Alfred North Whitehead - Nature Quotes

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To be an abstraction does not mean that an entity is nothing. It merely means that its existence is only a factor of a more concrete element of nature.

Alfred North Whitehead
Thus we gain from the poets the doctrine that a philosophy of nature must concern itself with at least these five notions: change, value, eternal objects, endurance, organism, interfusion.

Alfred North Whitehead
It is impossible to meditate on time and the mystery of nature without an overwhelming emotion at the limitations of human intelligence.

Alfred North Whitehead
We have to remember that while nature is complex with timeless subtlety, human thought issues from the simple-mindedness of beings whose active life is less than half a century.

Alfred North Whitehead
In the first place, there can be no living science unless there is a widespread instinctive conviction in the existence of an Order of Things, and, in particular, of an Order of Nature.

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
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
Human nature loses its most precious quality when it is robbed of its sense of things beyond, unexplored and yet insistent.

Alfred North Whitehead
Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song; and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self congratulation on the excellence of the human mind.

Alfred North Whitehead
Unfortunately in this book of nature the biologists fare badly. Every expression of life takes time. Nothing that is characteristic of life can manifest itself at an instant. Murder is a prerequisite for the absorption of biology into physics as expressed in these traditional concepts.

Alfred North Whitehead
All mathematical calculations about the course of nature must start from some assumed law of nature... Accordingly, however accurately we have calculated that some event must occur, the doubt always remains — Is it true?

Alfred North Whitehead
Man, who at times dreamt of himself as a little lower than the angels, has submitted to become the servant and minister of nature.

Alfred North Whitehead
Philosophy, in one of its functions, is the critic of cosmologies. It is its function to harmonise, refashion, and justify divergent intuitions as to the nature of things. It has to insist on the scrutiny of the ultimate ideas, and on the retention of the whole of the evidence in shaping our cosmological scheme. Its business is to render explicit, and — so far as may be — efficient, a process which otherwise is unconsciously performed without rational tests.

Alfred North Whitehead
Nature, even in the act of satisfying anticipation, often provides a surprise.

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 rhythm is then the life, in the sense in which it can be said to be included within nature.

Alfred North Whitehead
People make the mistake of talking about 'natural laws' There are no natural laws. There are only temporary habits of nature.

Alfred North Whitehead
We forget how strained and paradoxical is the view of nature which modern science imposes on our thoughts.

Alfred North Whitehead
Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God. The presentation of God under the aspect of power awakens every modern instinct of critical reaction. This is fatal; for religion collapses unless its main positions command immediacy of assent. In this respect the old phraseology is at variance with the psychology of modern civilisations. This change in psychology is largely due to science, and is one of the chief ways in which the advance of science has weakened the hold of the old religious forms of expression.

Alfred North Whitehead
Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.

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
We find here the final application of the doctrine of objective immortality. Throughout the perishing occasions in the life of each temporal Creature, the inward source of distaste or of refreshment, the judge arising out of the very nature of things, redeemer or goddess of mischief, is the transformation of Itself, everlasting in the Being of God. In this way, the insistent craving is justified — the insistent craving that zest for existence be refreshed by the ever-present, unfading importance of our immediate actions, which perish and yet live for evermore.

Alfred North Whitehead
No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.

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