II

One of the hardest things for a student to learn, which yet, if he

could but know it at the beginning, would save him from endless

perplexities and perhaps from final despair, is just the simple fact

that _brain-power is no guarantee for rightness of thinking_, that on

the contrary a restlessly outreaching mind, unchecked by the humility

of common sense, is more than likely to lead its owner into bogs of

duplicity if not into the bottomless pit of fatuity, that, to repeat

the phrase of Bacon, himself a shining example, the _intellectus sibi

permissus_ is the easiest of all dupes for the Demon of the Absolute.

There has been no more powerful intellect for the past hundred years

than Kant’s; I doubt if any writer ever filled the world with more

confusion of thought or clouded the truth with a thicker dust of

obscurity. And it is in this spirit of distrust, not incompatible with

a kind of admiration, that I criticise the works of one who to-day has

reached the pinnacle of fame as a thinker.

Professor Whitehead’s philosophy spans the double field of religion and

science; and in each of these, I presume to say, he has come by the

circuitous ways of abstract reasoning to conclusions that in a lesser

man would be regarded as preposterous. If such a statement shocks you

or sounds disrespectful, take yourself the argument of his _Religion in

the Making_ and strip it to the bones. You will find that it proceeds

from the definition of religion as “the longing for justification,”

and is directed by the fact that “to-day there is but one religious

dogma in debate: What do you mean by ‘God’?” Upon this basis, then, Mr.

Whitehead undertakes to find such a meaning for the word “God” as will

satisfy man’s “longing for justification.” Such a simplification of the

religious problem will strike some inquirers as high-handed, but I let

that pass; it has at least whatever merits appertain to simplicity. And

I admit ungrudgingly that in the course of his lectures Mr. Whitehead

makes many shrewd observations on the deeper mysteries of human life.

Memorable passages might be quoted, for instance such sentences as

these, that touch the Crocean metaphysic on the quick: “To be an actual

thing is to be limited,” “Thus rightness of limitation is essential for

growth of reality,” “Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can

procure nothing.”

But in the end how does Mr. Whitehead reply to his own question: “What

do you mean by ‘God’?” For convenience’ sake I quote this summary of

his answer from a eulogistic article in the _Hibbert Journal_ for July

1927:

All being does this [_i.e._, “comes to a focus in each thing”]

because it is its nature so to do. _This inherent nature of all

being is God._ All being does this because it is organised

according to the principle of concretion. All being does this

because of a certain order or character which pervades it. That

order pervading the universe that makes it concrete is God. God is

not himself concrete, says Whitehead, but he is the principle which

constitutes the concreteness of things.

That is to say, in still simpler language: An individual object is not

cut off from the universe, but stands in some relation to all other

objects and owes its character to this relationship; this is so because

it is the nature of things to be so; such is the law of “concretion,”

and the “principle of concretion” is God.

Now, apart from the final clause, a plain man might suggest that the

argument, so relieved of the obscurantism of metaphysical jargon, is

more true than original--true to the point of insipidity. As for the

conclusion, no doubt, so left in its native jargon, it comes with the

shock of originality; but has it sense? Will any man admit that the God

whom he worships and to whom he prays--and without worship and prayer

the use of the word “God” is a pure solecism--is no more than the

“principle of concretion” in the universe? Has such a definition any

bearing on religion as the “longing for justification”? Is it anything

more than a phantom of abstract science surreptitiously substituted for

the object of faith? The fact is that between the last clause of the

argument and what precedes there is a sheer hiatus. It is the age-old

fallacy of metaphysics: you take a word used in ordinary speech (“God”)

with a perfectly clear connotation; you define the word in a manner

to suit your convenience (“the principle of concretion”); you prove

that there is something in the nature of things corresponding to your

definition, and then casually assume that your proof holds good of the

word in its popular sense. It is the oft-repeated adventure of the

Absolute: you wrap a common-place up in abstract terminology, and then

in that fog of language you find yourself precipitated into an abyss of

nonsense (that the “longing for justification” is satisfied by belief

in “the inherent nature of all being”).[24]

But this is by the way. Our present topic is rather Mr. Whitehead’s

philosophy of science, which is his real concern, and in which the

terms “God” and “religion” are manifestly unwarranted intrusions.

Here, again, to the student of contemporary thought Mr. Whitehead’s

_Science and the Modern World_ must be in many ways a welcome book. His

comments on the connexion between the poets and the physical theories

of their day are illuminating and bring to the subject a knowledge not

often found in the literary critic. And I for one am much beholden to

him for his treatment of the ghastly relic of materialism bequeathed

to us by our fathers--I would almost say his indecent burial of it,

were the epithet indecent applicable to the disposal of a corpse which

has remained too long above ground. And very cleverly he directs his

attack to the two points where the mechanistic philosophy is most

vulnerable--its apparent simplicity and its presumptive regard of facts.

