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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
The intention of this article is to examine the concept of the Divine persuasion as presented within the system of Dr. A. N. Whitehead. An attempt will be made to indicate the distinctive value of the concept in relation to certain relevant aspects of the religious thought of our time.
page 149 note 1 Adventures of Ideas, pp. 53, 84, 269. Process and Reality, pp. 29, 58, 62.
page 150 note 1 The Realm of Matter (Constable, 1930), pp. 86–9Google Scholar.
page 150 note 2 Ibid., pp. 84, 194–5. The Realm of Spirit, p. 79.
page 150 note 3 The Realm of Spirit, pp. 106, 107.
page 150 note 4 Process and Reality, p. 5.
page 151 note 1 Process and Reality, pp. 39, 54.
page 151 note 2 The Function of Reason (Princetown, 1929), p. 19Google Scholar.
page 151 note 3 Op. cit,., p. 21.
page 151 note 4 Cf. Modes of Thought (Cambridge, 1938), p. 158Google Scholar: “Thus we finally construe the world in terms of the type of activities disclosed in our intimate experience.”
page 152 note 1 Process and Reality, p. 116.
page 152 note 2 The Boundaries of Science (Faber, 1939), ch. VI.
page 152 note 3 Process and Reality, p. 310.
page 153 note 1 “Can Present Human Motives Work a Planned Society,” Philosophy, 07, 1935Google Scholar.
page 153 note 2 Loc. cit., P. 312.
page 153 note 3 Buber, Martin in Ich und Du, translated by Smith, R. G., I and Thou, Edinburgh, 1937Google Scholar.
page 154 note 1 See especially Buber, 's statement (I and Thou, pp. 57–8)Google Scholar of the distinction between the limited scientific truth concerned with the “having become” (nichts-als-geworden-seins) and the truth, valid for spirit, of the active presence of the Thou, “the becoming out of solid connexion” (das Warden aus der Verbundenheit). In a supplement to The Christian News-Letter (December 29, 1943) the Archbishop of Canterbury refers to the distiiiction between the scientific and the more fundamental spiritual approach to reality, and declares that a choice of the spiritual approach—“a decision for society as the basic truth of hqman existence”—would create a new epoch in human history.
page 154 note 2 In The Life of the Church and the Order of Society (Longmans)
page 154 note 3 From Sir Stafford Cripps's rectorial address to Aberdeen University, February 1943.
page 155 note 1 Adventures of Ideas, p. 252: see also Modes of Thought, p. 206.
page 155 note 2 Science and the Modern World, ch. V, pp. 109–12.
page 155 note 3 Miss Dorothy Emmet has noted that the “cell-theory” applied in the passage in Science and the Modern World helps to explain Whitehead's continual characterization of atomic actualities in terms intelligible in the first instance only by reference to nexus of relatively long duration. Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism (Macmillan, 1932), pp. 183–6Google Scholar.
page 156 note 1 The Philosophy of A. N. Whitehead, edited Schilpp, (North Western Univ., 1941), p. 545Google Scholar.
page 156 note 2 Adventures of Ideas, p. 267.
page 156 note 3 Ibid., p. 318.
page 156 note 4 Whitehead has spoken of such an appearance as the young child's direct perception of its mother's mood as having “to the contemporary real mother a truth-relation in the fullest sense of the term ‘truth’ ” (op. cit., p. 316). In such an awareness there is no falsifying abstraction of “bare sense-perception” from total experience, with consequent “veiling from the observer” of the self-enjoyment of the contemporary world (cf. Ibid., pp. 280–2). The perceived feelings of the mother belong to the percipient's past only in the primary sense in which all activities of the bodily nexus are in the past by which the percipient occasion is conditioned. Yet for all the immediacy of such a perceptive encounter, the relation of appearance to reality is through the physical rather than the mental pole—a matter of efficient not final causation. An example of the relation of high-grade occasions through the mental pole might be that “sacrament of expression” in which I enjoy the communicated thought of Plato, extending my apprehension of the universe through “community of intuition” with the originating thinker (cf. Religion in the Making (Cambridge, Re-issue, 1930), p. 118)Google Scholar. Here there is appearance immediate “in its relation to the mental side of the contemporary world” in which the thought of Plato, though not his animal body, still lives.
page 157 note 1 Adventures of Ideas, pp. 256–7.
page 157 note 2 A certain difficulty appears inevitable in the use of the term percipient occasion or event for my own self-awareness. The difficulty has been emphasized by Professor Bowmanin his criticism of Whitehead's system. (See his discussion of the percipient event, A Sacramental Universe, Princetown, 1939, pp. 117–24Google Scholar.) If, with Lowes, Victor (in his essay “The Development of Whitehead's Philosophy,” The Philosophy of A. N. Whitehead, 1941Google Scholar), we venture to discount Bowman's criticism as taking account only of Whitehead's earlier work in which “the understanding of the physical level from the perspective of the metaphysical level is postponed” (loc. cit., p. 87) we may still feel the awkwardness that must accompany the use of terms designed for exposition of the physical level, when we pass to consider our own life from the metaphysical level. The awkwardness is perhaps the price that must be paid for that systematic inclusiveness—the effort to achieve both coherence and adequacy—that has made Whitehead's thought relevant and stimulating within very diverse fields of interest.
page 157 note 3 Adventures of Ideas, p. 259.
page 157 note 4 Process and Reality, p. 147.
page 158 note 1 Religion in the Making (Cambridge, Re-issue, 1930), p. 84Google Scholar, cf. also the saying that “God as conditioning the creativity with his harmony of apprehension issues into the mental creature as moral judgment.” Ibid., p. 105.
page 158 note 2 Process and Reality, Part II, ch. Ill, §§ IX–XI.
page 158 note 3 Religion in the Making, p. 118.
page 158 note 4 Modes of Thought, p. 57.
page 158 note 5 Quoted and discussed by Baillie, John, Our Knowledge of God (Oxford Press, 1939)Google Scholar.
page 159 note 1 Quoted by DrOldham, in The Christian News-Letter, Supplement to No. 192, 10 6, 1943Google Scholar.
page 160 note 1 Writing in 1931 (Adventures of Ideas, pp. 205–6) Whitehead used as illustration of response to the divine persuasion the welcome halt in violence effected by talks between Gandhi and the then Viceroy of India. He affirmed his belief that the religious motive thus exemplified still at the present time, though institutional forms of Christianity decay, holds “more than its old power over the minds and consciences of men.” Our outlook to-day may be less hopeful. The ill odour of practices named “appeasement” has infected for many the idea of conciliation through reason. Yet the value remains of that ideal truly conceived, felt perhaps by some even more poignantly amid the terrors of violence uncontrolled.
The religious thinker seeking present-day illustration of the divine persuasion might choose from the economic field the example of the Tenessee Valley experiment, as described in Huxley, Julian's T.V.A. (Architectural Press, 1943)Google Scholar. Persuasion here appears as the gradual triumph over individual prejudice of a wide-ranging plan whose rationality is able to convince first the few, through skilful presentation, then the many through actual working.
page 160 note 2 Adventures of Ideas, p. 213.
page 160 note 3 Religion in the Making, p. 86.
page 161 note 1 Modes of Thought, p. 142.