[In the following essay, Dewey explicates the fundamental structure of Whitehead's philosophy of experience.]

I

It was long the fashion for philosophers to base their doctrines upon what each one happened to regard as “first principles,” the latter being “premises” in their capacity of coming logically first. When the principles were regarded, under the influence of Aristotelianism, as axioms or self-evident truths, apart from which there was no demonstration of other truths (and without demonstration no “science”), they seemed to descend directly via pure intellect, out of the ether of reason, situated next to God or perhaps in his own intrinsic abode. Even if there were some special occasion in virtue of which they were humanly noted, there was nothing beyond them or outside of them from which, as truths, they arose or upon which they depended. One might as well suppose that the stars, and not simply the view of them, were dependent upon the ladder by which one, perhaps, mounted to see them as to give attention to the setting in which “principles” were formulated. When the latter were called postulates, in place of premises, there was gain in candor and in knowledge by philosophers of what they were about. But the change did not of itself ensure recognition and statement of the background out of which postulates arise and which determines the function they perform.

It cannot be said, even yet, that explicit attention is given as a matter of course to the background which sets the special problems with which a given philosopher is occupied. This failure is partly due to the persistence of the tradition according to which it derogates from the purity of philosophy to doubt its immaculate conception. But it is also due, I think, to the fact that a philosophic thinker is much more explicitly aware of what lies ahead and of being urged forward than of the background from which he derives his push. And, as I write these words, I am painfully aware of the inadequacy of the word “background” to convey what I have in mind—the words “place” or “point of departure” being even more inadequate, if they suggest anything narrower than the home and regional environment from which a traveller sets out.

Whitehead, it seems to me, has come closer than most philosophers have done to stating the nature of the region from which he sets out. It is for that reason I have engaged in these introductory remarks. I am thinking especially of a passage in which, after saying that philosophy “can deal only with things in some sense experienced,” he goes on to say,

The living organ of experience is the living body as a whole. Every instability of any part of it—be it chemical, physical, or molar—imposes an activity of readjustment throughout the whole organism. In the course of such physical activities human experience has its origin. The plausible interpretation of such experience is that it is one of the natural activities involved in the functioning of such a high-grade organism. The actualities of nature … must be explanatory of this fact. …

Such experience seems to be more particularly related to the activities of the brain. But … we cannot determine with what molecules the brain begins and the rest of the body ends. Further, we cannot tell with what molecules the body ends and the external world begins. The truth is that the brain is continuous with the body, and the body is continuous with the rest of the natural world. Human experience is an act of self-origination including the whole of nature, limited to the perspective of a focal region, located within the body, but not necessarily persisting in any fixed coördination with a definite part of the brain.¹

If I had a right to assume on the part of the reader acquaintance with my own writings on the topic of the reciprocal connections of nature and experience, and the bearing of these connections upon the problems and task of philosophy, I would add that it will also be obvious why I cite this particular passage. For what I have called the background and point of departure seems to be the same for both of us, no matter what deviations may occur later. And such a community of backgrounds is so rare that I make no apology for dwelling upon it at the outset. In any case, the reader is entitled to the warning that my belief in the fundamental significance of the ideas set forth in the passage quoted controls what I have to say about the tenor of Whitehead's philosophy. If I am wrong in attributing central importance to the ideas that experience is a manifestation of the energies of the organism; that these energies are in such intimate continuity with the rest of nature that the traits of experience provide clews for forming “generalized descriptions” of nature—the especial business of philosophy according to Whitehead—and that what is discovered about the rest of nature (constituting the conclusions of the natural sciences) provides the organs for analyzing and understanding what is otherwise obscure and ambiguous in experiences directly had—if, I say, I am wrong in this view, then there will be no particular point to what I have further to say.

