A BIOLOGIST S VIEW OF WHITEHEAD S PHILOSOPHY 



"But an essential gap still remained. If all multicellular organ- 

 isms — plants as well as animals, including man — grow from a 

 single cell according to the law of cell-division, whence, then, 

 comes the infinite variety of these organisms? This question 

 was answered by the third great discovery, the theory of evolu- 

 tion, which was first presented in connected form and substan- 

 tiated by Darwin."^ 



Whitehead speaks of four rather than three great advances, the 

 first two being the idea of a field of physical activity pervading all 

 space, and of atomism.^ In the seventies of the last century some of 

 the great departments of physics, such as light and electromagnetism, 

 were established on the basis of waves in a continuous medium. 

 But other sciences, such as chemistry, were established on the basis 

 of ultimate particles or atoms and their interactions. Whitehead 

 includes the cell-"theory" in biology as another example of the 

 atomistic basis. It was, he says, in some respects, more revolutionary 

 than the atomism of Dalton, for it introduced the notion of organism 

 into the world of minute beings. "There had been a tendency to treat 

 the atom as an ultimate entity, capable only of external relations, but 

 Pasteur showed the decisive importance of the idea of organism at 

 the stage of infinitesimal magnitude." Whitehead's second group of 

 two new ideas comprises the law of the conservation of energy, and 

 the doctrine of evolution. In energy-transformations, permanence 

 underlies change. In evolution, permanence abdicates and change 

 takes its place. There is, therefore, in the world an aspect of permanence 

 and an aspect of change. In modern physics, wrote Whitehead,^ 

 "mass becomes the name for a quantity of energy considered in 

 relation to some of its dynamical effects. This train of thought leads 

 to the notion of energy being fundamental, thus displacing matter 

 from that position. But energy is merely the name for the quantitative 

 aspect of the structure of happenings; in short, it depends on the 

 notion of the functioning of an organism." And evolution is the 

 evolution of organisms of ever increasing organisation. As for the 

 dialectical contradiction between particles and waves, that has only 

 in our own time been, at any rate partially, resolved, with the modern 

 theories of wave-mechanics, quantum mechanics, etc., about which it 

 is hardly fitting that a biologist should speak. 



^ Appendix B to Ludwig Feuerbach and the outcome of classical German philosophy, 

 2 S & MW, pp. 143 ff. ^ S & MW, p. 149. 



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