GREAT PHILOSOPHER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 779, 25 June 1954, Page 14

GREAT PHILOSOPHER

ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD, an anthology, selected by F. S. C. Northrop and Mason W. Gross; Cambridge University Press, English price 75/-. HE only criticism which can be made of this noble anthology must come from personal preferences. It was clearly no easy task to compress, even into 924 pages, the full range of Whitehead’s thought. One of the smaller books, Religion in the Making, is reprinted in full; and the first six chapters of Science and the Modern World-the historical sec-tion-are given without abridgment. Ample justice is also done to Process and Reality, the supreme expression of Whitehead’s thought, and the hardest to read. The first part, included in entirety, gives his conception of what should be attempted by speculative philosophy, and goes on to sketch an outline of his own system; and the first six chapters of the second part illustrate the application of his general ideas to the traditional philosophical problems. In their

treatment of Adventures of Ideas, however, the editors have had to sacrifice "too much. Only one chapter has been reprinted from the first part-‘Sociolo-gical"--which explains the evolution of the idea of freedom as a factor in Western civilisation. These early chapters have a special relevance to our own times. They could well have replaced the section of a mathematical treatise which stands thornily in the first part of the anthology. Yet the book as a whole is most valuable-an excellent introduction to one of the greatest thinkers of

the century.

H.