Michel Weber

Whitehead's Pancreativism
Jamesian Applications
Process Thought volume VIII
Contents
AbbreviationsWhitehead .......................................................................... v
AbbreviationsJames................................................................................. vi
0. Preface .................................................................................................... vii
1. IntroductionWhiteheads Reading of James and Its Context ............... 1
2. The Creative Advance of Nature............................................................ 27
3. Panpsychism in Action........................................................................... 65
4. The Polysemiality of the Concept of Pure Experience ....................... 91
5. Religiousness and Religion .................................................................. 115
6. James Mystical Body in the Light of the Transmarginal Field........... 147
7. The Art of Epochal Change.................................................................. 175
8. On Pragmatic Anarchy ......................................................................... 205
9. ConclusionThe Assassination of the Diadoches............................... 243
Bibliography............................................................................................. 277
Table of Contents ..................................................................................... 279


AbbreviationsWhitehead
ADG The Axioms of Descriptive Geometry, Cambridge, 1907.
APG The Axioms of Projective Geometry, Cambridge, 1906.
AE The Aims of Education, 1929 (Free Press, 1967).
AI Adventures of Ideas, 1933 (Free Press, 1967).
CN The Concept of Nature, 1920 (Cambridge, 1964).
D Lucien Price, Dialogues, 1954 (Mentor Book, 1956).
ESP Essays in Science and Philosophy, Philosophical Lib., 1947.
FR The Function of Reason, 1929 (Beacon Press, 1958).
ICNV Indication, Classes, Numbers, Validation, Mind, 1934.
IM An Introduction to Mathematics, 1911 (Oxford, 1958).
IS The Interpretation of Science, Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1961.
MCMW On Mathematical Concepts of the Material World, 1906.
MT Modes of Thought, 1938 (Free Press, 1968).
OCN On Cardinal Numbers, American J. of Mathematics, 1902.
OT The Organisation of Thought, Williams and Norgate, 1917.
PM Principia Mathematica, 19101913 (Cambridge, 19251927).
PNK Principles of Natural Knowledge, 1919/1925 (Dover, 1982).
PR Process and Reality, 1929 (Free Press Corr. Edition, 1978).
R The Principle of Relativity, Cambridge, 1922.
RM Religion in the Making, Macmillan, 1926.
S Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect, Macmillan, 1927.
SMW Science and the Modern World, 1925 (Free Press, 1967).
TRE La thorie relationniste de lespace, Revue de Mta., 1916.
UA A Treatise on Universal Algebra, Cambridge, 1898.

AbbreviationsJames
BC Psychology. Briefer Course, 1892 (Henry Holt, 1920).
CER Collected Essays and Reviews, Longmans, 1920.
EMS Exceptional Mental States, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1982.
EP Essays in Philosophy, Harvard University Press, 1978.
EPR Essays in Psychical Research, Harvard U. Press, 1986.
ERE Essays in Radical Empiricism, 1912 (Bison Books, 1996).
ERM Essays in Religion and Morality, Harvard U. Press, 1982.
MS Memories and Studies, Longmans, 1911.
MEN Manuscripts, Essays and Notes, Harvard U. Press, 1988.
MT The Meaning of Truth, Longmans, 1909.
Letters The Letters of William James, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920.
P Pragmatism, 1907 (Longmans, 1916).
PP The Principles of Psychology, 1890 (Dover Pub., 1950).
PU A Pluralistic Universe, 1909 (Bison Books, 1996).
SPP Some Problems of Philosophy, 1911 (Bison Books, 1996).
TT Talks to Teachers and Students, Henry Holt, 1899.
VRE The Varieties of Religious Experience, Longmans, 1902.
WB The Will to Believe, Longmans, 1897.

Perry Thought and Character of William James, Little, Brown, 1935.

