Lancelot Law Whyte Quotes (62 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)
Context: The most productive novelties often spring, in thought as in biological evolution, from more primitive and simpler forms, rather than from differentiated ones which, through their elaboration, have become too specialized to be adaptable to new tasks.<!--p.8

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Lancelot Law Whyte Quotes

“The idea that time may be an active factor in causation has the mathematical significance that ' t ' (for the system in question) must appear explicitly in the formulation of the law.... Such law may claim to express the fact of historic, irreversible duration.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Archimedes or the Future of Physics (1927)

Mathematics , Idea , Time

“It is widely believed that only those who can master the latest quantum mathematics can understand anything of what is happening. That is not so”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)
Context: It is widely believed that only those who can master the latest quantum mathematics can understand anything of what is happening. That is not so, provided one takes the long view, for no one can see far ahead. Against a historical background, the layman can understand what is involved, for example, in the fascinating challenge of continuity and discontinuity expressed in the antithesis of field and particle.<!--p.4

Mathematics , Understanding

“To rob man of his noblest faculty, the experience of and aspiration to perfection and unity in himself, we can now see to have been a truly hellish surgery.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

The Universe of Experience: A Worldview Beyond Science and Religion (1974)

“Theory confronts experiment, and both sides are a mixture of obscurity and clarity.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961), p.19

“The basic challenge to mankind is”

Lancelot Law Whyte

The Universe of Experience: A Worldview Beyond Science and Religion (1974)
Context: The basic challenge to mankind is not population, poverty, war, technology, pollution, religious or racial intolerance, or blind nationalism, but an underlying nihilism promoting violence and frustrating sane policies on these issues.... the only hope lies in the emergence of a potentially worldwide consensus of heart, mind, and will, appealing to all sane men and women everywhere... The time has come for the west to speak to the world in universal terms.... the consensus, if it comes, is likely to surprise by its suddenness, timeliness, and universality.

“The material particle or the conscious mind—has been discovered not to be sufficiently unchanging to be treated as a thing in isolation... but more often to be the opposite: a changing system in a changing environment.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961), p.6

“Did ever the history of the intellect so little conceal so much?”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961), p.6

History

“Physics and psychology are going somewhere, but where they do not know. But… they are traveling”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)
Context: Physics and psychology are going somewhere, but where they do not know. But... they are traveling from: Democritan permanent particles and the Cartesian mind necessarily aware.... they are both traveling away from the same point of origin and in the same general direction: from the isolation of supposedly permanent "substances" towards the identification of changing relations potentially affecting everything; briefly, from substance to changing relations and structures.

Travel

“Dogmatism in science is usually mistaken”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)
Context: Dogmatism in science is usually mistaken, because the conviction of certainty expresses a psychological compulsion, never any truly compelling reasons or facts. When a view attains wide popularity and seems obviously beyond question, its decline has usually begun or will begin very soon.<!--p.21

Science

“The Western search for unifying truth did not come to an end with Christianity, any more than with the physical theories of forty years ago.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

The Universe of Experience: A Worldview Beyond Science and Religion (1974)
Context: Faced by the dire nihilism of our time, we need a greater honesty... The Western search for unifying truth did not come to an end with Christianity, any more than with the physical theories of forty years ago.

Truth , Search

“No one is so brilliant that he can afford to neglect what history can teach him.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961), p.11

History

“Two extreme interpretations of atomism have persisted through centuries”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)
Context: Two extreme interpretations of atomism have persisted through centuries: the näive assumption of objectively real indivisible pieces of matter, and the sophisticated view that "atom" is merely a name given to abstractions which it is convenient to assume in simplifying complex phenomena. The second perhaps stems from Ockham, who wrote in 1330 of "the fiction of abstract nouns"; from John Troland, who in 1704 interpreted material particles as mental fictions; and from countless others down to Ernst Mach, who after starting as a physical atomist came to regard atoms as "mental artifices" or "economical ways of symbolizing experience."
Both views have advantages...

