplaced concreteness," his central caution, names the error of treating these abstractions as if they were the actualities of experience. Science, he argues, advances by precise simplification, but philosophy must remember the neglected factors that simplification omits.
From this vantage, the mechanistic materialism dominant since the seventeenth century is examined and found conceptually incomplete. The primary–secondary quality split divorces experience from nature, leaving value, purpose, and life outside physical description. Whitehead proposes that a credible cosmology must include perception, feeling, and causal efficacy as elements in nature rather than as extraneous additions. He reframes nature in terms of events and relations rather than self-sufficient bits of matter, challenging the assumption of substances enduring unchanged. The critique is presented not as a rejection of science, but as a call to revise its underlying metaphysics to match its practice.
Contemporary physics supplies decisive motivation for revision. Relativity fuses space and time into a single structure, replaces absolute measures with relational frameworks, and treats energy and geometry as intertwined. Quantum theory introduces discontinuities, limits to prediction, and a role for probability and measurement contexts. These developments erode the image of inert particles moving in empty space and suggest a world of fields, processes, and interdependent events. Whitehead interprets these shifts as invitations to reconceive causation and substance, aligning scientific theory with an ontology of becoming. The modern picture, he argues, supports an emphasis on pattern, process, and relational order.
Alongside scientific change, he considers the Romantic reaction in literature and philosophy as a counterweight to mechanistic reduction. Figures such as Wordsworth and Shelley valued immediate experience, beauty, and the felt qualities of nature. Their protest, in Whitehead’s account, highlights aspects of reality omitted by the classical scheme: purpose, emotion, and the depth of perception. He treats this movement not as anti-scientific, but as an effort to reinstate significance and imagination. The book advocates a settlement in which exact analysis and aesthetic appreciation cooperate, allowing the precision of science to coexist with the richness that gives human life meaning.
To articulate such a settlement, Whitehead sketches a philosophy of organism, or organic realism. Nature is conceived as a web of interrelated occasions, where entities arise through their relations and inherit patterns from their environments. Causation conveys forms of order, and value is an ingredient in experience rather than an external commentary. He cautiously introduces a theistic element to secure both order and novelty, proposing that a complete cosmology must account for stability, change, and the emergence of new forms. This scheme aims to include scientific law, biological life, and human consciousness within a unified, non-reductive vision of reality.
The cultural consequences of science receive sustained attention. Whitehead analyzes how industrial technology, specialized research, and bureaucratic systems reshape work, education, and governance. He warns that unchecked specialization can drain a civilization of general ideas and vision. Universities, in his view, should cultivate disciplined imagination, balancing technical competence with breadth and humane purpose. Scientific habits—experimentation, clarity, and respect for evidence—are praised as civic virtues, yet they must be joined to sensitivity to value. The discussion outlines a model of progress in which knowledge serves life, and institutions nurture adventure without sacrificing coherence or ethical responsibility.
The book concludes by advocating speculative philosophy as a necessary companion to science. Speculation, responsibly constrained by evidence and coherence, seeks a rational scheme spacious enough for facts and meanings. Whitehead’s overall message is that modernity requires a revised cosmology: one that honors scientific achievement while rejecting the abstractions that exile experience and value from nature. By emphasizing process, relation, and organism, he proposes a framework for integrating physics, biology, art, and religion. The closing chapters invite continued inquiry rather than final doctrine, presenting science as part of the broader adventure of ideas shaping a humane modern world.
Historical Context
Science and the Modern World was published in 1925, drawn from Alfred North Whitehead’s Lowell Lectures delivered in Boston that year. The setting is the immediate post–World War I era, with Whitehead newly arrived at Harvard after a long career in British academia. The interwar period was marked by rapid technological change, social dislocation, and a crisis of intellectual certainties triggered by new physics. Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, provided a transatlantic crossroads: a wealthy, industrial United States funding research and higher education, and European traditions of philosophy and science migrating with scholars. Whitehead writes amid institutional expansion, moral unease, and accelerating scientific specialization.
The book’s time and place also reflect an atmosphere of profound methodological reevaluation. Einstein’s relativity and emerging quantum theory had unsettled classical mechanics, while industrial America showcased the power and dangers of applied science—from assembly lines to electrification. Whitehead, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and seasoned in the University of London’s applied mathematics milieu, encountered in Harvard a public discourse eager for synthesis. He addressed an audience shaped by war losses, mass media, and corporate laboratories, asking how science’s concepts relate to lived experience and values. The United States of the 1920s thus provided both the resources and the urgency for his philosophical reconstruction of modernity.
