Science and the modern worldWhitehead, Alfred North
Religion
Science and the modern world
Whitehead, Alfred North
Science
We can substitute the concept, that the realisation is a gathering of
things into the unity of a prehension; and that what is thereby realised
is the prehension, and not the things. This unity of a prehension
defines itself as a _here_ and a _now_, and the things so gathered into
the grasped unity have essential reference to other places and other
times. For Berkeley’s _mind_, I substitute a process of prehensive
unification. In order to make intelligible this concept of the
progressive realisation of natural occurrences, considerable expansion
is required, and confrontation with its actual implications in terms of
concrete experience. This will be the task of the subsequent lectures.
In the first place, note that the idea of simple location has gone. The
things which are grasped into a realised unity, here and now, are not
the castle, the cloud, and the planet simply in themselves; but they are
the castle, the cloud, and the planet from the standpoint, in space and
time, of the prehensive unification. In other words, it is the
perspective of the castle over there from the standpoint of the
unification here. It is, therefore, aspects of the castle, the cloud,
and the planet which are grasped into unity here. You will remember that
the idea of perspectives is quite familiar in philosophy. It was
introduced by Leibniz, in the notion of his monads mirroring
perspectives of the universe. I am using the same notion, only I am
toning down his monads into the unified events in space and time. In
some ways, there is a greater analogy with Spinoza’s modes; that is why
I use the terms ‘_mode_’ and ‘_modal_.’ In the analogy with Spinoza, his
one substance is for me the one underlying activity of realisation
individualising itself in an interlocked plurality of modes. Thus,
concrete fact is process. Its primary analysis is into underlying
activity of prehension, and into realised prehensive events. Each event
is an individual matter of fact issuing from an individualisation of the
substrate activity. But individualisation does not mean substantial
independence.
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