Science and the modern world

by Alfred North Whitehead

The doctrine of energy has to do with the notion of quantitative permanence underlying change. The doctrine of evolution has to do with the emergence of novel organisms as the outcome of change. The theory of energy lies in the province of physics. The theory of evolution lies mainly in the province of biology, although it had previously been touched upon by Kant and Laplace in connection with the formation of suns and planets.

The convergent effect of the new power for scientific advance, which resulted from these four ideas, transformed the middle period of the century into an orgy of scientific triumph. Clear-sighted men, of the sort who are so clearly wrong, now proclaimed that the secrets of the physical universe were finally disclosed. If only you ignored everything which refused to come into line, your powers of explanation were unlimited. On the other side, muddle-headed men muddled themselves into the most indefensible positions. Learned dogmatism, conjoined with ignorance of the crucial facts, suffered a heavy defeat from the scientific advocates of new ways. Thus to the excitement derived from technological revolution, there was now added the excitement arising from the vistas disclosed by scientific theory. Both the material and the spiritual bases of social life were in process of transformation. When the century entered upon its last quarter, its three sources of inspiration, the romantic, the technological, and the scientific had done their work.

Then, almost suddenly, a pause occurred; and in its last twenty years the century closed with one of the dullest stages of thought since the time of the First Crusade. It was an echo of the eighteenth century, lacking Voltaire and the reckless grace of the French aristocrats. The period was efficient, dull, and half-hearted. It celebrated the triumph of the professional man.

But looking backwards upon this time of pause, we can now discern signs of change. In the first place, the modern conditions of systematic research prevent absolute stagnation. In every branch of science, there was effective progress, indeed rapid progress, although it was confined somewhat strictly within the accepted ideas of each branch. It was an age of successful scientific orthodoxy, undisturbed by much thought beyond the conventions.

In the second place, we can now see that the adequacy of scientific materialism as a scheme of thought for the use of science was endangered. The conservation of energy provided a new type of quantitative permanence. It is true that energy could be construed as something subsidiary to matter. But, anyhow, the notion of mass was losing its unique preeminence as being the one final permanent quantity. Later on, we find the relations of mass and energy inverted; so that mass now becomes the name for a quantity of energy considered in relation to some of its dynamical effects. This train of thought leads to the notion of energy being fundamental, thus displacing matter from that position. But energy is merely the name for the quantitative aspect of a structure of happenings; in short, it depends on the notion of the functioning of an organism. The question is, can we define an organism without recurrence to the concept of matter in simple location? We must, later on, consider this point in more detail.

The same relegation of matter to the background occurs in connection with the electromagnetic fields. The modern theory presupposes happenings in that field which are divorced from immediate dependence upon matter. It is usual to provide an ether as a substratum. But the ether does not really enter into the theory. Thus again the notion of material loses its fundamental position. Also, the atom is transforming itself into an organism; and finally the evolution theory is nothing else than the analysis of the conditions for the formation and survival of various types of organisms. In truth, one most significant fact of this later period is the advance in biological sciences. These sciences are essentially sciences concerning organisms. During the epoch in question, and indeed also at the present moment, the prestige of the more perfect scientific form belongs to the physical sciences. Accordingly, biology apes the manners of physics. It is orthodox to hold, that there is nothing in biology but what is physical mechanism under somewhat complex circumstances.

One difficulty in this position is the present confusion as to the foundational concepts of physical science. This same difficulty also attaches to the opposed doctrine of vitalism. For, in this later theory, the fact of mechanism is accepted—I mean, mechanism based upon materialism—and an additional vital control is introduced to explain the actions of living bodies. It cannot be too clearly understood that the various physical laws which appear to apply to the behaviour of atoms are not mutually consistent as at present formulated. The appeal to mechanism on behalf of biology was in its origin an appeal to the well-attested self-consistent physical concepts as expressing the basis of all natural phenomena. But at present there is no such system of concepts.

