Essays in Science and Philosophy by Albert North Whitehead (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 889 Essays in Science and Philosophy, By ALBERT NoRTH WHITEHEAD. New York: Philosophical Library, 1947. Pp. 348, with index. $4.75. A new book by Professor Whitehead is always approached with a certain interested curiosity and anticipation. The individual chapters in Essays in Science and Philosophy, however, are not new. All have appeared in print at various times since 1912. The jacket tells us that these essays represent a cross-section from the career of the late distinguished philosopher . Mr. Whitehead's selection of material for the book indicates very well that his great contribution has been in the field of science and mathematics. He tells us that in 1924 at the age of sixty-three he joined the faculty of Harvard University in the department of philosophy. His philosophic writings were begun in London at the latter end of World War I. Thus it is not surprising to find that he devotes half again as much text to science and mathematics as to each of the other topics which are entitled: "Personal,'' "Philosophy,'' and "Education." The fact that three of the essays in science-" Axioms of Geometry,"" Mathematics ,'' and "Non-Euclidean Geometry "-first appeared in the Encyclopedia Britannica is an indication of the author's excellent reputation in the field of mathematics. The essay on non-Euclidean geometry is especially interesting to the ordinary reader because of its historical approach to the subject. It would be eminently unfair to attempt a critical analysis of Mr. Whitehead 's philosophy on the basis of this series of essays. His claim to fame as a philosopher rests on his Process and Reality, published in 1929. In the present series, the most representative are the essays on " Immortality " and "Uniformity and Contingency." The latter, by the way, is not listed in the table of contents. The reader's interest is immediately aroused when he notes the title, " Immortality." More specifically he is told that the immortality of human beings is the subject of discussion. Most of us would expect the word, as applied to man, to involve a personal, individual immortality in a life after death. Such a use of the word is meaningless in this philosophy. First of all, any immortality possessed by man is not essentially different from that of any other being in the universe. Men and matter are the same. This immortality consists in the "Evaluation" of the whole World of Action or Activity. Immortality means that the World of Activity, which is passing, is transformed in God's nature. "This nature (of God) conceived as the unification derived from the World of Values is founded in ideals of perfection, moral and aesthetic. It receives into its unity the scattered effectiveness of realized activities transformed by the supremacy of its own ideals." (p. 94) In terms of the doctrine as expressed in Process and Reality, any entity 8 390 BOOK REVIEWS achieves its immortality in its character of " subject superject " when it is ready to be an object of prehensive unification in a higher entity. No entity ever is, it is always becoming. It passes without any state of being, into the next higher step in the process of unification. This is called the process of concretion. Eventually, immortality is attained by transformation (union) in the Consequent Nature of God. The whole process of the universe of things is merely a constant becoming: each entity positively unites in itself other lower entities. The process of prehensive unification is guided, after a fashion, by God, the Principle of Concretion, until all entities are united in his Consequent Nature. This is their immortalityeach entity is immortal insofar as it is an element in the constitution of a higher entity. Such immortality is by no means personal in the Scholastic sense of that word. Rather, it is a pantheistic continuation of the being in God. As Mr. Whitehead says, things simply are not alone. They are always in process, a process which involves the unification of personality in acoordination of the becoming of all Active Entities in God. This pantheistic type of immortality leaves the reader definitely unsatisfied. If that is all human immortality invokes, why should it be discussed...