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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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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.

• 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.

• Ch. VI, The Nineteenth Century

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

• 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.