Science and the modern world

by Alfred North Whitehead

The effect of this antagonism to philosophy has been equally unfortunate both for philosophy and for science. In this lecture we are concerned with philosophy. Philosophers are rationalists. They are seeking to go behind stubborn and irreducible facts: they wish to explain in the light of universal principles the mutual reference between the various details entering into the flux of things. Also, they seek such principles as will eliminate mere arbitrariness; so that, whatever portion of fact is assumed or given, the existence of the remainder of things shall satisfy some demand of rationality. They demand meaning. In the words of Henry Sidgwick[^[13]]—“It is the primary aim of philosophy to unify completely, bring into clear coherence, all departments of rational thought, and this aim cannot be realised by any philosophy that leaves out of its view the important body of judgments and reasonings which form the subject matter of ethics.” Accordingly, the bias towards history on the part of the physical and social sciences with their refusal to rationalise below some ultimate mechanism, has pushed philosophy out of the effective currents of modern life. It has lost its proper rôle as a constant critic of partial formulations. It has retreated into the subjectivist sphere of mind, by reason of its expulsion by science from the objectivist sphere of matter. Thus the evolution of thought in the seventeenth century coöperated with the enhanced sense of individual personality derived from the Middle Ages. We see Descartes taking his stand upon his own ultimate mind, which his philosophy assures him of; and asking about its relations to the ultimate matter—exemplified, in the second Meditation, by the human body and a lump of wax—which his science assumes. There is Aaron’s rod, and the magicians’ serpents; and the only question for philosophy is, which swallows which; or whether, as Descartes thought, they all lived happily together. In this stream of thought are to be found Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant. Two great names lie outside this list, Spinoza and Leibniz. But there is a certain isolation of both of them in respect to their philosophical influence so far as science is concerned; as though they had strayed to extremes which lie outside the boundaries of safe philosophy, Spinoza by retaining older ways of thought, and Leibniz by the novelty of his monads.

[13]. Cf. Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir, Appendix I.

The history of philosophy runs curiously parallel to that of science. In the case of both, the seventeenth century set the stage for its two successors. But with the twentieth century a new act commences. It is an exaggeration to attribute a general change in a climate of thought to any one piece of writing, or to any one author. No doubt Descartes only expressed definitely and in decisive form what was already in the air of his period. Analogously, in attributing to William James the inauguration of a new stage in philosophy, we should be neglecting other influences of his time. But, admitting this, there still remains a certain fitness in contrasting his essay, Does Consciousness Exist, published in 1904, with Descartes’ Discourse on Method, published in 1637. James clears the stage of the old paraphernalia; or rather he entirely alters its lighting. Take for example these two sentences from his essay: “To deny plumply that ‘consciousness’ exists seems so absurd on the face of it—for undeniably ‘thoughts’ do exist—that I fear some readers will follow me no farther. Let me then immediately explain that I mean only to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function.”

The scientific materialism and the Cartesian Ego were both challenged at the same moment, one by science and the other by philosophy, as represented by William James with his psychological antecedents; and the double challenge marks the end of a period which lasted for about two hundred and fifty years. Of course, ‘matter’ and ‘consciousness’ both express something so evident in ordinary experience that any philosophy must provide some things which answer to their respective meanings. But the point is that, in respect to both of them, the seventeenth century settlement was infected with a presupposition which is now challenged. James denies that consciousness is an entity, but admits that it is a function. The discrimination between an entity and a function is therefore vital to the understanding of the challenge which James is advancing against the older modes of thought. In the essay in question, the character which James assigns to consciousness is fully discussed. But he does not unambiguously explain what he means by the notion of an entity, which he refuses to apply to consciousness. In the sentence which immediately follows the one which I have already quoted, he says:

“There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made; but there is a function in experience which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this quality of being is invoked. That function is knowing. ‘Consciousness’ is supposed necessary to explain the fact that things not only are, but get reported, are known.”

Thus James is denying that consciousness is a ‘stuff.’

The term ‘entity,’ or even that of ‘stuff,’ does not fully tell its own tale. The notion of ‘entity’ is so general that it may be taken to mean anything that can be thought about. You cannot think of mere nothing; and the something which is an object of thought may be called an entity. In this sense, a function is an entity. Obviously, this is not what James had in his mind.

