time: the refreshing river 



In parenthesis, having mentioned the agreement between White- 

 head and Engels on the history of science, it is interesting to find at 

 various places in Whitehead's writings remarkable echoes of marxist 

 thought. One conceives that these originate from the congruity that 

 there is between the dialectical conception of Nature and the organic 

 conception. For example, when discussing dualism. Whitehead says, 

 "The Universe is many because it is wholly and completely to be 

 analysed into many final actualities. It is one because of the universal 

 immanence. There is thus a dualism in this contrast between the 

 unity and multiplicity. Throughout the Universe there reigns the 

 union of opposites which is the ground of dualism."^ And in another 

 place, "In the past human life was lived in a bullock cart; in the future 

 it will be lived in an aeroplane; and this change of speed amounts 

 to a difference in quality.'"'^ More important, there are some fine 

 passages where Whitehead expounds the changeableness of scientific 

 formulations; the additions, distinctions, and modifications which 

 have to be introduced perpetually into them; and the complete 

 inadequacy of formal logic for science.^ "We are told by logicians 

 that a proposition must either be true or false, and that there is no 

 middle term. But in practice, we may know that a proposition ex- 

 presses an important truth, but that it is subject to limitations and 

 qualifications which at present remain undiscovered." Clashes between 

 theories are no sign of the failure of science, they are dialectical 

 contradictions out of which much better approximations to truth will 

 later arise. "A clash of doctrines is not a disaster — it is an oppor- 

 tunity."* A contradiction may be a sign of defeat in formal logic, 

 but in science it marks the first step towards a victory. A reliance on 

 scholastic and undialectical logic, which has marked so much writing 

 in biological theory (e.g. the later works of H. Driesch) has been 

 the reason why few biologists have troubled about it. 



The Naturalness of the Mental and the Spiritual. 



Reference was made above to Marx's phrase about making material- 

 ism not "misanthropic." An admirably parallel passage is to be found 

 in Whitehead.^ "In the same way as Descartes introduced the tradition 

 of thought which kept subsequent philosophy in some measure of 

 contact with the scientific movement, so Leibnitz introduced the 



1 AOI, p. 245. 2 S & MW, p. 142. 3 s & MW, p. 262. 



4 S & MW, p. 266. 5 s & MW, p. 225. 



200 



