Alfred North Whitehead - Science and the modern world (1925)

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Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative, which never emerges explicitly into its trains of reasoning.

Alfred North Whitehead
Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

Alfred North Whitehead
In the garden of Eden God saw the animals before he named them: in the traditional system [of education] children named the animals before they saw them.

Alfred North Whitehead
When we consider what religion is for mankind, and what science is, it is no exaggeration to say that the future course of history depends upon the decision of this generation as to the relations between them.

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
Philosophy works slowly. Thoughts lie dormant for ages; and then, almost suddenly as it were, mankind finds that they have embodied themselves in institutions.

Alfred North Whitehead
Science repudiates philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its truth or explain its meaning.

Alfred North Whitehead
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.

Alfred North Whitehead
The importance of an individual thinker owes something to chance. For it depends upon the fate of his ideas in the minds of his successors.

Alfred North Whitehead
The way in which the persecution of Galileo has been remembered is a tribute to the quiet commencement of the most intimate change in outlook which the human race had yet encountered. Since a babe was born in a manger, it may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened with so little stir

Alfred North Whitehead
The reason why we are on a higher imaginative level is not because we have finer imagination, but because we have better instruments.

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
The physical doctrine of the atom has got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus.

Alfred North Whitehead
Search for measurable elements among your phenomena, and then search for relations between these measures of physical quantities.

Alfred North Whitehead
It [philosophy] builds cathedrals before the workmen have moved a stone, and it destroys them before the elements have worn down their arches.

Alfred North Whitehead
For, whereas you can make a replica of an ancient statue, there is no possible replica of an ancient state of mind. There can be no nearer approximation [of one] than that which a masquerade bears to real life.

Alfred North Whitehead
We think of the number "five" as applying to appropriate groups of any entities whatsoever - to five fishes, five children, five apples, five days... We are merely thinking of those relationships between those two groups which are entirely independent of the individual essences of any of the members of either group. This is a very remarkable feat of abstraction; and it must have taken ages for the human race to rise to it

Alfred North Whitehead
If you have had your attention directed to the novelties in thought in your own lifetime, you will have observed that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced, and almost any idea which jogs you out of your current abstractions may be better than nothing.

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
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
It is the large generalisation, limited by a happy particularity, which is the fruitful conception.

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
Science is even more changeable than theology.

Alfred North Whitehead
Other nations of different habits are not enemies: they are godsends. Men require of their neighbours something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command admiration. We must not expect, however, all the virtues.

Alfred North Whitehead
For mathematics is the science of the most complete abstractions to which the human mind can attain.

Alfred North Whitehead
There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch.

Alfred North Whitehead
The electrons seems to be borrowing the character which some people have assigned to the Mahatmas of Tibet.

Alfred North Whitehead
An unflinching determination to take the whole evidence into account is the only method of preservation against the fluctuating extremes of fashionable opinion.

Alfred North Whitehead
The laws of physics are the decrees of fate.

Alfred North Whitehead
If science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypotheses, it must become philosophical and must enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations.

Alfred North Whitehead