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.

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    of a sentinel on the walls of Padua or Aquileia was not quite adequate in its presentation of the Huns. In every age of well-marked transition there is the pattern of habitual dumb practice and emotion which is passing, and there is the oncoming of a new complex of habit. Between the two lies a zone of anarchy, either a passing danger or a prolonged welter involving misery of decay and zest of young life. In our estimate of these agencies everything depends upon our standpoint of criticism. In other words, our history of ideas is derivative from our ideas of history, that is to say, upon our own intellectual standpoint. Mankind is not wholly dumb, and in this respect it differs from other races of animals. Yet in the history of the world of animals even among the ancestors of men, there have been transitions of patterns of habit which exemplify a history of forms of behaviour devoid of any contemporary intellectual expression, either in the form of antecedently expressed purpose or in the form of subsequently expressed reflection. For example, at a remote period urged by the growth of forests some mammals ascended trees and became apes; and then later, after the lapse of some vast period, urged by the decay of forests, the same race descended from trees and became men. We have here history on its senseless side, with its tran¬ sitions pushed forward either by rainfall and trees, or by brute barbarians, or by coal, steam, electricity and oil. Yet even the senseless side of history refuses to accept its own proper category of sheer senselessness. The rainfall and the trees are items in a majestic order of nature: Attila’s Huns had their own intellectual point of view in some respects surprisingly preferable to that of the degenerate Romans: the age of coal and steam was pierced through and through by the intellectual abilities of particular men who urged
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