Science and the Modern World

Summary

Science and the Modern World grew out of eight Lowell Lectures that Alfred North Whitehead delivered in Boston in February 1925, a year after leaving London for a chair in philosophy at Harvard. The book, published that October, adds four further chapters to the lectures and pursues one question across thirteen: how has the picture of nature built by modern science shaped the outlook of Western civilisation over three centuries, and what is wrong with that picture? The preface states Whitehead's conviction that every age is governed by the cosmology dominant among its educated classes, and that philosophy's task is to criticise such cosmologies. The opening chapters are historical. Whitehead argues that modern science needed more than clever observers. It required an instinctive belief that every event can be correlated with its antecedents according to general principles, and he traces that belief to the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, calling the faith in the possibility of science 'an unconscious derivative from medieval theology'. He adds the Greek tragedians' sense of inexorable fate, the scholastic habit of exact reasoning, and the naturalistic attention of painters and craftsmen. A chapter on mathematics presents abstraction as the great instrument of the new science. 'The Century of Genius' surveys the age of Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Harvey and Newton and names the settlement it left behind, 'scientific materialism': the assumption that nature consists ultimately of bits of senseless matter, each simply located at a point in space and time, while colour, sound and value are supplied by the mind. Whitehead does not call this science wrong. He calls it a high abstraction mistaken for concrete fact, which he names the 'fallacy of misplaced concreteness'. The eighteenth century made the abstraction an efficient method; the Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth and Shelley, bore witness to what it left out. Chapters on the nineteenth century, relativity and quantum theory show physics itself dissolving the old idea of matter, and Whitehead proposes instead an 'organic' philosophy in which the basic realities are interrelated events. The later chapters turn to metaphysics and culture. 'Abstraction' and 'God' introduce the technical vocabulary Whitehead would develop in Process and Reality (1929); his God is a 'principle of limitation' that grounds actuality, a conception far from the God of the creeds. 'Religion and Science' argues that a clash of doctrines is an opportunity rather than a disaster and that religion must restate its principles as science revises its theories. The last chapter warns that professional specialisation yields knowledge without wisdom. Students will find the chapters on physics demanding, but the first, third, fifth, twelfth and thirteenth reward careful reading on their own.

Plot or Argument

• Preface: philosophy as the critic of cosmologies

  Whitehead explains that the book studies Western culture over three centuries as shaped by science, that each epoch's mentality springs from its dominant view of the world, and that men can be provincial in time as well as in place. He lists which chapters were lectures and which were added.

• Ch. I: The Origins of Modern Science

  Modern science arose from a new interest in 'irreducible and stubborn facts' joined to an older faith in the order of nature. Whitehead finds that faith in Greek tragedy's sense of fate and above all in medieval theology's confidence in a rational God, and he presents the seventeenth-century revolt as anti-intellectualist, a return to brute fact.

• Ch. II: Mathematics as an Element in the History of Thought

  Originally a lecture at Brown University, this chapter shows how the abstract study of number, periodicity and pattern, from Pythagoras to the calculus, prepared the conceptual tools of physics. Mathematics is called 'a divine madness of the human spirit'.

• Ch. III: The Century of Genius

  The seventeenth century of Bacon, Harvey, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, Huygens, Boyle, Newton, Locke, Spinoza and Leibniz bequeathed the scheme of matter with simple location in space and time. Whitehead ironically states its outcome: a nature without colour, sound or scent, merely the hurrying of material.

• Ch. IV: The Eighteenth Century

  The contrast between Chartres and the Paris salons frames an age of reason based upon faith. Mathematical physics triumphs, and Whitehead diagnoses its key error as the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, while beginning to sketch his alternative, organic view.

• Ch. V: The Romantic Reaction

  Milton, Pope, Wordsworth and Tennyson are read as witnesses to the relation of the human spirit to a mechanised nature. Wordsworth's sense of presences in the hills and Shelley's love of science within a living, coloured world testify to what materialism omits. Whitehead argues that mechanism cannot account for the efficacy of mind and introduces 'organic mechanism'.

