Science and the modern worldWhitehead, Alfred North
Religion
Science and the modern world
Whitehead, Alfred North
Science
Notice that the pattern requires a duration involving a definite lapse
of time, and not merely an instantaneous moment. Such a moment is more
abstract, in that it merely denotes a certain relation of contiguity
between the concrete events. Thus a duration is spatialised; and by
‘spatialised’ is meant that the duration is the field for the realised
pattern constituting the character of the event. A duration, as the
field of the pattern realised in the actualisation of one of its
contained events, is an epoch, _i.e._, an arrest. Endurance is the
repetition of the pattern in successive events. Thus endurance requires
a succession of durations, each exhibiting the pattern. In this account
‘time’ has been separated from ‘extension’ and from the ‘divisibility’
which arises from the character of spatio-temporal extension’.
Accordingly we must not proceed to conceive time as another form of
extensiveness. Time is sheer succession of epochal durations. But the
entities which succeed each other in this account are durations. The
duration is that which is required for the realisation of a pattern in
the given event. Thus the divisibility and extensiveness is within the
given duration. The epochal duration is not realised _via_ its
_successive_ divisible parts, but is given _with_ its parts. In this
way, the objection which Zeno might make to the joint validity of two
passages from Kant’s _Critique of Pure Reason_ is met by abandoning the
earlier of the two passages. I refer to passages from the section ‘Of
the Axioms of Intuition’; the earlier from the subsection on _Extensive
Quantity_, and the latter from the subsection on _Intensive Quantity_
where considerations respecting quantity in general, extensive and
intensive, are summed up. The earlier passage runs thus:[8]
Footnote 8:
Max Müller’s translation.
“I call an extensive quantity that in which the representation of the
whole is rendered possible by the representation of its parts, _and
therefore necessarily preceded by it_.[9] I cannot represent to myself
any line, however small it may be, without drawing it in thought, that
is, without producing all its parts one after the other, starting from a
given point, and thus, first of all, drawing its intuition. The same
applies to every, even the smallest portion of time. I can only think in
it the successive progress from one moment to another, thus producing in
the end, by all the portions of time, and their addition, a definite
quantity of time.”
Footnote 9:
Italics mine, and also in the second passage.
The second passage runs thus:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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