Science and the Modern World quotes

The progress of civilisation is not wholly a uniform drift towards better things.

It may perhaps wear this aspect if we map it on a scale which is large enough. But such broad views obscure the details on which rest our whole understanding of the process.

The sixteenth century of our era saw the disruption of Western Christianity and the rise of modern science. It was an age of ferment.

Nothing was settled, though much was opened—new worlds and new ideas.

In science, Copernicus and Vesalius may be chosen as representative figures: they typify the new cosmology and the scientific emphasis on direct observation. Giordano Bruno was the martyr;

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.

Another contrast which singles out science from among the European movements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is its universality.

Modern science was born in Europe, but its home is the whole world.

In the last two centuries there has been a long and confused impact of Western modes upon the civilisation of Asia.

Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them.

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

Accordingly I wish to consider the stages in which this analysis became explicit, and finally became unalterably impressed upon the educated minds of Western Europe.

But there is a complementary fact which is equally true and equally obvious:—nothing ever really recurs in exact detail.

No two days are identical, no two winters. What has gone, has gone forever.

Accordingly the practical philosophy of mankind has been to expect the broad recurrences, and to accept the details as emanating from the inscrutable womb of things, beyond the ken of rationality. Men expected the sun to rise, but the wind bloweth where it listeth.

The celestial spheres were for things which are impassible and ingenerable, the lower regions for things impassible and generable.

Nature was a drama in which each thing played its part.

I do not say that this is a view to which Aristotle would have subscribed without severe reservations, in fact without the sort of reservations which we ourselves would make.

‘Though many complained here-of [i.e., of the Decree], yet it prevailed but little, because generally the Fathers [i.e., the Bishops] desired to hear men speak with intelligible terms, not abstrusely, as in the matter of Justification, and others already handled.’

Poor belated medievalists! When they used reason they were not even intelligible to the ruling powers of their epoch.

It will take centuries before stubborn facts are reducible by reason, and meanwhile the pendulum swings slowly and heavily to the extreme of the historical method.

The pilgrim fathers of the scientific imagination as it exists today, are the great tragedians of ancient Athens, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. Their vision of fate, remorseless and indifferent, urging a tragic incident to its inevitable issue, is the vision possessed by science.

Fate in Greek Tragedy becomes the order of nature in modern thought.

The absorbing interest in the particular heroic incidents, as an example and a verification of the workings of fate, reappears in our epoch as concentration of interest on the crucial experiments.

For it is only by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama. This remorseless inevitableness is what pervades scientific thought.

The laws of physics are the decrees of fate.

The conception of the moral order in the Greek plays was certainly not a discovery of the dramatists. It must have passed into the literary tradition from the general serious opinion of the times.

There may have been some deficiency in respect to practice. But the idea never for a moment lost its grip. It was preëminently an epoch of orderly thought, rationalist through and through.

The very anarchy quickened the sense for coherent system; just as the modern anarchy of Europe has stimulated the intellectual vision of a League of Nations.

But for science something more is wanted than a general sense of the order in things.

I mean the inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles. Without this belief the incredible labours of scientists would be without hope.

It is this instinctive conviction, vividly poised before the imagination, which is the motive power of research:—that there is a secret, a secret which can be unveiled.

How has this conviction been so vividly implanted on the European mind?

It is unnecessary to tell in detail the various incidents which marked the rise of science: the growth of wealth and leisure; the expansion of universities; the invention of printing; the taking of Constantinople; Copernicus; Vasco da Gama; Columbus; the telescope.

The soil, the climate, the seeds, were there, and the forest grew.

Science has never shaken off the impress of its origin in the historical revolt of the later Renaissance. It has remained predominantly an anti-rationalistic movement, based upon a naïve faith.

It was a very sensible reaction; but it was not a protest on behalf of reason.

There is, however, a Nemesis which waits upon those who deliberately avoid avenues of knowledge.

Oliver Cromwell’s cry echoes down the ages, ‘My brethren, by the bowels of Christ I beseech you, bethink you that you may be mistaken.’

also for the first time physiology is asserting itself as an effective body of knowledge, as distinct from a scrap-heap. The old foundations of scientific thought are becoming unintelligible. Time, space, matter, material, ether, electricity, mechanism, organism, configuration, structure, pattern, function, all require reinterpretation.

What is the sense of talking about a mechanical explanation when you do not know what you mean by mechanics?

The truth is that science started its modern career by taking over ideas derived from the weakest side of the philosophies of Aristotle’s successors. In some respects it was a happy choice.

For after all, you need only attend to those aspects of your concrete experience which lie within some limited scheme. There are two methods for the purification of ideas. One of them is dispassionate observation by means of the bodily senses.

But observation is selection.

Accordingly, it is difficult to transcend a scheme of abstraction whose success is sufficiently wide. The other method is by comparing the various schemes of abstraction which are well founded in our various types of experience.

This faith cannot be justified by any inductive generalisation. It springs from direct inspection of the nature of things as disclosed in our own immediate present experience.

There is no parting from your own shadow.

To experience this faith is to know that in being ourselves we are more than ourselves: to know that our experience, dim and fragmentary as it is, yet sounds the utmost depths of reality:

Also the example of science affected other regions of thought. The historical revolt has thus been exaggerated into the exclusion of philosophy from its proper rôle of harmonising the various abstractions of methodological thought.

Thought is abstract; and the intolerant use of abstractions is the major vice of the intellect.

This vice is not wholly corrected by the recurrence to concrete experience. For after all, you need only attend to those aspects of your concrete experience which lie within some limited scheme. There are two methods for the purification of ideas.

The science of Pure Mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.

Another claimant for this position is music. But we will put aside all rivals, and consider the ground on which such a claim can be made for mathematics.

That would be claiming too much. But it is certainly analogous to cutting out the part of Ophelia. This simile is singularly exact. For Ophelia is quite essential to the play, she is very charming,—and a little mad.

Let us grant that the pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit, a refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings.

When we think of mathematics, we have in our mind a science devoted to the exploration of number, quantity, geometry, and in modern times also including investigation into yet more abstract concepts of order, and into analogous types of purely logical relations.

We thence conclude that the additional relationships which we concluded to hold in any such case, must therefore hold in this particular case.

The certainty of mathematics depends upon its complete abstract generality.

But we can have no à priori certainty that we are right in believing that the observed entities in the concrete universe form a particular instance of what falls under our general reasoning. To take another example from arithmetic.

This process of reasoning from the sample to the whole species is Induction.

The theory of Induction is the despair of philosophy—and yet all our activities are based upon it.

Anyhow, in criticising a mathematical conclusion as to a particular matter of fact, the real difficulties consist in finding out the abstract assumptions involved, and in estimating the evidence for their applicability to the particular case in hand.

