Whitehead begins his next chapter by appreciating not only the inventiveness of the Nineteenth Century, but “the invention of the method of invention.” Although he credits the English for having begun the industrial revolution, He credits the Germans, and their technical schools, for this innovation, one that represents the change from amateurism to professionalism. He asserts that the resulting “situation of disciplined progress is the setting within which the thought of the century developed.”
Apart from this, Science and the Modern World lists four fundamental scientific ideas that this century brought us: The first was “of a field of physical activity pervading all space, even where there is an apparent vacuum.” He nicknames this idea “continuity,” an idea that the wave theory of light introduced, then that Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism strengthened. Our author pairs this idea with a second, “atomicity” Noting that atomicity had been theorized as early as the ancient Greeks, Whitehead specifies that its novelty in the 19th century was its use as an efficient way of accounting for chemical processes, and he connects it with biological cell theory – “The two theories are independent exemplifications of the same idea of ‘atomism.’”* Unlike many scientists, Whitehead denies that these ideas are per se contradictory: “Ordinary matter was conceived as atomic: electromagnetic effects were conceived as arising from a continuous field.” It is only when one tries to collapse one of them into the other (as in a “unified field theory”) that a problem arises. The third idea was the doctrine of the conservation of energy, and the fourth was the doctrine of evolution.
Whitehead from this point on gets more obscure, since he freely makes up terms that strike me as a bit counterintuitive. I think the gist of what he is saying about these ideas is that all of them can only avoid contradicting each other if we don’t try to create a “Theory of Everything.” The Four can be represented by The Temporal, for continuity; The Potential, for atomicity; The Integral, for conservation; and The Sensual, for evolution.
He then returns to the concept of “value” we discussed in our last entry, and stresses the importance of the concept, “event” as “as the ultimate unit of natural occurrence … however you analyse the event according to the flux of its parts through time, there is the same thing-for-its-own-sake standing before you.”
I’ll leave the rest of the chapter for now, only saying that it seems to be an early expression of his theory on how prehensive micro-entities/events evolve to larger and more complex ones. I’ll return to it, if needed, for elucidation on his later chapters. I only want to quote one passage, as it reminds me of a line from Star Trek: Voyager that I’ve used a couple times on this blog already: “One of the simplest ways of evolving a favourable environment concurrently with the development of the individual organism, is that the influence of each organism on the environment should be favourable to the endurance of other organisms of the same type.”
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* Here, Whitehead credits Pasteur for having “showed the decisive importance of the idea of organism at the stage of infinitesimal magnitude”
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