“Is there a real temporal process in nature? Is the passage of irreversible time a necessary element in any view of the structure of nature? Or, alternatively, is the subjective experience of time a mere illusion of the mind which cannot be given objective expression? These are not metaphysical questions that can still be neglected with impunity.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Archimedes or the Future of Physics (1927)
Context: The question of the reversibility of natural processes provides the key to a great intellectual struggle which is now behind the complexities of philosophic and scientific thought. The issue can be formulated thus: Is there a real temporal process in nature? Is the passage of irreversible time a necessary element in any view of the structure of nature? Or, alternatively, is the subjective experience of time a mere illusion of the mind which cannot be given objective expression? These are not metaphysical questions that can still be neglected with impunity. For just as Einstein made his advance by analysing conceptions such as simultaneity, which had been thought to be adequately understood for the purposes of experimental science, so the next development of physical theory will probably be made by carrying on the analysis of time from the point at which Einstein left it.

Question , Nature , Time

“When a view attains wide popularity and seems obviously beyond question, its decline has usually begun or will begin very soon.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Question

“Discontinuity of its linguistic and logical terms is for the conscious analytical intellect psychologically and logically prior to notions of continuity.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)
Context: Discontinuity of its linguistic and logical terms is for the conscious analytical intellect psychologically and logically prior to notions of continuity.... This functional priority... may not have been reflected in the history of the development of reason in all human communities.... But it is relevant for the West that the Pythagoreans, with their discrete integers and point patterns, came before Euclid, with his continuous metrical geometry, and that physical atomism as a speculative philosophy preceded by some two thousand years the conception of a continuous physical medium with properties of its own.<!--pp.13-14

“The internal tendencies of every organism, if isolated, lead to its disintegration. But the processes of the wider system sustain and modify those internal tendencies by "nourishing" them and gradually increasing the mutual conformity of organism and environment.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 36

“No scientist has yet provided an acceptable definition of "mind" or "mental" that reveals the character of "unconscious mental processes," and no physicist a lucid definition of "elementary particles" that shows how they can appear or disappear, and why there are so many.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)

Appearance

“This essay touches bottom for twentieth century man. …it is one many signals marking the end of "Antiman," with his hopeless relativism, and announcing "Unitary Man," …able to be more harmonious because he has become aware of the ordering processes at all levels in nature, without and within. …here at last subject and object are potentially fused in a single insight.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

The Universe of Experience: A Worldview Beyond Science and Religion (1974)

Nature

“Every scientific generation, measured by its most vocal members, exaggerates the historical importance of its own members. …there is a perpetual temptation to study the latest and to neglect the past.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)

Study , Past

“There are good reasons to expect… a return to a concreteness of basic ideas, to simpler fundamentals easily understood, to principles that will bring exact science closer to the human perspective.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

p, 125
Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)

Idea , Science

“By openly recognizing the inescapable rhythm of harmony and tension which is the form of all human processes unitary man achieves a far-reaching emancipation. Much that was concealed can now stand in the open. The neutrality and objectivity of the quantity symbolism seemed to dissociated man a guarantee of the liberation of the mind from anthropomorphic and subjective illusions. But at deeper level it expressed merely the desire to escape inner conflict in a harmony of static form. This escape was wholly illusory; the superficial neutrality of science left it open to abuse, and the spirit of man has been punished by its attempt to escape struggle in an intellectual harmony. Unitary man renounces such separation and partakes in the development of the whole. Man finds himself in the universal process, by finding the universal process within himself. Tension continues, but henceforward his struggle is with, not against, the process of nature.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 276

Nature , Universe , Science

“More comprehensive process than those of the conscious mind control human destiny.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 151

“The ideals of truth, beauty, and goodness represent attempts to interpret the process of development as a group of tendencies permanently directed towards certain permanent and universal ends. But human behaviour is not directed towards unchanging ends, not even towards those temporary ideals which each community sets up for itself. The formative tendency is displayed, not in any steady process of definite orientation, but in a rhythmic sequence of transformation which cannot be represented as tending towards any particular final condition.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 261-262

Truth , Beauty , Communication , Universe

“Man abhors the absence of integration. He demands integration, and will create religions, achieve heroic self-sacrifice, pursue mad ambitions, or follow the ecstasy of danger, rather than live without. If society refuses him this satisfaction in a constructive form he will seize a destructive principle to which he can devote himself and will take revenge on the society that thought his only demand was pleasure.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 188

Pleasure , Religion , Revenge , Madness

“The idealist seeks the security of a static harmony, and therefore considers every tension evil. Unitary man recognizes tension as an essential feature of the formative process operating in man. Man creates in resolving tensions, but never brings them to an end. The contrasts of past, present and future forms provide an inexhaustible source of tension.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 274

Evil , Past , Future

“The term dissociation is here used for a condition in which the organizing process in an individual fail to develop one characteristic form, and two or more mutually incompatible systems of behavior compete for control.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 62