Also it is not with what he knows he has assumed, but with what he has unconsciously assumed. We do not doubt the author’s honesty. It is his perspicacity which we are criticising.

Each generation criticises the unconscious assumptions made by its parents. It may assent to them, but it brings them out in the open.

The history of the development of language illustrates this point. It is a history of the progressive analysis of ideas. Latin and Greek were inflected languages. This means that they express an unanalyzed complex of ideas by the mere modification of a word;

… all these distances in time, the importance of definite number in the constitution of the Divine Nature, and the concept of the real world as exhibiting the evolution of an idea, can both be traced back to the train of thought set going by Pythagoras.

The importance of an individual thinker owes something to chance. For it depends upon the fate of his ideas in the minds of his successors.

In this respect Pythagoras was fortunate. His philosophical speculations reach us through the mind of Plato. The Platonic world of ideas is the refined, revised form of the Pythagorean doctrine that number lies at the base of the real world.

But the biological sciences, then and till our own time, have been overwhelmingly classificatory. Accordingly, Aristotle by his Logic throws the emphasis on classification. The popularity of Aristotelian Logic retarded the advance of physical science throughout the Middle Ages.

If only the schoolmen had measured instead of classifying, how much they might have learnt!

Classification is a halfway house between the immediate concreteness of the individual thing and the complete abstraction of mathematical notions. The species take account of the specific character, and the genera of the generic character.

Finally the particular functions, such as the trigonometrical functions, and the logarithmic functions, and the algebraic functions, are generalised into the idea of ‘any function.’

Too large a generalisation leads to mere barrenness. It is the large generalisation, limited by a happy particularity, which is the fruitful conception.

For instance the idea of any continuous function, whereby the limitation of continuity is introduced, is the fruitful idea which has led to most of the important applications.

The general recurrences of things are very obvious in our ordinary experience. Days recur, lunar phases recur, the seasons of the year recur, rotating bodies recur to their old positions, beats of the heart recur, breathing recurs. On every side, we are met by recurrence.

Apart from recurrence, knowledge would be impossible; for nothing could be referred to our past experience.

Also, apart from some regularity of recurrence, measurement would be impossible. In our experience, as we gain the idea of exactness, recurrence is fundamental.

Then, under the influence of the newly discovered mathematical science of the analysis of functions, it broadened out into the study of the simple abstract periodic functions which these ratios exemplify.

Thus trigonometry became completely abstract; and in thus becoming abstract, it became useful.

It illuminated the underlying analogy between sets of utterly diverse physical phenomena; and at the same time it supplied the weapons by which any one such set could have its various features analysed and related to each other.[2]

2. For a more detailed consideration of the nature and function of pure mathematics cf. my Introduction to Mathematics, Home University Library, Williams and Norgate, London.

The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.

As the result of the prominence of mathematicians in the seventeenth century, the eighteenth century was mathematically minded, more especially where French influence predominated. An exception must be made of the English empiricism derived from Locke.

Thus the temporary submergence of the mathematical mentality from the time of Rousseau onwards appears already to be at an end. We are entering upon an age of reconstruction, in religion, in science, and in political thought.

Such ages, if they are to avoid mere ignorant oscillation between extremes, must seek truth in its ultimate depths.

There can be no vision of this depth of truth apart from a philosophy which takes full account of those ultimate abstractions, whose interconnections it is the business of mathematics to explore.

This system, forming the primordial element, is nothing at any instant. It requires its whole period in which to manifest itself.

In an analogous way, a note of music is nothing at an instant, but it also requires its whole period in which to manifest itself.

Accordingly, in asking where the primordial element is, we must settle on its average position at the centre of each period. If we divide time into smaller elements, the vibratory system as one electronic entity has no existence.

Newton was born in the year that Galileo died (1642), exactly one hundred years after the publication of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus. One year earlier Descartes published his Meditationes and two years later his Principia Philosophiae.

There simply was not time for the century to space out nicely its notable events concerning men of genius.

I cannot now enter upon a chronicle of the various stages of intellectual advance included within this epoch. It is too large a topic for one lecture, and would obscure the ideas which it is my purpose to develop.

Accordingly, we must recur to the method of the school-divinity as explained by the Italian medievalists whom I quoted in the first lecture. We must observe the immediate occasion, and use reason to elicit a general description of its nature.

Induction presupposes metaphysics.

In other words, it rests upon an antecedent rationalism. You cannot have a rational justification for your appeal to history till your metaphysics has assured you that there is a history to appeal to;

Accordingly, Newton rejected this theory and adopted the corpuscular theory which completely explained shadows. Since then both theories have had their periods of triumph. At the present moment the scientific world is seeking for a combination of the two.

These examples illustrate the danger of refusing to entertain an idea because of its failure to explain one of the most obvious facts in the subject matter in question.

If you have had your attention directed to the novelties in thought in your own lifetime, you will have observed that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.

At the present moment the scientific world is seeking for a combination of the two. These examples illustrate the danger of refusing to entertain an idea because of its failure to explain one of the most obvious facts in the subject matter in question.

If you have had your attention directed to the novelties in thought in your own lifetime, you will have observed that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.

Returning to the laws of motion, it is noticeable that no reason was produced in the seventeenth century for the Galilean as distinct from the Aristotelian position. It was an ultimate fact.

All the motions which enter into our normal everyday experience cease unless they are evidently sustained from the outside. Apparently, therefore, the sound empiricist must devote his attention to this question of the sustenance of motion.

We here hit upon one of the dangers of unimaginative empiricism.

The seventeenth century exhibits another example of this same danger; and, of all people in the world, Newton fell into it. Huyghens had produced the wave theory of light.

There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose.

Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of puttingputting things has ever occurred to them.

With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch.

Furthermore, the creed justified itself by the pragmatic test. It worked. Physicists took no more interest in philosophy. They emphasized the anti-rationalism of the Historical Revolt. But the difficulties of this theory of materialistic mechanism very soon became apparent.

The history of thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is governed by the fact that the world had got hold of a general idea which it could neither live with nor live without.

This simple location of instantaneous material configurations is what Bergson has protested against, so far as it concerns time and so far as it is taken to be the fundamental fact of concrete nature.

but I do not agree that such distortion is a vice necessary to the intellectual apprehension of nature. I shall in subsequent lectures endeavour to show that this spatialisation is the expression of more concrete facts under the guise of very abstract logical constructions.

There is an error; but it is merely the accidental error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete.

It is an example of what I will call the ‘Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.’ This fallacy is the occasion of great confusion in philosophy.

Accordingly, induction is not based on anything which can be observed as inherent in nature. Thus we cannot look to nature for the justification of our belief in any law such as the law of gravitation.

In other words, the order of nature cannot be justified by the mere observation of nature.

For there is nothing in the present fact which inherently refers either to the past or to the future. It looks, therefore, as though memory, as well as induction, would fail to find any justification within nature itself.

