Adventures of ideas / by Alfred North Whitehead.

  • Alfred North Whitehead
Date:
1933
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Adventures of ideas / by Alfred North Whitehead. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    113/412 page 97
    ture, physical and intellectual. Avocations are initiated as means of subsistence: they end as passions. The result in Europe has been the introduction of novelties, of Commerce, of Scientific Technology, and of Geographic Knowledge, which have entirely masked sociological consequences of the Malthusian type. The central activity from which the other two developed was Commerce. We are speaking of Europe from the Age of Charlemagne onwards. If we had included the six hun¬ dred years preceding that Age, the migration of Peoples within Europe was one main factor. But in the period under review these great migrations were over. The diffusion of the Scandinavian Northmen was still in progress. But this migration was hardly a mass movement. It is best conceived as the diffusion of the ablest governing class that Europe has ever seen—Canute and his Danes, Norman Barons in France, and in England, and in Southern Italy. Also their direct activities were not such as to mask the Malthusian Laws. They introduced order, and good order is a con¬ dition for the increase of population. Order, as such, gives no reason for escape from the consequences of an increasing population. Also an enumeration of some main interests of the epoch is not to the point. For example, the various activities of the Catholic Church, the scholastic controversies, the Holy Roman Empire, architecture, the artistic and literary interests of the Renaissance, the Reformation, had no direct bearing on the evasion of Malthusian consequences arising from the increase of population. Granting the in¬ crease of population, History has only disclosed three ways of escape—expanding Commerce, improving Technology, and utilization of Empty Regions. The most fundamental of all sociological classifications is that between civilized societies for which one or more of these conditions do obtain, 7 wi
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