Science and the modern worldWhitehead, Alfred North
Religion
Science and the modern world
Whitehead, Alfred North
Science
Further, even for self-cognition, the aspects of the parts of our own
bodies partly take the form of aspects of shape, and of sense-objects.
But that part of the bodily event, in respect to which the cognitive
mentality is associated, is for itself the unit psychological field. Its
ingredients are not referent to the event itself; they are aspects of
what lies beyond that event. Thus the self-knowledge inherent in the
bodily event is the knowledge of itself as a complex unity, whose
ingredients involve all reality beyond itself, restricted under the
limitation of its pattern of aspects. Thus we know ourselves as a
function of unification of a plurality of things which are other than
ourselves. Cognition discloses an event as being an activity, organising
a real togetherness of alien things. But this psychological field does
not depend on its cognition; so that this field is still a unit event as
abstracted from its self-cognition.
Accordingly, consciousness will be the function of knowing. But what is
known is already a prehension of aspects of the one real universe. These
aspects are aspects of other events as mutually modifying, each the
others. In the pattern of aspects they stand in their pattern of mutual
relatedness.
The aboriginal data in terms of which the pattern weaves itself are the
aspects of shapes, of sense-objects, and of other eternal objects whose
self-identity is not dependent on the flux of things. Wherever such
objects have ingression into the general flux, they interpret events,
each to the other. They are here in the perceiver; but, as perceived by
him, they convey for him something of the total flux which is beyond
himself. The subject-object relation takes its origin in the double rôle
of these eternal objects. They are modifications of the subject, but
only in their character of conveying aspects of other subjects in the
community of the universe. Thus no individual subject can have
independent reality, since it is a prehension of limited aspects of
subjects other than itself.
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