Whitehead is of course well aware that “experience” has often been restricted, both by those who called themselves empiricists and by their opponents, to certain arbitrarily selected activities of the organism to which a privileged rôle is assigned. For experience has, notoriously, been limited to the activities of sense-organs—or rather to their products, called sensations, or, better, sensa. In the light of the history of culture, one can find reasons for this peculiar arbitrary selection. But, viewing the matter impartially, the limitation can only be regarded as one of the most extraordinary and uncalled for errors human belief has ever indulged in—especially since, if one really began there and stuck, in the conclusion, solely to what the beginning justifies, one would never know even that he had sense-organs or that the sense-organs are organs of a creature engaged in living in an environment partly friendly and partly hostile to its activities. Whitehead expressly repudiates this restriction:

We must appeal to evidence relating to every variety of occasion. Nothing can be omitted, experience drunk and experience sober, experience sleeping and experience waking, experience drowsy and experience wide-awake, experience self-conscious and experience self-forgetful, experience intellectual and experience physical, experience religious and experience sceptical, experience anxious and experience care-free, experience anticipatory and experience retrospective, experience happy and experience grieving, experience dominated by emotion and experience under self-restraint, experience in the light and experience in the dark, experience normal and experience abnormal.²

Those who profess belief in empirical philosophy can hardly be other than grateful for emancipation from chains which, after all, were self-imposed. Artists, poets, prophets may be drawn to a philosophy that sees “experience” to be rich beyond the possibility of exhaustion and subtle beyond the reach of human wit.

II

I am not sure that the denial of “the bifurcation of nature” found in Whitehead's earlier writings was connected, consciously, with the enlarged and deepened idea about experience which is expressed in the passages quoted from his later writings. I imagine the denial had its source in Whitehead's reflections upon the new science; a mathematical strain dominates his cosmological account. But I have no doubt the denial has its completion in the express sense that physical nature must be such as to account for the specialized peculiarities of human experience, while the latter provides clews to be used in expanding to their full significance that which physical science discovers. “Neutral monists” have denied the existence of a gulf between physical and “mental” experience. Indeed, thoroughgoing materialism and spiritual idealism have at all times denied its existence. But as long as Newtonian physics was the accepted authority about the constitution of nature in its physical aspects, such theories seemed forced. Dualism was not so much an inferential conclusion as it was a frank recognition of the difference between the traits marking the objects of (Newtonian) physics and the undeniable features of immediate experience. The genius of Whitehead is exhibited in the earliness of his perception that the new mathematical physics did away with the supposedly scientific foundations, upon the physical side, which gave obvious point to the separation. Given this initial move, continued reflection could hardly do other than develop a less abstract, a more vital, sense of the essential community of the less and the more specialized occasions of experience.

In any case we have such a passage as the following: “All final individual actualities have the metaphysical character of occasions of experience;” a passage to be read and understood in connection with the thesis that, granted this view, “the direct evidence as to the connectedness of one's immediate present occasion of experience with one's immediately past occasions can be validly used to suggest categories applying to the connectedness of all occasions in nature.”³ If the meaning assigned to this sentence is not entirely clear, the following sentence should render it definite: “An occasion of experience which includes a human mentality is an extreme instance, at one end of the scale, of those happenings which constitute nature”⁴—a sentence which shows, I believe, the sense in which propositions like the following are to be understood: “It is a false dichotomy to think of Nature and Man. Mankind is that factor in Nature which exhibits in its most intense form the plasticity of nature.”⁵

This doctrine that all actual existences are to be treated as “occasions of experience” carries and elaborates, it seems to me, the significance contained in the propositions I quoted earlier about the depth and width of scope of experience. The idea that the immediate traits of distinctively human experience are highly specialized cases of what actually goes on in every actualized event of nature does infinitely more than merely deny the existence of an impassable gulf between physical and psychological subject-matter. It authorizes us, as philosophers engaged in forming highly generalized descriptions of nature, to use the traits of immediate experience as clews for interpreting our observations of non-human and non-animate nature. It also authorizes us to carry over the main conclusions of physical science into explanation and description of mysterious and inexplicable traits of experience marked by “consciousness.” It enables us to do so without engaging in the dogmatic mechanistic materialism that inevitably resulted when Newtonian physics was used to account for what is distinctive in human experience. That which on the negative side is simply an elimination of the grounds of the metaphysical dualism of physical and mental, material and ideal, object and subject, opens the road to free observation of whatever experience of any kind discloses and points toward:—free, that is, from a rigid frame of preconceptions.

