Science and the modern worldWhitehead, Alfred North
Religion
Science and the modern world
Whitehead, Alfred North
Science
The atomic material entities which are considered in physical science
are merely these individual enduring entities, conceived in abstraction
from everything except what concerns their mutual interplay in
determining each other’s historical routes of life-history. Such
entities are partially formed by the inheritance of aspects from their
own past. But they are also partially formed by the aspects of other
events forming their environments. The laws of physics are the laws
declaring how the entities mutually react among themselves. For physics
these laws are arbitrary, because that science has abstracted from what
the entities are in themselves. We have seen that this fact of what the
entities are in themselves is liable to modification by their
environments. Accordingly, the assumption that no modification of these
laws is to be looked for in environments, which have any striking
difference from the environments for which the laws have been observed
to hold, is very unsafe. The physical entities may be modified in very
essential ways, so far as these laws are concerned. It is even possible
that they may be developed into individualities of more fundamental
types, with wider embodiment of envisagement. Such envisagement might
reach to the attainment of the poising of alternative values with
exercise of choice lying outside the physical laws, and expressible only
in terms of purpose. Apart from such remote possibilities, it remains an
immediate deduction that an individual entity, whose own life-history is
a part within the life-history of some larger, deeper, more complete
pattern, is liable to have aspects of that larger pattern dominating its
own being, and to experience modifications of that larger pattern
reflected in itself as modifications of its own being. This is the
theory of organic mechanism.
According to this theory the evolution of laws of nature is concurrent
with the evolution of enduring pattern. For the general state of the
universe, as it now is, partly determines the very essences of the
entities whose modes of functioning these laws express. The general
principle is that in a new environment there is an evolution of the old
entities into new forms.
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