Alfred North Whitehead was born in 1861, the son of Canon Whitehead, Vicar of St. Peter's on the Isle of Thanet. In the current number of the Atlantic Monthly, he has given some account of his childhood and of that region of the Kentish coast from which he comes. The characteristics of the people who have to cope with the currents, fogs, and storms of the English Channel are, he tells us, “obstinacy and a tendency to lonely thought.” Of his father, he says that he was perhaps “the last of those East Kentish clergymen who were really homogeneous with their people, and therefore natural leaders on all occasions, secular and religious.” He knew all the farmers and laborers and had played cricket and hunted with their fathers. He read Gibbon, hated “cant,” and his favorite Bible character was Abraham. And one is struck, in Dr. Whitehead himself, for all his bent scholar's shoulders, by precisely those qualities of hardiness and independence which he describes as characteristic of Kent. One realizes that his intellectual strength is the strength of a stout ruddy-cheeked English stock, not easily awed by pretensions, quite ready to pit itself against difficulties and whose kindliness is combined with steady common sense. If, as has been said, he has something of a clerical aspect, it is that of such a clergyman as he has described, and with the urbanity and the irony of the university. The sort of beneficence which he sheds is as different as possible from that with which we have been familiarized in America by reformers and evangelists: in fact, despite his preoccupation with theology, the subject of Ethics itself is said to be Dr. Whitehead's bête noire and he has been heard to assert that doing people good “is an object best promoted indirectly.” Dr. Whitehead was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and returned there as a Fellow of the College and as Senior Mathematical Lecturer. In 1910, he went to London University, where he became, first, Lecturer in Applied Mathematics and Mechanics, and, later, Reader in Geometry, at University College; from 1914 to 1924, he was Professor of Applied Mechanics at Imperial College, where he also played an important part in the administration of the University. He is on the Council of the Royal Society, and was at one time President of the Mathematical Association.

Dr. Whitehead's activities have thus been closely bound up with the university world, and his reputation, until recently, has not extended much beyond it. His books, until the period of the War, were mainly scientific and technical. In 1898, he had published an important Treatise on Universal Algebra. The purpose of this work, he wrote, was “to present a thorough investigation of the various systems of Symbolic Reasoning allied to ordinary Algebra. … It is hoped to exhibit the algebras both as systems of symbolism, and also as engines for the investigation of the possibilities of thought and reasoning connected with the abstract general idea of space. … Ordinary algebra in its modern developments is studied as being a large body of propositions, interrelated by deductive reasoning, and based upon conventional definitions which are generalizations of fundamental conceptions. Thus a science is gradually being created, which by reason of its fundamental character has relation to almost every event, phenomenal or intellectual, which can occur. But these reasons for the study of ordinary Algebra apply to the study of Universal Algebra; provided that the newly invented algebras can be shown either to exemplify in their symbolism, or to represent in their interpretations interesting generalizations of important systems of ideas, and to be useful engines of investigation. Such algebras are mathematical sciences, which are not essentially concerned with number or quantity; and this bold extension beyond the traditional domain of pure quantity forms their peculiar interest. The ideal of mathematics should be to erect a calculus to facilitate reasoning in connection with every province of thought, or of external experience, in which the succession of thoughts, or of events external experience, in which the succession of thoughts, or of events can be definitely ascertained and precisely stated. So that all serious thought which is not philosophy, or inductive reasoning, or imaginative literature shall be mathematically developed by means of calculus.”