For the generalization of “experience” which is involved in calling every actual existence by the name “occasion of experience” has a two-fold consequence, each aspect of this dual consequence being complementary to the other. The traits of human experience can be used to direct observation of the generalized traits of all nature. For they are intensified manifestations, specialized developments, of conditions and factors found everywhere in nature. On the other hand, all the generalizations to which physical science leads are resources available for analysis and descriptive interpretation of all the phenomena of human life, personal and “social.” It is my impression that in his earlier writings Whitehead started preferably from the physical side, and then moved on to a doctrine of nature “in general” without much explicit attention to what may be called experience from the psychological point of view, while in his later writings he supplements and extends the conclusions thus reached by adoption of a reverse movement:—that from specialized human experience through physical experience to a comprehensive doctrine of Nature. The “events” of his earlier treatises thus become the “occasions of experience” of later writings. But whether or not this impression is well-founded is of slight importance compared with the fact that Whitehead proceeds systematically upon the ground indicated in the following passage: “The world within experience is identical with the world beyond experience, the occasion of experience is within the world and the world is within the occasion. The categories have to elucidate this paradox of the connectedness of things:—the many things, the one world without and within.”⁶

In putting forward this particular mode of approach to interpretation of Whitehead's philosophy, I am doubtless deliberately emphasizing the things with which my own way of philosophical thinking most agrees. I would not deny that Whitehead's philosophy is so comprehensive that there are other ways of approach that other commentators and critics may find more significant than the one I have taken. None the less it cannot be denied that the path I have chosen is explicitly indicated (with increasing plainness) in Whitehead's own writings, so that what I say is legitimate if not inclusive. And if it is legitimate then I am entitled to my personal, and perhaps private, view that the consistency and sensitivity with which Whitehead follows the method thereby determined is the source of the originality and fecundity of his writings. For I believe that only by means of a view of the same general nature as is involved in this position can philosophy escape the road it has been following, a road which demonstrably has led to a dead end, where virtuosity of academic technique may flourish, but which cannot save philosophy from the sterility that is the Dead Sea fruit of academicism.

III

The passage already quoted to the effect that experiences involving human mentality are but extreme instances of the happenings constitutive of nature, is directly followed by the sentences:

Any doctrine that refuses to place human experience outside nature, must find in the description of experience factors which enter also into the description of less specialized natural occurrences. If there be no such factors, then the doctrine of human experience as a fact within nature is mere bluff, founded upon vague phrases whose sole merit is a comforting familiarity. We should either admit dualism, at least as a provisional doctrine, or we should point out the identical elements connecting human experience with physical science.⁷

That my interpretation is justly open to the charge of oversimplifying the philosophy of Whitehead is true in the sense in which it is an oversimplification to exhibit the skeleton of an organism without reference to flesh, blood, and the muscles with which it performs its actions. But I do not claim to be here concerned with anything but the skeleton of Whitehead's system, and even so only with its backbone. Any reader of his writings who keeps an open mind does not have to be reminded of the profound suggestiveness that marks the pages of such a book as Science and the Modern World and Adventures of Ideas, and of the extraordinarily wide field to which these suggestions refer. My particular theme compels me to be content with only this indefinite reference to everything in his books that does not have to do with what I take to be the general structural condition of his thinking. Accordingly, I now pass to consideration of the treatment given two historic problems of philosophy, confining myself in respect to them to matters that exemplify the principle of procedure I have taken to constitute the originality of Whitehead's thought, and that mark the direction in which he has made a contribution to subsequent philosophizing the surest to grow in scope and fruitfulness.

IV

In speaking of Whitehead's doctrine of the identity of elements in human and physical subject-matter of experience, I quoted a sentence in which the general view took on a special concrete form. The sentence was to the effect that the connectedness of present conscious experience with experience immediately past “can be validly used to suggest categories applying to the connectedness of all occasions in nature.” I propose to apply this statement to an account of what follows with respect to the problem of the subject-object relation, and the problem of the discrete-continuous, or individuality and relativity. That is to say, I wish to give in condensed form an outline of how Whitehead, starting from the prima facie fact that every temporally present immediate experience contains within itself elements of what is passing (which will soon be the past) and what is coming (which will be itself the immediately present as soon as the passing has become the past), goes on to derive from the fact an explanation both of the subject-object relation and the individuality-continuity relation, as universal traits of all the actualities of Nature.