There was indeed at first sight a seductive simplicity about the

theories of Huxley and his militant brothers. It is so easy to say

that the world is nothing but a machine nicely constructed of atoms,

running smoothly and undeviatingly under the mechanical laws of

motion; to deny that anything new or incalculable ever breaks in to

disarrange the regularity demanded by science; to dispose of the

passions and appetites and the very consciousness of man as mere

products of atomical reaction. It was the kind of simplification that

promised to solve for us all the annoying problems of life, exactly

the kind of bait that the Demon of the Absolute loves to dangle before

a mind unprotected by the humility of common sense. Certainly if

ever any group of men had a cosmic footrule in their pockets, it was

this particular group of mid-Victorians who married the atheistical

philosophy of the eighteenth century to the physical discoveries of

the nineteenth. Unfortunately, what seemed a process of simplification

has led step by step to such a complexity of adjustments to keep

the machine going that long ago the plain man, if he dared, would

have scouted the whole conception as a fantastic dream. And here Mr.

Whitehead, by virtue of his standing as a mathematician, speaks with an

authority for which the plain man must be very grateful. “The physical

doctrine of the atom,” he says, “has got into a state which is strongly

suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus.” In all

conscience, is it not true that to accept the more recent developments

of scientific mechanism requires about the same sort of credulity as

was demanded of the theologian in the Middle Ages when asked to debate

the number of angels who could stand together on the point of a needle?

And as the mechanistic theory, when used to explain the inner workings

of matter, instead of simplifying science, breaks down under a weight

of infinite complications, so, when applied to the nature of man, it

shatters itself on what Mr. Whitehead rightly calls certain “stubborn

and irreducible facts”--the most stubborn and irreducible of these

facts being, as every unperverted mind knows, that we are not pure

machines, and that any argument which would subject the human will and

consciousness to the mechanical laws of motion is void because based

on false premises. Against the high-handed assumptions of Darwinian

materialism and the fanatical dogmatism of its votaries (relics of

which still circulate in the backwaters of the biological laboratory),

as against all forms of complacent obscurantism, whether theological or

scientific, “Oliver Cromwell’s cry echoes down the ages: ‘My brethren,

by the bowels of Christ I beseech you, bethink you that you may be

mistaken.’”

It is the bare truth that one must rake the records of history to

discover a more complete and abject subservience to the Demon of the

Absolute than that of the philosophy, falsely called science, of the

period now closing. And, as I say, any one who clings to common sense

must be thankful to Mr. Whitehead for lending his authority as a

scientist to the unlocking of these shackles. But then, why should so

masterly an intellect, again like Luther’s drunken man, topple over on

the other side into a contrary but equally impossible absolutism? Why?

“The only way of mitigating mechanism,” he says, “is by the discovery

that it is not mechanism.” And so, instead of admitting humbly that

mechanism is mechanism while beside it there exists something of a

totally different nature, and that the ultimate nexus between these two

fields of experience surpasses our comprehension, he must demonstrate

mechanism out of the world altogether. In his philosophy there will be

no more solid obstinate material things such as go to the making of

machines, but only “events.” Time and space, which used to be regarded

as modes of perception, become internal components of things; value,

which used to be a name for our conscious estimation of what we could

do with things or for their effect on our spiritual life, now proves to

be “the intrinsic reality of an event.” There is, you see, an entire

reversal of the mechanistic hypothesis. Formerly it was held that the

human soul obeys the same laws as a stone; now we are to believe that

a stone is of the same nature as the soul. In either case we avoid the

discomfort of a paradoxical dualism and reduce the world to a monism

which may plausibly call itself science, though as a matter of fact Mr.

Whitehead’s theory, if carried out, would simply abolish science.

And it is clear enough that the new monism is open to precisely

the same criticism as was that of the mechanists which it looks to

supplant. Aiming ostensibly to simplify, it really renders the nature

of things incomprehensibly complex. Promising to release us from the

known paradox of a world composed of two irreconcilable classes of

things, it ends by forcing a perfectly arbitrary paradox upon us in

its definition of inanimate objects. To define a stone as an event

consisting of a bundle of time, space, value, and relationships, does

not seem to me to be moving in the direction of lucid simplicity. “What

is the sense,” Mr. Whitehead asks, “of talking about a mechanical

explanation when you do not know what you mean by mechanics?” And the

question is entirely pertinent, if by the word “mechanics” we mean

slyly to imply something more than the observed actions and reactions

of material bodies in motion. Mr. Whitehead therefore discards the

“traditional scientific materialism” for an “alternative doctrine of

organism,” that is, for a “theory of _organic mechanism_.” Well and

good. But is it unkind to ask the use of talking about an organical

explanation when you do not know what you mean by “organism,” or to

hint that no very clear idea will be evoked by joining together two

unknown quantities, “organism” and “mechanism,” and calling the world

an “organic mechanism”?