• Ch. VI: The Nineteenth Century

  The century of the method of invention, technology, the theory of energy, atomic chemistry, Pasteur's micro-organisms and evolution. Whitehead argues that these developments, especially the ideas of organism and field, undermined the materialism on which they still officially rested.

• Ch. VII-VIII: Relativity and the Quantum Theory

  Einstein's theory removes the fixed space and time that simple location required, and quantum jumps suggest to Whitehead that the ultimate physical entities are vibratory organisms, which he calls 'primates', whose patterns need a span of time to be what they are. Whitehead interprets both as support for a philosophy of events rather than of enduring bits of matter.

• Ch. IX: Science and Philosophy

  A survey of modern philosophy from Descartes to William James and Bergson in its contacts with science. Whitehead pairs Descartes, who thought of the body with a physicist's outfit, and James, whose psychology was shaped by medical physiology, and argues that physiology has put mind back into nature.

• Ch. X-XI: Abstraction and God

  Two new, highly technical chapters develop the notions of 'eternal objects' and 'actual occasions' and argue that metaphysics requires a principle of limitation that it cannot itself explain. Whitehead names that principle God, the ground of concrete actuality, and rejects the habit of paying God 'metaphysical compliments'.

• Ch. XII: Religion and Science

  First given at Harvard's Phillips Brooks House and printed in the Atlantic Monthly, this chapter argues that the future depends on how this generation relates religion and science, that conflict is an opportunity, and that religion is the vision of something beyond, behind and within the passing flux.

• Ch. XIII: Requisites for Social Progress

  Whitehead criticises professionalised knowledge that grows without wisdom, the 'Gospel of Force' and the 'Gospel of Uniformity', and calls for education aimed at balanced development and the appreciation of value. He closes by claiming that men of thought, individually powerless, are ultimately the rulers of the world.

Characters

• Galileo Galilei, exemplar of the new science

  His insistence on how things happen, against Simplicius's reasons for why they happen, illustrates Whitehead's claim that the scientific revolt was a return to brute fact.

• Isaac Newton, architect of the classical scheme

  His physics supplies the framework of matter, absolute space and time that Whitehead calls scientific materialism and later treats as a high abstraction.

• René Descartes, philosopher of the seventeenth-century settlement

  His division of nature into extended matter and thinking minds frames the problem Whitehead believes modern science has inherited and must outgrow.

• William Wordsworth, Romantic witness

  Read as a thoughtful poet 'drunk with nature' whose sense of presences in the landscape testifies to what the mechanical scheme leaves out.

• Percy Bysshe Shelley, Romantic witness

  A poet who loved science yet kept a nature of colour and organism; Whitehead quotes him to show that the poets' evidence is not merely anti-scientific.

• William James, psychologist and philosopher

  Whitehead pairs James with Descartes as an opener of an epoch, a thinker whose physiological psychology put mind back into nature.

• Albert Einstein, physicist

  In Chapter I Whitehead recalls being present at the Royal Society when the eclipse plates confirming Einstein's prediction were announced; relativity removes the fixed space and time on which simple location depended.

Lessons

• Faith in an ordered nature

  Whitehead argues that scientists work in hope only because they believe every event has definite antecedents, and that Europe acquired this instinctive belief from centuries of medieval faith in a rational, personal God. He offers this as a historical explanation, not as proof of God, and he admits the belief is not logically justified even by its own theology. The claim invites careful thinking about how belief shapes inquiry.

  • What exactly does Whitehead say science owes to medieval theology, and what does he explicitly not claim?
  • Why does he also credit the Greek tragedians, and how is fate different from a rational Creator?
  • If the belief in an ordered nature came from theology, can science keep the belief after abandoning the theology?

• Mistaking the map for the country

  The 'fallacy of misplaced concreteness' is Whitehead's name for treating a useful abstraction, such as matter with simple location, as if it were the whole of concrete reality. He does not reject the abstraction; he praises its efficiency. The error lies in forgetting what was left out, including colour, value and mind.

