4i 



A biologist's view of whitehead's philosophy 



"My aim," he says,^ ". . . is briefly to point out how both Newton's 

 and Hume's contributions are each, in their way, gravely defective. 

 They are right as far as they go. But they omit those aspects of the 

 universe as experienced, and of our modes of experiencing, which 

 jointly lead to the more penetrating ways of understanding. In the 

 recent situations at Washington, D.C., the Hume-Newton modes of 

 thought can only discern a complex transition of sensa and an entangled 

 locomotion of molecules, while the deepest intuition of the whole 

 world discerns tlie President of the United States inaugurating a 

 new chapter in the history of mankind. In such ways the Hume- 

 Newton interpretation omits our intuitive modes of understanding." 

 In other words, what the President does is relevant to events at an 

 extremely high level of organisation, and the concomitant atomic 

 happenings are not directly concerned, though they underlie, and 

 are entirely presupposed by, all that goes on at that high level. 



Whitehead as the Philosopher of Organism. 



Whitehead proceeds to his famous attack on the notion of "simple 

 location. "2 "To say that a bit of matter has simple location means 

 that, in expressing its spatio-temporal relations, it is adequate to 

 state that it is where it is, in a definite finite region of space, and 

 throughout a definite finite duration of time, apart from any essential 

 reference of the relations of that bit of matter to other regions of space 

 and to other durations of time. Again, this concept of simple location 

 is independent of the controversy between the absolutist and relativist 

 views of space or time. So long as any theory of space, or of time, 

 can give a meaning, either absolute or relative, to the idea of a definite 

 region of space, and of a definite duration of time, the idea of simple 

 location has a perfectly definite meaning. This idea is the very 

 foundation of the seventeenth-century scheme of Nature. Apart from 

 it, the scheme is incapable of expression. I shall argue that among the 

 primary elements of nature as apprehended in our immediate experi- 

 ence, there is no element whatever which possesses this character of 

 simple location. It does not follow, however, that the science of the 

 seventeenth century was simply wrong. I hold that by a process of 

 constructive abstraction we can arrive at abstractions which are the 

 simply-located bits of material, and at other abstractions which are 

 the minds included in the scientific scheme. Accordingly the real 



1 N & L, p. 26. 2 s & MW, p. 84 (italics inserted). 