The Scientific Revolution (c. 1550–1700) recast European knowledge through experimentation and mathematization. Figures such as Francis Bacon (1561–1626) advocated empirical method, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) linked mathematics to natural laws, René Descartes (1596–1650) advanced a mechanistic dualism, and the Royal Society was founded in London in 1660 to institutionalize experimental philosophy. This period displaced Aristotelian physics and theological cosmologies, laying the groundwork for a cosmos conceived as matter in motion under law. Whitehead explicitly interprets modern thought as the outcome of this revolution and critiques the inherited bifurcation of nature it bequeathed: the split between objective fact and subjective value embedded in mechanistic ideology.
Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (London, 1687) synthesized celestial and terrestrial physics under universal gravitation, supported by calculus and precise measurement. The Newtonian framework, disseminated across the 18th century, fostered determinism, predictability, and a clockwork view of the universe, shaping statecraft, engineering, and Enlightenment confidence in reason. The success of Newtonian mechanics in navigation, artillery, and industrial mechanics elevated mathematics as the language of nature and set expectations for science’s scope. Whitehead treats this Newtonian inheritance as both an intellectual triumph and a metaphysical temptation, arguing that the materialistic world-picture it inspired obscures process, qualities, and organismic relations central to experience.
Relativity revolutionized physics and public imagination. In 1905 Albert Einstein’s special relativity recast space and time via Lorentz transformations; in 1915 general relativity described gravity as spacetime curvature. The 1919 Principe and Sobral eclipse expeditions, coordinated by Arthur Eddington, confirmed light deflection predicted by the theory, catapulting Einstein to global fame and challenging Newtonian absolutes. Relativity’s success depended on precise instruments, international collaboration, and wartime-bridging scientific diplomacy. Whitehead engaged these debates directly—publishing The Principle of Relativity in 1922—and in Science and the Modern World he treats relativity as a paradigm of conceptual revision, showing how frameworks, not just facts, shape the intelligibility of nature.
Quantum theory unsettled causality and substance. Max Planck’s 1900 blackbody quantization, Einstein’s 1905 light quanta, Niels Bohr’s 1913 atomic model, and the quantum revolution of 1925–1926—Werner Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics, Erwin Schrödinger’s wave mechanics, and Max Born’s probabilistic interpretation—established discontinuity and indeterminacy at micro scales. The 1927 uncertainty principle and early Solvay Conferences (Brussels, from 1911) forged a new physics that challenged classical visualization. Empirically anchored yet conceptually radical, quantum theory demanded rethinking measurement, observation, and reality. Whitehead uses this moment to argue for an ontology of process and relations, rejecting naive materialism and the bifurcation that separates experienced qualities from scientific abstractions.
The Industrial Revolution transformed production, labor, and social life from the late 18th to 19th centuries. James Watt’s improvements to the steam engine (patents 1769; separate condenser; rotary motion 1781), mechanized textile mills in Lancashire, ironworks in the Midlands, and the spread of railways (Stockton and Darlington Railway, 1825) reorganized time, work, and urbanization. Britain’s industrial model radiated to Europe and North America, fueling global trade and empire. Techniques of mass production, standardization, and machine-mediated power made science economically central. Whitehead reads this transformation as the practical triumph of scientific ideas, yet warns that technique without philosophical reflection generates a civilization rich in power but poor in wisdom.
World War I (1914–1918) exposed the catastrophic potential of scientific-technical modernity. Mechanized warfare—artillery barrages on the Somme (1916), attrition at Verdun (1916), tanks introduced in 1916, chemical weapons at Ypres (1915)—and aerial bombing brought industrial death to mass armies and civilians. Over 16 million died; empires fell (Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, German). Whitehead, living in London during Zeppelin and Gotha raids, witnessed the war’s toll and the wartime mobilization of laboratories and engineering. Science and the Modern World speaks from this aftermath, interrogating the notion of progress and insisting that scientific advance without a corresponding moral and metaphysical renewal threatens social order and humane values.
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (London, 1859) reframed biology through natural selection, supported by biogeography and paleontology. Darwinism reshaped debates on human nature, religion, and society, spawning controversies from the 1860 Oxford debate (Huxley versus Wilberforce) to late 19th-century evolutionary ethics. The integration of heredity advanced with Mendel’s rediscovery (c. 1900). Evolutionary theory influenced industrial-era ideologies and social policy. Whitehead positions biology as a crucial corrective to mechanistic reductionism, emphasizing organisms, adaptation, and continuity of life. He appropriates evolutionary insights into a philosophy of process, while warning against crude social extrapolations that mistake scientific description for moral justification.
