1 - Whitehead

Summary

‘Expression is the one fundamental sacrament. It is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.’

A. N. Whitehead Religion in the Making 1926 pp. 131–32.

‘If my view of the function of philosophy is correct, it is the most effective of all the intellectual pursuits. It builds cathedrals before the workmen have moved a stone, and it destroys them before the elements have worn down their arches. It is the architect of the buildings of the spirit, and it is also their solvent: and the spiritual precedes the material. Philosophy works slowly. Thoughts lie dormant for ages; and then, almost suddenly as it were, mankind finds that they have embodied themselves in institutions.’

A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World 1926 p. x.

‘Shakespeare wrote his plays for English people reared in the beauty of the country, amid the pageant of life as the Middle Ages merged into the Renaissance, and with a new world across the ocean to make vivid the call of romance. Today we deal with herded town populations, reared in a scientific age. I have no doubt that unless we can meet the new age with new methods, to sustain for our populations the life of the spirit, sooner or later, amid some savage outbreak of defeated longings, the fate of Russia will be the fate of England. Historians will write as her epitaph that her fall issued from the spiritual blindness of her governing classes, from their dull materialism, and from their Pharisaic attachment to petty formulae of statesmanship.’