The Concept of Nature: The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919Whitehead, Alfred North
Philosophy
The Concept of Nature: The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919
Whitehead, Alfred North
Knowledge, Theory of; Nature; Science -- Philosophy
Space is not merely an ordering of material entities so that any one
entity bears certain relations to other material entities. The
occupation of space impresses a certain character on each material
entity in itself. By reason of its occupation of space matter has
extension. By reason of its extension each bit of matter is divisible
into parts, and each part is a numerically distinct entity from every
other such part. Accordingly it would seem that every material entity is
not really one entity. It is an essential multiplicity of entities.
There seems to be no stopping this dissociation of matter into
multiplicities short of finding each ultimate entity occupying one
individual point. This essential multiplicity of material entities is
certainly not what is meant by science, nor does it correspond to
anything disclosed in sense-awareness. It is absolutely necessary that
at a certain stage in this dissociation of matter a halt should be
called, and that the material entities thus obtained should be treated
as units. The stage of arrest may be arbitrary or may be set by the
characteristics of nature; but all reasoning in science ultimately drops
its space-analysis and poses to itself the problem, 'Here is one
material entity, what is happening to it as a unit entity?' Yet this
material entity is still retaining its extension, and as thus extended
is a mere multiplicity. Thus there is an essential atomic property in
nature which is independent of the dissociation of extension. There is
something which in itself is one, and which is more than the logical
aggregate of entities occupying points within the volume which the unit
occupies. Indeed we may well be sceptical as to these ultimate entities
at points, and doubt whether there are any such entities at all. They
have the suspicious character that we are driven to accept them by
abstract logic and not by observed fact.
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