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Creative Evolution in its Bearing on the Idea of God
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
Extract
In two previous articles I have considered (1) the significance of Aristotle's conception of God and its relation to the philosophy of Plato and (2) Spinoza's central doctrine as related to his view of causation. Both articles were especially concerned with the question of the relation of God to the World or Universe. The purpose of the present paper, which is the concluding one of the series, is to inquire what contribution toward a solution of the problem is made by the theory of Creative Evolution.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1950
References
page 195 note 1 From some verses by William Henry Carruth entitled “Each in His Own Tongue.”
page 195 note 2 “Aristotle's Concept of God as Final Cause” (Philosophy, Vol. XXII, No. 82, 07 1947)Google Scholar.
page 195 note 3 “Spinoza's Doctrine of God in Relation to his Conception of Causality” (Vol. XXIII, No. 87, October 1948).
page 196 note 1 Creative Evolution, ch. i, esp. pp. 1–24; Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 8 ff. For the principle that movement is primary, rest only secondary as the arrest of movement, see Matter and Memory, pp. 246 ff.; Introduc. to Metaphys., pp. 40 ff. (Except in the case of one or two quotations from the original my references are all to the English translations of Bergson's works.)
page 197 note 1 Time and Free Will, ch. ii, esp. pp. 98–112 and 124–28 Matter and Memory, pp. 272–82; Creative Evolution, pp. 210–15. It is not necessary for my purpose to go into the question of the relation of time to space or of the time of the individual subject to objective or universal time. As is well known, Bergson equates or even identifies abstract time with space and connects the distinction between concrete duration and abstract time (or space) with the opposition of intuition and intellect. What should rather be contrasted are concrete time and space (or space-time) and abstract conceptions of either of them. Cf. the reference to Alexander's criticism of Bergson's view given below.
page 197 note 2 Time and Free Will, ch. iii, pp. 140–55Google Scholar. In relation to human action and volition Bergson's exposition of freedom is directed to showing the falsity of both absolute determinism and absolute indeterminism. Although the reality of free will is an essential condition of all volitional activity, this does not imply arbitrary or motiveless willing. For motives are the very life of the agent or self whose volition and action they determine or direct; and any motive, provided it goes deep enough, is indistinguishable from the whole self. “Freedom is the relation of the concrete self to the act which it performs.” But our acts are fully free only when they spring, not from mere habit or from some momentary feeling or impulse, but from our whole personality, so that they manifest all that we have been, are, or could be; and in proportion as they do so they are factors in the progressive development of the self. Ibid., esp. pp. 165–75 and 215–21; Matter and Memory, pp. 243, 295–97, 330 ff.
page 198 note 1 Matter and Memory, pp. 1–45, 233–38, 291 ff.; Creative Evolution, p. 249 ff. In the particular case of mind and body the bodily organism is the mechanism that functions as the instrument of selection of representations of things with a view to action in relation to them, while consciousness is potentially a representation of the whole universe. I have stated more fully in previous papers this conception of the fundamental equivalence of body or matter with habit and mechanism (cf. the former of the two articles mentioned above, p. 114).
page 198 note 2 I well remember how Bergson in his lectures at the Collège de France (in 1905) rolled out Spencer's formula of evolution—“from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity”—as typifying the kind of mechanical conception to which his own thought was opposed.
page 198 note 3 Creative Evolution, ch. i, esp. pp. 38–55, 89–102; ch. iv, pp. 384 ff.
page 199 note 1 P. 262.
page 199 note 2 P. 207.
page 199 note 3 This section in its original form was written for the purpose of an address on Bergson's philosophy, which I was asked to give at short notice soon after the first appearance of the book, and this and another sentence below in inverted commas are, if I remember rightly, from a review by Muirhead.
page 200 note 1 “La Création … une enterprise de Dieu pour créer des créateurs, pour s'adjoindre des êtres digues de son amour.” Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, p. 273Google Scholar.
page 200 note 2 “La fonction essentielle de l'univers, qui est une machine à faire des dieux,” p. 343.
page 200 note 3 Creative Evolution, ch. ii, pp. 142 ff. At its highest instinct is intuition, which is a complementary and more penetrative factor in the advancement of knowledge quite distinct from intellect.
