Science and the modern worldWhitehead, Alfred North
Religion
Science and the modern world
Whitehead, Alfred North
Science
“This peculiar property of quantities that no part of them is the
smallest possible part (no part indivisible) is called continuity. Time
and space are quanta continua, because there is no part of them that is
not enclosed between limits (points and moments), _no part that is not
itself again a space or a time. Space consists of spaces only, time of
times. Points and moments are only limits_, mere places of limitation,
and as places _presupposing always_ those intuitions which they are
meant to limit or to determine. Mere places or parts that might be given
before space or time, could never be compounded into space or time.”
I am in complete agreement with the second extract if ‘time and space’
is the extensive continuum; but it is inconsistent with its predecessor.
For Zeno would object that a vicious infinite regress is involved. Every
part of time involves some smaller part of itself, and so on. Also this
series regresses backwards ultimately to nothing; since the initial
moment is without duration and merely marks the relation of contiguity
to an earlier time. Thus time is impossible, if the two extracts are
both adhered to. I accept the later, and reject the earlier, passage.
Realisation is the becoming of time in the field of extension. Extension
is the complex of events, _quâ_ their potentialities. In realisation the
potentiality becomes actuality. But the potential pattern requires a
duration; and the duration must be exhibited as an epochal whole, by the
realisation of the pattern. Thus time is the succession of elements in
themselves divisible and contiguous. A duration, in becoming temporal,
thereby incurs realisation in respect to some enduring object.
Temporalisation is realisation. Temporalisation is not another
continuous process. It is an atomic succession. Thus time is atomic
(_i.e._, epochal), though what is temporalised is divisible. This
doctrine follows from the doctrine of events, and of the nature of
enduring objects. In the next chapter we must consider its relevance to
the quantum theory of recent science.
It is to be noted that this doctrine of the epochal character of time
does not depend on the modern doctrine of relativity, and holds
equally—and indeed, more simply—if this doctrine be abandoned. It does
depend on the analysis of the intrinsic character of an event,
considered as the most concrete finite entity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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