In 1910, in collaboration with Bertrand Russell, Dr. Whitehead published two volumes of a Principia Mathematica, upon which he and Russell had been working since 1900. Bertrand Russell, who is eleven years younger than Whitehead, had sat under him at Trinity and afterwards became closely associated with him in the study and original development of Symbolic Logic—that is, of the attempt, by means of a language of symbols which shall stand for purely logical ideas to supply “the proof that all pure mathematics deals exclusively with concepts definable in terms of a very small number of fundamental logical concepts, and that all its propositions are deducible from a very small number of fundamental logical principles.” “Mathematics,” wrote Bertrand Russell in his preliminary Principles of Mathematics, “includes not only Arithmetic and Analysis but also Geometry, Euclidean and non-Euclidean, rational Dynamics and an indefinite number of other studies still unborn or in their infancy. The fact that all mathematics is Symbolic Logic is one of the greatest discoveries of our age; and when this fact has been established, the remainder of the principles of mathematics consists in the analysis of Symbolic Logic itself.” Russell's Principles of Mathematics, which had been prepared with the assistance of Whitehead, was published in 1903, and what eventually, with Whitehead's active collaboration, appeared as the Principia Mathematica was originally announced as merely a continuation of the earlier work. It was, however, found necessary to start afresh and make the new book an independent work to be distinguished from The Principles of Mathematics. It grew to enormous proportions and, though it has just had a new edition, constitutes what is certainly—and even, one is told, for mathematicians—one of the most formidable of modern works. The ordinary reader picking it up receives an impression even more appalling than that which ensues upon opening the Chinese classics: there is apparently, not merely no English to be seen for spaces of hundreds of pages; but not even any recognizable mathematics: what confronts him is a totally new language compounded of the Roman, Greek and Hebrew alphabets; excessively large exclamation points; defective signs for equations of proportion; and other symbols of eery aspect and entirely unfamiliar form. It is possible, however, to gain some idea of what the authors are here attempting from their introductory explanation: “The reasons for this extension of symbolism beyond the familiar regions of number and allied ideas are many: (1) The ideas here employed are more abstract than those familiarly considered in language. Accordingly there are no words which are used mainly in the exact consistent senses which are required here. Any use of words would require unnatural limitations to their ordinary meanings, which would be in fact more difficult to remember consistently than are the definitions of entirely new symbols. (2) The grammatical structure of language is adapted to a wide variety of usages. Thus it possesses no unique simplicity in representing the few simple, though highly abstract, processes and ideas arising in the deductive trains of reasoning employed here. In fact, the very abstract simplicity of the ideas of this work defeats language. … (3) The adaptation of the rules of the symbolism to the processes of deduction aids the intuition in regions too abstract for the imagination readily to present to the mind the true relation between the ideas employed. For various collocations of symbols become familiar as representing important collocations of ideas; and, in turn the possible relations—according to the rules of symbolism—between these collocations of symbols become familiar, and these further collocations represent still more complicated relations between the abstract ideas. And thus the mind is finally led to construct trains of reasoning in regions of thought in which the imagination would be entirely unable to sustain itself without symbolic help.”

It is interesting to note that Whitehead's mind, even while occupied with highly technical subjects, has always tended, whether in his Universal Algebra or in the Principia Mathematica, toward the discovery of general principles which may be applied to the greatest number of branches of mathematics and of fields of experience. Bertrand Russell, during the War, turned to politics and social criticism. Dr. Whitehead had already published a short Introduction to Mathematics (in the Home University Library), which was almost unique among books for beginners in its philosophic interest and its appeal to the imagination; and a collection of essays on education (The Organization of Thought) which showed an astonishingly comprehensive grasp and appreciation of the political and the esthetic, as well as the scientific and philosophical, departments of human thought. But only with the series of books which began in 1919 with An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, did the extraordinary range of his culture and the brilliance and penetration of his intelligence become fully apparent. With these books, he emerged as a full-blown philosopher. The Principles of Natural Knowledge was followed, in 1920, by The Concept of Nature and, in 1922, by The Principle of Relativity. In 1924, Dr. Whitehead came to Harvard and delivered the Lowell lectures, which were afterwards incorporated in Science and the Modern World (1925) and in Religion in the Making (1926). The first three of these books were partly technical and were read principally by philosophers and scientists; but the two latter have excited a wide interest and seem likely to establish Dr. Whitehead among the most influential writers of the time.

It may, therefore, be worth while to quote from a pamphlet by Professor Norman Kemp Smith (Whitehead's Philosophy of Nature: University of California Publications in Philosophy) an exposition of Whitehead's argument in his earlier books, which have been less accessible and less popular than the later, but upon whose foundations Science and the Modern World and Religion in the Making are based. “Whitehead's teaching,” writes Professor Kemp Smith, “is directed to showing that the fundamental concepts usually employed in the physical sciences rest on certain assumptions which may seem to have behind them the prestige of science, but which really have been foisted upon science, partly through the influence of mental habits acquired under the stress of practical needs, and partly through the influence of speculative doctrines that obtained currency among the early Greek thinkers, and that have held the field ever since. … The physicist ordinarily regards himself as concerned with the adventures of material entities in space and time, and accordingly has interpreted the course of nature as being the history of matter. More particularly defined, the attitude is this: the physicist conceives himself as perceiving the attributes of things, and the things which have these attributes as being bits of matter. He further conceives these bits of matter as capable only of moving in space; and so has come to believe that a complete description of the aggregations and motions of which they are capable would constitute an adequate solution of all the problems with which natural science has to deal. … Whitehead formulates an alternative to this philosophy of nature. In place of the substantial, material entities, persisting through time and moving in space, he would substitute as being the ultimate components of reality, a very different kind of entities; and these he would describe as being events. Nature, he declares, is at each moment an all-comprehensive event within which we discriminate constituent events; and behind the notion of an event we cannot penetrate by any amount of analysis. … What we alone immediately experience are events, not detached events standing in serial order in time, but events that always overlap and so together constitute the one total durational event that is nature at any assignable period.”