page 195 note 4 The term “emergent” was used by G. H. Lewes to signify the product of any set of factors or components in so far as it is not only their “resultant” but is qualitatively unlike all of them. Lloyd Morgan adopts this term, and seems to use “emergent evolution” in contradistinction to “creative evolution” as avoiding any suggestion of an extraneous factor such as a vital force or the like.
page 200 note 5 Emergent Evolution, pp. 8, 12, etc.
page 201 note 1 Excerpted from an article of mine in the South African Journal of Science, vol. xxv, which contains a fuller treatment of the theory of emergence. That evolution involves a tendency toward ever fuller organization and the formation of wholes that are more than the mere sum of their component parts inasmuch as the parts are related in them in new ways, is the principle advanced by Smuts in Holism and Evolution (cf. “The Significance of Holism,” contributed by me to the same Journal, vol. xxvi, at the time of the visit of the British Association to South Africa).
page 201 note 2 Op. cit., pp. 26, 62.
page 202 note 1 Pp. 33–4, 62–3, 89, 116. Making use of Whitehead's terminology he says that the ideal values are not only “emergent” but also in some sense “ingredient.” Cf. p. 44.
page 202 note 2 Space, Time, and Deity, esp. bk. iii, ch. 2Google Scholar. Alexander criticizes Bergson's view of the relation between space and time (see bk. i, pp. 140–43, 148–50). But the two doctrines are in general agreement; for Alexander takes time and space to be so related that time is the mind of space, while space is the body of time. Space and time are mutually implicative, but time is distinctively the generating principle in all becoming. Cf. Alexander's very interesting little book Spinoza and Time.
page 203 note 1 Ibid., bk. iv, esp. pp. 341–54. Cf. Artistic and Cosmic Creation (from Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. xiii, 1927)Google Scholar.
page 203 note 2 The expression is Whitehead's own, and it indicates perhaps more distinctively than “the philosophy of organism” (or “organic realism”) the nature of his fundamental principle. As Whitehead himself says, there are aspects of his philosophy that connect with that of Bradley.
page 203 note 3 Process and Reality, passim. Whitehead's method of exposition makes it particularly difficult to give detailed references to sections or pages. It is worth noting that for Whitehead the space-time continuum is not, as with Alexander, a primary datum but is a construction from the relations between actual occasions.
page 203 note 4 Prehension is the grasping or taking hold of one thing by another which is the root of conscious apprehension. The theory of prehensions is given more especially in Process and Reality, pt. iii, ch. 1–3.
page 203 note 5 Cf. Bergson's principle of the inheritance of the past by the present and the present by the future.
page 204 note 1 Cf. on this conception E. D. Fawcett: Divine Imagining; Zermatt and Oberland Dialogues.
page 205 note 1 Process and Reality, pt. v, ch. 2. Whitehead maintains that his conception of the consequent nature of God as equally a one and a many and as both changeless and changing is the only one that can avoid an opposition of reality and appearance.
page 205 note 2 Creative Evolution, pp. 332–35 (cf. Introd. to Metaphys., p. 64).
page 206 note 1 Pp. 339–45Google Scholar.
page 206 note 2 Ibid., pp. 367–74; Time and Free Will, p. 208 f. I have already referred to Alexander's Spinoza and Time, where he suggests a recasting of Spinoza's philosophy in which time (in place of thought) would be an attribute of God as denoting God's activity. Cf. Space, Time, and Deity, vol. ii, p. 401.
page 206 note 3 Process and Reality, pp. 131–34.
page 206 note 4 Pp. 296 f.
page 206 note 5 Pp. 8 f.
page 206 note 6 A recent book. The Crisis in Human Affairs, by J. G. Bennett, speaks of the need of learning to “take eternity seriously.” This may serve to indicate in advance the kind of complement which seems to me to be necessary.
page 207 note 1 Cf. the complementary truth that time is “the path of the infinite.”
page 208 note 1 Alexander, in Mind, vol. xxx, p. 428Google Scholar. How far the conception of self-limitation or diremption as applied to God is finally tenable, is very hard to say. I made use of the conception in the second of the articles already referred to, but its validity is often questioned.
page 208 note 2 Ethics I, 11, Dem.
page 208 note 3 Cf. here McTaggart, The Nature of Existence, vol. ii. In my article on Spinoza I already touched on the truth that the sense or consciousness of eternity as transcending though not annihilating time is, at least at fleeting moments, an experience within the temporal process.