Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.

Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development.

Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography.

[W]e cannot think first and act afterwards. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.

Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not to-morrow be demonstrated truth.

A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, he is content.

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.

The deliberate aim at Peace very easily passes into its bastard substitute, Anesthesia.

Whenever we attempt to express the matter of immediate experience, we find that its understanding leads us beyond itself, to its contemporaries, to its past, to its future, and to the universals in terms of which its definiteness is exhibited. But such universals, by their very character of universality, embody the potentiality of other facts with variant types of definiteness. Thus [22] the understanding of the immediate brute fact requires its metaphysical interpretation as an item in a world with some systematic relation to it. When thought comes upon the scene, it finds the interpretations as matters of practice. Philosophy does not initiate interpretations. Its search for a rationalistic scheme is the search for more adequate criticism, and for more adequate justification, of the interpretations which we perforce employ. Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography. Every scientific memoir in its record of the ‘facts’ is shot through and through with interpretation. The methodology of rational interpretation is the product of the fitful vagueness of consciousness. Elements which shine with immediate distinctness, in some circumstances, retire into penumbral shadow in other circumstances, and into black darkness on other occasions. And yet all occasions proclaim themselves as actualities within the flux of a solid world, demanding a unity of interpretation. Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity.

Modern science has imposed on humanity the necessity for wandering. Its progressive thought and its progressive technology make the transition through time, from generation to generation, a true migration into uncharted seas of adventure.

We do not require elaborate training merely in order to refrain from embarking upon intricate trains of inference. Such abstinence is only too easy.

A clash of doctrines is not a disaster — it is an opportunity.

In the theory of well-ordered series and compact series, we have followed Cantor closely, except in dealing with Zermelo's theorem (*257 — 8), and in cases where Cantor's work tacitly assumes the multiplicative axiom. Thus what novelty there is, is in the main negative. In particular, the multiplicative axiom is required in all known proofs of the fundamental proposition that the limit of a progression of ordinals of the second class {i.e. applicable to series whose fields have ^{o terms) is an ordinal of the second class (cf *265). In consequence of this fact, a very large part of the recognized theory of transfinite ordinals must be considered doubtful.

Error is the price we pay for progress.

The English never abolish anything. They put it in cold storage.