Produced by Janet Kegg, Laura Wisewell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net +------------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | Transcriber's Note: In the parts containing mathematical | | notation, superscript characters have been used where possible. | | The remaining few are denoted using underscores and curly | | brackets, for example e_{n+1}. Italicised words are marked using | | underscores _like this_, but the letters used in the mathematics | | (which were all in italic font) have not been marked, to aid | | legibility and to avoid confusion with the subscripts. | | | | The special characters used in this file are: | | α β γ δ ε η θ ι λ μ ν ο π ρ ς σ τ υ | | à é ê ï ô ➝ ′ ″ ² ₁ ₂ ₃ ₄ ⁸ | | If you can only display the first few on the 2nd line, you may | | prefer the ISO-8859-1 version of this ebook; if you can see all | | apart from the last six, then either the ISO-8859-1 text or the | | HTML versions should be suitable. If you can see none of the | | special characters, use the ASCII version. | | | | Two printer errors have been corrected. These are: | | | | "...relating the entity discriminated by sight with that | | discriminated by [sight]..." sight has been changed to touch as | | suggested by the sense. | | | | "...[universely] proportional to..." universely has been changed | | to inversely. | | | +------------------------------------------------------------------+ The Concept of NATURE THE TARNER LECTURES DELIVERED IN TRINITY COLLEGE NOVEMBER 1919 Alfred North Whitehead PREFACE The contents of this book were originally delivered at Trinity College in the autumn of 1919 as the inaugural course of Tarner lectures. The Tarner lectureship is an occasional office founded by the liberality of Mr Edward Tarner. The duty of each of the successive holders of the post will be to deliver a course on 'the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Relations or Want of Relations between the different Departments of Knowledge.' The present book embodies the endeavour of the first lecturer of the series to fulfil his task.