80 
THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION AT 
NEWCASTLE. 
SECTION A. 
MATHEMATICAL AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 
OpeninG AppRESS (ABRIDGED) BY Pror. A. N. WHITE- 
HEAD, Sc.D., F.R.S., PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 
The Organisation of Thought. 
Tue subject of this address is the organisation of 
thought, a topic evidently capable of many diverse 
modes of treatment. I intend more particularly to 
give some account of that department of logical science 
with which some of my own studies have been con- 
nected. But 1 am anxious, if I can succeed in so 
doing, to handle this account so as to exhibit the 
relation with certain considerations which underlie 
general scientific activities. 
It is no accident that an age of science has developed 
into an age of organisation. Organised thought is the 
basis of organised action. Organisation is the ad- 
justment of diverse elements so that their mutual 
relations may exhibit some predetermined quality, An 
epic poem is a triumph of organisation—that is to say, 
it is a triumph in the unlikely event of it being a good 
epic poem. It is the successful organisation of multi- 
tudinous sounds of words, associations of words, pic- 
torial memories of diverse events and feelings ordinarily 
occurring in life, combined with a special narrative of 
great events: the whole so disposed as to excite emo- 
tions which, as defined by Milton, are simple, sen- 
suous, and passionate. The number of successful epic 
poems is commensurate, or, rather, is inversely com- 
mensurate, with the obvious difficulty of the task of 
organisation. 
Science is the organisation of thought. But the 
example of the epic poem warns us that science is 
not any organisation of thought. It is an organisation 
of a certain definite type which we will endeavour to 
determine. 
Science is a river with two sources, the practical 
source and the theoretical source. The practical source 
is the desire to direct our actions to achieve pre- 
determined ends. For example, the British nation, 
fighting for justice, turns to science, which teaches it 
the importance of compounds of nitrogen. The theo- 
retical source is ‘the desire to understand. Now I am 
going to emphasise the importance of theory in science. 
But to avoid misconception I most emphatically state 
that I do not consider one source as in any sense 
nobler than the other, or intrinsically more interesting. 
The importance, even in practice, of the theoretical 
side of science arises from the fact that action must be 
immediate, and takes place in circumstances which 
are excessively complicated. If we wait for the neces- 
sities of action before we commence to arrange our 
ideas, in peace we shall have lost our trade, and in 
war we shall have lost the battle. 
Success in practice depends on theorists who, led 
by other motives of exploration, have been there before, 
and by some good chance have hit upon the relevant 
ideas. By a theorist 1 do not mean a man who is 
up in the clouds, but a man whose motive for thought 
is the desire to formulate correctly the rules according 
to which events occur. A successful theorist should be 
excessively interested in immediate events, otherwise 
he is not at all likely to formulate correctly anything 
about them. Of course, bofh sources of science exist 
in all men. j 
Now, what is this thought organisation which we 
call science? The first aspect of modern science which 
struck thoughtful observers was its inductive character. 
The nature of induction, its importance, and the rules 
of inductive logic have been considered by a long series 
NO. 2448, VoL. 98] 
NATURE 
[SEPTEMBER 28, 1916 
of thinkers, especially English thinkers, Bacon, Her- 
schel, J. S. Mill, Venn, Jevons, and others. I am not 
going to plunge into an analysis of the process of 
induction. Induction is the machinery and not the 
product, and it is the product which I want to consider, 
When we understand the product we shall be in a 
stronger position to improve the machinery. ‘ 
First, there is one point which it is necessary to 
emphasise. There is a tendency in analysing scientific 
processes to assume a given assemblage of concepts 
applying to nature, and to imagine that the discovery 
of laws of nature consists in selecting by means of 
inductive logic some one out of a definite set of pos- 
sible alternative relations which may hold between the 
things in nature answering to these obvious concepts. 
In a sense this assumption is fairly correct, especially 
in regard to the earlier stages of science. Mankind 
found itself in possession of certain concepts respecting 
nature—for example, the concept of fairly permanent 
material bodies—and proceeded to determine laws 
which related the corresponding precepts in nature, 
But the formulation of laws changed the concepts, 
sometimes gently by an added precision, sometimes 
violently. At first this process was not much noticed, 
a ee 
or at least was felt to be a process curbed within 
narrow bounds, not touching fundamental ideas. At 
the stage where we now are, the formulation of the 
concepts can be seen to be as important as the formu- 
lation of the empirical laws connecting the events in 
the universe as thus conceived by us—for example, 
the concepts of life, of heredity, of a material body, 
of a molecule, of an atom, of an electron, of energy, — 
of space, of time, of quantity, and of number. 
But, for the purposes of science, what is the actual 
world? Has science to wait for the termination of 
the metaphysical debate till it can determine its own 
subject-matter ? 
more homely starting-ground, Its task is the dis- 
covery of the relations which exist within that flux 
of perceptions, sensations, and emotions which forms 
our experience of life. The panorama yielded by sight, 
sound, taste, smell, touch, and by more inchoate sen- 
sible feelings, is the sole field of its activity. It is in 
this way that science is the thought organisation of 
experience. The most obvious aspect of this field of 
actual experience is its disorderly character. It is for 
each person a continuum, fragmentary, and with 
elements not clearly differentiated. The comparison 
of the sensible experiences of diverse people brings its 
own difficulties. I insist on the radically untidy, ill- 
adjusted character of the fields of actual experience 
from which science starts. To grasp this fun ental 
truth is the first step in wisdom, when constructing 
a philosophy of science. , This fact is concealed by the 
influence of language, moulded by science, which foists 
on us exact concepts as though they represented the 
immediate deliverances of experience. The result is 
that we imagine that we have immediate experience 
of a world of perfectly defined objects implicated in 
perfectly defined events which, as known to us by the 
direct deliverance of our senses, happen at exact in- 
stants of time, in a space formed by exact points, 
without parts and without magnitude: the neat, trim, 
tidy, exact world which is the goal of scientific 
thought. . 
My contention is that this world is a world of ideas, 
and that its internal relations are relations between 
abstract concepts, and that the elucidation of the pre- 
cise connection between this world and the feelings of 
actual experience is the fundamental question of 
scientific philosophy. The question which I am in- 
viting you to consider is this: How does exact thought 
apply to the fragmentary, vague continua of experi- 
ence? I am not saying that it does not apply; quite 
the contrary. But I want to know how it applies. 
I suggest that science has a much— 
