The Concept of Nature

Concept of Nature, by Alfred
North Whitehead

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Title: The Concept of Nature The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity
College, November 1919
Author: Alfred North Whitehead
Release Date: July 16, 2006 [EBook #18835]
Language: English
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The Concept of
NATURE
THE TARNER LECTURES DELIVERED IN TRINITY COLLEGE
NOVEMBER 1919
Alfred North Whitehead

PREFACE
The contents of this book were originally delivered at Trinity College
in the autumn of 1919 as the inaugural course of Tarner lectures. The
Tarner lectureship is an occasional office founded by the liberality of
Mr Edward Tarner. The duty of each of the successive holders of the
post will be to deliver a course on 'the Philosophy of the Sciences and
the Relations or Want of Relations between the different Departments
of Knowledge.' The present book embodies the endeavour of the first
lecturer of the series to fulfil his task.
The chapters retain their original lecture form and remain as delivered
with the exception of minor changes designed to remove obscurities of

expression. The lecture form has the advantage of suggesting an
audience with a definite mental background which it is the purpose of
the lecture to modify in a specific way. In the presentation of a novel
outlook with wide ramifications a single line of communications from
premises to conclusions is not sufficient for intelligibility. Your
audience will construe whatever you say into conformity with their
pre-existing outlook. For this reason the first two chapters and the last
two chapters are essential for intelligibility though they hardly add to
the formal completeness of the exposition. Their function is to prevent
the reader from bolting up side tracks in pursuit of misunderstandings.
The same reason dictates my avoidance of the existing technical
terminology of philosophy. The modern natural philosophy is shot
through and through with the fallacy of bifurcation which is discussed
in the second chapter of this work. Accordingly all its technical terms
in some subtle way presuppose a misunderstanding of my thesis. It is
perhaps as well to state explicitly that if the reader indulges in the facile
vice of bifurcation not a word of what I have here written will be
intelligible.
The last two chapters do not properly belong to the special course.
Chapter VIII is a lecture delivered in the spring of 1920 before the
Chemical Society of the students of the Imperial College of Science
and Technology. It has been appended here as conveniently summing
up and applying the doctrine of the book for an audience with one
definite type of outlook.
This volume on 'the Concept of Nature' forms a companion book to my
previous work An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Natural
Knowledge. Either book can be read independently, but they
supplement each other. In part the present book supplies points of view
which were omitted from its predecessor; in part it traverses the same
ground with an alternative exposition. For one thing, mathematical
notation has been carefully avoided, and the results of mathematical
deductions are assumed. Some of the explanations have been improved
and others have been set in a new light. On the other hand important
points of the previous work have been omitted where I have had
nothing fresh to