The fact as to human experience is stated as follows: “Each moment of experience confesses itself to be a transition between two worlds, the immediate past and the immediate future. This is the persistent delivery of common sense. Also this immediate future is immanent in the present with some degree of structural definition.” In a previous passage, after speaking of “the immanence of past occasions in the occasions which are future, relatively to them,” he goes on to say:

It is evident that the future certainty is something for the present. The most familiar habits of mankind witness to this fact. Legal contracts, social understandings of every type, ambitions, anxieties, railway time-tables, are futile gestures of consciousness apart from the fact that the present bears in its own realized constitution relationships to a future beyond itself. Cut away the future and the present collapses, emptied of its proper content. Immediate existence requires the insertion of the future in the crannies of the present.⁸

The immanence of the immediately past in the immediately present is with equal assurance a direct fact of observation. Otherwise we should be always starting anew and never getting anywhere. Life would be unceasing interruptions with nothing to interrupt. As Whitehead acutely remarks, Hume was forced, in order to procure even a semblance of plausibility, to balance his extreme atomization with recognition of cumulative continuity in the force he attributes to habit and to anticipation. Without the presence of the past in the immediate present there would be no keeping track of what we are doing (including thinking), and no power of selecting and adapting means to effectuation of the plans which are the future in the present. We should not even be aware, I add on my own account, that what is called “consciousness” is in flux, unless the past somehow lingered in the present so that we are aware of change and contrast.

The influence of the new physics, with its theories of space-time, relativity, vectors and world-lines, paths of energy, differentiates the identification of actual entities with processes, asserted by Whitehead to exist, from everything of the kind traditionally ascribed to the Heraclitean river:—a point, it seems to me, not always taken into consideration by critics of his position. For instead of our not being able to step into the same river twice, we can step in twice—and many times, as we do whenever we make statements about an object—because the river or process exhibits temporal immanences. But even if the new physics was the original source of the idea, it does not seem probable that the idea of “prehension” would have acquired the broad sweep now marking it without explicit observation of the facts of immediate experience. The interpretation given by Whitehead of the subject-object structure is a fundamental instance of the peculiar kind of “prehension” which is seen in the presence of past and future in every immediately present experience.

For he agrees with the view of (modern) philosophy that the relation of subject-object “is the fundamental structural pattern of experience … but not in the sense in which subject-object is identified with knower-known.” The ground of his dissent from this identification (which has so controlled modern epistemology as to make it impossible for any one view to win general acceptance over against other views) is suggested in the sentence after the one just quoted: “I contend that the notion of mere knowledge is a high abstraction, and that conscious discrimination itself is a variable factor only present in the more elaborate examples of occasions of experience.”⁹ However, the next sentence reads, “The basis of experience is emotional,” and the context indicates that Whitehead is chiefly interested in showing that the fundamental connection of actual occasions is that of taking over “affective tone,” or a connection in which things have “concern” one for another. Although this aspect of his doctrine tends to dominate his interpretation of that temporal immanence which is manifested in determination of a present experience by retention and anticipation, nevertheless the latter is so involved in Whitehead's account of the “subject-object” structure, that I confine my account to this point, reserving what I have to say about its subordination to a superior emphasis upon emotion and affection till later. Anticipating here the gist of my later critical remarks, I would say his emphasis upon the emotional seems to be the result of the failure to adopt and carry through consistently his interpretation in terms of active energies. For this procedure would have resulted in a functional interpretation of “identical elements,” while as it is, Whitehead seems to fall back upon identity of contents.

The chapter in which the subject-object structure of experience is discussed is clothed in language not readily understandable when it is taken in isolation from the system which gives words their technical meanings. However, I shall quote a passage and then venture upon an interpretation through a paraphrase.

An occasion of experience is an activity, analysable into modes of functioning which jointly constitute its process of becoming. Each mode [of experience] is analysable into the total experience as [an] active subject, and into the thing or object with which the special activity is concerned. … An object is anything performing this function of a datum provoking some special activity of the occasion in question. Thus subject and object are relative terms. An occasion is a subject in respect to its special activity concerning an object; and anything is an object in respect to its provocation of some special activity within a subject.¹⁰

Any difficulties that attend grasp of the meaning of this passage will be mitigated, if not dissipated, I think, if one bears in mind a certain duality of relationship. We begin with the fact that every occasion or actual existence is a temporal process. When we observe, without preconception, the nature of the becoming which forms the process, we see that it is aroused or provoked by some other actual and active occasion. In so far, the latter is object, and the process is subject, which started but which is carried forward to special or distinctive activity only by the stimulation it receives from another process. A process as subject does not merely undergo or experience the object. Its own actualization, as the single special process it is, is conditioned upon the nature of the provocation it receives.