With the problem of representative perception, Whitehead deals as follows: “When Whitehead,” continues Professor Kemp Smith, “tells us that all present-day natural philosophy is vitiated by the fallacy of bifurcation, he means that it commits us to a quite untenable division of the components of objective nature into two diametrically opposed types of existence, the material and the mental; or to employ a more adequate pair of terms, the physical and the psychical. … The physicist bifurcates objective nature into physical and psychical components, and counts the secondary qualities [sound, color, heat, etc.] as belonging to the latter class, because he is unable, by means of his physical principles, to explain either their coming to be or their ceasing to be. Indeed, from his point of view, it would be more satisfactory if they did not exist at all. So far as he can discover, they make no difference in the behavior of the bodies in which they are found. A red billiard ball acts on a white ball in precisely the same manner as a green one. … Where the colors do come in, to make a difference, is solely in the behavior of the players: the colors enable them to identify which ball is which. The colors, that is to say, first come in just where, through the intervention of life, or at least of consciousness, reality displays that degree and kind of qualitative complexity which marks the limit beyond which, on the traditional view, no scientific knowledge, at least of the explanatory type, is any longer possible. Since, it is argued, the behavior of physical entities is completely accounted for in the absence of the secondary qualities, these qualities must fall outside physical nature, and must, like consciousness, be irrelevant to it.

But is not a very large assumption being here made? … Are we not justified in holding that colors are as truly physical as are the bodily organs of sight, and sounds as truly physical as are the organs of hearing? These organs are telepathic; they discharge their functions by enabling us to apprehend what exists in places where our organisms are not themselves located; and they do so in and through the secondary qualities. … To treat the bodily organs as strictly physical, and the qualities of color and sound as purely psychical, is surely to substitute for nature's complex but unitary workings the crude and incredible simplicities of a cast-iron dualism, the sole justification for which is the supposed adequacy of the Newtonian physics, and the supposedly closed character of the physical system as therein conceived. Nature, then, is not, as in the traditional view, a sequence of instantaneous events: such a view arises from a false idea of time. For the ordinary idea of time, Whitehead substitutes the doctrine of duration, according to which, since the melody, say, of the nightingale's song “extending over a sequence of events, demands for its apprehension as melody certain mental processes, namely, those which make possible recollection and anticipation,” it may exist really “as an item in physical nature. … The traditional physics will not countenance persistent melodies, but it does believe in what, as Whitehead is prepared to show, are more or less in the same class therewith, namely, persistent electrons, atoms and molecules. These, Whitehead argues, cannot exist, any more than the secondary qualities, if nature be viewed as instantaneous.” And the living organism “must be interpreted in the same general manner as atoms and molecules. By its existence it demonstrates the physical reality of certain rhythmic functionings which, as such, are incapable of being enclosed within the instantaneous. As rhythmic, they presuppose duration as truly as does a melody. ‘Life is too obstinately concrete’ to be located in an instant, even if at the instant it be spread over a space. …

Thus nature, as envisaged by Whitehead, is extraordinarily different from nature as defined in terms of classical physics. While less tidy, with all sorts of loose ends, it is allowed to have more content; and in proportion as it has become more bewildering, just thereby it has become more and more like unto the reality which faces us in experience. In view of the amazing diversity of the items which, on Whitehead's view, compose nature—the tastes as well as the textures of foods, the roar of the lion and the song of the nightingale as well as the labyrinthine structures of the inner ear, the gorgeous coloration of the peacock's tail as well as the rods and cones of the retina—nature, thus envisaged, will at every turn, to the great benefit of our open-mindedness, force upon our attention the immense gaps, not merely in our detailed and established theories, but also even in our most conjectural interpretations of nature's doings. …

