Science and the modern worldWhitehead, Alfred North
Religion
Science and the modern world
Whitehead, Alfred North
Science
Now that we have cleared space and time from the taint of simple
location, we may partially abandon the awkward term prehension. This
term was introduced to signify the essential unity of an event, namely,
the event as one entity, and not as a mere assemblage of parts or of
ingredients. It is necessary to understand that space-time is nothing
else than a system of pulling together of assemblages into unities. But
the word _event_ just means one of these spatio-temporal unities.
Accordingly, it may be used instead of the term ‘prehension’ as meaning
the thing prehended.
An event has contemporaries. This means that an event mirrors within
itself the modes of its contemporaries as a display of immediate
achievement. An event has a past. This means that an event mirrors
within itself the modes of its predecessors, as memories which are fused
into its own content. An event has a future. This means that an event
mirrors within itself such aspects as the future throws back onto the
present, or, in other words, as the present has determined concerning
the future. Thus an event has anticipation:
“The prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.” [cvii]
These conclusions are essential for any form of realism. For there is in
the world for our cognisance, memory of the past, immediacy of
realisation, and indication of things to come.
In this sketch of an analysis more concrete than that of the scientific
scheme of thought, I have started from our own psychological field, as
it stands for our cognition. I take it for what it claims to be: the
self-knowledge of our bodily event. I mean the total event, and not the
inspection of the details of the body. This self-knowledge discloses a
prehensive unification of modal presences of entities beyond itself. I
generalise by the use of the principle that this total bodily event is
on the same level as all other events, except for an unusual complexity
and stability of inherent pattern. The strength of the theory of
materialistic mechanism has been the demand, that no arbitrary breaks be
introduced into nature, to eke out the collapse of an explanation. I
accept this principle. But if you start from the immediate facts of our
psychological experience, as surely an empiricist should begin, you are
at once led to the organic conception of nature of which the description
has been commenced in this lecture.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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