Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

The nineteenth century exaggerated the power of the historical method, and assumed as a matter of course that every character should be studied only in its embryonic stage. Thus, for example, “Love” has been studied among the savages and latterly among the morons.

Such a conception is paradoxical if you will persist in thinking of the actual world as a collection of passive actual substances with their private characters or qualities. In that case, it must be nonsense to ask, how one such substance can form a component in the make-up of another such substance.

The many become one, and are increased by one.

The reasonable harmony of being, which is required for the unity of a complex occasion, together with the completeness of the realization (in that occasion) of all that is involved in its logical harmony, is the primary article of metaphysical doctrine. It means that for things to be together involves that they are reasonably together. This means that thought can penetrate into every occasion of fact, so that by comprehending its key conditions, the whole complex patterns of conditions lies open before it.

In its use of this method natural science has shown a curious mixture
of rationalism and irrationalism. Its prevalent tone of thought has been
ardently rationalistic within its own borders, and dogmatically irrational
beyond those borders. In practice such an attitude tends to become a dog-
matic denial that there are any factors in the world not fully expressible in terms of its own primary notions devoid of further generalization. Such
a denial is the self-denial of thought.

Christianity is the mother of science.

The success of the imaginative experiment is always to be tested by the applicability of its results beyond the restricted locus from which it originated. In default of such extended application, a generalization started from physics, for example, remains merely an alternative expression of notions applicable to physics. The partially successful philosophic generalization will, if derived from physics, find applications in fields of experience beyond physics. It will enlighten observation in those remote fields, so that general principles can be discerned as in process of illustration, which in the absence of the imaginative generalization are obscured by their persistent exemplification.

[I]t is a profoundly erroneous truism … that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them.

It builds cathedrals before the workmen have moved a stone, and it destroys them before the elements have worn down their arches. It is the architect of the buildings of the spirit, and it is also their solvent: - and the spiritual precedes the material.

There is finitude — unless this were true, infinity would have no meaning. The contrast of finitude and infinity arises from the fundamental metaphysical truth that every entity involves an indefinite array of perspectives, each perspective expressing a finite characteristic of that entity. But any one finite perspective does not enable an entity to shake off its essential connection with totality. The infinite background always remains as the unanalysed reason why that finite perspective of that entity has the special character that it does have. Any analysis