Lancelot Law Whyte: Trending quotes (page 2)

“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

“We are sick today for lack of simple ideas which can help us be what we want to be.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

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

Idea , Help

“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