Science is taking on a new aspect which is neither purely physical, nor purely biological. It is becoming the study of organisms. Biology is the study of the larger organisms; whereas physics is the study of the smaller organisms. There is another difference between the two divisions of science. The organisms of biology include as ingredients the smaller organisms of physics; but there is at present no evidence that the smaller of the physical organisms can be analysed into component organisms. It may be so. But anyhow we are faced with the question as to whether there are not primary organisms which are incapable of further analysis. It seems very unlikely that there should be any infinite regress in nature. Accordingly, a theory of science which discards materialism must answer the question as to the character of these primary entities. There can be only one answer on this basis. We must start with the event as the ultimate unit of natural occurrence. An event has to do with all that there is, and in particular with all other events. This interfusion of events is effected by the aspects of those eternal objects, such as colours, sounds, scents, geometrical characters, which are required for nature and are not emergent from it. Such an eternal object will be an ingredient of one event under the guise, or aspect, of qualifying another event. There is a reciprocity of aspects, and there are patterns of aspects. Each event corresponds to two such patterns; namely, the pattern of aspects of other events which it grasps into its own unity, and the pattern of its aspects which other events severally grasp into their unities. Accordingly, a non-materialistic philosophy of nature will identify a primary organism as being the emergence of some particular pattern as grasped in the unity of a real event. Such a pattern will also include the aspects of the event in question as grasped in other events, whereby those other events receive a modification, or partial determination. There is thus an intrinsic and an extrinsic reality of an event, namely, the event as in its own prehension, and the event as in the prehension of other events. The concept of an organism includes, therefore, the concept of the interaction of organisms. The ordinary scientific ideas of transmission and continuity are, relatively speaking, details concerning the empirically observed characters of these patterns throughout space and time. The position here maintained is that the relationships of an event are internal, so far as concerns the event itself; that is to say, that they are constitutive of what the event is in itself.

Also in the previous lecture, we arrived at the notion that an actual event is an achievement for its own sake, a grasping of diverse entities into a value by reason of their real togetherness in that pattern, to the exclusion of other entities. It is not the mere logical togetherness of merely diverse things. For in that case, to modify Bacon’s words, “all eternal objects would be alike one to another.” This reality means that each intrinsic essence, that is to say, what each eternal object is in itself, becomes relevant to the one limited value emergent in the guise of the event. But values differ in importance. Thus though each event is necessary for the community of events, the weight of its contribution is determined by something intrinsic in itself. We have now to discuss what that property is. Empirical observation shows that it is the property which we may call indifferently retention, endurance or reiteration. This property amounts to the recovery, on behalf of value amid the transitoriness of reality, of the self-identity which is also enjoyed by the primary eternal objects. The reiteration of a particular shape (or formation) of value within an event occurs when the event as a whole repeats some shape which is also exhibited by each one of a succession of its parts. Thus however you analyse the event according to the flux of its parts through time, there is the same thing-for-its-own-sake standing before you. Thus the event, in its own intrinsic reality, mirrors in itself, as derived from its own parts, aspects of the same patterned value as it realises in its complete self. It thus realises itself under the guise of an enduring individual entity, with a life history contained within itself. Furthermore, the extrinsic reality of such an event, as mirrored in other events, takes this same form of an enduring individuality; only in this case, the individuality is implanted as a reiteration of aspects of itself in the alien events composing the environment.

The total temporal duration of such an event bearing an enduring pattern, constitutes its specious present. Within this specious present the event realises itself as a totality, and also in so doing realises itself as grouping together a number of aspects of its own temporal parts. One and the same pattern is realised in the total event, and is exhibited by each of these various parts through an aspect of each part grasped into the togetherness of the total event. Also, the earlier life-history of the same pattern is exhibited by its aspects in this total event. There is, thus, in this event a memory of the antecedent life-history of its own dominant pattern, as having formed an element of value in its own antecedent environment. This concrete prehension, from within, of the life-history of an enduring fact is analysable into two abstractions, of which one is the enduring entity which has emerged as a real matter of fact to be taken account of by other things, and the other is the individualised embodiment of the underlying energy of realisation.