Science and the modern worldWhitehead, Alfred North
Religion
Science and the modern world
Whitehead, Alfred North
Science
is a manifold of prehensions; and a ‘prehension’ is a ‘prehensive
occasion’; and a prehensive occasion is the most concrete finite entity,
conceived as what it is in itself and for itself, and not as from its
aspect in the essence of another such occasion. Prehensive unification
might be said to have simple location in its volume A. But this would be
a mere tautology. For space and time are simply abstractions from the
totality of prehensive unifications as mutually patterned in each other.
Thus a prehension has simple location at the volume A in the same way as
that in which a man’s face fits on to the smile which spreads over it.
There is, so far as we have gone, more sense in saying that an act of
perception has simple location; for it may be conceived as being simply
at the cognised prehension.
There are more entities involved in nature than the mere sense-objects,
so far considered. But, allowing for the necessity of revision
consequent on a more complete point of view, we can frame our answer to
Berkeley’s question as to the character of the reality to be assigned to
nature. He states it to be the reality of ideas in mind. A complete
metaphysic which has attained to some notion of mind, and to some notion
of ideas, may perhaps ultimately adopt that view. It is unnecessary for
the purpose of these lectures to ask such a fundamental question. We can
be content with a provisional realism in which nature is conceived as a
complex of prehensive unifications. Space and time exhibit the general
scheme of interlocked relations of these prehensions. You cannot tear
any one of them out of its context. Yet each one of them within its
context has all the reality that attaches to the whole complex.
Conversely, the totality has the same reality as each prehension; for
each prehension unifies the modalities to be ascribed, from its
standpoint, to every part of the whole. A prehension is a process of
unifying. Accordingly, nature is a process of expansive development,
necessarily transitional from prehension to prehension. What is achieved
is thereby passed beyond, but it is also retained as having aspects of
itself present to prehensions which lie beyond it.
Thus nature is a structure of evolving processes. The reality is the
process. It is nonsense to ask if the colour red is real. The colour red
is ingredient in the process of realisation. The realities of nature are
the prehensions in nature, that is to say, the events in nature.
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