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

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

Alfred North Whitehead
It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.

Alfred North Whitehead
The relevant poems are Milton's Paradise Lost, Pope's Essay on Man, Wordsworth's Excursion, Tennyson's In Memoriam.

Alfred North Whitehead
In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world

Alfred North Whitehead
He has been named respectively, Jehovah, Allah, Brahma, Father in Heaven, Order of Heaven, First Cause, Supreme Being, Chance. Each name corresponds to a system of thought derived from the experiences of those who have used it.... He has been conceived as the foundation of the metaphysical situation with its ultimate activity. If this conception be adhered to, there can be no alternative except to discern in Him the origin of all evil as well as of all good. He is then the supreme author of the play, and to him must therefore be ascribed its shortcomings as well as its success.

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

Alfred North Whitehead
The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.

Alfred North Whitehead
It does not matter what men say in words, so long as their activities are controlled by settled instincts. The words may ultimately destroy the instincts. But until this has occurred, words do not count.

Alfred North Whitehead
... We cannot think first and act afterwards. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.

Alfred North Whitehead
It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.

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
The first man who noticed the analogy between a group of seven fishes and a group of seven days made a notable advance in the history of thought.

Alfred North Whitehead
... The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit...

Alfred North Whitehead
More and more it is becoming evident that what the West can most readily give to the East is its science and its scientific outlook. This is transferable from country to country, and from race to race, wherever there is a rational society.

Alfred North Whitehead
In the past human life was lived in a bullock cart; in the future it will be lived in an aeroplane; and the change of speed amounts to a difference in quality.

Alfred North Whitehead
Every human being is the natural guardian of his own importance.

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
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
It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.

Alfred North Whitehead
The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.

Alfred North Whitehead
We cannot think first and act afterward. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.

Alfred North Whitehead
Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development.

Alfred North Whitehead
Mathematics as an Element in the History of Thought.

Alfred North Whitehead
The worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed.

Alfred North Whitehead
Science is taking on a new aspect that is neither purely physical nor purely biological. It is becoming the study of organisms. Biology is the study of the larger organisms; whereas physics is the study of the smaller organisms.

Alfred North Whitehead