These sensations are projected by the mind so as to clothe appropriate bodies in external nature. Thus the bodies are perceived as with qualities which in reality do not belong to them, qualities which in fact are purely the offspring of the mind.

Thus nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent: the nightingale for his song: and the sun for his radiance.

The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellency of the human mind. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly.

Thus nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent: the nightingale for his song: and the sun for his radiance.

The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellency of the human mind.

Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly.

the rose for its scent: the nightingale for his song: and the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellency of the human mind.

Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly.

However you disguise it, this is the practical outcome of the characteristic scientific philosophy which closed the seventeenth century.

It is still reigning. Every university in the world organises itself in accordance with it. No alternative system of organising the pursuit of scientific truth has been suggested. It is not only reigning, but it is without a rival.

And yet—it is quite unbelievable.

This conception of the universe is surely framed in terms of high abstractions, and the paradox only arises because we have mistaken our abstractions for concrete realities.

The Middle Ages were haunted with the desire to rationalise the infinite: the men of the eighteenth century rationalised the social life of modern communities, and based their sociological theories on an appeal to the facts of nature.

The earlier period was the age of faith, based upon reason. In the later period, they let sleeping dogs lie: it was the age of reason, based upon faith.

To illustrate my meaning:—St.

In so far as the excluded things are important in your experience, your modes of thought are not fitted to deal with them.

You cannot think without abstractions; accordingly, it is of the utmost importance to be vigilant in critically revising your modes of abstraction.

It is here that philosophy finds its niche as essential to the healthy progress of society. It is the critic of abstractions. A civilisation which cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility after a very limited period of progress.

You cannot think without abstractions; accordingly, it is of the utmost importance to be vigilant in critically revising your modes of abstraction. It is here that philosophy finds its niche as essential to the healthy progress of society. It is the critic of abstractions.

A civilisation which cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility after a very limited period of progress.

An active school of philosophy is quite as important for the locomotion of ideas, as is an active school of railway engineers for the locomotion of fuel.

It is here that philosophy finds its niche as essential to the healthy progress of society. It is the critic of abstractions. A civilisation which cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility after a very limited period of progress.

An active school of philosophy is quite as important for the locomotion of ideas, as is an active school of railway engineers for the locomotion of fuel.

Sometimes it happens that the service rendered by philosophy is entirely obscured by the astonishing success of a scheme of abstractions in expressing the dominant interests of an epoch. This is exactly what happened during the eighteenth century. Les philosophes were not philosophers.

Voltaire must have the credit, that he hated injustice, he hated cruelty, he hated senseless repression, and he hated hocus-pocus. Furthermore, when he saw them, he knew them. In these supreme virtues, he was typical of his century, on its better side.

But if men cannot live on bread alone, still less can they do so on disinfectants.

The age had its limitations; yet we cannot understand the passion with which some of its main positions are still defended, especially in the schools of science, unless we do full justice to its positive achievements.

Exactly analogous considerations hold with respect to durations in time.

An instant of time, without duration, is an imaginative logical construction.

Also each duration of time mirrors in itself all temporal durations.

that is why I use the terms ‘mode’ and ‘modal.’ In the analogy with Spinoza, his one substance is for me the one underlying activity of realisation individualising itself in an interlocked plurality of modes.

Thus, concrete fact is process.

Its primary analysis is into underlying activity of prehension, and into realised prehensive events. Each event is an individual matter of fact issuing from an individualisation of the substrate activity. But individualisation does not mean substantial independence.

A prehension is a process of unifying. Accordingly, nature is a process of expansive development, necessarily transitional from prehension to prehension. What is achieved is thereby passed beyond, but it is also retained as having aspects of itself present to prehensions which lie beyond it.

Thus nature is a structure of evolving processes. The reality is the process.

It is nonsense to ask if the colour red is real. The colour red is ingredient in the process of realisation. The realities of nature are the prehensions in nature, that is to say, the events in nature.

In other words, that mechanism can, at most, presuppose a mechanic, and not merely a mechanic but its mechanic.

The only way of mitigating mechanism is by the discovery that it is not mechanism.

When we leave apologetic theology, and come to ordinary literature, we find, as we might expect, that the scientific outlook is in general simply ignored. So far as the mass of literature is concerned, science might never have been heard of.

In the earlier times there were opposing camps, bitterly at variance on questions which they deemed fundamental. But, except for a few stragglers, either camp was whole-hearted. The importance of Tennyson’s poem lies in the fact that it exactly expressed the character of its period.

Each individual was divided against himself.

In the earlier times, the deep thinkers were the clear thinkers,—Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz. They knew exactly what they meant and said it. In the nineteenth century, some of the deeper thinkers among theologians and philosophers were muddled thinkers.

Wordsworth was passionately absorbed in nature.

It has been said of Spinoza, that he was drunk with God. It is equally true that Wordsworth was drunk with nature.

But he was a thoughtful, well-read man, with philosophical interests, and sane even to the point of prosiness. In addition, he was a genius. He weakens his evidence by his dislike of science.

Shelley’s attitude to science was at the opposite pole to that of Wordsworth. He loved it, and is never tired of expressing in poetry the thoughts which it suggests. It symbolises to him joy, and peace, and illumination.

What the hills were to the youth of Wordsworth, a chemical laboratory was to Shelley.

It is unfortunate that Shelley’s literary critics have, in this respect, so little of Shelley in their own mentality.

There is yet a third fact to be placed by it, eternality, I will call it. The mountain endures. But when after ages it has been worn away, it has gone. If a replica arises, it is yet a new mountain.

A colour is eternal. It haunts time like a spirit.

It comes and it goes. But where it comes, it is the same colour. It neither survives nor does it live. It appears when it is wanted. The mountain has to time and space a different relation from that which colour has.

If a replica arises, it is yet a new mountain. A colour is eternal. It haunts time like a spirit. It comes and it goes. But where it comes, it is the same colour.

It neither survives nor does it live. It appears when it is wanted.

The mountain has to time and space a different relation from that which colour has. In the previous lecture, I was chiefly considering the relation to space-time of things which, in my sense of the term, are eternal.

Also we must recollect the basis of our procedure.

I hold that philosophy is the critic of abstractions.

Its function is the double one, first of harmonising them by assigning to them their right relative status as abstractions, and secondly of completing them by direct comparison with more concrete intuitions of the universe, and thereby promoting the formation of more complete schemes of …

It is the survey of sciences, with the special objects of their harmony, and of their completion. It brings to this task, not only the evidence of the separate sciences, but also its own appeal to concrete experience.

It confronts the sciences with concrete fact.

The literature of the nineteenth century, especially its English poetic literature, is a witness to the discord between the aesthetic intuitions of mankind and the mechanism of science.

