A PHILOSOPHER’S ESSAYS

Press, Volume LXXXV, Issue 25739, 26 February 1949, Page 3

A PHILOSOPHER’S ESSAYS

Essays in Science and Philosophy. By Professor A. N. Whitehead. Rider and Co. 254 pp. Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd. [Reviewed by L.G.W.] Professor A. N. Whitehead was famous both as a mathematician and as a philosopher. He produced a system of philosophy when nearly all the philosophical world had decided that the time for systems had passed. His writings are not for philosophic babes; even Dr. Inge says that he tears his hair trying to understand the Whiteheadian metaphysics. The present volume is divided into four parts. The first, which deals with personal matters, will be of interest to anyone who wishes to understand a great man and his early environment. The next three parts are concerned with philosophy, education, and science. The first two are comparatively easy to read and the reading will be found profitable. Only those with shine skill in mathematics and philosopljy will enjoy the last part, which is sometimes highly technical. Though Dr. Whitehead was a Cambridge man, he spent a large part of his working life in London and in the United States. In this book he declares that Harvard University “is the greatest of existing cultural institutions.” He asks the question: “Will Harvard rise to its opportunity, and in the modern world repeat the brilliant leadership of medieval Paris?” Despite his admiration for Harvard, he makes this confession: I will disclose one private conviction, based upon no confused research, that, as a training in political imagination, the Harvard school of Politics and of Government cannot hold a candle to the oldfashioned English classical education of a half a century ago. He does not like the “habit among philosophers, of having recourse to secret stores of information, which are not allowed for in their system of philosophy.” This is a criticism which he directs against his famous colleague, Lord Russell, and it has great justification. “Youngs English writers, you know, it seems to me they’re too parochial,’’ said Somerset Maugham, in the course of an interview with a “Sunday Times” representative, J. W. Lambert. “Not in their settings—in their whole outlook. One result is that they’re so little read abroad. But it’s important that they should be read abroad. Of course the war’s made matters worse. “That’s why I arranged for the Society of Authors to make an annual award so that some young writer can go abroad and live abroad while the money lasts. That’s all he’s got to do. He can loaf to his heart’s content. But it ought to make him a bit more cosmopolitan. Of course it’ll only come off now and again, but if it’s only once in 10 years it’ll do some good. “Anyway it may help to enrich English literature, and perhaps increase our prestige abroad. It’s most important that we should use these means of putting up our prestige.” One of Professor Chauncey Tinker’s recent “Essays in Retrospect” pays some attention to the now disfavoured and neglected Meredith: “We that have good wits,” mused Touchstone long ago, “have much to answer for.” Meredith, too, as one of the wits, has much to answer for. He must answer for constantly distracting |he reader from the subject to his mere cleverness of diction and metaphor; he must answer for his habit of leading the reader a merry chase, in which the author always wins, that leaves the reader wondering whether anybody can relish this staccato wit quite as much as its practitioner does. Yet, when all is said, it is a fine compliment which Meredith pays the reader, for he makes the courteous assumption that he has good wits and is willing to use them. Poets, he tells us, “spring imagination with a word or phrase.” This is his aim in writing, to invigorate and delight his reader by bringing him into a state where response shall be a genuine activity of mind and admiration a flattering sense of a certain kinship with the author.