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Lancelot Law Whyte

61 quotes

“The idea that time may be an active factor in causation has the mathematical significance that ' t ' (for the system in question) must appear explicitly in the formulation of the law. ...Such law may claim to express the fact of historic, irreversible duration.”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thought is born of failure. When action satisfies there is no residue to hold the attention; to think is to confess a lack of adjustment which we must stop to consider. Only when the human organism fails to achieve an adequate response to its situation is there material for the process of thought, and the greater the failure the more searching they become. (p. 1)”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The unitary system of thought has three main characteristics which distinguish it from many other systems: it deals with the form of systems rather than with their component parts; it recognizes a process of development as prior to the apparently static aspects of nature; and it is unitary, emphasizing one general form beneath all apparent dualism. (p. 21-22)”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p. 25)”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The internal tendencies of every organism, if isolated, lead to its disintegration. But the processes of the wider system sustain and modify those internal tendencies by "nourishing" them and gradually increasing the mutual conformity of organism and environment. (p. 36)”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p. 62)”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Throughout history there runs one main trend: a progressive differentiation, or passage from simple to more complex forms in behavior, thought, and social organization. (p. 73)”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The dissociation of the typical adult European is a consequence not of any universal human nature, a term that has no meaning, but of the influence of an inadequately organized tradition. (p. 124)”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p. 132)”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The capitalist and the quantitative scientist were working out the final consequences of the tendencies that had begun with Plato and Archimedes, borne fruit in Kepler and Galileo, and were reaching their culmination in Carnegie, Ford, and Zaharoff, and – as we shall see – in Heisenberg. Yes, it would be unfair, and perhaps libelous, to accuse recent leaders of the West of a mature consciousness of their own historical significance. (p. 150)”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“More comprehensive process than those of the conscious mind control human destiny. (p. 151)”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Three centuries of increasingly intense application of the quantitative method had exhausted its guarantee of the progressive improvement of thought, because the regions where the method is adequate have already been explored. [...] It is scarcely possible to avoid the conclusion that a new method is now necessary to supplement the method of quantitative analysis. (p. 180)”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p. 188)”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In Plato we find the essential form of the European attitude: the intellectual rejection of the phenomenal world of process on account of its sordid ruthlessness and the emancipation of the spirit within its own realm of permanent intellectual clarity and harmony. The ancient, aristocratic, tragic consciousness disappears; man sets out to console his spirit and protect his body by the exploitation of static ideas. (p. 201)”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In separating consciousness from the material world Plato has to ascribe the formative faculty of the mind to consciousness, whereas the formative processes of the human system are largely unconscious, that is, they operate below the dominant processes of the human hierarchy and only come to attention at special moments. (p. 203)”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p. 224)”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The human need for unity first created subjective religion, then objective analytical science; now it corrects the partiality of these attitudes by substituting one complete doctrine. (p. 251)”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p. 254)”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Unitary man escapes these confusions through his recognition that one factor is of supreme importance: the maturity proper to man can only come through the experience of adult unity. This experience may come in many ways, but it means that the individual has, for the moment, outgrown the sense of any division, either within himself of from others, through a mature relations to at least one other person. Tension is inherent in the process, but tension does not become frustrating conflict if the overriding unity is realized. (p. 255)”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p. 261-262)”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p. 274)”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are indeed a blind race, and the next generation, blind to its own blindness, will be amazed at ours.”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is widely believed that only those who can master the latest quantum mathematics can understand anything of what is happening. That is not so, provided one takes the long view, for no one can see far ahead. Against a historical background, the layman can understand what is involved, for example, in the fascinating challenge of continuity and discontinuity expressed in the antithesis of field and particle.”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A clue to the future must lie in the past... every scientist, and everyone with intellectual curiosity, can learn something useful from a brief study of the history of atomism.”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Did ever the history of the intellect so little conceal so much?”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Physics and psychology are going somewhere, but where they do not know. But... they are traveling from: Democritan permanent particles and the Cartesian mind necessarily aware. ...they are both traveling away from the same point of origin and in the same general direction: from the isolation of supposedly permanent "substances" towards the identification of changing relations potentially affecting everything; briefly, from substance to changing relations and structures.”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The material particle or the conscious mind—has been discovered not to be sufficiently unchanging to be treated as a thing in isolation... but more often to be the opposite: a changing system in a changing environment.”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing is more surprising than the surprises of history, and nothing more untrustworthy than the uncritical extrapolation of the tendencies of the recent past.”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The most productive novelties often spring, in thought as in biological evolution, from more primitive and simpler forms, rather than from differentiated ones which, through their elaboration, have become too specialized to be adaptable to new tasks.”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Systematic errors of theory can seldom be discovered by direct attack; it is easier to uncover them by studying how and why physical theory took the path it did. That is why a clue to the future can sometimes be found in the past, and this is my reason for studying the history of atomism.”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no doubt of the need for an up-to-date, balanced, and comprehensive work on the history of atomism, drawing ideas, mathematics, and experiment together into a single story. When available, it should become required reading for all students of the exact sciences.”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No one is so brilliant that he can afford to neglect what history can teach him.”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Atomism originally stood for iconoclasm, impiety, and atheism, because the Greek atomists conceived a universe under the reign of chance.”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Theory confronts experiment, and both sides are a mixture of obscurity and clarity.”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dogmatism in science is usually mistaken, because the conviction of certainty expresses a psychological compulsion, never any truly compelling reasons or facts. When a view attains wide popularity and seems obviously beyond question, its decline has usually begun or will begin very soon.”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The idea of the unconscious mental processes was, in many of its aspects, conceivable around 1700, topical around 1800, and became effective around 1900, thanks to the imaginative efforts of a large number of individuals of varied interests in many lands.”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are sick today for lack of simple ideas which can help us be what we want to be.”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The basic challenge to mankind is not population, poverty, war, technology, pollution, religious or racial intolerance, or blind nationalism, but an underlying nihilism promoting violence and frustrating sane policies on these issues. ...the only hope lies in the emergence of a potentially worldwide consensus of heart, mind, and will, appealing to all sane men and women everywhere ...The time has come for the west to speak to the world in universal terms. ...the consensus, if it comes, is likely to surprise by its suddenness, timeliness, and universality.”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We know nothing about the Christian transcendental God except His total indifference both to individual suffering and to the collapse of the pseudo Christian civilization which the Church supported. The pretension to a transcendental authority... was a hypnotic given to children and remaining with them as adults. During one period in history it served a purpose... its early rational opponents... were strangely naive, for they imagined that a half-developed faculty called "reason" should, and could, lead the species. But reason... is not a prime mover.”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Faced by the dire nihilism of our time, we need a greater honesty... The Western search for unifying truth did not come to an end with Christianity, any more than with the physical theories of forty years ago.”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“God doesn't give a damn.”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The author... has known for that for several centuries freethinkers have led mankind. Only recently... new to him though perhaps long understood by others, possibly Kant and certainly Nietzsche, there emerged into his mind a clarity that will remain... the conception of transcendental divinity is damaging to man.”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Belief in a transcendental divinity arose from a misinterpretation of intimations from the less conscious levels of the mind. ...God is in the unconscious, is the unconscious, perhaps.”
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1896–1972) said by 1972 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source