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PARTISAN REVIEW
mastery of mathematics and physics and a magnificent logical equipment ;
and for a.few years he was a recognized leader among those who, sceptical
of the clauns made for the great systems of philosophy as sources of know·
.ledge, hoped to make of philosophy an instrument of genuine clarification.
.Professor Whitehead is still engaged in the critique of abstractions, but
not m the sense which his many admirers found in his earlier writings. He
is now preoccupied with adding one more system to the metaphysical specu·
lations of traditional philosophy, and his critique of the concepts of science
consists in using the latest set of scientific terms either as weapons to attack
"mechanical science" or as building-blocks to fortify his own vision of the
universe. The substance of his present views, shorn of their details, their
suggestiveness, and their subtle nuances, is as follows: Classical natural sci–
ence relied upon the materials of sense-experience for its interpretation of
nature; and it took for granted that nature was composed of permanent
things, each enduring self-identically and moving about in empty space. As
a consequence, nature was thought of as a system of isolated facts, severally
and jointly without "ultimate meaning." For example, Newton assumed that
certain forces operated between bodies, but no reason can be found in the
Newtonian concepts of mass and motion as to why bodies should be con–
nected by such stresses; in Professor Whitehead's words, "Newton left no
hint why in the nature of things there should be any stresses at all." But
such a "mechanical science" is not a satisfactory formulation of the nature
of
things, and the reasons science has neglected to supply must be found in
other ways. They can be found, however, only if we come to regard nature
not as something dead, but as something characterized by the traits of living
things or organisms. Now living things exhibit three characteristics: indi–
vidual acts of "immediate self-enjoyment" (or "feeling"); a creative ad–
vance into the future, in which unrealized potentialities become actual and
fuse into new unities of feeling; and an "appetition" or "aim," which se–
lects and rejects from the infinite set of. alternative potentialities and so in–
volves "the entertainment of the purely ideal so as to be directive of the
creative advance." But a natural science which is wedded to the assumption
that the materials of sense supply the sole basis for an interpretation of na–
ture, can never discover these traits in nature ; and if we are going to be
sensitive to the "really real" things about us we must admit the vague but
more adequate evidence of our feelings and emotions. On the other hand,
Professor Whitehead maintains that modern
sci~nce
has been compelled to
abandon the preconceptions of classical physics: space and matter conceived
in the manner of Newton have been dethroned as the fundamental notions ;
and process, conceived as a complex activity with internal relations between
its various factors, has come to be the fundamental category. Physical science
has come to regard the spatial universe as a field of force or incessant ac–
tivity, with matter identified as energy; and this constant energizing can be
made intelligible only by interpreting it in terms of the categories appro–
priate for understanding life. Nature is thus not a meaningless system of
detached elements, but must be construed as aiming at the realization of
feelings or values.
To the present reviewer Professor Whitehead's discourse carries
n~
con–
viction.
It
does not supply us with knowledge, because knowledge 1s not
achieved
by
simply giving names or labels. When, for example, a biologist