  • Explain in your own words Whitehead's ironic sentence that nature is 'a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless'. Is he stating his view or someone else's?
  • Give an example from school subjects, economics or medicine where a useful abstraction might be mistaken for the whole truth.
  • How can a person use abstractions without being ruled by them?

• The poets as witnesses

  In 'The Romantic Reaction' Whitehead treats Wordsworth and Shelley as evidence: what they report of nature is data that a complete philosophy must explain, not decoration. This is an unusual argument for a mathematician to make, and it asks students to take literature seriously as a form of knowledge.

  • Why does Whitehead think Wordsworth 'weakens his evidence' by disliking science, yet still counts it as evidence?
  • How does Shelley's love of chemistry make his testimony about living nature more persuasive to Whitehead?
  • Can a poem be evidence about the world? What would make it trustworthy or untrustworthy?

• Doctrines that clash

  Whitehead argues that a clash between religion and science, like a clash within science between two experiments, is an opportunity to discover something new. He urges religion to distinguish its principles from their changing expression. Christian readers will want to weigh which parts of the faith Whitehead treats as expression and which the creeds treat as revealed truth, and to notice that his God of Chapter XI differs from the personal God of Scripture.

  • What does the story of Rayleigh and Ramsay's two weights of nitrogen illustrate in Chapter XII?
  • Whitehead says religion's principles may be eternal while their expression develops. Where would a historic Christian agree, and where would he object?
  • Is every conflict between religion and science an opportunity, or are some resolved only by one side being wrong?

• Specialists without wisdom

  The closing chapter warns that the nineteenth century trained professionals in grooves, so that a modern chemist may know nothing of drama or rhythm, and that the fixed person for fixed duties becomes dangerous in a changing world. Whitehead's remedy is education for balanced development and the appreciation of value, a theme close to the aims of liberal learning.

  • What does Whitehead mean when he says wisdom is the fruit of balanced development?
  • Why does he think a rapidly changing society makes narrow training more dangerous rather than less?
  • How should a student plan a course of study that avoids the danger Whitehead describes?

Context

Whitehead spoke in 1925, after two decades in which relativity and quantum theory had overturned the Newtonian physics that most educated people still took for the scientific picture of the world. He had himself been a leading mathematician, co-author with Bertrand Russell of Principia Mathematica (1910-1913), and had written on the philosophy of physics in London before Harvard invited him at the age of sixty-three to teach philosophy. The lectures also came at a time of public debate in America over evolution and religion, the year of the Scopes trial, though Whitehead does not address that controversy directly.

Composition

The preface, dated Harvard, 29 June 1925, explains that eight Lowell Lectures given in February 1925 are printed with slight expansion, one lecture being divided into Chapters VII and VIII. Chapter II was a lecture to the Mathematical Society of Brown University; Chapter XII was an address at Phillips Brooks House, Harvard, also published in the Atlantic Monthly in August 1925; Chapters X and XI were new. Macmillan published the book in New York in October 1925, with Cambridge University Press in Britain.

Reception

The book reached a general readership unusual for a work of metaphysics and introduced phrases such as 'the fallacy of misplaced concreteness' and the 'century of genius' into wider use. Its argument that medieval theology fostered modern science influenced later historians of science, and its philosophy of organism led directly to Process and Reality (1929), the founding text of process philosophy and process theology. It was later included in the second edition of the Great Books of the Western World (1990).

Comparisons

• Novum Organum

  Whitehead counts Bacon among the builders of the modern mind but repeats Harvey's jibe that he wrote of science like a Lord Chancellor and judges his account of induction too simple. Reading Bacon's aphorisms on the idols beside Chapter III shows two critics of mental habits, one at the start of the scientific age and one at its crisis.