I will not repeat myself now, except to remind you that my theory involves the entire abandonment of the notion that simple location is the primary way in which things are involved in space-time.

In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location.

Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world.

… see at once that the element of value, of being valuable, of having value, of being an end in itself, of being something which is for its own sake, must not be omitted in any account of an event as the most concrete actual something.

‘Value’ is the word I use for the intrinsic reality of an event.

Value is an element which permeates through and through the poetic view of nature. We have only to transfer to the very texture of realisation in itself that value which we recognise so readily in terms of human life.

This is the secret of Wordsworth’s worship of nature. Realization therefore is in itself the attainment of value. But there is no such thing as mere value.

Value is the outcome of limitation.

The definite finite entity is the selected mode which is the shaping of attainment; apart from such shaping into individual matter of fact there is no attainment. The mere fusion of all that there is would be the nonentity of indefiniteness.

The definite finite entity is the selected mode which is the shaping of attainment; apart from such shaping into individual matter of fact there is no attainment. The mere fusion of all that there is would be the nonentity of indefiniteness.

The salvation of reality is its obstinate, irreducible, matter-of-fact entities, which are limited to be no other than themselves.

Neither science, nor art, nor creative action can tear itself away from obstinate, irreducible, limited facts. The endurance of things has its significance in the self-retention of that which imposes itself as a definite attainment for its own sake.

Conversely it is only itself by lending its aspects to this same environment in which it finds itself. The problem of evolution is the development of enduring harmonies of enduring shapes of value, which merge into higher attainments of things beyond themselves.

Aesthetic attainment is interwoven in the texture of realisation.

The endurance of an entity represents the attainment of a limited aesthetic success, though if we look beyond it to its external effects, it may represent an aesthetic failure. Even within itself, it may represent the conflict between a lower success and a higher failure.

The endurance of an entity represents the attainment of a limited aesthetic success, though if we look beyond it to its external effects, it may represent an aesthetic failure. Even within itself, it may represent the conflict between a lower success and a higher failure.

The conflict is the presage of disruption.

The further discussion of the nature of enduring objects and of the conditions they require will be relevant to the consideration of the doctrine of evolution which dominated the latter half of the nineteenth century.

However we fix a determinate entity, there is always a narrower determination of something which is presupposed in our first choice. Also there is always a wider determination into which our first choice fades by transition beyond itself.

The general aspect of nature is that of evolutionary expansiveness.

These unities, which I call events, are the emergence into actuality of something. How are we to characterise the something which thus emerges? The name ‘event’ given to such a unity, draws attention to the inherent transitoriness, combined with the actual unity.

It was a peculiar period of hope, in the sense in which, sixty or seventy years later, we can now detect a note of disillusionment, or at least of anxiety.

The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.

A new method entered into life. In order to understand our epoch, we can neglect all the details of change, such as railways, telegraphs, radios, spinning machines, synthetic dyes. We must concentrate on the method in itself;

The prophecy of Francis Bacon has now been fulfilled; and man, who at times dreamt of himself as a little lower than the angels, has submitted to become the servant and the minister of nature.

It still remains to be seen whether the same actor can play both parts.

The whole change has arisen from the new scientific information. Science, conceived not so much in its principles as in its results, is an obvious storehouse of ideas for utilisation.

An intense period of imaginative design lies between. One element in the new method is just the discovery of how to set about bridging the gap between the scientific ideas, and the ultimate product.

It is a process of disciplined attack upon one difficulty after another.

The possibilities of modern technology were first in practice realised in England, by the energy of a prosperous middle class. Accordingly, the industrial revolution started there.

and among the various countries, chiefly in Germany.

In the past human life was lived in a bullock cart; in the future it will be lived in an aeroplane; and the change of speed amounts to a difference in quality.

The transformation of the field of knowledge, which has been thus effected, has not been wholly a gain. At least, there are dangers implicit in it, although the increase of efficiency is undeniable.

This attitude of mind was breaking down under the influence of Mendeleef’s periodic law. But Pasteur showed the decisive importance of the idea of organism at the stage of infinitesimal magnitude.

The astronomers had shown us how big is the universe. The chemists and biologists teach us how small it is.

There is in modern scientific practice a famous standard of length. It is rather small: to obtain it, you must divide a centimetre into one hundred million parts, and take one of them. Pasteur’s organisms are a good deal bigger than this length.

The convergent effect of the new power for scientific advance, which resulted from these four ideas, transformed the middle period of the century into an orgy of scientific triumph.

Clear-sighted men, of the sort who are so clearly wrong, now proclaimed that the secrets of the physical universe were finally disclosed.

If only you ignored everything which refused to come into line, your powers of explanation were unlimited. On the other side, muddle-headed men muddled themselves into the most indefensible positions.

Clear-sighted men, of the sort who are so clearly wrong, now proclaimed that the secrets of the physical universe were finally disclosed.

If only you ignored everything which refused to come into line, your powers of explanation were unlimited.

On the other side, muddle-headed men muddled themselves into the most indefensible positions. Learned dogmatism, conjoined with ignorance of the crucial facts, suffered a heavy defeat from the scientific advocates of new ways.

It was an echo of the eighteenth century, lacking Voltaire and the reckless grace of the French aristocrats. The period was efficient, dull, and half-hearted.

It celebrated the triumph of the professional man.

But looking backwards upon this time of pause, we can now discern signs of change. In the first place, the modern conditions of systematic research prevent absolute stagnation.

Science is taking on a new aspect which is neither purely physical, nor purely biological. It is becoming the study of organisms.

Biology is the study of the larger organisms; whereas physics is the study of the smaller organisms.

There is another difference between the two divisions of science. The organisms of biology include as ingredients the smaller organisms of physics; but there is at present no evidence that the smaller of the physical organisms can be analysed into component organisms.

Analogously, all hydrogen nuclei are alike. Also we note the great numbers of these analogous objects. There are throngs of them. It seems as though a certain similarity were a favourable condition for endurance. Common sense also suggests this conclusion.

If organisms are to survive, they must work together.

Accordingly, the key to the mechanism of evolution is the necessity for the evolution of a favourable environment, conjointly with the evolution of any specific type of enduring organisms of great permanence. Any physical object which by its influence deteriorates its environment, commits suicide.

Accordingly, the key to the mechanism of evolution is the necessity for the evolution of a favourable environment, conjointly with the evolution of any specific type of enduring organisms of great permanence.

Any physical object which by its influence deteriorates its environment, commits suicide.

One of the simplest ways of evolving a favourable environment concurrently with the development of the individual organism, is that the influence of each organism on the environment should be favourable to the endurance of other organisms of the same type.

The other side of the evolutionary machinery, the neglected side, is expressed by the word creativeness.

The organisms can create their own environment.

