time: the refreshing river 



that Whitehead goes so far as to say that "a thoroughgoing evolu- 

 tionary philosophy is inconsistent with [mechanical] materialism. The 

 aboriginal stuff, or material, from which a materialist philosophy 

 starts is incapable of evolution. This material is itself the ultimate 

 substance. Evolution, on the [mechanical] materialist theory, is 

 reduced to the role of being another word for the description of the 

 changes of the external relations between portions of matter. There 

 is nothing to evolve, because one set of external relations is as good 

 as any other set of external relations. There can merely be change, 

 purposeless and unprogressive. But the whole point of the modem 

 doctrine is the evolution of the complex organisms from the antecedent 

 states of less complex organisms. The doctrine thus cries aloud for a 

 conception of organism as fundamental for nature. It also requires 

 an underlying activity — a substantial activity — expressing itself in 

 individual embodiments, and evolving in achievements of organism. 

 The organism is a unit of emergent value, a real fusion of the characters 

 of eternal objects, emerging for its own sake."^ If in this passage 

 Whitehead speaks like Lloyd-Morgan, we shall see others in which 

 he speaks like Marx. Little though the philosophers of organic evo- 

 lutionary naturalism may have borrowed from one another, they 

 march in the same ranks. 



Elsewhere Whitehead explains why he ignores for the most part 

 nineteenth-century idealism. It was, he says, too much divorced 

 from the scientific outlook, yet at the same time it swallowed the 

 scientific scheme in its entirety and then explained it away as being 

 an idea in some ultimate mentality. He leaves open, however, a final 

 decision on the metaphysical issue — "However you take it, the 

 idealistic schools have conspicuously failed to connect, in any organic 

 fashion, the fact of nature with their idealistic philosophies. So far 

 as concerns what will be said in these lectures [Science and the 

 Modem World], your ultimate outlook maybe realistic or idealistic- 

 My point is that a further stage of provisional realism is required in 

 which the scientific scheme is recast, and founded upon the ultimate 

 concept of organism." 2 While this failure to close the door definitely 

 on idealism has endeared him to theologians such as Thornton,^ 

 many scientists have preferred the robuster materialism of the 

 marxists. No marxist, however, could be more strongly opposed to 

 mechanical materialism than Whitehead. 



iS&MW, p. 157. 2S&MW, p. 93. 



L. Thornton, The Incarnate Lord (London^ 1930)- 



194 -^ 



