But if this merging together of the animate and the inanimate in a new naturalism makes a travesty of the inorganic world, its real menace is that, equally with the older naturalism, it reacts to deprive humanity of what is distinctly human. The solid objects of “our naïve experience” have been made organic by a kind of relaxation into fluid composites of time and space and value and relationships; they have evaporated into a semblance of psychical events (the very term “events” indeed is little more than an awkward translation of Berkeley’s “ideas in the mind”), and the peculiar note of an event is its transitoriness: “one all-pervasive fact, inherent in the character of what is real, is the transition of things, the passage one to another.” Thus it happens that the organic and the inorganic worlds flow together in an indistinguishable flux, wherein the soul also, dissolved by association into a complex of relationships, loses that central permanence of entity which used to be held to mark the dignity of man. Nor, if we look beyond, is there anywhere “an ultimate reality” to which we can appeal “for the removal of perplexity,” but only an endless concurrence of events. “In the place of Aristotle’s God as Prime Mover [itself a conception, one might suppose, far enough removed from ‘our naïve experience’ into the abyss of abstraction], we require God as the Principle of Concretion”--not a person, not an entity of any sort, nor even a law apparently, but a mere name for the fact that concrete groups of qualities are everlastingly forming and reforming in the infinite vortex of existence. A cynic might distinguish between the old naturalism and the naturalism now proposed to take its place by saying that under the régime of the former true science might flourish but no humanism or religion, whereas the metaphysical naturalism of Mr. Whitehead would leave us neither true science nor humanism and religion, but only mathematics. The Demon of the Absolute, whether he appears as the advocate of a mechanical fatalism or of the universal flux of relativity, is brother germane to Apollyon, the Destroyer. The curious thing in all this farrago of insight and error is the superstitious hold of the word science on a mind otherwise so awakened. Mr. Whitehead perceives that one scientific hypothesis swallows up another--as indeed he could not fail to see that his own hypothesis turns its predecessor upside down; he admits with engaging candour that one and all they rest on a “naïve faith” which cannot be verified and is “indifferent to refutation”; yet he clings fanatically to the scientific attitude as possessing a monopoly of truth and honesty. “When,” he says, “Darwin or Einstein proclaim[s] theories which modify our ideas, it is a triumph for science. We do not go about saying that there is another defeat for science, because its old ideas have been abandoned. We know that another step of scientific insight has been gained.”