For this purpose, the single organism is almost helpless. The adequate forces require societies of coöperatingcoöperating organisms. But with such coöperation and in proportion to the effort put forward, the environment has a plasticity which alters the whole ethical aspect of evolution.

The increased plasticity of the environment for mankind, resulting from the advances in scientific technology, is being construed in terms of habits of thought which find their justification in the theory of a fixed environment.

The riddle of the universe is not so simple.

There is the aspect of permanence in which a given type of attainment is endlessly repeated for its own sake; and there is the aspect of transition to other things,—it may be of higher worth, and it may be of lower worth.

and there is the aspect of transition to other things,—it may be of higher worth, and it may be of lower worth. Also there are its aspects of struggle and of friendly help.

But romantic ruthlessness is no nearer to real politics, than is romantic self-abnegation.

For example, it generalised the ordinary notions of weight and massiveness. The eighteenth century opened with the quiet confidence that at last nonsense had been got rid of. To-day we are at the opposite pole of thought.

Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not to-morrow be demonstrated truth.

We have recaptured some of the tone of the early nineteenth century, only on a higher imaginative level.

It is obvious that they will not do as Newton left them, or even as Clerk Maxwell left them. There must be a reorganization.

The new situation in the thought of to-day arises from the fact that scientific theory is outrunning common sense.

The settlement as inherited by the eighteenth century was a triumph of organised common sense. It had got rid of medieval phantasies, and of Cartesian vortices.

He can thus depend upon obtaining the material he desires; and it can be ground to the shapes he desires, within very narrow limits of tolerance. These instruments have put thought onto a new level.

A fresh instrument serves the same purpose as foreign travel; it shows things in unusual combinations.

The gain is more than a mere addition; it is a transformation. The advance in experimental ingenuity is, perhaps, also due to the larger proportion of national ability which now flows into scientific pursuits.

The whole set of ideas might have been familiar to the family of King Minos of Crete, as they dropped pebbles into the sea from high battlements rising from the shore.

We cannot too carefully realise that science started with the organisation of ordinary experiences.

It was in this way that it coalesced so readily with the anti-rationalistic bias of the historical revolt. It was not asking for ultimate meanings. It confined itself to investigating the connections regulating the succession of obvious occurrences.

The only method of selection between them is to wait for experimental evidence respecting those effects on which the formulae differ.

Nature is probably quite indifferent to the aesthetic preferences of mathematicians.

It only remains to add that Einstein would probably reject the theory of multiple space-time systems which I have been expounding to you.

It may shortly be characterised as being the direct recurrence to the original sources of Greek inspiration on the part of men whose spiritual shape had been derived from inheritance from the Middle Ages. There was therefore no revival of Greek mentality.

Epochs do not rise from the dead.

The principles of aesthetics and of reason, which animated the Greek civilisation, were reclothed in a modern mentality. Between the two there lay other religions, other systems of law, other anarchies, and other racial inheritances, dividing the living from the dead.

Philosophy is peculiarly sensitive to such differences.

For, whereas you can make a replica of an ancient statue, there is no possible replica of an ancient state of mind.

There can be no nearer approximation than that which a masquerade bears to real life. There may be understanding of the past, but there is a difference between the modern and the ancient reactions to the same stimuli.

For century after century it insisted upon the infinite worth of the individual human soul. Accordingly, to the instinctive egotism of physical desires, it has superadded an instinctive feeling of justification for an egotism of intellectual outlook.

Every human being is the natural guardian of his own importance.

Without a doubt, this modern direction of attention emphasises truths of the highest value. For example, in the field of practical life, it has abolished slavery, and has impressed upon the popular imagination the primary rights of mankind.

The subsequent history of philosophy revolves round the Cartesian formulation of the primary datum.

The ancient world takes its stand upon the drama of the Universe, the modern world upon the inward drama of the Soul.

Descartes, in his Meditations, expressly grounds the existence of this inward drama upon the possibility of error. There may be no correspondence with objective fact, and thus there must be a soul with activities whose reality is purely derivative from itself.

Also, they seek such principles as will eliminate mere arbitrariness; so that, whatever portion of fact is assumed or given, the existence of the remainder of things shall satisfy some demand of rationality.

They demand meaning.

In the words of Henry Sidgwick[13]—“It is the primary aim of philosophy to unify completely, bring into clear coherence, all departments of rational thought, and this aim cannot be realised by any philosophy that leaves out of its view the important body of judgments and …

This total unity, considered as an entity for its own sake, is the prehension into unity of the patterned aspects of the universe of events. Its knowledge of itself arises from its own relevance to the things of which it prehends the aspects.

It knows the world as a system of mutual relevance, and thus sees itself as mirrored in other things.

These other things include more especially the various parts of its own body.

But it is to be noticed that in the first place Locke wavers in his grasp of this position; and in the second place, what is more important still, he only applies his idea to self-consciousness. The physiological attitude has not yet established itself.

The effect of physiology was to put mind back into nature.

The neurologist traces first the effect of stimuli along the bodily nerves, then integration at nerve centres, and finally the rise of a projective reference beyond the body with a resulting motor efficacy in renewed nervous excitement.

The claim that the cognition of alien mentalities must necessarily be by means of indirect inferences from aspects of shape and of sense-objects is wholly unwarranted by this philosophy of organism.

The fundamental principle is that whatever merges into actuality, implants its aspects in every individual event.

Further, even for self-cognition, the aspects of the parts of our own bodies partly take the form of aspects of shape, and of sense-objects.

they are aspects of what lies beyond that event. Thus the self-knowledge inherent in the bodily event is the knowledge of itself as a complex unity, whose ingredients involve all reality beyond itself, restricted under the limitation of its pattern of aspects.

Thus we know ourselves as a function of unification of a plurality of things which are other than ourselves.

Cognition discloses an event as being an activity, organising a real togetherness of alien things. But this psychological field does not depend on its cognition; so that this field is still a unit event as abstracted from its self-cognition.

Eternal objects are thus, in their nature, abstract. By ‘abstract’ I mean that what an eternal object is in itself—that is to say, its essence—is comprehensible without reference to some one particular occasion of experience.

To be abstract is to transcend particular concrete occasions of actual happening.

But to transcend an actual occasion does not mean being disconnected from it. On the contrary, I hold that each eternal object has its own proper connection with each such occasion, which I term its mode of ingression into that occasion.

Also it is inherent in the nature of possibility that it should include this relevance to actuality.

For possibility is that in which there stands achievability, abstracted from achievement.

It has already been emphasised that an actual occasion is to be conceived as a limitation; and that this process of limitation can be still further characterised as a gradation. This characteristic of an actual occasion (α, say) requires further elucidation:

The difficulty which arises in respect to internal relations is to explain how any particular truth is possible.

In so far as there are internal relations, everything must depend upon everything else. But if this be the case, we cannot know about anything till we equally know everything else.

