Alfred North Whitehead Quotes (1861-1947)

“All the world over and at all times there have been practical men, absorbed in 'irreducible and stubborn facts': all the world over and at all times there have been men of philosophic temperament who have been absorbed in the weaving of general principles. It is the union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty in our present society. Previously it had appeared sporadically and as if by chance. This balance of mind has now become part of the tradition which infects cultivated thought. It is the salt which keeps life sweet. The main business of universities is to transmit this tradition as a widespread inheritance from generation to generation.”

“Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.”

“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.”

“The main importance of Francis Bacon’s influence does not lie in any peculiar theory of inductive reasoning which he happened to express, but in the revolt against second-hand information of which he was a leader.”

“The point is that in the past the time-span of important change was considerably longer than that of a single human life. Thus mankind was trained to adapt itself to fixed conditions. To-day the time-span is considerably shorter than that of human life, and accordingly our training must prepare individuals to face a novelty of conditions.”

“In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed. Not all your heroism, not all your social charm, not all your wit, not all your victories on land or at sea, can move back the finger of fate. To-day we maintain ourselves. To-morrow science will have moved forward yet one more step, and there will be no appeal from the judgment which will then be pronounced on the uneducated.”

“The worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed.”

“Some of the later Greeks, such as Archimedes, had just views on the elementary phenomena of hydrostatics and optics. Indeed, Archimedes, who combined a genius for mathematics with physical insight, must rank with Newton, who lived nearly two thousand years later, as one of the founders of mathematical physics.”

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”

“We have a painter here [in Bath ], who takes the most exact likenesses I ever saw. His painting is coarse and slight, but has ease and spirit. Lord Villiers sat to him before he left Bath, and I hope we shall be able to bring his picture to town with us, as it is he himself, and is preferable in my opinion to the finest unlike picture in the universe, though it might serve for a sign; he sate only twice. The painter's name is Gainsborough.”

“Alfred North Whitehead, whose philosophical works pushed back heretofore perceived boundaries of thought and re-framed Western epistemology.”

“Professor Whitehead has recently restored a seventeenth century phrase—"climate of opinion." The phrase is much needed. Whether arguments command assent or not depends less upon the logic that conveys them than upon the climate of opinion in which they are sustained.”

“Our time has seen the best-educated society, situated in the heart of the most civilized part of the world, give birth to the most murderously vengeful government in history. Forty years ago the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead thought it self-evident that you would get a good government if you took power out of the hands of the acquisitive and gave it to the learned and the cultivated. At present, a child in kindergarten knows better than that.”

“In "Religion in the Making," by A. N. Whitehead... the approach is philosophical, and there are many interesting and valuable observations. But Dr. Whitehead occasionally indulges himself, like all metaphysicians, in what has a suspicious resemblance to nonsense.”

“Mr. Alfred North Whitehead has pointed out that one of our chief literary sins is in thinking of past and future in terms of a thousand years forward and backward, when really to experience the organic nature of past and future one should think of time in the order of a second, or a fraction of a second. One can make a similar remark about our esthetic perceptions... one of the signs of a rational enjoyment of the machine and the machine-made environment is to be concerned with much smaller differences and to react sensitively to them.”

“In a book called Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect, Whitehead points out that perception is usually a matter of symbols, just like language; I say I see a book when I actually see a red oblong. The Transactionists (who have been influenced by Whitehead rather than Husserl) take this one stage further, and point out that when I 'perceive' something, I am actually making a bet with myself that what I perceive is what I think it is. In order to act and live at all, I have to make these bets; I cannot afford to make absolutely certain that things are what I think they are. But this means that we should not take our perceptions at face value, any more than Nietzsche was willing to take philosophy at its face value; we must allow for prejudice and distortion.”

“[Whitehead’s claims] cannot be observed, directly and separately, by a mind untrained in introspective meditation... Just as the minute living beings in the microcosm of a drop of water become visible only through a microscope, so, too, the exceedingly short-lived processes in the world of mind become cognizable only with the help of a very subtle mental scrutiny, and that only obtains as a result of meditative training. None but the kind of introspective mindfulness or attention (satti ) that has acquired, in meditative absorption, a high degree of inner equipoise, purity and firmness (upekkha-sati-parisuddhi ), will possess the keenness, subtlety and quickness of cognitive response required for such delicate mental microscopy. Without that … only the way of inference from comparisons between various fragmentary series of thought moments will be open as a means of research.”

“What is surprising is Whitehead’s determination to attribute the origins of his thought solely to Western sources. While the Western precedents he cites are at best weak analogues, the Buddhist tenets from which his system derives are clearcut and extremely detailed. His arguments are strongest and most lucid when they are framed using Buddhist models; they become vague and confusing when he turns speculative and tries to appear original in both terminology and framework. Anyone knowledgeable in Buddhism would find his attempts very unconvincing in their attribution to Western philosophers as his theoretical predecessors.”