The Concept of Nature

The Concept of Nature.

by 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.

The chapters retain their original lecture form and remain as delivered with the exception of minor changes designed to remove obscurities of expression. The lecture form has the advantage of suggesting an audience with a definite mental background which it is the purpose of the lecture to modify in a specific way. In the presentation of a novel outlook with wide ramifications a single line of communications from premises to conclusions is not sufficient for intelligibility. Your audience will construe whatever you say into conformity with their pre-existing outlook. For this reason the first two chapters and the last two chapters are essential for intelligibility though they hardly add to the formal completeness of the exposition. Their function is to prevent the reader from bolting up side tracks in pursuit of misunderstandings. The same reason dictates my avoidance of the existing technical terminology of philosophy. The modern natural philosophy is shot through and through with the fallacy of bifurcation which is discussed in the second chapter of this work. Accordingly all its technical terms in some subtle way presuppose a misunderstanding of my thesis. It is perhaps as well to state explicitly that if the reader indulges in the facile vice of bifurcation not a word of what I have here written will be intelligible.

The last two chapters do not properly belong to the special course.

Chapter VIII is a lecture delivered in the spring of 1920 before the Chemical Society of the students of the Imperial College of Science and Technology. It has been appended here as conveniently summing up and applying the doctrine of the book for an audience with one definite type of outlook.

This volume on 'the Concept of Nature' forms a companion book to my previous work _An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge_. Either book can be read independently, but they supplement each other. In part the present book supplies points of view which were omitted from its predecessor; in part it traverses the same ground with an alternative exposition. For one thing, mathematical notation has been carefully avoided, and the results of mathematical deductions are a.s.sumed. Some of the explanations have been improved and others have been set in a new light. On the other hand important points of the previous work have been omitted where I have had nothing fresh to say about them. On the whole, whereas the former work based itself chiefly on ideas directly drawn from mathematical physics, the present book keeps closer to certain fields of philosophy and physics to the exclusion of mathematics. The two works meet in their discussions of some details of s.p.a.ce and time.

I am not conscious that I have in any way altered my views. Some developments have been made. Those that are capable of a non-mathematical exposition have been incorporated in the text. The mathematical developments are alluded to in the last two chapters. They concern the adaptation of the principles of mathematical physics to the form of the relativity principle which is here maintained. Einstein's method of using the theory of tensors is adopted, but the application is worked out on different lines and from different a.s.sumptions. Those of his results which have been verified by experience are obtained also by my methods. The divergence chiefly arises from the fact that I do not accept his theory of non-uniform s.p.a.ce or his a.s.sumption as to the peculiar fundamental character of light-signals. I would not however be misunderstood to be lacking in appreciation of the value of his recent work on general relativity which has the high merit of first disclosing the way in which mathematical physics should proceed in the light of the principle of relativity. But in my judgment he has cramped the development of his brilliant mathematical method in the narrow bounds of a very doubtful philosophy.

The object of the present volume and of its predecessor is to lay the basis of a natural philosophy which is the necessary presupposition of a reorganised speculative physics. The general a.s.similation of s.p.a.ce and time which dominates the constructive thought can claim the independent support of Minkowski from the side of science and also of succeeding relativists, while on the side of philosophers it was, I believe, one theme of Prof. Alexander's Gifford lectures delivered some few years ago but not yet published. He also summarised his conclusions on this question in a lecture to the Aristotelian Society in the July of 1918.

Since the publication of _An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge_ I have had the advantage of reading Mr C. D. Broad's _Perception, Physics, and Reality_ [Camb. Univ. Press, 1914]. This valuable book has a.s.sisted me in my discussion in Chapter II, though I am unaware as to how far Mr Broad would a.s.sent to any of my arguments as there stated.

It remains for me to thank the staff of the University Press, its compositors, its proof-readers, its clerks, and its managing officials, not only for the technical excellence of their work, but for the way they have co-operated so as to secure my convenience.

A. N. W.

IMPERIAL COLLEGE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY.

_April_, 1920.

THE CONCEPT OF NATURE

CHAPTER I

NATURE AND THOUGHT

The subject-matter of the Tarner lectures is defined by the founder to be 'the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Relations or Want of Relations between the different Departments of Knowledge.' It is fitting at the first lecture of this new foundation to dwell for a few moments on the intentions of the donor as expressed in this definition; and I do so the more willingly as I shall thereby be enabled to introduce the topics to which the present course is to be devoted.

