Interestingness

Extract

I propose to fashion this paper after the pattern of a conventional sermon. That is, I shall begin by taking a text, and shall then elaborate on it. My text is a sentence of Whitehead, and it reads as follows: “It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true; the importance of truth is that it adds to interest.” To my knowledge Whitehead makes this identical remark at least twice in his writings. It appears in Process and Reality. And it appears again, word for word, several years later in Adventures of Ideas. The fact that he thus says it twice, in identical words, suggests to me that he is himself immensely pleased with it, and that he values highly the thought which it expresses. At this I am not at all surprised. For it seems to me that the remark enshrines one of those sudden flashes of insight for which Whitehead is famous, and which stamp him as, not merely the ordinary very clever or very learned man, but the man of genius. Speaking for myself, I can record that when I first read this remark it produced in me a sudden thrill, a sense of illumination, of the opening of new vistas, not wholly dissimilar to the thrill which, as a very young man, one felt when one first read certain stanzas of Shelley or Wordsworth.