Apparently, therefore, we are under the necessity of saying everything at once. This supposed necessity is palpably untrue. Accordingly it is incumbent on us to explain how there can be internal relations, seeing that we admit finite truths.

This graded envisagement is how the actual includes what (in one sense) is not-being as a positive factor in its own achievement. It is the source of error, of truth, of art, of ethics, and of religion.

By it, fact is confronted with alternatives.

This general concept, of an event as a process whose outcome is a unit of experience, points to the analysis of an event into (i) substantial activity, (ii) conditioned potentialities which are there for synthesis, and (iii) the achieved outcome of the synthesis.

But there could not then have been these modes, for each mode represents a synthesis of actualities which are limited to conform to a standard. We here come to the second way of limitation.

Restriction is the price of value.

There cannot be value without antecedent standards of value, to discriminate the acceptance or rejection of what is before the envisaging mode of activity. Thus there is an antecedent limitation among values, introducing contraries, grades, and oppositions.

Also Cardinal Newman devoted a treatise to the discussion of the development of doctrine. He wrote it before he became a great Roman Catholic ecclesiastic; but throughout his life, it was never retracted and continually reissued.

Science is even more changeable than theology.

No man of science could subscribe without qualification to Galileo’s beliefs, or to Newton’s beliefs, or to all his own scientific beliefs of ten years ago.

It may be that we are more interested in one set of doctrines than in the other. But, if we have any sense of perspective and of the history of thought, we shall wait and refrain from mutual anathemas.

We should wait: but we should not wait passively, or in despair.

The clash is a sign that there are wider truths and finer perspectives within which a reconciliation of a deeper religion and a more subtle science will be found.

We should wait: but we should not wait passively, or in despair.

The clash is a sign that there are wider truths and finer perspectives within which a reconciliation of a deeper religion and a more subtle science will be found.

In one sense, therefore, the conflict between science and religion is a slight matter which has been unduly emphasised. A mere logical contradiction cannot in itself point to more than the necessity of some readjustments, possibly of a very minor character on both sides.

It would, however, be missing the point to think that we need not trouble ourselves about the conflict between science and religion. In an intellectual age there can be no active interest which puts aside all hope of a vision of the harmony of truth.

To acquiesce in discrepancy is destructive of candour, and of moral cleanliness.

It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment. If you check that impulse, you will get no religion and no science from an awakened thoughtfulness.

In an intellectual age there can be no active interest which puts aside all hope of a vision of the harmony of truth. To acquiesce in discrepancy is destructive of candour, and of moral cleanliness.

It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.

If you check that impulse, you will get no religion and no science from an awakened thoughtfulness. The important question is, In what spirit are we going to face the issue? There we come to something absolutely vital.

If you check that impulse, you will get no religion and no science from an awakened thoughtfulness. The important question is, In what spirit are we going to face the issue? There we come to something absolutely vital.

A clash of doctrines is not a disaster—it is an opportunity.

I will explain my meaning by some illustrations from science. The weight of an atom of nitrogen was well known. Also it was an established scientific doctrine that the average weight of such atoms in any considerable mass will be always the same.

The moral of these stories lies on the surface, and I will leave to you their application to the case of religion and science.

In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of a defeat: but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress towards a victory.

This is one great reason for the utmost toleration of variety of opinion. Once and forever, this duty of toleration has been summed up in the words, ‘Let both grow together until the harvest.’

Such people are apt resolutely to ignore, or to explain away, all evidence which confuses their scheme with contradictory instances.

What they cannot fit in is for them nonsense.

An unflinching determination to take the whole evidence into account is the only method of preservation against the fluctuating extremes of fashionable opinion. This advice seems so easy, and is in fact so difficult to follow.

Such people are apt resolutely to ignore, or to explain away, all evidence which confuses their scheme with contradictory instances. What they cannot fit in is for them nonsense.

An unflinching determination to take the whole evidence into account is the only method of preservation against the fluctuating extremes of fashionable opinion.

This advice seems so easy, and is in fact so difficult to follow.

They are either fading into meaningless formulae, or are gaining power by the new lights thrown by a more delicate apprehension. They are transformed by the urge of critical reason, by the vivid evidence of emotional experience, and by the cold certainties of scientific perception.

One fact is certain, you cannot keep them still. No generation can merely reproduce its ancestors.

You may preserve the life in a flux of form, or preserve the form amid an ebb of life. But you cannot permanently enclose the same life in the same mould.

They are transformed by the urge of critical reason, by the vivid evidence of emotional experience, and by the cold certainties of scientific perception. One fact is certain, you cannot keep them still. No generation can merely reproduce its ancestors.

You may preserve the life in a flux of form, or preserve the form amid an ebb of life. But you cannot permanently enclose the same life in the same mould.

The present state of religion among the European races illustrates the statements which I have been making. The phenomena are mixed. There have been reactions and revivals.

One reason for this difficulty is that we cannot think first and act afterwards.

From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.

We have, therefore, in various spheres of experience to adopt those ideas which seem to work within those spheres. It is absolutely necessary to trust to ideas which are generally adequate, even though we know that there are subtleties and distinctions beyond our ken.

The average curve marks a steady fall in religious tone. In some countries the interest in religion is higher than in others. But in those countries where the interest is relatively high, it still falls as the generations pass.

Religion is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life.

A great historical movement on this scale results from the convergence of many causes. I wish to suggest two of them which lie within the scope of this chapter for consideration.

The religious controversies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries put theologians into a most unfortunate state of mind. They were always attacking and defending. They pictured themselves as the garrison of a fort surrounded by hostile forces.

All such pictures express half-truths. That is why they are so popular.

But they are dangerous. This particular picture fostered a pugnacious party spirit which really expresses an ultimate lack of faith. They dared not modify, because they shirked the task of disengaging their spiritual message from the associations of a particular imagery.

Saint Paul denounced the Law, and Puritan divines spoke of the filthy rags of righteousness. The insistence upon rules of conduct marks the ebb of religious fervour.

Above and beyond all things, the religious life is not a research after comfort.

I must now state, in all diffidence, what I conceive to be the essential character of the religious spirit.

Religion has emerged into human experience mixed with the crudest fancies of barbaric imagination. Gradually, slowly, steadily the vision recurs in history under nobler form and with clearer expression. It is the one element in human experience which persistently shows an upward trend.

It fades and then recurs.

But when it renews its force, it recurs with an added richness and purity of content. The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism.

It is the one element in human experience which persistently shows an upward trend. It fades and then recurs. But when it renews its force, it recurs with an added richness and purity of content.

The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism.

Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.

The vision claims nothing but worship; and worship is a surrender to the claim for assimilation, urged with the motive force of mutual love.

The vision never overrules.

