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.

    52/412 page 36
    ligible. Indeed, one of the reasons for the separation of America from England was that the particular circum¬ stances of English life were not applicable to America, and that England was not fermenting with any universal ideas capable of specialization for American conditions. English influence survived, it is true, in the Common Law; but, apart from that exception, the mentality of men like Jefferson and Franklin was French. There was the homeland of their thoughts. It has required the whole of the activity of the nineteenth century, from 1790 onward, to reconstruct the intellectual influence of England on the outside world. In the eighteenth century, France looked to England; but it was to the England of the seventeenth century, Bacon, Newton, Locke and the Regicides. In order to understand the intellectual history of Europe, it is essential to remember the collapse of Germany during and after the Thirty Years5 War, to remember the collapse of Italy owing to the super- session of the Mediterranean trade route to the East, owing to the Catholic Reaction with its activity of censorship, and owing to the domination of Spaniards and Habsburgs, and to remember the collapse of England owing to absorption in the commercial expansion of the eighteenth century—in the words of the old song, ‘When George and pudding-time came round5. In the eighteenth century France carried the ‘White Man’s Burden5 of intellectual advance. Perhaps it was owing to the loss of the habit of speculative thoroughness, that in the revival of intellectual activity in England the issue of the emerging lines of thought was not discerned. Hume’s flux of impressions and of reactions to impressions, each impression a distinct, self-sufficient exist¬ ence, was very different to the Platonic soul. The status of man in the universe required re-considering. ‘What is man
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