In this paper we shall consider the circumstances under which the concept of ‘field’ was introduced into electrical theory, the traditional use of the notion of field with particular reference to electrical theory, and sketch three characters of a field in this context. These are its pervasiveness, its independent existence, and its status as an elastic body. In each case we will briefly bring to bear more modern comment on these three facets of the traditional conception, attempting to salvage the meaning for the term field that is currently accepted. Following this, ‘field intensity’ will be compared with other terms such as ‘displacement current’ and the fictional character of terms and the conventional character of the equations in which ‘field intensity’ appears will be discussed. The paper closes with a summary of the points made.

In what follows our purpose is to make clear the reasons which lie back of Whitehead's appeal to eternal objects in his explanation of the emergence of actual entities and to show that so long as one operates within his scheme of ideas no other consistent explanation is available. A thoroughgoing reconstruction of the scheme is necessary if this presupposition is to be eliminated. If the project is successful, it will be demonstrated that the theory of actual entities provides no basis for the explanation of the emergence of novel things, which is one of the major tenets of the organic philosophy. The argument will develop by way of an analysis of the theory of “physical relatedness.”

It seems that Whitehead's original problem, as evidenced in his earlier works, was epistemological and metaphysical dualism. His method of extensive abstraction is an attempt to bring the factual world and the abstract world of thought together. So far as his books on nature are concerned, then, Whitehead denied the ultimate reality of a static world and accepted the reality of dynamic relations analogous to the relations found in a biological organism.

The epoch-making revolution that has been taking place in mathematics and physics during the past hundred years is gradually changing our whole conception of reality and of the function of science in regard to it. We have discovered that the “common sense” view of the world which has become ingrained in the feeling-thought habits of Western man, especially since the seventeenth century, contains elements of serious limitation and even an illusion both from the standpoint of immediately intuited experience and from that of demonstrated scientific fact. Moreover, by a long drawn out tortuous process, lasting over many centuries and involving the constant creation and correction of an enormously complicated scientific structure, we have finally arrived at an understanding of what may be the root of our difficulty. It seems that certain peculiarities of the over-all grammatical structure of those languages that have conditioned the feeling-thought world of the West have tended to lead us astray. Their correction, however, has so far been possible only through the invention of new esoteric languages, such as the symbolism of mathematics and the new logic. By means of these “languages of science” modern mathematicians and physicists have at last succeeded in freeing themselves from the shackles of their everyday speech and “common sense” concepts, at least so far as their scientific work is concerned.

W. H. Sheldon has recently remarked that philosophical naturalism of the type propounded by John Dewey and his followers boils down to materialism in a new guise. Of course, any effort to relate human experience to the physical world within which it arises is open to the general charge of “materialism.” But naturalism can be called “materialistic” in a more specific sense if it tends to pass cavalierly over those aspects of experience upon which older philosophers have based a sharp contrast between experience and nature. This, I take it, is the primary complaint against recent naturalism, and it has its roots, I believe, in the influence of modern psychological theory upon philosophical thought.

Means-centered approach to science is contrasted with a problem-centered orientation. Overstress on and too exclusive concern with method, instrument, technique or procedure fosters the following mistakes:

1) Emphasis on polish and elegance rather than on vitality, significance and creativeness.

2) Giving the commanding positions in science to technicians rather than discoverers.

3) Over-valuation of quantification for its own sake.

4) Fitting problems to techniques rather than vice-versa.

5) Creation of a false and pernicious hierarchical system among the sciences.

6) Overstrong compartmentalization between the sciences.

7) Emphasis on the difference rather than the similarities between scientists and other truth-seekers (poets, novelist, artists, philosophers).

8) Creation of a scientific orthodoxy, which in turn a) tends to block the development of new methods, b) tends to exclude many problems from the jurisdiction of science and c) tends to make scientists “safe” rather than daring and unconventional.

9) Neglect of the problems of values, with a consequent blurring of the criteria for judging the worth or importance of an experiment.

Scientists are people. They are not “people, but…”. They have not escaped and cannot escape the “democentric” predicament. They are members of a society, no matter how hard they strain to be individualistic or exclusively clannish. If they succeed in being members of a small clan or a club they can be credited possibly with having more or less shrunk only the apparent size of their society, without escaping in any significant manner the social field implied in being “people”. If they attempt a greater shrinkage than that, they court complete frustration. To verify that, try, if you will, to imagine a thoroughly solitary scientist on a desert isle. Is he not alone and at last an illustration of the ungrammatical and even logically fictitious singular of the word “people”? No, he is definitely and hopelessly not alone, unless he first forgets even as habit everything he has learned from people. And, if he does that, he is no longer a scientist or even the rudiments of one. Indeed he must be reduced at least to the status of an animal, and an extremely unsocial one at that, because by the terms of our imaginary experiment, he must not join any other society, even if it were of but “animal-people”, e.g. a wolf-pack or an ant-hill culture, where he might learn something from others. Such strictness in argument is introduced only to drive home the fact that what constitutes “people” is derived from the dimmest animal past, where language is still unspoken and is constituted of simple actions taken together, literally concepts. The “con” in “concept” tends to be forgotten. We underscore it.

At the outset it will be useful, I think, to distinguish the following components in the definitional situation:

1. The “definitional relation” that holds, in a given case, between either (1) a definiendum and definiens (a dyadic symmetrical relation between symbols) or (2) a definiendum, definiens, and referent (a triadic relation between (a) the symbol being defined, (b) the defining symbol, which is usually complex and includes descriptive terms, and (c) any member of the class of non-symbolic referents by means of references to which the descriptive terms in (b) are given their semantical meaning—the relation between (b) and (c) being non-symmetrical, even though the relata are, in some contests, functionally equivalent. The former syntactical relation connects one symbol (the definiendum) with another symbol (the definiens); the latter semantical relation also does this, but includes the additional factor of a descriptive reference, via the definiens, to a class of non-symbolic referents.

Life, said William James, is a series of flights and perchings. Action is the process of life, and when its natural tempo or freedom is blocked or thwarted, the costs are those of life. Action is the goal-seeking behavior of the organism. All organisms have “goals”; without them they perish. Goals function as satisfiers of needs; without such satisfaction there is no life. Goal-directed action makes claims upon the organism's environments, and the levies are the stuff of life. Action is commerce with a milieu; “drives”—or any other motivational terms—only suggest the intensity and the form of that exchange; “death” is its cessation. The whole organism is involved, and the involvement is insistent, recurring, cyclical: it is the whole body which acts.