0
Preface
In his review of Cliffords Lectures and Essays, William James has
claimed that
The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with
measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
1

It seems to me that this mysterious unison is nowhere as evident as in Plato,
Leibniz, Peirce, Bergson and Whitehead. According to the latter,
philosophy is indeed both akin to algebraic calculus and to poetry
2

Moreover, the factual systematic correlation and even Wahlverwandt-
schaften of Peirces (18391914), James (18421910), Bergsons (1859
1941) and Whiteheads (18611947) worldviews has often been noted but
rarely studied in detail. To think them together offers the possibility of
activating one of the very rare possible synergies between first-rate
philosophers. Their respective thought developments, albeit genuinely
personal, spring from a similar radical empiricism feeding a pragmatic
method making sense in the very same ontological direction.
There has not only been some significant influence (direct and indirect)
between them but there is also a strong compatibility of their respective
visions (which does not mean at all, however, that their respective
categories can be carelessly put side by side). One could speak of a process
pragmatic pluralism to suggest the visionary community that was the direct
by-product of the anti-Spencerian Zeitgeist, a chaosmotic mood that will be
sketched during our inquiry. That community should be expanded of course

1
James review of William Kingdon Cliffords Lectures and Essays Vol. 1 (Edited
by Leslie Stephen and Frederick Pollock, London, MacMillan and Co., 1879) is
reprinted in his CER 138. See the Abbreviations for the references to the
editions I am using; I have sought to quote the most accessible editions.
2
See the Bergson and Whitehead issue of Process Studies, edited by Randall E.
Auxier (Volume 28/3-4, 1999) and MT vii, 50, 174.
viii Michel Weber
to immediate fellows: upstream to James Ward (18431925) and G.
Fechner (18011887), downstream to J. Dewey (18591952), S. Alexander
(18591938) and Bertrand Russell (18721970), and to more processually
eccentric figures such as Philippe Devaux (19021979) in Belgium, Enzo
Paci (19111976) in Italy and Jean Wahl (18881974) in France.
1

As a matter of interest, Whitehead has successively taught at Trinity
College (Cambridge), University College and Imperial College of Science
and Technology (London), and eventually at the other Cambridge, the one
of the State of Massachusetts, i.e., the John Harvard University. Tireless
polygraph, after a distinguished career of algebraist and logicist (1891
1913), of philosopher of natural science (19141923), he framed in
Harvard a revolutionary ontology in anti-metaphysical times par
excellence (19241947). For his part, William James has spent his entire
academic career at Harvard, where he taught physiology and anatomy
(1873), psychology (18761889) and philosophy (18811907)with
periods where these fields overlapped.
If we focus especially on the proximity existing between James and
Whitehead, we are forced to acknowledge the existence of a mysterium
conjunctionis between two psychic opposites: on the one hand, their late
philosophical vision is basically the same; on the other, the philosophical
temperaments differ slightly. Two issues ought to be distinguished
pragmatism and radical empiricismand in both cases James appears to
have framed his argument in dialogue with Peirce and to have made bolder
claims than Whitehead, who has kept an archeological temperament of
sorts. On the one hand, the pragmatic standpoint, that cannot be severed
from the triple opening that defines post-modernity (spatial, temporal and
psychological), has been adopted by numerous scholars in the late XIXth
and early XXth century. On the other hand, radical empiricism embodies
James central trait. Although it is also present, to a certain extent, in
Peirces phaneroscopy
2
and in Husserls imperative to return to thing
themselves (Zurck zu den Sachen selbst
3
), James motto all experiences

