Science and the modern worldWhitehead, Alfred North
Religion
Science and the modern world
Whitehead, Alfred North
Science
Also in the previous lecture, we arrived at the notion that an actual
event is an achievement for its own sake, a grasping of diverse
entities into a value by reason of their real togetherness in that
pattern, to the exclusion of other entities. It is not the mere
logical togetherness of merely diverse things. For in that case, to
modify Bacon’s words, “all eternal objects would be alike one to
another.” This reality means that each intrinsic essence, that is to
say, what each eternal object is in itself, becomes relevant to the
one limited value emergent in the guise of the event. But values
differ in importance. Thus though each event is necessary for the
community of events, the weight of its contribution is determined by
something intrinsic in itself. We have now to discuss what that
property is. Empirical observation shows that it is the property which
we may call indifferently _retention_, _endurance_ or _reiteration_.
This property amounts to the recovery, on behalf of value amid the
transitoriness of reality, of the self-identity which is also enjoyed
by the primary eternal objects. The reiteration of a particular shape
(or formation) of value within an event occurs when the event as a
whole repeats some shape which is also exhibited by each one of a
succession of its parts. Thus however you analyse the event according
to the flux of its parts through time, there is the same
thing-for-its-own-sake standing before you. Thus the event, in its own
intrinsic reality, mirrors in itself, as derived from its own parts,
aspects of the same patterned value as it realises in its complete
self. It thus realises itself under the guise of an enduring
individual entity, with a life history contained within itself.
Furthermore, the extrinsic reality of such an event, as mirrored in
other events, takes this same form of an enduring individuality; only
in this case, the individuality is implanted as a reiteration of
aspects of itself in the alien events composing the environment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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