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.

    156/412 page 140
    high-grade reflection upon the course of events. It requires a forecast of the course of nature months ahead. Many an ape-man must have snatched up a stone wherewith to hit somebody, either another man or other animal, on the head, without any reflection upon the course of nature beyond the next few minutes. Also he might notice that some stones are better than others as lethal weapons, and he might even help them out by chipping them. He is then approaching civilization. But he—or more probably, she—has crossed the great divide, when he puts seeds into a patch of earth and waits for a season. It is obvious that seasonal ceremonies must extend back¬ wards in time far beyond the introduction of agriculture. The differences between the seasons impose differences of behaviour upon all living things, vegetables and animals alike. The seasonal urge towards change of habit, hiberna¬ tion or migration, must have begotten some expression of emotional restlessness. The interest of agriculture comes in when we consider the later interpretation of the seasonal ceremonies in which the tribe had been indulging for count¬ less ages. Civilization did not start with a social contract determining modes of behaviour. Its earliest effort was the slow introduction of ideas explanatory of modes of be¬ haviour and of inrushes of emotion which already dominated their lives. Undoubtedly ideas modified the practice. But in the main practice precedes thought; and thought is mainly concerned with the justification or the modification of a pre-existing situation. Now, apart from the practice of agriculture, animal habits are mainly based on the massive recurrence of the seasons, heat and frost, rain and drought, day and night. There was stolid recurrent matter of fact, with accompanying rhythms of emotion and ritual. Vagrant questions may have
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