Adventures of Ideas/Preface
PREFACE
The title of this book, Adventures of Ideas, bears two meanings, both applicable to the subject-matter. One meaning is the effect of certain ideas in promoting the slow drift of mankind towards civilization. This is the Adventure of Ideas in the history of mankind. The other meaning is the author’s adventure in framing a speculative scheme of ideas which shall be explanatory of the historical adventure.
The book is in fact a study of the concept of civilization, and an endeavour to understand how it is that civilized beings arise. One point, emphasized throughout, is the im- portance of Adventure for the promotion and preservation of civilization.
The three books — Science and the Modern World, Process and Reality, Adventures of Ideas — are an endeavour to express a way of understanding the nature of things, and to point out how that way of understanding is illustrated by a survey of the mutations of human experience. Each book can be read separately; but they supplement each other’s omissions or compressions.
The books that have chiefly influenced my general way of looking at this historical topic are Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Cardinal Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Paul Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent, Henry Osborn Taylor’s The Mediæval Mind, Leslie Stephen’s English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, and various well-known collections of letters. While on the subject of literature, I venture to commend to the notice of those interested in an earlier development of English Thought, and also in good literature, the sermons of the Elizabethan and Jacobean divines. Also H. O. Taylor’s Thought and Expression in the Sixteenth Century presents the currents and cross-currents of thought in those times. The twentieth century, so far as it has yet advanced, bears some analogy to that predecessor in European history, both in clash of thought and in clash of political interest.
In Part ii, dealing with Cosmology, I have made constant use of two books published by the Oxford University Press in 1928, namely, A Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, by Professor A. E. Taylor of the University of Edinburgh, and The Greek Atomists and Epicurus, by Dr Cyril Bailey, Tutor of Balliol College, Oxford.
Use has already been made of some parts of the book in response to invitations which I had the honour to receive. The main substance of Chapters i, ii, iii, vii, viii was delivered as the four Mary Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College, during the session 1929-30: they have not been hitherto published. Also Chapter ix, ‘Science and Philosophy’ — not previously published — was delivered as the Davies Lecture in Philosophy, at the Institute of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University, March, 1932. Chapter vi, ‘Foresight’, was delivered as a lecture at the Harvard Business School, and by the request of Dean W. B. Donham was published as a preface to his book, Business Adrift, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., New York, 1931. Also Chapter xi, ‘Objects and Subjects’, was delivered as the presidential address to the eastern division of the American Philosophical Association, at New Haven, December, 1931; and has since been published in The Philosophical Review, Vol. xli, 1932, Longmans, Green, and Company, New York.
Some unpublished lectures, delivered at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, in 1926, embodied a preliminary sketch of the topic of this book. They were concerned with the two levels of ideas which are required for successful civilization, namely, particularized ideas of low generality, and philosophic ideas of high generality. The former set are required to reap the fruit of the type of civilization immediately attained; the latter set are required to guide the adventure toward novelty, and to secure the immediate realization of the worth of such ideal aim.
I am indebted to my wife for many ideas fundamental to the discussion; and also for the great labour of revision of the successive drafts of the various chapters.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
September 1932