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.

    173/412 page 157
    *57 nothing else than the imposed conditions provided by God. This point of view was the working formula of the eighteenth century. God made his appearance in religion under the frigid title of the First Cause, and was appropriately worshipped in white-washed churches. Another theory as to the paths can be adopted by the Positivist School of Mere Description. For this reason, the atomic theory, of the Lucretian type, has always been a favourite first principle of cosmology with this School of Thought. The paths of the molecules can be ascribed to mere chance. They are random distributions, each path being entirely disconnected from any other path, and each continuation of one path being unconditioned by the earlier portion of the same path. Thus the world, as we know it, exhibits for our confused perception an involution of paths and a concatenation of circumstances which have arisen entirely by chance. We can describe what has happened, but with that description all possibility of knowledge ends. Lucretius wavers between the notion of imposed law and the notion of chance. For example: “This point too we wish you to apprehend: when bodies are borne downwards sheer through void by their own weights, at quite uncertain times and uncertain spots they push themselves a little from their course: you just and only just can call it a change of inclination. If they were not used to swerve, they would all fall down, like drops of rain, through the deep void, and no clashing would have been begotten nor blow produced among the first-beginnings [i.e. the atoms] : thus nature never would have produced aught”.1 1 Book ii, lines 216-224. Translated by H. A. J. Monro, published separately in Bohn’s series, by G. Bell and Sons, Ltd.: Cf. also Cyril Bailey’s translation, Lucretius on the Nature of Things, Oxford University Press, 1929.
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