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.

    218/412 page 202
    range. There is a focal region, which in common speech is where the thing is. But its influence streams away from it with finite velocity throughout the utmost recesses of space and time. Of course, it is natural, and for certain purposes entirely proper, to speak of the focal region, thus modified, as the thing itself situated there. But difficulties arise if we press this way of thought too far. For physics, the thing itself is what it does, and what it does is this divergent stream of influence. Again the focal region cannot be separated from the external stream. It obstinately refuses to be con¬ ceived as an instantaneous fact. It is a state of agitation, only differing from the so-called external stream by its superior dominance within the focal region. Also we are puzzled how to express exactly the existence of these physical things at any definite moment of time. For at every instantaneous point-event, within or without the focal region, the modifica¬ tion to be ascribed to this thing is antecedent to, or successive to, the corresponding modification introduced by that thing at another point-event. Thus if we endeavour to conceive a complete instance of the existence of the physical thing in question, we cannot confine ourselves to one part of space or to one moment of time. The physical thing is a certain co-ordination of spaces and times and of conditions in those spaces at those times, this co-ordination illustrating one exemplification of a certain general rule, expressible in terms of mathematical relations. Here we have returned to a fundamental Platonic doctrine. Again, with the denial of simple location we must admit that within any region of space-time the innumerable mul¬ titude of these physical things are in a sense superposed. Thus the physical fact at each region of space-time is a com¬ position of what the physical entities throughout the Universe mean for that region. But a complete existence is not a com-
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