Alfred North Whitehead - Fact Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

View all Alfred North Whitehead Quotes
The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.

Alfred North Whitehead
Governments are best classified by considering who are the "somebodies" they are in fact endeavoring to satisfy.

Alfred North Whitehead
Matter-of-fact is an abstraction, arrived at by confining thought to purely formal relations which then masquerade as the final reality. This is why science, in its perfection, relapses into the study of differential equations. The concrete world has slipped through the meshes of the scientific net.

Alfred North Whitehead
Nature can be thought of as a closed system whose mutual relations do not require the expression of the fact that they are thought about.

Alfred North Whitehead
Experiment is nothing else than a mode of cooking the facts for the sake of exemplifying the law.

Alfred North Whitehead
A chain of facts is like a barrier reef. On one side there is wreckage, and beyond it harborage and safety.

Alfred North Whitehead
Apart from time there is no meaning for purpose, hope, fear, energy. If there be no historic process, then everything is what it is, namely, a mere fact. Life and motion are lost.

Alfred North Whitehead
There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.

Alfred North Whitehead
Positivistic science is solely concerned with observed fact, and must hazard no conjecture as to the future. If observed fact be all we know, then there is no other knowledge. Probability is relative to knowledge. There is no probability as to the future within the doctrine of Positivism.

Alfred North Whitehead
The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.

Alfred North Whitehead
In the modern world the celibacy of the medieval learned class has been replaced by a celibacy of the intellectual which is divorced from the concrete contemplation of the complete facts.

Alfred North Whitehead
The originality of mathematics consists in the fact that in mathematical science connections between things are exhibited which, apart from the agency of human reason, are extremely unobvious.

Alfred North Whitehead
There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life; and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the quality of the quality.

Alfred North Whitehead
Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts. It is a way of illuminating the facts.

Alfred North Whitehead
Our problem is, in fact, to fit the world to our perceptions, and not our perceptions to the world.

Alfred North Whitehead
Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind and within the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.

Alfred North Whitehead
Thus the universe is to be conceived as attaining the active self-expression of its own variety of opposites of its own freedom and its own necessity, of its own multiplicity and its own unity, of its own imperfection and its own perfection. All the opposites are elements in the nature of things, and are incorrigibly there. The concept of God is the way in which we understand this incredible fact that what cannot be, yet is.

Alfred North Whitehead
The mentality of mankind and the language of mankind created each other. If we like to assume the rise of language as a given fact, then it is not going too far to say that the souls of men are the gift from language to mankind. The account of the sixth day should be written: He gave them speech, and they became souls.

Alfred North Whitehead
The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, "Seek simplicity and distrust it."

Alfred North Whitehead
The 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 of our present society.

Alfred North Whitehead
In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as if it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasoning grasps at straws for premises and float on gossamer for deductions.

Alfred North Whitehead
I regret that it has been necessary for me in this lecture to administer a large dose of four-dimensional geometry. I do not apologize, because I am really not responsible for the fact that nature in its most fundamental aspect is four-dimensional. Things are what they are.

Alfred North Whitehead
Creativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.

Alfred North Whitehead