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
A station is a vagrant route and no moment can intersect any station in
more than one event-particle. Thus a station carries with it a
comparison of the positions in their respective moments of the
event-particles covered by it. Rects arise from the intersection of
moments. But as yet no properties of events have been mentioned by which
any analogous vagrant loci can be found out.
The general problem for our investigation is to determine a method of
comparison of position in one instantaneous space with positions in
other instantaneous spaces. We may limit ourselves to the spaces of the
parallel moments of one time-system. How are positions in these various
spaces to be compared? In other words, What do we mean by motion? It is
the fundamental question to be asked of any theory of relative space,
and like many other fundamental questions it is apt to be left
unanswered. It is not an answer to reply, that we all know what we mean
by motion. Of course we do, so far as sense-awareness is concerned. I am
asking that your theory of space should provide nature with something to
be observed. You have not settled the question by bringing forward a
theory according to which there is nothing to be observed, and by then
reiterating that nevertheless we do observe this non-existent fact.
Unless motion is something as a fact in nature, kinetic energy and
momentum and all that depends on these physical concepts evaporate from
our list of physical realities. Even in this revolutionary age my
conservatism resolutely opposes the identification of momentum and
moonshine.
Accordingly I assume it as an axiom, that motion is a physical fact. It
is something that we perceive as in nature. Motion presupposes rest.
Until theory arose to vitiate immediate intuition, that is to say to
vitiate the uncriticised judgments which immediately arise from
sense-awareness, no one doubted that in motion you leave behind that
which is at rest. Abraham in his wanderings left his birthplace where it
had ever been. A theory of motion and a theory of rest are the same
thing viewed from different aspects with altered emphasis.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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