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.

    204/412 page 188
    Aristotle’s classifications; whereas Plato moves about amid a fragmentary system like a man dazed by his own pene¬ tration. A few main doctrines stand out and they are of priceless importance for science, in the largest sense of that term. As to their co-ordination into a system, he is undogmatic and can only tell ‘the most likely tale’. Indeed, in his seventh Epistle1 he denounces the notion that a final system can be verbally expressed. His later thought circles round the inter¬ weaving of seven main notions namely, The Ideas, The Physical Elements, The Psyche, The Eros, The Harmony, The Mathematical Relations, The Receptacle. These notions are as important for us now, as they were then at the dawn of the modern world, when civilizations of the old type were dying. From their point of view the Athenians were right to condemn Socrates. After the coalescence of Greek and Semitic thought the old order of life was doomed. Western Civilization acquired a new intellectuality, clarified, humanized, moralized. Considering the Ideas by themselves, Plato points out that any selections are either compatible for joint exemplification, or are incompatible. It thus follows, as he notes, that the determinations of compatibilities and incompatibilities are the key to coherent thought, and to the understanding of the world in its function as the theatre for the temporal realization of ideas. The Aristotelian Logic is only a specialized derivative from this general notion. Plato then passes on to the agency whereby ideas obtain efficiency in the creative advance. As he conceives them in abstraction, he finds ideas to be static, frozen, and lifeless. They obtain ‘life and motion’ by their entertainment in a living intelligence. Such a living intelligence with its ‘gaze 1 Cf. 341, G.
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3