Behavior

“I consider that Curie's Principle has two major consequences:
First: It shows that the class of processes which can be isolated for causal representation, not requiring the inference of external causes, is wider than the class of energetically closed systems. One-way processes in which the system loses energy can be isolable, in the sense that they can be given complete representation without taking their environment into account.
Second: It suggests the possibility of a geometrical physics treating 3D spatial relations, i. e., angles or lengths, as primary. Just as statistical mechanics, the theory of crystal symmetry, and Group theory in quantum mechanics, are useful without assumptions about forces, so Curie's principle, with an appropriate model, can determine the path of a one-way process without such assumptions…”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Pierre Curie's Principle of One Way-Process (1970)

Way , Sense

“In the religious age, the religious hierarchy wields power; in the political age, the ruler, nobles and commoners; in the economic, the hierarchy of wealth. The development of Europe during the last six centuries has consisted in the progressive shifting of the hierarchy of power from one set of functions to another.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 132

Age , Wealth

“Goethe did not propose a return to the undifferentiated condition of Heraclitus. The development of man lead from undifferentiated unity with nature, through a differentiation achieved by separation, to a new organized unity. But this last state would be different from the first; it must contain within its recovered unity all the differentiated knowledge, all the specialized organs and faculties, of two thousands years of development.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 224

Nature , Knowledge

“A naturalistic reinterpretation renders all that is authentic about the Christian doctrine greater not less, for it makes it a part of a new and stronger man, not of some fancied "superman," but simply man as he is but less distorted by a dissociating tradition.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

The Universe of Experience: A Worldview Beyond Science and Religion (1974)

Parting

“The Christian fog of self deception still does its damage: we either deceive ourselves by pretending to believe or overreact into a contempt of all religion. So, away with the fog!”

Lancelot Law Whyte

The Universe of Experience: A Worldview Beyond Science and Religion (1974)

Religion

“A unitary method of thought is indispensable to the interpretation of European history. The pervasive dualisms which distort the thought of western man are an element in this general condition, which therefore must be diagnosed in a language which does not take these dualisms for granted. No interpretation of European man in traditional European terms can bring the truth to light, any more than the color-blind can know their deficiency.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 25

Truth , Color , History , Light

“The failure of idealistic thought lay partly in the fact that it did not recognize that every ideal is linked to its shadow. […] Whatever is incomplete is thus always complemented by its contrary; the penalty for any principle which fails to express the whole is the necessity to co-exist with its opposite. Partial love implies partial hate; spirit, sensuality; self-sacrificing compassion, sadism. The denial of any aspect sharpens and preserves it, while its acceptance transforms it by bringing it within the process of the whole.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 254

Love , Hate , Penalty , Failure

“The "divine" in man: creative bliss, the experience of perfection, the surprising joys of love all human, not divine. …It is time that God was put in his place, that is, in man, and no nonsense about it. But, to prevent misunderstanding, instead of speaking of the "divine" in man I will call it the human sense of perfection or unity. …Need I add that we may retain the Sermon on the Mount, Saint Paul's poem to charity, and much else, though we discard the Christian God?”

Lancelot Law Whyte

The Universe of Experience: A Worldview Beyond Science and Religion (1974)

Love , God , Sense , Time

“Throughout history there runs one main trend: a progressive differentiation, or passage from simple to more complex forms in behavior, thought, and social organization.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 73

Behavior , History

“The author… has known for that for several centuries freethinkers have led mankind. Only recently… new to him though perhaps long understood by others, possibly Kant and certainly Nietzsche, there emerged into his mind a clarity that will remain… the conception of transcendental divinity is damaging to man.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

The Universe of Experience: A Worldview Beyond Science and Religion (1974)

“In Plato we find the essential form of the European attitude: the intellectual rejection of the phenomenal world of process on account of its sordid ruthlessness and the emancipation of the spirit within its own realm of permanent intellectual clarity and harmony. The ancient, aristocratic, tragic consciousness disappears; man sets out to console his spirit and protect his body by the exploitation of static ideas.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 201

World , Idea

“The capitalist and the quantitative scientist were working out the final consequences of the tendencies that had begun with Plato and Archimedes, borne fruit in Kepler and Galileo, and were reaching their culmination in Carnegie, Ford, and Zaharoff, and – as we shall see – in Heisenberg. Yes, it would be unfair, and perhaps libelous, to accuse recent leaders of the West of a mature consciousness of their own historical significance.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 150

“We are indeed a blind race, and the next generation, blind to its own blindness, will be amazed at ours.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

p, 125
Accent on Form: An Anticipation of the Science of Tomorrow (1955)

“The idea of the unconscious mental processes was, in many of its aspects, conceivable around 1700, topical around 1800, and became effective around 1900, thanks to the imaginative efforts of a large number of individuals of varied interests in many lands.”