In the more technical parts of these volumes, Whitehead had developed, as a substitute for the commonly accepted doctrine of “simple location” in space and time mentioned at the beginning of this summary, a new and more complex theory of location which has been described by Bertrand Russell as “destroying materialism while leaving physics intact.” And, though his system was based upon concepts introduced by the theory of relativity, he had undertaken a criticism of Einstein, whose conclusions, it appears, were not entirely consistent with the previously formulated theories of Russell and Whitehead. Whitehead, in general, accepts Einstein's mathematics, but he attributes to his algebraic formulae a different significance. He does not believe in Einstein's curvature in the space-time manifold. “I cannot,” he says, “attach any clear conception to his interpretation of space and time. … I have considerably toned down the various exciting peculiarities of the original theory and have reduced it to a greater conformity with the older physics. I do not allow that physical phenomena are due to oddities of space.” “As the result of a consideration of the character of our knowledge in general, and of our knowledge of nature in particular, I deduce that our experience requires and exhibits a basis of uniformity, and that in the case of nature this basis exhibits itself as the uniformity of spatio-temporal relations. This conclusion entirely cuts away the casual heterogeneity of these relations which is the essential of Einstein's later theory.” It may be that in Whitehead's resolute and thorough-going criticism of Einstein, such a criticism as has scarcely elsewhere been attempted and which, if we accept it, has the effect of making the universe seem somewhat less fantastic than, on Einstein's view, it must appear, we are to see an example of that obstinacy and independence which characterize the men of East Kent.

In Science and the Modern World and Religion in the Making, Whitehead has further developed his organic theory of nature and has attempted to show, not merely that color, sound, taste, etc., are realities of nature, but also that our values of good and bad are: there are in nature intrinsic values of an esthetic order; and the “completed ideal harmony” which the existence of these values implies is to be identified with God. Our moments of keenest awareness of these values, that is, of the order of the universe, of the creative purpose of God (who determines, in the flux of events, what possibilities shall become actual) are our moments of religious revelation. “You cannot,” however, “confine any important reorganization to one sphere of thought alone. You cannot shelter theology from science, or science from theology; nor can you shelter either of them from metaphysics, or metaphysics from either of them. There is no short cut to truth.” I shall not attempt further to summarize these books, which have already been discussed in the New Republic by Professors Dewey, Wieman and Miller; but it may be interesting to quote the criticism of Dr. Whitehead's old collaborator, Bertrand Russell, from a review of Science and the Modern World in the London Nation; “To the present reviewer it seems,” writes Mr. Russell, “though perhaps mistakenly—that Dr. Whitehead's theory consists of two parts: on the one hand, a logical construction leading to physics from a new set of non-material fundamentals, wholly admirable and profound; on the other hand, a metaphysic believed by the author to be bound up with his logical construction, but in fact—again I speak with diffidence—separable from it. The metaphysic is not essentially new: it is approximately that of Bergson or Plotinus. … Speaking generally, I cannot persuade myself that his logical reconstruction of physical concepts has any such tendency as he attributes to it, to restore the consolations of religion to a world desolated by mechanism.”

And it is true that Dr. Whitehead just now occupies a difficult and dangerous situation, which lays him open especially to the criticism of those academic specialists who have always considered it more respectable, as it is also so much safer, not to venture outside their prescribed fields. The mathematicians deplore the fact that Dr. Whitehead has abandoned mathematics; and some professional philosophers show a tendency to discount him as an amateur. To the ordinary reader, however, it is precisely the range of Whitehead's speculations which makes him appear interesting and important. He is inclined to agree with Dr. Whitehead that a too rigorous specialization may be also a line of least resistance: “There is no short cut to truth.” And he is likely to feel profoundly grateful to the first scientist, with a first-hand grasp of modern physical theory, to attempt to trace the implications of that theory for other departments of thought, to bring it forward into metaphysics, into literature and into theology. It may be true, as Mr. Russell suggests, that Dr. Whitehead's theological theories do not follow inevitably from his physics; but we are interested to see what new theological views may be formulated by a mind imbued with modern theories of physics. The ideas and the imagination of humanity seem to change with a certain uniformity in widely different departments of thought which seem quite out of reach of one another. There is much in common between modern art and literature, on the one hand, and modern scientific thought, on the other. And in Whitehead (who has “modernist” pictures on his wall) it is possible, to an astonishing extent, to watch in one mind the modification of thought, under the action of radically novel ideas, in a variety of fields of experience; and its reorganization at the hands of a vigorous intellect and a daring imagination. As Proust and Valéry have been the novelist and the poet who have assimilated modern philosophy and science, so Whitehead is the modern mathematician who has read poetry.