1
Such a global contextualization has been attempted in the biographical entries
featured by the Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought, edited by Michel
Weber and Will Desmond and published by ontos verlag in 2008.
2
Peirce, Adirondack Lectures (1905), in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders
Peirce, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, Cambridge, Harvard
University Press, 1931, Vol. 1, 284.
3
Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phnomenologie und phmenologische
Philosophie, Jahrbuch fr Philosophie und phmenologische Forschung, t. I,
Halle, Max Niemeyer, 1913, 19.
Prface ix
and only experiences (ERE) has been throughly enforced only by James
himself. Peirce, like Whitehead, had too much of a systematic temperament
and Husserl seemed to be increasingly concerned only with the empirical
data disclosed in sense-perception and in rational data produced by
ratiocination. In other words, only James relativizes the normal state of
consciousness through experience. Whitehead, for one, heavily relied upon
imagination with that regard.
The Preface examines briefly this temperamental contrast in order to open
the way to the assessment of their respective pragmatism and particularly
of the ontological question of the bud or epochal theory of
actualization.
First, a little tiological reminder. Although James is very unlikely to
have read any of Whiteheads workswhich were mainly mathematical
(say logico-algebraical) until the publication of The Organisation of
Thought, Educational and Scientific in 1917
1
Whitehead has read very
early James Pragmatism (1907)
2
and one can speculate that he promptly
devoured as well the Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and the
Essays in Radical Empiricism (published in 1912, but all of which essays
were written in the years 19041905). James pragmatism is also discussed
in the unpublished Whitehead-Russell correspondance. For instance, in his
letter to Russell of January 5, 1908, Whitehead criticizes Russells
interpretation of Jamesian pragmatism:
Your article on Pragmatism does not quite convince meperhaps
because the alternative you dismiss without discussion (i.e. no facts)
seems to me by far their strongest thrust. You do no seem to me to
touch a theory such as this: The life of sensation and emotion (I dont
know the technical terms) is essentially without thought and without
subdivision. Objects are only for thought; they are the form by which
thought represents the alien complex of sensation. As soon as I think I
perceive the landscape, I am creating for the purpose of thought the
objects I and the landscapeand so on, if I proceed to split up the
landscapeNow as to truththere are two essentially dis-tinct

1
Most papers are reprinted in The Aims of Education and Other Essays, 1929.
2
Cf. Alfred North Whitehead, sub verso Mathematics, in Encyclopaedia
Britannica, XIth edition, vol. 17, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
19101911, pp. 878-883, p. 881; reprinted under the title Mathematics, Nature
of in the XIVth edition (vol. 15, London and New York, 1929, pp. 85-89); and
later reprinted in ESP.
x Michel Weber
indefinable harmonies which constitute the whole of truth (1) the self-
consistency of thought with itselfthis is logic: and (2) the
consistency of thought with the non-rational complex of sensation
but this does not mean that the relation between objects should be
thought of, as they are in fact, because the objects themselves are not
in fact, they are merely in thought. Thus for truth the objects of
thought are partly arbitrary within the limits necessary to secure the
two harmonies. I am quite prepared to hear that the pragmatist position
as thus sketched is too hopeless to require refutation. All I mean is that
I do not see how it is refuted on the lines laid down in your article.
1

Having said this, the temperamental contrast can be sketched with the
help of the following pairs of concepts: James was a cosmopolitan US-
American, an extravert and experimental geniuswhereas Whitehead was
a British, introvert, imaginative systematiser. This contrast is only for
heuristic purposes and two further points deserve to be made straight away.
Primo, James entire life was crippled by mood swings that sometimes
made his social life painful whereas Whitehead enjoyed teaching and
gathering around him his colleagues and students (during the then famous
evening at the WhiteheadsD 15). Perhaps that, when all is said and
done, the two philosophers were equally lonely. Secundo, when Whitehead
claimed that Plato had intuitioned all philosophical problems and provided
hints (even sometimes contradictory hints) to solve them, he failed to see
that Peirce had done the exact same thing only a couple of decades before
he arrived in Harvard! (James and Peirce met in 1861, the year of
Whiteheads birth.) Hence his famous quote could apply, mutatis mutandis,
to Peirce:
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical
tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not
mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have
doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general
ideas scattered through them. His personal endowments, his wide
opportunities for experience at a great period of civilization, his
inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive
systematization, have made his writing an inexhaustible mine of