In agreement with the organic theory of nature which I have been tentatively putting forward in these lectures, I shall for my own purposes construe James as denying exactly what Descartes asserts in his Discourse and his Meditations. Descartes discriminates two species of entities, matter and soul. The essence of matter is spatial extension; the essence of soul is its cogitation, in the full sense which Descartes assigns to the word ‘cogitare.’ For example, in Section Fifty-three of Part I of his Principles of Philosophy, he enunciates: “That of every substance there is one principal attribute, as thinking of the mind, extension of the body.” In the earlier, Fifty-first Section, Descartes states: “By substance we can conceive nothing else than a thing which exists in such a way as to stand in need of nothing beyond itself in order to its existence.” Furthermore, later on, Descartes says: “For example, because any substance which ceases to endure ceases also to exist, duration is not distinct from substance except in thought;....” Thus we conclude that, for Descartes, minds and bodies exist in such a way as to stand in need of nothing beyond themselves individually (God only excepted, as being the foundation of all things); that both minds and bodies endure, because without endurance they would cease to exist; that spatial extension is the essential attribute of bodies; and that cogitation is the essential attribute of minds.

It is difficult to praise too highly the genius exhibited by Descartes in the complete sections of his Principles which deal with these questions. It is worthy of the century in which he writes, and of the clearness of the French intellect. Descartes in his distinction between time and duration, and in his way of grounding time upon motion, and in his close relation between matter and extension, anticipates, as far as it was possible at his epoch, modern notions suggested by the doctrine of relativity, or by some aspects of Bergson’s doctrine of the generation of things. But the fundamental principles are so set out as to presuppose independently existing substances with simple location in a community of temporal durations, and, in the case of bodies, with simple location in the community of spatial extensions. Those principles lead straight to the theory of a materialistic, mechanistic nature, surveyed by cogitating minds. After the close of the seventeenth century, science took charge of the materialistic nature, and philosophy took charge of the cogitating minds. Some schools of philosophy admitted an ultimate dualism; and the various idealistic schools claimed that nature was merely the chief example of the cogitations of minds. But all schools admitted the Cartesian analysis of the ultimate elements of nature. I am excluding Spinoza and Leibniz from these statements as to the main stream of modern philosophy, as derivative from Descartes; though of course they were influenced by him, and in their turn influenced philosophers. I am thinking mainly of the effective contacts between science and philosophy.

This division[division] of territory between science and philosophy was not a simple business; and in fact it illustrated the weakness of the whole cut-and-dried presupposition upon which it rested. We are aware of nature as an interplay of bodies, colours, sounds, scents, tastes, touches and other various bodily feelings, displayed as in space, in patterns of mutual separation by intervening volumes, and of individual shape. Also the whole is a flux, changing with the lapse of time. This systematic totality is disclosed to us as one complex of things. But the seventeenth century dualism cuts straight across it. The objective world of science was confined to mere spatial material with simple location in space and time, and subjected to definite rules as to its locomotion. The subjective world of philosophy annexed the colours, sounds, scents, tastes, touches, bodily feelings, as forming the subjective content of the cogitations of the individual minds. Both worlds shared in the general flux; but time, as measured, is assigned by Descartes to the cogitations of the observer’s mind. There is obviously one fatal weakness to this scheme. The cogitations of mind exhibit themselves as holding up entities, such as colours for instance, before the mind as the termini of contemplation. But in this theory these colours are, after all, merely the furniture of the mind. Accordingly, the mind seems to be confined to its own private world of cogitations. The subject-object conformation of experience in its entirety lies within the mind as one of its private passions. This conclusion from the Cartesian data is the starting point from which Berkeley, Hume, and Kant developed their respective systems. And, antecedently to them, it was the point upon which Locke concentrated as being the vital question. Thus the question as to how any knowledge is obtained of the truly objective world of science becomes a problem of the first magnitude. Descartes states that the objective body is perceived by the intellect. He says (Meditation II): “I must, therefore, admit that I cannot even comprehend by imagination what the piece of wax is, and that it is the mind alone which perceives it. I speak of one piece in particular; for, as to wax in general, this is still more evident. But what is the piece of wax that can be perceived only by the mind?... The perception of it is neither an act of sight, of touch, nor of imagination, and never was either of these, though it might formerly seem so, but is simply an intuition (inspectio) of the mind,....” It must be noted that the Latin word ‘inspectio’ is associated in its classical use with the notion of theory as opposed to practice.