And the ordinary reader, though he may sometimes be baffled by the more abstract chapters of Whitehead's books, may even forgive him the forbidding and unfamiliar terminology, partly carried over from the language of mathematics and partly invented by Whitehead himself, which has provoked murmurs even among philosophers. “I am not for imposing any sense on your words,” Dr. Whitehead quotes from a dialogue of Berkeley, on the title page of his Principles of Natural Knowledge, “you are at liberty to explain them as you please. Only, I beseech you, make me understand something by them.” We must grant Whitehead his special vocabulary and see whether he does not make us understand something by it. For certain types of mind, this is difficult. We have seen that Bertrand Russell has become almost as suspicious of Whitehead's metaphysics as he was formerly of Bergson's. And it is reported that Gilson, the French professor of medieval philosophy, on a recent visit to America, finally gave up in despair in the attempt to master Whitehead's system in the course of an interview with him, owing to the fact that the English philosopher would not precisely define his terms at the beginning but persisted in endeavoring to suggest what they meant by a series of varied explanations. Yet Bergson contributed new metaphors to modern thought; and a metaphor may be as important as an argument. And Whitehead, who admires Bergson and has something in common with him, at the lowest estimate, has contributed metaphors as arresting. Actually, however, he has done much more than this: Bergson, without Whitehead's scientific training, rejected science altogether and threw out logic and reason with it: Whitehead, confronted with the same problems to which the concepts of science gave rise and with an equal conviction of the impossibility of the mechanistic answers, manages to preserve the theories of science by working out a metaphysic of the “creative advance of nature” which, unlike Bergson's “creative evolution,” admits them. He has saved logic along with God.

In his combination of a kind of metaphysical vision, transcending purely physical theory, with an addiction to the rigorous abstract reasoning characteristic of modern physics, it may be that Whitehead represents a type of mind destined to become typical of our time. Whitehead enormously, from certain points of view, admires the philosophers of the eighteenth century: even in rejecting their conclusions, he applauds their boldness in confronting their problems and their directness in dealing with them—virtues which the philosophers of the nineteenth century, for all their merits, he claims, did not possess. Whitehead himself has a mind of this sort—and he has also something of the dry, dispassionate and imperturbable intellectual temperament, as well as the wide knowledge of the world and the lack of provincial and national prejudices, in which the boldness and the directness of the eighteenth-century writers flourished. He has even a certain eighteenth-century epicureanism of the intellect which makes him relish a page of Hume or a verse of Shelley or Wordsworth as if it were a flower or a wine. Yet he has, at the same time, something quite different from these qualities. Personally witty and an excellent talker, with a taste for paradox which he shares with Bertrand Russell but indulges less easily, his books are not quite the sort of writings which one would expect from so urbane a talker: there is a peculiar earnestness and intensity to his thought and a tough woody grain to his style which are quite alien to the eighteenth century and perhaps characteristic of our own. It may be that Whitehead, who, at such a late age, has emerged for the first time as a philosopher, is really one of the major prophets of our period: it may be that his doctrine, first formulated during the War, has appeared to supply a new and necessary significance to a world of which the old accepted meanings have so disastrously come to be discredited. “The book,” he wrote in his preface to The Principles of Natural Knowledge, the first of his philosophic series, published in 1919 and dedicated to a son killed in the War, “is the product of intervals of leisure amid pressing occupation, a refuge from immediate fact. It has been thought out and written amid the sound of guns—guns of Kitchener's army training on Salisbury Plain, guns of the Somme faintly echoing across the Sussex coast: some few parts composed to pass times of expectation during air-raids over London, punctuated by the sound of bombs and the answer of artillery, with argument clipped by the whirr of aeroplanes. And through the land anxiety, and at last the anguish which is the price of victory.”

And the development of the philosophic ideas of which the application was begun in the Principles of Natural Knowledge has by no means reached completion. It may be predicted that Dr. Whitehead, who, at sixty-six, seems still at the fullest tide of enthusiasm and fertility, will carry them even further and apply them to wider areas of thought. He has been invited to remain at Harvard indefinitely and, after delivering the Gifford lectures in England this summer, will return to the United States. We are peculiarly fortunate in America, at a time when we have perhaps more intellectual eagerness and energy than the disillusion and exhaustion of the War have left to Europe and but few intellectual leaders to satisfy it, and when England herself, in poetry, fiction and drama has but little that is first-rate to send us, to entertain, not merely as a visiting lecturer but as a resident teacher, a great English philosopher and perhaps one of the great creative minds of our day.