We are justified, I think, in taking the second clause of the definition as in part explanatory of the earlier clause. What is the philosophy of the sciences? It is not a bad answer to say that it is the study of the relations between the different departments of knowledge. Then with admirable solicitude for the freedom of learning there is inserted in the definition after the word 'relations' the phrase 'or want of relations.' A disproof of relations between sciences would in itself const.i.tute a philosophy of the sciences. But we could not dispense either with the earlier or the later clause. It is not every relation between sciences which enters into their philosophy. For example biology and physics are connected by the use of the microscope. Still, I may safely a.s.sert that a technical description of the uses of the microscope in biology is not part of the philosophy of the sciences. Again, you cannot abandon the later clause of the definition; namely that referring to the relations between the sciences, without abandoning the explicit reference to an ideal in the absence of which philosophy must languish from lack of intrinsic interest. That ideal is the attainment of some unifying concept which will set in a.s.signed relationships within itself all that there is for knowledge, for feeling, and for emotion.

That far off ideal is the motive power of philosophic research; and claims allegiance even as you expel it. The philosophic pluralist is a strict logician; the Hegelian thrives on contradictions by the help of his absolute; the Mohammedan divine bows before the creative will of Allah; and the pragmatist will swallow anything so long as it 'works.'

The mention of these vast systems and of the age-long controversies from which they spring, warns us to concentrate. Our task is the simpler one of the philosophy of the sciences. Now a science has already a certain unity which is the very reason why that body of knowledge has been instinctively recognised as forming a science. The philosophy of a science is the endeavour to express explicitly those unifying characteristics which pervade that complex of thoughts and make it to be a science. The philosophy of the sciences--conceived as one subject--is the endeavour to exhibit all sciences as one science, or--in case of defeat--the disproof of such a possibility.

Again I will make a further simplification, and confine attention to the natural sciences, that is, to the sciences whose subject-matter is nature. By postulating a common subject-matter for this group of sciences a unifying philosophy of natural science has been thereby presupposed.

What do we mean by nature? We have to discuss the philosophy of natural science. Natural science is the science of nature. But--What is nature?

Nature is that which we observe in perception through the senses. In this sense-perception we are aware of something which is not thought and which is self-contained for thought. This property of being self-contained for thought lies at the base of natural science. It means that nature can be thought of as a closed system whose mutual relations do not require the expression of the fact that they are thought about.

Thus in a sense nature is independent of thought. By this statement no metaphysical p.r.o.nouncement is intended. What I mean is that we can think about nature without thinking about thought. I shall say that then we are thinking 'h.o.m.ogeneously' about nature.

Of course it is possible to think of nature in conjunction with thought about the fact that nature is thought about. In such a case I shall say that we are thinking 'heterogeneously' about nature. In fact during the last few minutes we have been thinking heterogeneously about nature.

Natural science is exclusively concerned with h.o.m.ogeneous thoughts about nature.

But sense-perception has in it an element which is not thought. It is a difficult psychological question whether sense-perception involves thought; and if it does involve thought, what is the kind of thought which it necessarily involves. Note that it has been stated above that sense-perception is an awareness of something which is not thought.

Namely, nature is not thought. But this is a different question, namely that the fact of sense-perception has a factor which is not thought. I call this factor 'sense-awareness.' Accordingly the doctrine that natural science is exclusively concerned with h.o.m.ogeneous thoughts about nature does not immediately carry with it the conclusion that natural science is not concerned with sense-awareness.

However, I do a.s.sert this further statement; namely, that though natural science is concerned with nature which is the terminus of sense-perception, it is not concerned with the sense-awareness itself.

I repeat the main line of this argument, and expand it in certain directions.

Thought about nature is different from the sense-perception of nature.

Hence the fact of sense-perception has an ingredient or factor which is not thought. I call this ingredient sense-awareness. It is indifferent to my argument whether sense-perception has or has not thought as another ingredient. If sense-perception does not involve thought, then sense-awareness and sense-perception are identical. But the something perceived is perceived as an ent.i.ty which is the terminus of the sense-awareness, something which for thought is beyond the fact of that sense-awareness. Also the something perceived certainly does not contain other sense-awarenesses which are different from the sense-awareness which is an ingredient in that perception. Accordingly nature as disclosed in sense-perception is self-contained as against sense-awareness, in addition to being self-contained as against thought.