And again, what of the “stubborn and irreducible facts,” in whose name

Mr. Whitehead attacks the rationalism of the Huxleyites and their

predecessors of the eighteenth century? If we are to cast away their

imposing structure of logic as unreasonable for the simple reason

that, after all is said, we still know that the human mind (or soul,

if you please) is something other than a stone, shall we swallow the

contrary theory, which has not even the virtue of logic, and which

transfers human qualities to a stone? Aristotle made the proper and

sufficient distinction long ago, when he said that a stone obeys laws

and a man forms habits: you may throw a stone into the air a thousand

times and it will continue to do the same thing, whereas a man learns

by experience. But alas for those “stubborn and irreducible facts”! How

bravely we all summon them to our aid! How desperately we run from them

when they appear!

But if this merging together of the animate and the inanimate in a new

naturalism makes a travesty of the inorganic world, its real menace

is that, equally with the older naturalism, it reacts to deprive

humanity of what is distinctly human. The solid objects of “our naïve

experience” have been made organic by a kind of relaxation into fluid

composites of time and space and value and relationships; they have

evaporated into a semblance of psychical events (the very term “events”

indeed is little more than an awkward translation of Berkeley’s “ideas

in the mind”), and the peculiar note of an event is its transitoriness:

“one all-pervasive fact, inherent in the character of what is real,

is the transition of things, the passage one to another.” Thus it

happens that the organic and the inorganic worlds flow together in an

indistinguishable flux, wherein the soul also, dissolved by association

into a complex of relationships, loses that central permanence of

entity which used to be held to mark the dignity of man. Nor, if we

look beyond, is there anywhere “an ultimate reality” to which we can

appeal “for the removal of perplexity,” but only an endless concurrence

of events. “In the place of Aristotle’s God as Prime Mover [itself a

conception, one might suppose, far enough removed from ‘our naïve

experience’ into the abyss of abstraction], we require God as the

Principle of Concretion”--not a person, not an entity of any sort,

nor even a law apparently, but a mere name for the fact that concrete

groups of qualities are everlastingly forming and reforming in the

infinite vortex of existence. A cynic might distinguish between the

old naturalism and the naturalism now proposed to take its place by

saying that under the régime of the former true science might flourish

but no humanism or religion, whereas the metaphysical naturalism of

Mr. Whitehead would leave us neither true science nor humanism and

religion, but only mathematics. The Demon of the Absolute, whether he

appears as the advocate of a mechanical fatalism or of the universal

flux of relativity, is brother germane to Apollyon, the Destroyer.

The curious thing in all this farrago of insight and error is the

superstitious hold of the word science on a mind otherwise so awakened.

Mr. Whitehead perceives that one scientific hypothesis swallows up

another--as indeed he could not fail to see that his own hypothesis

turns its predecessor upside down; he admits with engaging candour

that one and all they rest on a “naïve faith” which cannot be verified

and is “indifferent to refutation”; yet he clings fanatically to the

scientific attitude as possessing a monopoly of truth and honesty.

“When,” he says, “Darwin or Einstein proclaim[s] theories which modify

our ideas, it is a triumph for science. We do not go about saying that

there is another defeat for science, because its old ideas have been

abandoned. We know that another step of scientific insight has been

gained.”

I suspect that an utter confusion of thought has arisen here

from the ambiguity of a word--as has happened immemorially with

metaphysicians better and worse than Mr. Whitehead. Science as an

accumulation and classification and utilisation of observed facts

may go on from victory to victory; but science as a name for such

hypothetical theories of time and space, matter and motion and life,

as those broached by the Darwinians of the nineteenth century, or the

Einsteinian relativists of the twentieth, is not a progress in insight

but a lapse from one naïve assumption to another in a vicious circle

of self-contradicting monisms. It really is not easy to understand the

state of mind of one, cognisant of the history of thought, who urges

us to seek relief from the present _débâcle_--Mr. Whitehead himself

places our intellectual and spiritual level lower than it has ever been

since the Dark Ages--by introducing the hypothetical method of science

into religion. This is his analysis of the present condition of the

popular mind: “A scientific realism, based on mechanism, is conjoined

with an unwavering belief in the world of men and of the higher

animals as being composed of self-determining organisms. This radical

inconsistency at the basis of modern thought accounts for much that is

half-hearted and wavering in our civilisation.” My reading of history

is different. I should assert that our vacillating half-heartedness

is the inevitable outcome of the endeavour, persistent since the

naturalistic invasion of the Renaissance, to flee from the paradox of

life to some philosophy which will merge, no matter how, the mechanical

and the human together. I should assert that the only escape from our

muddle is to overthrow this idol of Unity, this Demon of the Absolute,

this abortion sprung from the union of science and metaphysics, and to

submit ourselves humbly to the stubborn and irreducible fact that a

stone and the human soul cannot be brought under the same definition.

There are two laws discrete

Not reconciled,--

Law for man, and law for thing;

The last builds town and fleet,

But it runs wild,

And doth the man unking.

For legitimate science one may have the deepest respect. But to

scientific absolutism masquerading as religion, one may say justly and

truly what was said so unjustly and cruelly to Keats: Back to your

gallipots!