If the account stopped at this point, it would, however, be defective. For the process which in the account just given forms the subject, and which is so to speak on the receiving end, is also an active factor in evoking the special activities of other things. In other words, occasions that are objects with respect to being things already given, and hence can function to provoke the special activities that determine other processes as subjects, are themselves subjects, having their own qualitative immediacy of being with respect to some other processes or given objects. Indeed, a process may achieve its own special forms of activity, and become thereby a subject in the full sense of the term, in the very interaction in which it operates as object in reference to some other process as subject. Reciprocally, it is true that the process which, from the standpoint first mentioned, is subject, becomes, as the process which it is moves forward, that which provokes the distinctive energies of other processes;—it takes on, that is to say, the function that defines an object. These considerations provide what I call the “duplicity”—though not a rigid dualism—in the subject-object structure. It follows that the subject-object relation in cases of deliberate or conscious knowledge is a specialized case of this general form of interconnectedness of the energies constituting processes as actual entities.

In discussing the subject-object relation we have, of necessity, trenched upon considerations which are pertinent to determination of the meaning of the discrete-continuous, individual-associational, relation. Indeed, at times I am not sure but that it was the problem in this latter form that was the primary factor in initiation of the distinctive elements in Whitehead's system. In any event, the need for reconstructing the doctrine of independent Newtonian atoms, which was forced by the doctrine of relativity as well as by that of quanta, brought the problem of atomicity-continuity into the foreground. Hence we have the intimate connection of this problem with the subject-object problem, a closeness that is contained in the passage in which it is said that “subject” is a name for “an actual entity in its immediacy of self-attainment when it stands out for itself alone. …”¹¹ It constitutes atomicity in physical occasions as it determines what we call individuality in human occasions. As in the latter we find both “distinguishable individualities” and continuity in the form of “personal identity,” so in the former “we should expect a doctrine of quanta, where the individualities of the occasions are relevant, and a doctrine of continuity where the conformal transference of subjective form is the dominating fact.”¹²

The meaning of the last clause of the sentence just quoted may not be readily understandable apart from reference to the places in which the phrase “conformal transference” is explained. For the purpose of the present theme, however, it may suffice to identify its meaning in terms of the immanence of the past in the present, thereby involving the way in which the present, in spite of its relative novelty as present, is subordinated to what the past inserts in it. The meaning could then be paraphrased as follows: The process of self-attainment is durational and, in its dependence upon given “objects,” extensional. It is not so much a name for the process as a whole as for its “decisive moment.” Although in a certain sense “self-originating,” it is not literally self-achieving, since the latter is a matter of connectedness. When the special activities are relatively complete, the subject (a functional term, be it recalled) takes on that function which defines an object, and thereby it gives direction to other occasions which, like itself, would remain aborted potentialities unless given direction from what, in a certain sense, is external and “objective.” The self-attainment of qualitative immediacy and finality (of individuality) is then a phase, though a decisive and outstanding one, of a process having continuity. Or, in Whitehead's own words, “The individual immediacy of an occasion is the final unity of subjective form, which is the occasion as an absolute reality. This immediacy is its moment of sheer individuality, bounded on either side by essential relativity.”¹³

V

I recall the fact that my discussion is limited to statement of what I take to be that which provides the most direct clew for entering into the system of Whitehead, so that the special points brought up are by way of illustrating the central theme. The new philosophical departure initiated by deep reflection upon the general significance of the new physics in its contrast with Newtonian cosmology was, as I have said, carried through by taking human experience to be a specialization of the traits of nature thus disclosed. When so taken, it was possible, indeed, was necessary, to turn around and use the specialized traits in interpretation of physical occasions. This procedure is the source, in my opinion, of the immense provocative and directive power of Whitehead's thought in the present critical juncture of philosophy. This opinion is the reason I limit my discussion to it, omitting reference to the multitude of special themes upon which Whitehead has shed abundant light. I turn now to certain matters in which Mr. Whitehead's treatment has aroused queries and uncertain misgivings. I begin with the following question: What, after all, does he take the task and office of philosophy to be? If, in discussing this question, I quote passages which seem to indicate two different views about this matter, it is not for the cheap purpose of pointing out inconsistencies—which in any case may be verbal rather than actual. It is for the sake of the possible bearing of what can be looked upon as two different strains upon an issue that is discussed later.