The professionalization of science in the 19th and early 20th centuries created laboratory-centered research cultures. The Humboldtian university model (Berlin, 1810) fused teaching and research; specialized institutes proliferated, including the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge (founded 1874) and the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in Germany (1911). Professional societies, journals, and peer review standardized methods and training. Industrial laboratories—General Electric in Schenectady, Bell Labs (founded 1925)—linked science to corporate strategy. Whitehead, moving from Cambridge to London and then Harvard, experienced this specialization firsthand. His book engages the promise of institutional science while cautioning that narrow expertise can obscure the broader conceptual and cultural bearings of knowledge.
Electromagnetism and communication reshaped modern life. James Clerk Maxwell’s equations (1860s) unified electricity and magnetism, predicting electromagnetic waves confirmed by Heinrich Hertz (1887). Telegraphy (Morse, 1844), telephony (Bell, 1876), and wireless radio (Marconi, demonstrations in 1895–1901) compressed time and space for commerce, news, and warfare. Electrical grids illuminated cities, altered work rhythms, and underwrote industrial productivity. Whitehead treats such achievements as evidence that abstract mathematics can disclose nature’s deep structures, yet he uses them to demonstrate abstraction’s selectivity: conceptual models illuminate certain relations and eclipse others, demanding a philosophical critique of what is omitted when power and efficiency dominate aims.
Urbanization and public health reforms reveal science’s social entanglements. Nineteenth-century cities faced cholera outbreaks; John Snow’s 1854 Broad Street pump investigation in London pioneered epidemiological method, while sanitary reforms under Edwin Chadwick reshaped infrastructure. Bacteriology (Pasteur, Koch) transformed medicine; vaccination campaigns and water purification reduced mortality. These developments paralleled zoning, housing reforms, and municipal engineering. Whitehead highlights how science modifies the texture of daily life and civic order, arguing that knowledge is not neutral but civic in consequence. He presses for a conception of science that integrates human values, lest technical control of environments outpace ethical reflection on communal well-being.
The American landscape of philanthropy and public lectures framed Whitehead’s 1925 Boston audience. The Lowell Institute (founded 1839) sponsored free public lectures drawing scholars and laypeople; foundations such as the Carnegie Institution (1902) and Rockefeller Foundation (1913) financed laboratories and universities. Harvard’s expansion in the 1910s–1920s epitomized U.S. investment in research. This environment rewarded synthetic accounts bridging disciplines for an educated public. Science and the Modern World, crafted for the Lowell Lectures, thus speaks to civic-minded patrons and institutions, modeling how philosophical interpretation can guide scientific education and policy. The venue shaped Whitehead’s emphasis on intelligibility across specialized domains.
International scientific cooperation persisted despite nationalist ruptures. The Solvay Conferences in Brussels (since 1911) convened leading physicists—Einstein, Planck, Bohr, Curie—to debate quantum theory. After 1918, the League of Nations’ International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (1922) worked to rebuild scholarly ties. Eddington’s 1919 eclipse expedition symbolized reconciliation between British and German science. Such gatherings illustrated science’s cosmopolitan ethos and the dependence of discovery on transnational networks. Whitehead invokes this internationalism to argue that science is a communal enterprise of conceptual revision, not a fixed creed, and that social arrangements—peace, communication, institutions—condition the very possibility of rational inquiry.
Mass production and consumer culture altered social relations in the early 20th century. Henry Ford’s moving assembly line (1913) exemplified standardized labor; radio broadcasting in the 1920s created national audiences; cinema industrialized entertainment. Advertising and credit systems expanded consumption, while labor unrest and managerial science (Taylorism) optimized work at human cost. These dynamics revealed technology’s capacity to reorganize perception, attention, and desire. Whitehead interprets such changes as symptoms of a civilization dominated by abstracted measures of efficiency. He urges that science be situated within a richer metaphysics of value and purpose, lest technique eclipse the qualitative dimensions of experience and community.
As social critique, the book challenges the bifurcation of nature that underwrites technocratic governance and moral indifference. Whitehead argues that modern institutions treat measurable quantities as reality and sideline qualities—value, purpose, experience—as subjective. This epistemic split legitimizes policies that prioritize productivity over human flourishing, from factory regimens to educational systems that fragment learning. By demonstrating how scientific concepts are abstractions from processual reality, he exposes the political danger of mistaking models for the whole. His analysis calls for institutions that integrate scientific rigor with ethical deliberation, resisting the reduction of citizens to variables in administrative calculus.
