Alfred North Whitehead Quotes on Nature
Alfred North Whitehead was a British mathematician, logician, and philosopher of the late 19th and 20th centuries. This page collects quotes attributed to Alfred North Whitehead on the topic of nature, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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“The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.”
Process and Reality, 1929 -
“The Concept of Nature (1919), Chapter VII, p.143 .”
The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, " Seek simplicity and distrust it. -
“Einstein analyses the ideas of time-order and of simultaneity. Primarily (according to his analysis) time-order only refers to the succession of events at a given place. Accordingly each given place has its own time-order. But these time-orders are not independent in the system of nature, and their correlation is known to us by means of physical measurement. Now ultimately all physical measurement depends upon coincidence in time and place.”
p. 51 -
“Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling. ... identification of rhythm as the causal counterpart of life; wherever there is some life, only perceptible to us when the analogies are sufficiently close ... The rhythm is then the life, in the sense in which it can be said to be included within nature.”
p. 197