Science and the modern worldWhitehead, Alfred North
Religion
Science and the modern world
Whitehead, Alfred North
Science
Forty-three years after the Italian divines had written this memorial,
Richard Hooker in his famous _Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity_ makes
exactly the same complaint of his Puritan adversaries.[1] Hooker’s
balanced thought—from which the appellation ‘The Judicious Hooker’ is
derived—, and his diffuse style, which is the vehicle of such thought,
make his writings singularly unfit for the process of summarising by a
short, pointed quotation. But, in the section referred to, he reproaches
his opponents with _Their Disparagement of Reason_; and in support of
his own position definitely refers to ‘The greatest amongst the
school-divines,’ by which designation I presume that he refers to St.
Thomas Aquinas.
Footnote 1:
_Cf._ Book III, Section VIII.
Hooker’s _Ecclesiastical Polity_ was published just before Sarpi’s
_Council of Trent_. Accordingly there was complete independence between
the two works. But both the Italian divines of 1551, and Hooker at the
end of that century testify to the anti-rationalist trend of thought at
that epoch, and in this respect contrast their own age with the epoch of
scholasticism.
This reaction was undoubtedly a very necessary corrective to the
unguarded rationalism of the Middle Ages. But reactions run to extremes.
Accordingly, although one outcome of this reaction was the birth of
modern science, yet we must remember that science thereby inherited the
bias of thought to which it owes its origin.
The effect of Greek dramatic literature was many-sided so far as
concerns the various ways in which it indirectly affected medieval
thought. The pilgrim fathers of the scientific imagination as it exists
today, are the great tragedians of ancient Athens, Aeschylus, Sophocles,
Euripides. Their vision of fate, remorseless and indifferent, urging a
tragic incident to its inevitable issue, is the vision possessed by
science. Fate in Greek Tragedy becomes the order of nature in modern
thought. The absorbing interest in the particular heroic incidents, as
an example and a verification of the workings of fate, reappears in our
epoch as concentration of interest on the crucial experiments. It was my
good fortune to be present at the meeting of the Royal Society in London
when the Astronomer Royal for England announced that the photographic
plates of the famous eclipse, as measured by his colleagues in Greenwich
Observatory, had verified the prediction of Einstein that rays of light
are bent as they pass in the neighbourhood of the sun. The whole
atmosphere of tense interest was exactly that of the Greek drama: we
were the chorus commenting on the decree of destiny as disclosed in the
development of a supreme incident. There was dramatic quality in the
very staging:—the traditional ceremonial, and in the background the
picture of Newton to remind us that the greatest of scientific
generalisations was now, after more than two centuries, to receive its
first modification. Nor was the personal interest wanting: a great
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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