Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

PART V
FINAL INTERPRETATION

ABSTRACT

Cuapter I. Tum Ipran OPpositTses SECTION I. Danger to Philosophy is Narrowness of Selection; Variety of Opposites; Puritan Self-restraint and Aesthetic Joy, Sorrow and Joy; Religious Fervour and Sceptical Criticism, Intuition and Reason. II. Permanence and Flux, Time and Eternity.

III. Order as Condition for Excellence, Order as Stifling Excellence; Tedium, Order Entering upon Novelty is Required; Dominant Living Occasion is Organ of Novelty for Animal Body.

IV. Paradox, Craving for Novelty, Terror at Loss; Final Religious Problem; Ultimate Evil is Time as ‘Perpetually Perishing’; Final Opposites, Joy and Sorrow, Good and Evil, Disjunction and Conjunction, Flux and Permanence, Greatness and Triviality, Freedom and Necessity, God and The World; These Pairs Given in Direct Intuition, except the Last Pair Which is Interpretive,

Cuapter II. Gop AND THE WorRLD

I. Permanence and Flux, God as Unmoved Mover; Conceptions of God, Imperial Ruler, Moral Energy, Philosophical Principle.

IJ. Another Speaker to Hume’s Dialogues On Natural Religion ;
Primordial Nature Deficiently Actual, neither Love nor
Hatred for Actualities, Quotation from Aristotle.

III. God’s Nature Dipolar, Conceptual and Physical; This Physical Nature Derived from the World; Two Natures Compared.

IV. God’s Consequent Nature, Creative Advance Retaining Unison of Immediacy, Everlastingness; Further Analysis, Tenderness, Wisdom, Patience; Poet of the World, Vision of Truth, Beauty, Goodness.

V. Permanence and Flux, Relation of God to the World; Group of Antitheses: God and the World Each the Instrument of Novelty For the Other.

VI. Universe Attaining Self-expression of Its Opposites.

YII. God as the Kingdom of Heaven; Objective Immortality Attaining Everlastingness, Reconciliation of Immediacy with Objective Immortality.

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CHAPTER I
THE IDEAL OPPOSITES

SECTION I

Tue chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence. This narrowness arises from the idiosyncrasies and timidities of particular authors, of particular social groups, of particular schools of thought, of particular epochs in the history of civilization. The evidence relied upon is arbitrarily biased by the temperaments of individuals, by the provincialities of groups, and by the limitations of schemes of thought.

The evil, resulting from this distortion of evidence, is at its worst in the consideration of the topic of the final part of this investigation—ultimate ideals. We must commence this topic by an endeavour to state impartially the general types of the great ideals which have prevailed at sundry seasons and places. Our test in the selection to be impartial, must be pragmatic: the chosen stage of exemplification must be such as to compel attention, by its own intrinsic interest, or by the intrinsic interest of the results which flow from it. For example, the stern self-restraint of the Roman farmers in the early history of the Republic issued in the great epoch of the Roman Empire; and the stern self-restraint of the early Puritans in New England issued in the flowering of New England culture. The epoch of the Covenanters has had for its issue the deep impression which modern civilization owes to Scotland. Neither the Roman farmers, nor the American Puritans, nor the Covenanters, can wholly command allegiance. Also they differ from each other. But in either case, there is greatness there, greatly exemplified. In contrast to this example, we find the flowering time of the aesthetic culture of ancient Greece, the Augustan epoch in Rome, the Italian Renaissance, the Elizabethan epoch in England, the Restoration epoch in England,

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French and Teutonic civilization throughout the centuries of the modern world, Modern Paris, and Modern New York. Moralists have much to say about some of these societies. Yet, while there is any critical judgment in the lives of men, such achievements can never be forgotten. In the estimation of either type of these contrasted examples, sheer contempt betokens blindness. In each of these instances, there are elements which compel admiration. There is a greatness in the lives of those who build up religious systems, a greatness in action, in idea and in self-subordination, embodied in instance after instance through centuries of growth. There is a greatness in the rebels who destroy such systems: they are the Titans who storm heaven, armed with passionate sincerity. It may be that the revolt is the mere assertion by youth of its right to its proper brilliance, to that final good of immediate joy. Philosophy may not neglect the multifariousness of the world—the fairies dance, and Christ is nailed to the cross.

SECTION II

There are various contrasted qualities of temperament, which control the formation of the mentalities of different epochs. In a previous chapter (Part II, Ch. X) attention has already been drawn to the sense of permanence dominating the invocation ‘Abide with Me,’ and the sense of flux dominating the sequel ‘Fast Falls the Eventide.’ Ideals fashion themselves round these two notions, permanence and flux. In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence. Those who would disjoin the two elements can find no interpretation of patent facts.

The four symbolic figures in the Medici chapel in Florence—Michelangelo’s masterpieces of statuary, Dayp. 514 and Night, Evening and Dawn—exhibit the everlasting elements in the passage of fact. The figures stay there, reclining in their recurring sequence, forever showing the essences in the nature of things. The perfect realization is not merely the exemplification of what in abstraction is timeless. It does more: it implants timelessness on what in its essence is passing. The perfect moment is fadeless in the lapse of time. Time has then lost its character of ‘perpetual perishing’; it becomes the ‘moving image of eternity,’

SECTION III

Another contrast is equally essential for the understanding of ideals—the contrast between order as the condition for excellence, and order as stifling the freshness of living. This contrast is met with in the theory of education. The condition for excellence is a thorough training in technique. Sheer skill must pass out of the sphere of conscious exercise, and must have assumed the character of unconscious habit. The first, the second, and the third condition for high achievement is scholarship, in that enlarged sense including knowledge and acquired instinct controlling action.

The paradox which wrecks so many promising theories of education is that the training which produces skill is so very apt to stifle imaginative zest. Skill demands repetition, and imaginative zest is tinged with impulse. Up to a certain point each gain in skill opens new paths for the imagination. But in each individual formal training has its limit of usefulness. Beyond that limit there is degeneration: ‘The lilies of the field toil not, neither do they spin.’