I will also express this self-containedness of nature by saying that nature is closed to mind.

This closure of nature does not carry with it any metaphysical doctrine of the disjunction of nature and mind. It means that in sense-perception nature is disclosed as a complex of ent.i.ties whose mutual relations are expressible in thought without reference to mind, that is, without reference either to sense-awareness or to thought. Furthermore, I do not wish to be understood as implying that sense-awareness and thought are the only activities which are to be ascribed to mind. Also I am not denying that there are relations of natural ent.i.ties to mind or minds other than being the termini of the sense-awarenesses of minds.

Accordingly I will extend the meaning of the terms 'h.o.m.ogeneous thoughts' and 'heterogeneous thoughts' which have already been introduced. We are thinking 'h.o.m.ogeneously' about nature when we are thinking about it without thinking about thought or about sense-awareness, and we are thinking 'heterogeneously' about nature when we are thinking about it in conjunction with thinking either about thought or about sense-awareness or about both.

I also take the h.o.m.ogeneity of thought about nature as excluding any reference to moral or aesthetic values whose apprehension is vivid in proportion to self-conscious activity. The values of nature are perhaps the key to the metaphysical synthesis of existence. But such a synthesis is exactly what I am not attempting. I am concerned exclusively with the generalisations of widest scope which can be effected respecting that which is known to us as the direct deliverance of sense-awareness.

I have said that nature is disclosed in sense-perception as a complex of ent.i.ties. It is worth considering what we mean by an ent.i.ty in this connexion. 'Ent.i.ty' is simply the Latin equivalent for 'thing' unless some arbitrary distinction is drawn between the words for technical purposes. All thought has to be about things. We can gain some idea of this necessity of things for thought by examination of the structure of a proposition.

Let us suppose that a proposition is being communicated by an expositor to a recipient. Such a proposition is composed of phrases; some of these phrases may be demonstrative and others may be descriptive.

By a demonstrative phrase I mean a phrase which makes the recipient aware of an ent.i.ty in a way which is independent of the particular demonstrative phrase. You will understand that I am here using 'demonstration' in the non-logical sense, namely in the sense in which a lecturer demonstrates by the aid of a frog and a microscope the circulation of the blood for an elementary cla.s.s of medical students. I will call such demonstration 'speculative' demonstration, remembering Hamlet's use of the word 'speculation' when he says,

There is no speculation in those eyes.

Thus a demonstrative phrase demonstrates an ent.i.ty speculatively. It may happen that the expositor has meant some other ent.i.ty--namely, the phrase demonstrates to him an ent.i.ty which is diverse from the ent.i.ty which it demonstrates to the recipient. In that case there is confusion; for there are two diverse propositions, namely the proposition for the expositor and the proposition for the recipient. I put this possibility aside as irrelevant for our discussion, though in practice it may be difficult for two persons to concur in the consideration of exactly the same proposition, or even for one person to have determined exactly the proposition which he is considering.

Again the demonstrative phrase may fail to demonstrate any ent.i.ty. In that case there is no proposition for the recipient. I think that we may a.s.sume (perhaps rashly) that the expositor knows what he means.

A demonstrative phrase is a gesture. It is not itself a const.i.tuent of the proposition, but the ent.i.ty which it demonstrates is such a const.i.tuent. You may quarrel with a demonstrative phrase as in some way obnoxious to you; but if it demonstrates the right ent.i.ty, the proposition is unaffected though your taste may be offended. This suggestiveness of the phraseology is part of the literary quality of the sentence which conveys the proposition. This is because a sentence directly conveys one proposition, while in its phraseology it suggests a penumbra of other propositions charged with emotional value. We are now talking of the one proposition directly conveyed in any phraseology.

This doctrine is obscured by the fact that in most cases what is in form a mere part of the demonstrative gesture is in fact a part of the proposition which it is desired directly to convey. In such a case we will call the phraseology of the proposition elliptical. In ordinary intercourse the phraseology of nearly all propositions is elliptical.

Let us take some examples. Suppose that the expositor is in London, say in Regent's Park and in Bedford College, the great women's college which is situated in that park. He is speaking in the college hall and he says,

'This college building is commodious.'

The phrase 'this college building' is a demonstrative phrase. Now suppose the recipient answers,

'This is not a college building, it is the lion-house in the Zoo.'

Then, provided that the expositor's original proposition has not been couched in elliptical phraseology, the expositor sticks to his original proposition when he replies,