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The Concept of

NATURE

THE TARNER LECTURES
DELIVERED IN TRINITY COLLEGE
NOVEMBER 1919

Alfred North Whitehead

PREFACE

The contents of this book were originally delivered at Trinity College
in the autumn of 1919 as the inaugural course of Tarner lectures. The
Tarner lectureship is an occasional office founded by the liberality of
Mr Edward Tarner. The duty of each of the successive holders of the post
will be to deliver a course on 'the Philosophy of the Sciences and the
Relations or Want of Relations between the different Departments of
Knowledge.' The present book embodies the endeavour of the first
lecturer of the series to fulfil his task.

The chapters retain their original lecture form and remain as delivered
with the exception of minor changes designed to remove obscurities of
expression. The lecture form has the advantage of suggesting an audience
with a definite mental background which it is the purpose of the lecture
to modify in a specific way. In the presentation of a novel outlook with
wide ramifications a single line of communications from premises to
conclusions is not sufficient for intelligibility. Your audience will
construe whatever you say into conformity with their pre-existing
outlook. For this reason the first two chapters and the last two
chapters are essential for intelligibility though they hardly add to the
formal completeness of the exposition. Their function is to prevent the
reader from bolting up side tracks in pursuit of misunderstandings. The
same reason dictates my avoidance of the existing technical terminology
of philosophy. The modern natural philosophy is shot through and
through with the fallacy of bifurcation which is discussed in the second
chapter of this work. Accordingly all its technical terms in some subtle
way presuppose a misunderstanding of my thesis. It is perhaps as well to
state explicitly that if the reader indulges in the facile vice of
bifurcation not a word of what I have here written will be intelligible.

The last two chapters do not properly belong to the special course.
Chapter VIII is a lecture delivered in the spring of 1920 before the
Chemical Society of the students of the Imperial College of Science and
Tec