Politically, Whitehead critiques the complacent equation of scientific progress with social progress, sharpened by World War I’s mechanized slaughter. He indicts the civilization of means without ends, in which industrial power amplifies inequalities and concentrates control. He advocates a reconstruction of education to counter class stratification by cultivating imagination and breadth alongside technique. By foregrounding interdependence and process, he challenges possessive individualism and market absolutism that exploit scientific power without responsibility. Science and the Modern World thus functions as a normative intervention: it demands that democratic societies subject their technical achievements to public reason grounded in a comprehensive philosophy of life.
Author Biography
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) was a British mathematician, logician, and philosopher whose career spanned the late Victorian era through the mid-twentieth century. Renowned first for rigorous work on the foundations of mathematics, he later became a leading voice in the philosophy of nature and metaphysics, proposing an influential philosophy of organism. His collaboration with Bertrand Russell on Principia Mathematica helped shape modern logic, while his mature writings sought to integrate scientific developments with a comprehensive account of experience, value, and process. Moving between academic cultures in Britain and the United States, Whitehead left a distinctive legacy across mathematics, philosophy, education, and public intellectual life.
Whitehead was educated in Britain, attending Sherborne School before studying mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became a fellow and taught for many years. The demanding Cambridge mathematical tradition formed his early outlook, as did the emergence of symbolic logic and new algebraic methods circulating in Britain and on the Continent. He read widely in physics and philosophy, absorbing classical mechanics and following debates that would eventually surround relativity. At Cambridge he taught and collaborated within a community that included younger scholars such as Bertrand Russell. This environment cultivated his distinctive combination of technical rigor, historical awareness, and philosophical ambition.
His early publications established him as a significant mathematician. A Treatise on Universal Algebra set out an ambitious program in 1898, and The Axioms of Projective Geometry followed in the next decade. He also wrote An Introduction to Mathematics, a lucid exposition intended for general readers. The culmination of his foundational phase was Principia Mathematica, coauthored with Russell and issued in several volumes in the 1910s, aiming to derive mathematics from logical principles. The project became a touchstone for twentieth-century logic. While later results in logic exposed limits to such formal programs, the depth and precision of Principia decisively shaped subsequent mathematical logic.
After leaving Cambridge, Whitehead worked within the University of London, teaching at constituent colleges and taking active roles in academic administration and educational reform. During this period he turned decisively toward the philosophy of nature and the interpretation of contemporary science. An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, The Concept of Nature, and The Principle of Relativity outlined a unified approach to space, time, and causation, engaging the implications of modern physics while criticizing the bifurcation of nature. These books marked a transition from technical mathematics to a broader philosophical project that sought to reconceive experience as continuous with the natural world.
Invited to the United States, Whitehead joined Harvard University, where he developed the metaphysical system often called the philosophy of organism. Science and the Modern World and Religion in the Making framed his aims and methods. His Gifford Lectures became Process and Reality, an ambitious synthesis proposing that reality is constituted by interrelated processes rather than enduring substances. He elaborated cultural and historical themes in Adventures of Ideas, addressed meaning and reference in Symbolism, and continued educational reflections collected in The Aims of Education and Other Essays. Modes of Thought gathered late essays, extending his effort to connect scientific insight with humane understanding.
Whitehead’s mature philosophy argued that creativity, relation, and value are basic features of the world, and that scientific abstraction should be integrated with the textures of lived experience. He criticized the transmission of inert ideas in schooling, urging education that cultivates imagination and discipline together. Philosophically, he drew on and responded to pragmatism and empiricism, especially the work of William James, while engaging developments in physics. Reception was mixed: admirers valued the scope and originality of his system, whereas critics in more austere analytic currents questioned its speculative character. Nonetheless, his ideas influenced philosophy of science, metaphysics, theology, and educational thought.
Whitehead retired from teaching in the late 1930s and remained in the United States, continuing to write and correspond. He died in 1947, leaving a body of work that continues to invite interdisciplinary study. Principia Mathematica remains a landmark in logic, and his process philosophy has inspired ongoing schools of thought, including developments in religious philosophy often termed process theology. Scholars read him today as a thinker who sought continuity between scientific discovery and human value, offering tools for reimagining metaphysics, ecological understanding, and cultural critique. His legacy endures through sustained debate, reinterpretation, and practical application.
Science and the modern world
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.
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[1] may be chosen as representative figures: they typify the new cosmology and the scientific emphasis on direct observation. Giordano Bruno[2] 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[3], 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.