What may be called the official view of philosophy is set forth in a passage in which, after saying that the business of philosophy is to frame “descriptive generalization” (a statement in itself neutral to the problem I am raising), he goes on to say that the generalizations should be such as to form “a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. Here ‘interpretation’ means that each element shall have the character of a particular instance of the general scheme.”¹⁴ The italicized words of this passage suggest the kind of structure exhibited in pure mathematics. It seems to go much further than the mere statement—to which no exception can be taken—that the different portions of any philosophical scheme must hang together. For it makes, if I understand it aright, an assertion about what the constituents of nature itself must be in and of themselves. This conception of the nature and office of philosophy is in line with the classic tradition, according to which philosophy is that branch of theory which tells, in the theoretical form appropriate to knowledge as knowledge, the story of the ultimate metaphysical or ontological structure of the universe. In connection with Whitehead's frequent recurrence to the “Seven Notions” of Plato,¹⁵ he expressly states that all philosophy is in fact “an endeavour to obtain a coherent system out of some modification of these notions” (p. 354). Again, it is expressly said that “The order of nature expresses the characters of the real things which jointly compose the existences to be found in nature. When we understand the essences of these things, we thereby know their mutual relations to each other.”¹⁶

Assignment of ontological priority to general characters and essences, and subordination to them of the existences actually observed in nature accords, to all appearances, not simply with the Platonic point of view, but with the assimilation of the proper subject-matter of philosophy (the constitution of nature) to that of mathematical theory. Hence it is legitimate to quote in this connection the following passage:

The general science of mathematics is concerned with the investigation of patterns of connectedness in abstraction from the particular relata and the particular modes of connection. … The essential connectedness of things can never be safely omitted. This is the doctrine of the thorough-going relativity which infects the universe and which makes the totality of things as it were a Receptacle uniting all that happens.¹⁷

Such passages seem to be intended to convey the meaning implied in the expression that it is the business of philosophy to frame a system in which “each element shall have the character of a particular instance of a general scheme.” Thereby they seem to warrant the conclusion that the phrase saying that general characters or essences constitute natural existences is to be taken literally. Deficiency of my own intellectual grasp may be the cause of my belief that this entire strain of thought substitutes abstract logical connectedness for the concrete existential temporal connectedness upon which I have based my interpretation of Whitehead's system. It is enough, in any case, to make me wonder whether I am on the right track when I make that interpretation.

Yet there are passages that give a freer and perhaps looser view of the office of philosophy, passages in which it is affirmed that the “gifts of philosophy” are “insight and foresight, and a sense of the worth of life, in short, that sense of importance which nerves all civilized effort …” a passage which ends by saying that “Philosophy is an attempt to clarify those fundamental beliefs [connected with fears, hopes, judgment of what is worth while] which finally determine the emphasis of attention that is the base of character.”¹⁸

A philosophy of experience that is thoroughgoing and systematic in its treatment of experience will, it seems to me, treat philosophy itself as a form of experience. It will realize that this statement is true not only of the philosophies put forward by others but of the philosophy one is now and here engaged in putting forth. It will realize that philosophies, itself included, are not outside intellectual reports upon subject-matters of experience that are complete and finished in themselves, but that that philosophy is an experimental effort at purification, continuation and extension of those elements of things already experienced that commend themselves to critical judgment as worthy, while it operates upon the basis of knowledge as wide and accurate as possible. It will necessarily look to what is known for clews and for means of testing. But it will not take itself to be a kind of knowledge. It will not be concerned with just reporting and “explaining” in a coherent way the things that are valid in past experiences. It will concern itself with the conditions under which they have arisen for the sake of being better able to form plans by which they may be reinforced and expanded. It will be in so far a genetic account of experience. When a new mode and object of experience is anticipated or actually brought into being it will ask, without ceasing, after its consequences. It will be a functional account of experience. Report, even in the most systematic fashion, of subject-matters and contents, of even the most “universal” and “essential” characters will be subordinated to determination of what will follow in consequence of them:—as a result, namely, of the way in which existential incarnations operate for good and for evil.