Lancelot Law Whyte book The Unconscious Before Freud

The Unconscious Before Freud (1967)

Imagination , Idea , Effort

“Systematic errors of theory can seldom be discovered by direct attack; it is easier to uncover them by studying how and why physical theory took the path it did. That is why a clue to the future can sometimes be found in the past, and this is my reason for studying the history of atomism.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

p, 125
Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)

Error , History , Study , Past

“Belief in a transcendental divinity arose from a misinterpretation of intimations from the less conscious levels of the mind. …God is in the unconscious, is the unconscious, perhaps.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

The Universe of Experience: A Worldview Beyond Science and Religion (1974)

God

“Unitary man escapes these confusions through his recognition that one factor is of supreme importance: the maturity proper to man can only come through the experience of adult unity. This experience may come in many ways, but it means that the individual has, for the moment, outgrown the sense of any division, either within himself of from others, through a mature relations to at least one other person. Tension is inherent in the process, but tension does not become frustrating conflict if the overriding unity is realized.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 255

Way , Sense , Personality

“Security is an impostor; little can be achieved while each seeks his own freedom from want, from war, or from fear. The general nature of all fear is the awareness that development is threatened. Fear and its consequences can be eliminated only by action leading to continuous development. Action can bring the assurance of a development which is more welcome than either spiritual or material security. Only through the pursuit of a general development can the species acquire the unity of purpose which may, as one of its secondary consequences, eliminate unemployment and war. In the individual life the same is true: only in unitary development can fear be overcome. Every individual experiences countless shocks from his first breath to his last, and these challenges are necessary to his development. But a unitary tradition can assist the members of each maturing generation to turn these challenges to advantage and to retain their basic integrity.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 256

Life , War , Fear , Nature

“We know nothing about the Christian transcendental God except His total indifference both to individual suffering and to the collapse of the pseudo Christian civilization which the Church supported. The pretension to a transcendental authority… was a hypnotic given to children and remaining with them as adults. During one period in history it served a purpose… its early rational opponents… were strangely naive, for they imagined that a half-developed faculty called "reason" should, and could, lead the species. But reason… is not a prime mover.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

The Universe of Experience: A Worldview Beyond Science and Religion (1974)

God , Children , Imagination , History

“During the metamorphosis from ancient to European man, self-awareness, rationalism, monotheism, and morality all developed in parallel as expressions of the influence of a new form of social tradition on the organization of the individual. […] Europe forced the new mode of life till it produced a definite dissociation, for self-awareness did not then bring with it an adequate understanding of the self; religion could not offer a complete integration; the rational intellect knew nothing of its own origins, limitations or mode of operation; and morality necessarily failed to realize its aim.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 114

Life , Religion , Understanding

“The dissociation of the typical adult European is a consequence not of any universal human nature, a term that has no meaning, but of the influence of an inadequately organized tradition.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 124

Nature , Universe

“Man set out on a two-thousand-year trial of a particular method of differentiation, adapting the structure of his mental processes, conscious and unconscious, to a certain general form. We need to consider only the most general characteristics of this form, and for the purpose of this analysis, there reduce to two. Thought may be either unitary or dualistic (since other pluralistic forms may be neglected), and it may be either process or static. These two pairs produce four combinations or types of thought: unitary-process, unitary-static, dualistic-process and dualistic-static. The first and the last are the most stable and common types; the unitary-static and dualistic-process forms are less frequent and may be regarded as anomalous forms appearing at times of transition.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 193-194

Appearance , Time

“There is no doubt of the need for an up-to-date, balanced, and comprehensive work on the history of atomism, drawing ideas, mathematics, and experiment together into a single story. When available, it should become required reading for all students of the exact sciences.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

p, 125
Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)

History , Mathematics , Idea , Science

“Atomism originally stood for iconoclasm, impiety, and atheism, because the Greek atomists conceived a universe under the reign of chance.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

p, 125
Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)

Universe , Chance

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Lancelot Law Whyte Quotes

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The Unconscious Before Freud

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