It is always there, and it has the power of love presenting the one purpose whose fulfilment is eternal harmony. Such order as we find in nature is never force—it presents itself as the one harmonious adjustment of complex detail.

Such order as we find in nature is never force—it presents itself as the one harmonious adjustment of complex detail. Evil is the brute motive force of fragmentary purpose, disregarding the eternal vision.

Evil is overruling, retarding, hurting.

The power of God is the worship He inspires. That religion is strong which in its ritual and its modes of thought evokes an apprehension of the commanding vision.

Such order as we find in nature is never force—it presents itself as the one harmonious adjustment of complex detail. Evil is the brute motive force of fragmentary purpose, disregarding the eternal vision. Evil is overruling, retarding, hurting.

The power of God is the worship He inspires.

That religion is strong which in its ritual and its modes of thought evokes an apprehension of the commanding vision. The worship of God is not a rule of safety—it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable.

Evil is overruling, retarding, hurting. The power of God is the worship He inspires. That religion is strong which in its ritual and its modes of thought evokes an apprehension of the commanding vision.

The worship of God is not a rule of safety—it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable.

The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure.

That religion is strong which in its ritual and its modes of thought evokes an apprehension of the commanding vision. The worship of God is not a rule of safety—it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable.

The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure.

The psychological field then exhibits what an event is in itself. Our bodily event is an unusually complex type of organism and consequently includes cognition. Further, space and time, in their most concrete signification, become the locus of events.

An organism is the realisation of a definite shape of value.

The emergence of some actual value depends on limitation which excludes neutralising cross-lights. Thus an event is a matter of fact which by reason of its limitation is a value for itself;

In the first place, the rate of progress is such that an individual human being, of ordinary length of life, will be called upon to face novel situations which find no parallel in his past.

The fixed person for the fixed duties, who in older societies was such a godsend, in the future will be a public danger.

In the second place, the modern professionalism in knowledge works in the opposite direction so far as the intellectual sphere is concerned.

Of course I am speaking of general tendencies; for chemists are no worse than engineers, or mathematicians, or classical scholars. Effective knowledge is professionalised knowledge, supported by a restricted acquaintance with useful subjects subservient to it.

This situation has its dangers. It produces minds in a groove.

Each profession makes progress, but it is progress in its own groove. Now to be mentally in a groove is to live in contemplating a given set of abstractions.

Now to be mentally in a groove is to live in contemplating a given set of abstractions. The groove prevents straying across country, and the abstraction abstracts from something to which no further attention is paid.

But there is no groove of abstractions which is adequate for the comprehension of human life.

Thus in the modern world, the celibacy of the medieval learned class has been replaced by a celibacy of the intellect which is divorced from the concrete contemplation of the complete facts. Of course, no one is merely a mathematician, or merely a lawyer.

It holds if you apply it to a nation, a city, a district, an institution, a family, or even to an individual. There is a development of particular abstractions, and a contraction of concrete appreciation.

The whole is lost in one of its aspects.

It is not necessary for my point that I should maintain that our directive wisdom, either as individuals or as communities, is less now than in the past. Perhaps it has slightly improved.

The point is that the discoveries of the nineteenth century were in the direction of professionalism, so that we are left with no expansion of wisdom and with greater need of it.

Wisdom is the fruit of a balanced development.

It is this balanced growth of individuality which it should be the aim of education to secure. The most useful discoveries for the immediate future would concern the furtherance of this aim without detriment to the necessary intellectual professionalism.

The general training should aim at eliciting our concrete apprehensions, and should satisfy the itch of youth to be doing something. There should be some analysis even here, but only just enough to illustrate the ways of thinking in diverse spheres.

In the Garden of Eden Adam saw the animals before he named them: in the traditional system, children named the animals before they saw them.

There is no easy single solution of the practical difficulties of education. We can, however, guide ourselves by a certain simplicity in its general theory. The student should concentrate within a limited field.

Both types have missed something; and if you add together the two sets of values, you do not obtain the missing elements. What is wanted is an appreciation of the infinite variety of vivid values achieved by an organism in its proper environment.

When you understand all about the sun and all about the atmosphere and all about the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset.

There is no substitute for the direct perception of the concrete achievement of a thing in its actuality. We want concrete fact with a high light thrown on what is relevant to its preciousness.

When you understand all about the sun and all about the atmosphere and all about the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset.

There is no substitute for the direct perception of the concrete achievement of a thing in its actuality.

We want concrete fact with a high light thrown on what is relevant to its preciousness.

For example, the mere disposing of the human body and the eyesight so as to get a good view of a sunset is a simple form of artistic selection.

The habit of art is the habit of enjoying vivid values.

But, in this sense, art concerns more than sunsets.

We must foster the creative initiative towards the maintenance of objective values. You will not obtain the apprehension without the initiative, or the initiative without the apprehension. As soon as you get towards the concrete, you cannot exclude action.

Sensitiveness without impulse spells decadence, and impulse without sensitiveness spells brutality.

I am using the word “sensitiveness” in its most general signification, so as to include apprehension of what lies beyond oneself; that is to say, sensitiveness to all the facts of the case.

This method is triumphant, provided that the abstractions are judicious. But, however triumphant, the triumph is within limits.

The neglect of these limits leads to disastrous oversights.

The anti-rationalism of science is partly justified, as a preservation of its useful methodology; it is partly mere irrational prejudice. Modern professionalism is the training of minds to conform to the methodology.

These early ages had an ideal of rationalism, but they failed in its pursuit. For they neglected to note that the methodology of reasoning requires the limitations involved in the abstract.

Accordingly, the true rationalism must always transcend itself by recurrence to the concrete in search of inspiration.

A self-satisfied rationalism is in effect a form of anti-rationalism. It means an arbitrary halt at a particular set of abstractions. This was the case with science.

For they neglected to note that the methodology of reasoning requires the limitations involved in the abstract. Accordingly, the true rationalism must always transcend itself by recurrence to the concrete in search of inspiration.

A self-satisfied rationalism is in effect a form of anti-rationalism.

It means an arbitrary halt at a particular set of abstractions. This was the case with science.

The psychological field, as restricted to sense-objects and passing emotions, is the minor permanence, barely rescued from the nonentity of mere change; and the mind is the major permanence, permeating that complete field, whose endurance is the living soul.

But the soul would wither without fertilisation from its transient experiences.

The secret of the higher organisms lies in their two grades of permanences. By this means the freshness of the environment is absorbed into the permanence of the soul.

There are two principles inherent in the very nature of things, recurring in some particular embodiments whatever field we explore—the spirit of change, and the spirit of conservation.

There can be nothing real without both. Mere change without conservation is a passage from nothing to nothing.

Its final integration yields mere transient non-entity. Mere conservation without change cannot conserve. For after all, there is a flux of circumstance, and the freshness of being evaporates under mere repetition.