• Discourse on Method

  Descartes' division of reality into thinking substance and extended matter is the settlement Whitehead most wants to overcome; Chapter IX cites Part V of the Discourse, where Descartes treats the body with a physicist's outlook.

• The Principles of Psychology

  Whitehead opens the book with James's letter about forging every sentence against 'irreducible and stubborn facts' and later pairs James with Descartes. James's physiological psychology is, for Whitehead, the sign that mind is being restored to nature.

• Lyrical Ballads

  Whitehead sums up Wordsworth's hostility to analysis with 'We murder to dissect', a line from 'The Tables Turned' in this collection, and then treats the poet's nature-feeling as serious evidence against mechanism.

• An Essay on Man

  Chapter V contrasts Pope's confident poem, addressed to Bolingbroke, with Milton's address to God, as a measure of how quickly the Newtonian order became the background of educated belief.

• Relativity: The Special and General Theory

  Einstein's popular exposition explains the theory that Chapter VII interprets; Whitehead accepts its physics but offers a different philosophical account of space and time, rooted in events.

• The Abolition of Man

  Lewis, writing in 1943, likewise warns that reducing nature to an object of analysis strips it of value; unlike Whitehead he grounds value in objective moral law rather than in a new metaphysics of organism.

Quotes

Medical Lens

Not a medical book, but useful for the history of ideas behind medicine and psychiatry. Whitehead's critique of scientific materialism bears on the mind-body problem: he argues that a strictly mechanical account of the body makes mental states irrelevant to action, and he welcomes physiology, neurology and biochemistry for treating cognition as an activity of the whole organism. He notes Harvey as the one biologist among the seventeenth century's geniuses, Pasteur's extension of atomic ideas to micro-organisms, and the late nineteenth-century passage from physiology to psychology exemplified by William James. These are philosophical interpretations of the history of science, not clinical claims.

• Ch. III, The Century of Genius

  Harvey is named as the period's only biologist and quoted on Bacon's way of writing about science; Whitehead remarks on the omission of other physiologists such as those of Padua.

  Physicians Doctors
• Ch. V, The Romantic Reaction

  Argument that if bodily molecules run blindly, mental states are irrelevant to bodily action, and the case for an organic alternative to mechanism.

  Mind Body
• Ch. VI, The Nineteenth Century

  The cell theory and Pasteur's work introduce the notion of organism into the world of minute beings.

  Physicians Doctors
• Ch. IX, Science and Philosophy

  Descartes thought of the body as a physicist, modern psychologists as medical physiologists; the neurologist's account of stimuli, nerve centres and motor response puts mind back into nature.

  Mind Body Psychiatry History

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Whitehead claims that faith in the possibility of science was an unconscious derivative from medieval theology. Write an essay that states his argument fairly, identifies the strongest objection to it, and decides whether the argument survives.

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation in which Galileo and Simplicius, as Whitehead portrays them in Chapter I, are joined by Whitehead himself, who tries to show each what the other has right.

• Poetry

  Write a short poem describing a single object (a rose, a bell, a sunset) twice: once as the 'dull affair' of Chapter III, and once as Wordsworth or Shelley might see it. Add a paragraph explaining which description Whitehead thinks is closer to concrete reality.

• Classroom

  List five abstractions used in your school subjects (for example a point mass, a median income, a diagnosis code). For each, write what the abstraction leaves out and when forgetting it would commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

Further Reading

• Process and Reality, Alfred North Whitehead

  The 1929 Gifford Lectures that develop the metaphysics sketched in Chapters X-XI.

• Adventures of Ideas, Alfred North Whitehead

  A 1933 companion volume on the history of ideas and civilisation.

• The Aims of Education and Other Essays, Alfred North Whitehead

  Essays on education that expand the closing chapter's concerns.

• The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, E. A. Burtt

  A 1924 study of the same seventeenth-century settlement, published a year earlier.

• Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives, John Hedley Brooke

  A modern historian's assessment of claims about religion and the rise of science.

• The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis

  A Christian critique of reducing nature and value to objects of analysis.