time: the refreshing river 



from the full common-sense notions of the sixteenth century to the 

 concept of Nature suggested by modem speculative physics. This 

 change of view, occupying four hundred years, may be characterised 

 as the transition from Space and Matter as the fundamental notions, 

 to Process conceived of as a complex of Activity with internal 

 relations between its various factors.^ The phrasing here is important 

 in view of what has to be said below concerning the transition from 

 the concepts of Form and Matter to those of Organisation and Energy. 

 The older point of view abstracted from any long-continuing change 

 and conceived of the full reality of Nature at a single instant. It 

 abstracted from any temporal duration, and characterised the inter- 

 relations in Nature solely by the distribution of matter in space. 

 For the modern view, process, activity, and change, are, as for the 

 dialectical materialists, the matter of fact. "At an instant there is 

 nothing. Each instant is only a way of grouping matters of fact. 

 There is no Nature at an instant. All interrelations of matters of fact 

 involve transition in their essence. All realisation involves implication 

 in the creative advance."^ 



Whitehead and the History of Science. 



It is extremely interesting that Whitehead in this century, and 

 Engels in the last century, both selected an almost identical group of 

 scientific advances which they felt to have been the deciding factors 

 in necessitating the great transition from the Renaissance or New- 

 tonian outlook in science to the modern, dialectical, or organic. 

 The three major discoveries selected by Engels were these: — 



"The first was the proof of the transformation of energy. 

 All the innumerable operative causes in nature, which until then 

 had led a mysterious, inexplicable, existence as so-called ^forces' — 

 mechanical force, heat, radiation, electricity, magnetism, chemical 

 affinity, etc. — are now proved to be special forms, modes of 

 existence of one and the same energy, i.e. motion. The unity 

 of all motion in nature is no longer a philosophical assertion but 

 a fact of natural science. 



"The second — chronologically earlier — discovery was that 

 of the organic cell by Schleiden and Schwann, of the cell as a 

 unit, out of the multiplication of which, and its differentiation, 

 all organisms, except the very lowest, arise and develop. 



^ N & L, p. 45. 2 N & L, p. 48 (italics inserted). 



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