REVELATIONS OF THE METASYBIL
A FEW years ago a new book by Professor Whitehead was in every sense of the word a philosophical event. Many, I make no doubt, will still consider it to be so. Our times are not rich in cosmologies, and the traditional conception of philosophy as a study which, taking the whole world of life, man and nature for its province, seeks a pattern in, or, as some would prefer to put it, imposes a pattern upon, the maze, has fallen into disrepute. In this temporary eclipse of speculation, when philosophy has become a microscope for the more extensive scrutiny of the trivial, Professor Whitehead has steadfastly maintained the right of the human mind to range at large through the universe, and to return furnished with a plan, albeit drawn in the roughest outlines, of the territories explored. Whitehead's first sketch was, to be sure, very rough, but it was hoped that subsequent books would give increased precision of outline and furnish an added fullness of detail. Has this hope been fulfilled? On the whole, I should say that it has not. The trouble with the Whitehead
:lassies, Science and the Modern World and Process and Reatity, was obscurity. One felt that Whitehead was saying great things and conveying important truths, but so darkly
were the things said, so sibylline was the revelation of the truths—scarce were their outlines glimpsed, before the veils were redrawn—that it was always open to the critic to wonder whether the immense difficulty of Whitehead was not due to obscurity of expression, rather than to the expression of obscurity.
It cannot be said that this latest book has added much in the way of new material, or much illuminated the darkness of the old. The strength of the previous works lay in their criticism of the scientific scheme of the universe. It is here that the present book is strong. Where they were weak was in the provision of substitutes for the scheme whose inadequacy
they exposed; this, too, is the weakness of Modes of Thought. It consists of three parts, entitled Creative Impulse, Activity, and Nature and Life, with a short Epilogue of five pages on the Aim of Philosophy. The first two parts consist of lectures delivered at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, and are here
published for the first time. The two lectures in the third
part were delivered in the University of Chicago, and have already appeared in a separate volume, entitled Nature and Life. They constitute the easiest and clearest part of the present book, and may be specially recommended to those who desire to acquaint themselves, without too much expendi- ture of effort or outwearing of patience, with the main features of Professor Whitehead's philosophy.
Broadly these are two. The first, negative, is a criticism of various forms of contemporary knowledge on the ground that each is in its different way a form not of knowledge, but of abstraction. Every entity is, Professor Whitehead points out, presented to us in a mesh of connexions with all the other entities in the universe. This mesh of connexions White- head terms " the perspective of the universe for that entity." Just as entities have their special properties and connexions,
so do groups of entities; for example, the group that is studied by physical science, or the groups which constitute sociology or art. Abstraction occurs because men take
notions which are valid for one perspective of the universe involved in one group of events and apply them uncritically to other events involving some discrepancy of perspective."
In particular, we accept two notions which are in physical science and in mathematics, the first that the:: are things having boundaries and occupying places ; the second, that these things are quantitatively numerable, and use them for the interpretation of the universe as a whole. Whitehead, revolting " against this concentration upon the multiplication table and the regular solids," shows how its application out- side the perspectives to which numbers and solids are relevant vitiates the results arrived at. It is responsible, for example, for the materialist conception of the universe as consisting of things and events which are related by the law of cause and effect, and the modern conception of history as the narration of factual sequences in which " such suggestion of causation, as is admitted, is confined to the statements of physical materialities, such as the economic motive."
The exposure of the various fallacies of abstraction con- stitutes the main thread of the lectures. The fallacies result in the introduction of divisions and distinctions which a true analysis finds it impossible to sustain. Whitehead devotes special attention to the distinctions between sense perception and feeling, between nature and life, between life and matter, and between mind and body. Science arises by taking one of these distinctions as final ; as representing, that is to say, a real line of cleavage in the universe, and then building a system out of the materials provided by the entities which have been falsely distinguished. For example, accuracy of observation, which involves focussing all one's power of atten- tion on one thing and ignoring its context, is a distinctive method of science. In order that we may observe accurately we must "dismiss from consciousness all irrelevant modes of experience. But there is no irrelevance. Thus the whole of science is based upon neglected modes of relevance." Nor is science alone guilty of this fallacy. Morality, religion, logic, art, have each earmarked for themselves an artificially de- limited area of the universe, proclaimed the importance of the structure which they have raised within the area, and either denied the reality of whatever lay outside the structure, or else sought to bring it within its confines.
I have left myself little space for the positive doctrine which is not so much stated as conveyed by a series of hints illuminated by flashes of insight. It is, in Professor White- head's words, that " as disclosed in the fundamental essence of our experience, the togetherness of things involves some doctrine of mutual immanence. In some sense or other, this community of the actualities of the world means that each happening is a factor in the nature of every other happening." The universe, in fact, is like a vast echoing chamber in which a sound made anywhere reverberates everywhere, just be- cause anywhere is everywhere. More precisely, it is a jelly. Touch a jelly at any point and the whole is set quivering; but since in Whitehead's universe there are no " places," it cannot in truth be said that the jelly is touched in one place more than in another.
As usual in Professor Whitehead's books, the writing is made vivid with striking phrases and illuminated by pene- trating appercus. " In order to acquire learning we must first shake ourselves free of it "; science is said to divide the " seamless coat of experience," while the belief that the human language expresses all the fundamental ideas applic- able to human experience is called " the Fallacy of the Per-
fect Dictionary." There are some intriguing intellectual asides—for example, the establishment of the relation be- tween order and the Good, or, as Whitehead puts it, between the multiplication table and the Sermon on the Mount; the development of the consequences which follow from the absence of the notion of evolution in Greek thought, and so on. Nevertheless, one leaves the book with a feeling of dis- appointment, of disappointment tinged with guilt, for when all is done, the uncomfortable thought remains that one's failure to make more of it may be, after all, not Professor Whitehead's fault, but one's own. C. E. M. JoAn.
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