I may appear to have abandoned the philosophy of Whitehead to set forth my own idea of what philosophy is. But what I am actually trying to do is to state my uncertainty, when all is said and done, of just what course is followed by Mr. Whitehead. Of one thing I am quite sure. He has opened an immensely fruitful new path for subsequent philosophy to follow, and has accomplished this task by wedding observable facts of physical experience to observable facts of human experience. The result is an almost incomparable suggestiveness on all sorts of topics—in case a mind is not closed to suggestion from a new source. But I am not sure that he does not frequently block and divert his own movements on the road he is opening by subjecting his conclusions to a combination of considerations too exclusively derived from a combination of mathematics with excessive piety toward those historic philosophers from whom he has derived valuable suggestions.

I have little sympathy with most of the criticisms that are passed upon Mr. Whitehead on the score of the terminology he uses. I find myself in complete agreement with what he has said about the limitations the inherited state of language places upon development of new ideas. And I fail to see how anyone who has struggled to get beyond restatement, in slightly changed verbal form, of old ideas can fail to sympathize with Whitehead's struggles to find words to convey ideas which have not been previously fixed in conventional modes of expression. Consequently, if I mention by way of adverse criticism his use of a mentalistic vocabulary, illustrated by such words as emotion, enjoyment, etc., etc., in his description of what are usually called physical phenomena, it is only because that usage seems to me to arise from that aspect of his philosophy in which cognitive report of existing subject-matter gets the better of a genetic-functional account made in behalf of possibilities of experience not yet adequately realized.

It is one thing, marking to my mind a great advance, to see and say that there must be something homologous in the material of physical science and that of feeling, ideas, emotion and enjoyment as they occur in human experience. But for the purpose of discovery of better possibilities and the criticism of what exists all that is needed in the way of homology is correspondence of functions. Insistence upon identity of content tends, I believe, to obscuration of what is philosophically important. One can thorougly agree with Whitehead when for example he says: “The mere phrase that ‘physical science is an abstraction’, is a confession of philosophic failure. It is the business of rational thought to describe the more concrete fact from which that abstraction is derivable.” But one may unite such agreement with deep regret that a previous sentence reads: “The notion of physical energy, which is at the base of physics, must then be conceived as an abstraction from the complex energy, emotional and purposeful, inherent in the subjective form of the final synthesis in which each occasion completes itself.”¹⁹ That the statement does not appear to be in harmony with his own theory according to which attainment of a subjective form is not final but marks a selected moment in an ongoing process may be only a technical matter. But in what the passage stands for, it appears to repeat that conversion of moral idealism, the idealism of action, into ontological idealism or “spiritualism,” a conversion which the history of thought demonstrates to be the fatal weakness of the whole movement initiated by Plato and Aristotle. It is doubtless true, as Mr. Whitehead has said, that the reaction against dogmatic and imposed systematizations marking so many historic philosophies, has led other thinkers to undue neglect of the kind of system that is important. But the abstract formalization that defines systematization upon the model provided by mathematics does not shut out the possibility of that kind of system in which what is known about Nature, physical and human, is brought to bear upon intelligent criticism of what exists (and hence is capable of being known) and upon construction of alternatives, of possibilities, which the play of free critical intelligence indicates to be better worth while. The substance of Whitehead's system I find to be of the latter sort; its formal statements seem to me often to lean in the former direction.

Notes

1. Adventures of Ideas, 289-90. (Italics not in original text.) The fact that my further references and quotations are limited to this particular book of Whitehead's is partially due to the limitations under which this essay is written. But in view of the simplicity and completeness with which the gist of Whitehead's doctrines is set forth in this book, I do not regard this limitation as of especial importance in respect to my interpretation and criticism.

2. Op. cit., 290f.

3. Op. cit., 284. (Italics not in original text.)

4. Op. cit., 237.

5. Op. cit., 99.

6. Op. cit., 293.

7. Op. cit., 237.

8. Op. cit., 246.

9. Op. cit., 225f.

10. Op. cit., 226f. This passage taken by itself would justify interpretation of Whitehead's doctrine in terms of a connection of active energies, or what I just called the functional interpretation.

11. Op. cit., 227.

12. Op. cit., 239.

13. Op. cit., 227. (Italics not in original text.)

14. Op. cit., 285; cited there from p. 4 of the author's Process and Reality. (Italics not in original text.)

15. Op. cit., 171-2, 188, 203, 241-2, 354, 366.

16. Op. cit., 142. (Italics not in the original text.)

17. Op. cit., 197.

18. Op. cit., 125. (Italics not in original text.) Cf. what is said on pp. 203-04 of op. cit.

19. Op. cit., 239. (Italics not in original text.)