There can be nothing real without both. Mere change without conservation is a passage from nothing to nothing. Its final integration yields mere transient non-entity.

Mere conservation without change cannot conserve.

For after all, there is a flux of circumstance, and the freshness of being evaporates under mere repetition. The character of existent reality is composed of organisms enduring through the flux of things.

It transforms the soul into the permanent realisation of values extending beyond its former self. This element of transition in art is shown by the restlessness exhibited in its history. An epoch gets saturated by the masterpieces of any one style.

Something new must be discovered. The human being wanders on.

Yet there is a balance in things. Mere change before the attainment of adequacy of achievement, either in quality or output, is destructive of greatness. But the importance of a living art, which moves on and yet leaves its permanent mark, can hardly be exaggerated.

This element of transition in art is shown by the restlessness exhibited in its history. An epoch gets saturated by the masterpieces of any one style. Something new must be discovered. The human being wanders on. Yet there is a balance in things.

Mere change before the attainment of adequacy of achievement, either in quality or output, is destructive of greatness.

But the importance of a living art, which moves on and yet leaves its permanent mark, can hardly be exaggerated.

This fertilisation of the soul is the reason for the necessity of art. A static value, however serious and important, becomes unendurable by its appalling monotony of endurance.

The soul cries aloud for release into change.

It suffers the agonies of claustrophobia. The transitions of humour, wit, irreverence, play, sleep, and—above all—of art are necessary for it. Great art is the arrangement of the environment so as to provide for the soul vivid, but transient, values.

This fertilisation of the soul is the reason for the necessity of art. A static value, however serious and important, becomes unendurable by its appalling monotony of endurance. The soul cries aloud for release into change. It suffers the agonies of claustrophobia.

The transitions of humour, wit, irreverence, play, sleep, and—above all—of art are necessary for it.

Great art is the arrangement of the environment so as to provide for the soul vivid, but transient, values. Human beings require something which absorbs them for a time, something out of the routine which they can stare at.

A static value, however serious and important, becomes unendurable by its appalling monotony of endurance. The soul cries aloud for release into change. It suffers the agonies of claustrophobia. The transitions of humour, wit, irreverence, play, sleep, and—above all—of art are necessary for it.

Great art is the arrangement of the environment so as to provide for the soul vivid, but transient, values.

Human beings require something which absorbs them for a time, something out of the routine which they can stare at. But you cannot subdivide life, except in the abstract analysis of thought. Accordingly, the great art is more than a transient refreshment.

It suffers the agonies of claustrophobia. The transitions of humour, wit, irreverence, play, sleep, and—above all—of art are necessary for it. Great art is the arrangement of the environment so as to provide for the soul vivid, but transient, values.

Human beings require something which absorbs them for a time, something out of the routine which they can stare at.

But you cannot subdivide life, except in the abstract analysis of thought. Accordingly, the great art is more than a transient refreshment. It is something which adds to the permanent richness of the soul’s self-attainment.

This fertilisation of the soul is the reason for the necessity of art.

A static value, however serious and important, becomes unendurable by its appalling monotony of endurance.

The soul cries aloud for release into change. It suffers the agonies of claustrophobia. The transitions of humour, wit, irreverence, play, sleep, and—above all—of art are necessary for it.

It is something which adds to the permanent richness of the soul’s self-attainment. It justifies itself both by its immediate enjoyment, and also by its discipline of the inmost being. Its discipline is not distinct from enjoyment, but by reason of it.

It transforms the soul into the permanent realisation of values extending beyond its former self.

This element of transition in art is shown by the restlessness exhibited in its history. An epoch gets saturated by the masterpieces of any one style. Something new must be discovered. The human being wanders on. Yet there is a balance in things.

finally, if we attend to what actually has happened in the past, and disregard romantic visions of democracies, aristocracies, kings, generals, armies, and merchants, material power has generally been wielded with blindness, obstinacy and selfishness, often with brutal malignancy.

And yet, mankind has progressed.

Even if you take a tiny oasis of peculiar excellence, the type of modern man who would have most chance of happiness in ancient Greece at its best period is probably (as now) an average professional heavy-weight boxer, and not an average Greek scholar from …

Indeed, the main use of the Oxford scholar would have been his capability of writing an ode in glorification of the boxer.

Nothing does more harm in unnerving men for their duties in the present, than the attention devoted to the points of excellence in the past as compared with the average failure of the present day.

But, after all, there have been real periods of decadence; and at the present time, as at other epochs, society is decaying, and there is need for preservative action. Professionals are not new to the world. But in the past, professionals have formed unprogressive castes.

For it directed almost exclusive attention to the aspect of struggle for existence in a fixed environment. To a large extent the environment is fixed, and to this extent there is a struggle for existence.

It is folly to look at the universe through rose-tinted spectacles.

We must admit the struggle. The question is, who is to be eliminated. In so far as we are educators, we have to have clear ideas upon that point; for it settles the type to be produced and the practical ethics to be inculcated.

Professionals are not new to the world. But in the past, professionals have formed unprogressive castes. The point is that professionalism has now been mated with progress.

The world is now faced with a self-evolving system, which it cannot stop.

There are dangers and advantages in this situation. It is obvious that the gain in material power affords opportunity for social betterment. If mankind can rise to the occasion, there lies in front a golden age of beneficent creativeness.

The world is now faced with a self-evolving system, which it cannot stop. There are dangers and advantages in this situation. It is obvious that the gain in material power affords opportunity for social betterment.

If mankind can rise to the occasion, there lies in front a golden age of beneficent creativeness.

But material power in itself is ethically neutral. It can equally well work in the wrong direction. The problem is not how to produce great men, but how to produce great societies. The great society will put up the men for the occasions.

There are dangers and advantages in this situation. It is obvious that the gain in material power affords opportunity for social betterment. If mankind can rise to the occasion, there lies in front a golden age of beneficent creativeness.

But material power in itself is ethically neutral. It can equally well work in the wrong direction.

The problem is not how to produce great men, but how to produce great societies. The great society will put up the men for the occasions. The materialistic philosophy emphasised the given quantity of material, and thence derivatively the given nature of the environment.

If mankind can rise to the occasion, there lies in front a golden age of beneficent creativeness. But material power in itself is ethically neutral. It can equally well work in the wrong direction.

The problem is not how to produce great men, but how to produce great societies.

The great society will put up the men for the occasions. The materialistic philosophy emphasised the given quantity of material, and thence derivatively the given nature of the environment. It thus operated most unfortunately upon the social conscience of mankind.

But material power in itself is ethically neutral. It can equally well work in the wrong direction. The problem is not how to produce great men, but how to produce great societies.

The great society will put up the men for the occasions.

The materialistic philosophy emphasised the given quantity of material, and thence derivatively the given nature of the environment. It thus operated most unfortunately upon the social conscience of mankind.