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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    or traders, would have none of it. They were individualists. For them the universities were secondary, the monasteries were a nuisance, the Church was a nuisance, feudalism was a nuisance, the guilds were a nuisance. They wanted good order, and to be let alone with their individual activities. The great thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen¬ turies were singularly detached from universities. Erasmus wanted printers, and Bacon, Hervey, Descartes, Galileo, Leibniz wanted governmental patronage, or protection, more than university colleagues, mostly reactionary. When Luther, Descartes, Galileo, or Leibniz shifted his residence, it was not to find a better university, but a more suitable government—a Duke who would protect, a Prince who would pay, or a Dutch Republic which would not ask questions. Nevertheless, the universities survived the change better than other institutions. In some ways it was a great time for them, though they shrank to be national. What finally emerged was the modern national organization of Europe with the sovereign state dictating every form of institutional organization, as subordinate elements for its own purposes. This was a recurrence to that earlier form of human organization which showed its faint signs of decay during the period of the Roman Empire. Naturally there were great differences. For nothing is ever restored. In fact the reaction was a failure, because mankind had outgrown the simplicities of the earlier form of civilization. The political philosophy of the modern era was a retro¬ gression, based upon a recurrence to the philosophers and lawyers of the old classical civilizations. The Middle Ages, in the simplified form of the relations of Church with State, were considering the problem of a civilization in which men owed a divided allegiance to many intersecting institutions pursuing diverse ends. This is the real problem
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