An enquiry concerning the principles of natural knowledge

by Alfred North Whitehead

The other type of answer was first given by Kant. We must distinguish between the general way he set about constructing his answer to Hume, and the details of his system which in many respects are highly disputable. The essential point of his method is the assumption that 'significance' is an essential element in concrete experience. The Berkeleyan dilemma starts with tacitly ignoring this aspect of experience, and thus with putting forward, as expressing experience, conceptions of it which have no relevance to fact. In the light of Kant's procedure, Johnson's answer falls into its place; it is the assertion that Berkeley has not correctly expounded what experience in fact is.

Berkeley himself insists that experience is significant, indeed three-quarters of his writings are devoted to enforcing this position. But Kant's position is the converse of Berkeley's, namely that significance is experience. Berkeley first analyses experience, and then expounds his view of its significance, namely that it is God conversing with us. For Berkeley the significance is detachable from the experience. It is here that Hume came in. He accepted Berkeley's assumption that experience is something given, an impression, without essential reference to significance, and exhibited it in its bare insignificance. Berkeley's conversation with God then becomes a fairy tale.

3.5 What is 'significance'? Evidently this is a fundamental question for the philosophy of natural knowledge, which cannot move a step until it has made up its mind as to what is meant by this 'significance' which is experience.

'Significance' is the relatedness of things. To say that significance is experience, is to affirm that perceptual knowledge is nothing else than an apprehension of the relatedness of things, namely of things in their relations and as related. Certainly if we commence with a knowledge of things, and then look around for their relations we shall not find them. 'Causal connection' is merely one typical instance of the universal ruin of relatedness. But then we are quite mistaken in thinking that there is a possible knowledge of things as unrelated. It is thus out of the question to start with a knowledge of things antecedent to a knowledge of their relations. The so-called properties of things can always be expressed as their relatedness to other things unspecified, and natural knowledge is exclusively concerned with relatedness.

3.6 The relatedness which is the subject of natural knowledge cannot be understood without reference to the general characteristics of perception. Our perception of natural events and natural objects is a perception from within nature, and is not an awareness contemplating all nature impartially from without. When Dr Johnson 'surveyed mankind from China to Peru,' he did it from Pump Court in London at a certain date. Even Pump Court was too wide for his peculiar locus standi; he was really merely conscious of the relations of his bodily events to the simultaneous events throughout the rest of the universe. Thus perception involves a percipient object, a percipient event, the complete event which is all nature simultaneous with the percipient event, and the particular events which are perceived as parts of the complete event. This general analysis of perception will be elaborated in [Part II]. The point here to be emphasised is that natural knowledge is a knowledge from within nature, a knowledge 'here within nature' and 'now within nature,' and is an awareness of the natural relations of one element in nature (namely, the percipient event) to the rest of nature. Also what is known is not barely the things but the relations of things, and not the relations in the abstract but specifically those things as related.

Thus Alciphron's vision of the planet is his perception of his relatedness (i.e. the relatedness of his percipient event) to some other elements of nature which as thus related he calls the planet. He admits in the dialogue that certain other specified relations of those elements are possible for other percipient events. In this he may be right or wrong. What he directly knows is his relation to some other elements of the universe namely, I, Alciphron, am located in my percipient event 'here and now' and the immediately perceived appearance of the planet is for me a characteristic of another event 'there and now.' In fact perceptual knowledge is always a knowledge of the relationship of the percipient event to something else in nature. This doctrine is in entire agreement with Dr Johnson's stamp of the foot by which he realised the otherness of the paving-stone.

3.7 The conception of knowledge as passive contemplation is too inadequate to meet the facts. Nature is ever originating its own development, and the sense of action is the direct knowledge of the percipient event as having its very being in the formation of its natural relations. Knowledge issues from this reciprocal insistence between this event and the rest of nature, namely relations are perceived in the making and because of the making. For this reason perception is always at the utmost point of creation. We cannot put ourselves back to the Crusades and know their events while they were happening. We essentially perceive our relations with nature because they are in the making. The sense of action is that essential factor in natural knowledge which exhibits it as a self-knowledge enjoyed by an element of nature respecting its active relations with the whole of nature in its various aspects. Natural knowledge is merely the other side of action. The forward moving time exhibits this characteristic of experience, that it is essentially action. This passage of nature—or, in other words, its creative advance—is its fundamental characteristic; the traditional concept is an attempt to catch nature without its passage.

3.8 Thus science leads to an entirely incoherent philosophy of perception in so far as it restricts itself to the ultimate datum of material in time and space, the spatio-temporal configuration of such material being the object of perception. This conclusion is no news to philosophy, but it has not led to any explicit reorganisation of the concepts actually employed in science. Implicitly, scientific theory is shot through and through with notions which are frankly inconsistent with its explicit fundamental data.

This confusion 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. A more elaborate view is required of which an explanation will be attempted in the sequel. It will suffice here to say that it issues in the assertion that all nature can (in many diverse ways) be analysed as a complex of things; thus all nature can be analysed as a complex of events, and all nature can be analysed as a complex of sense-data. The elements which result from such analyses, events, and sense-data, are aspects of nature of fundamentally different types, and the confusions of scientific theory have arisen from the absence of any clear recognition of the distinction between relations proper to one type of element and relations proper to another type of element. It is of course a commonplace that elements of these types are fundamentally different. What is here to be insisted on is the way in which this commonplace truth is important in yielding an analysis of the ultimate data for science more elaborate than that of its current tradition. We have to remember that while nature is complex with time-less subtlety, human thought issues from the simple-mindedness of beings whose active life is less than half a century.

[2]Alciphron, The Fourth Dialogue, Section 10.