Science and the modern worldWhitehead, Alfred North
Religion
Science and the modern world
Whitehead, Alfred North
Science
In the previous lectures of this course we have considered the
antecedent conditions which led up to the scientific movement, and have
traced the progress of thought from the seventeenth to the nineteenth
century. In the nineteenth century this history falls into three parts,
so far as it is to be grouped around science. These divisions are, the
contact between the romantic movement and science, the development of
technology and physics in the earlier part of the century, and lastly
the theory of evolution combined with the general advance of the
biological sciences.
The dominating note of the whole period of three centuries is that the
doctrine of materialism afforded an adequate basis for the concepts of
science. It was practically unquestioned. When undulations were wanted,
an ether was supplied, in order to perform the duties of an undulatory
material. To show the full assumption thus involved, I have sketched in
outline an alternative doctrine of an organic theory of nature. In the
last lecture it was pointed out that the biological developments, the
doctrine of evolution, the doctrine of energy, and the molecular
theories were rapidly undermining the adequacy of the orthodox
materialism. But until the close of the century no one drew that
conclusion. Materialism reigned supreme.
The note of the present epoch is that so many complexities have
developed regarding material, space, time, and energy, that the simple
security of the old orthodox assumptions has vanished. It is obvious
that they will not do as Newton left them, or even as Clerk Maxwell left
them. There must be a reorganization. The new situation in the thought
of to-day arises from the fact that scientific theory is outrunning
common sense. The settlement as inherited by the eighteenth century was
a triumph of organised common sense. It had got rid of medieval
phantasies, and of Cartesian vortices. As a result it gave full reign to
its anti-rationalistic tendencies derived from the historical revolt of
the Reformation period. It grounded itself upon what every plain man
could see with his own eyes, or with a microscope of moderate power. It
measured the obvious things to be measured, and it generalised the
obvious things to be generalised. For example, it generalised the
ordinary notions of weight and massiveness. The eighteenth century
opened with the quiet confidence that at last nonsense had been got rid
of. To-day we are at the opposite pole of thought. Heaven knows what
seeming nonsense may not to-morrow be demonstrated truth. We have
recaptured some of the tone of the early nineteenth century, only on a
higher imaginative level.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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