1
Quoted by Ronny Desmets A Refutation of Russells Stereotype, in Ronny
Desmet and Michel Weber (edited by), Whitehead. The Algebra of Metaphysics.
Applied Process Metaphysics Summer Institute Memorandum, Louvain-la-
Neuve, ditions Chromatika, 2010, pp. 172-173.
Prface xi
suggestion. Thus in one sense by stating my belief that the train of
thought in these lectures is Platonic, I am doing no more than
expressing the hope that it falls within the European tradition. But I do
mean more: I mean that if we had to render Plato's general point of
view with the least changes made necessary by the intervening two
thousand years of human experience in social organization, in aesthetic
attainments, in science, and in religion, we should have to set about the
construction of a philosophy of organism. In such a philosophy the
actualities constituting the process of the world are conceived as
exemplifying the ingression (or participation) of other things which
constitute the potentialities of definiteness for any actual existence.
(PR 39-40)
To put it differently: all the intuitions that Peirce always tried to
systematically unfold and that were put at work, usually in a more
pedestrian manner, by James, perhaps gained a second systematic life in
Whitehead.
If it is safe enough to characterize James works as American, the fact
remains that he was truly a citizen of the (Western) world, fluent in French
and German, someone who was straightforward, outgoing, very eager to
vulgarize science. He was equally in love with experience itself, with its
intrinsic opacity and even with the danger of its off-limits intercourse. All
he wrote was taped from the depths of his own experiences (some of them
being borderline: neurosis, intoxications, hypnosis). On the other hand,
Whitehead really appreciated the zeal for knowledge
1
and for freedom
2

which underlies the American ethos but he claimed to have remained a

1
Today in America, there is a zeal for knowledge which is reminiscent of the
great periods of Greece and the Renaissance. But above all, there is in all
sections of the population a warm-hearted kindness which is unsurpassed in any
large social system. (ESP 14) Americans are always warm-hearted, always
appreciative, always helpful, but they are always shrewd; and that is what makes
for me the continual delight of living in America, and it is why when I meet an
American I always expect to like him, because of that always delightful mixture
of shrewdness and warmheartedness. (ESP 114) I do feel that if a man is going
to do his best he ought to live in America, because there the treatment of any
effort is such that it stimulates everything that is eager in one. (ESP 115)
2
This is the justification of that liberalism, that zeal for freedom, which underlies
the American Constitution and other various forms of democratic government.
(ESP 65)
xii Michel Weber
typical example of the Victorian Englishman.
1
He read French and
German, but probably only in technical materials. Moreover, Lowe has
aptly claimed that Whitehead was a loner with many good friends but no
confidant.
2
He certainly accepted the radical empiricism promoted by the
life and thought of his illustrious predecessor in Harvard, but did so in a
less existential manner: experiences that were out of his reach were
simply imagined. Whatever relative truth James digged out through
(often painful) experiences, Whitehead reached through (apparently
painless) imaginative generalizations. Both philosophers had strong
intuitions and were keen to expand the scope of their fields of expertise at a
time when their contraction was more fashionablebut Whitehead the
algebraist was always keener to frame these intuitions into a grand scheme.
Both explicitly argued that science depends upon metaphysics: James since
The Knowing of Things Together (1894) and Whitehead since SMW
(1925). Neither had a real philosophical scholarly background: philosophy
was for them primarily a matter of a dialogue with their contemporaries, an
eminent Cambridge tradition promptly actualized in Harvard.
Granting that it is altogether of little heuristic value to understand the
James-Whitehead lineage as the genius and his epigone, the fact
remains that their temperamental difference, community of vision and
legacies allow such an interpretational short-circuitprovided that it
remains critical. Perhaps that a well-tempered Nietzschean contrast
between Dionysus and Apollo would open more interpretative doors
This also brings in the issue of intuition: the concept of intuition is perhaps
not fashionable anymore in philosophy, but it is a key to understand
thinkers such as James and Whitehead (or Einstein
3
). It is not just a matter

1
ESP 115. I am exactly an ordinary example of the general tone of the Victorian
Englishman, merely one of a group. (ib.)
2
Victor A. Lowe, A.N. Whitehead. The Man and His Work. Volume I: 18611910,
Volume II: 19101947 (edited by J. B. Schneewind), Baltimore, Maryland and
London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985 & 1990, vol. II, p. 150.
3
I believe in intuition and inspiration At times I feel certain I am right while
not knowing the reason. When the eclipse of 1919 confirmed my intuition, I was
not in the least surprised. In fact I would have been astonished that it turned out
otherwise. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is
limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress,
giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific
research. (Albert Einstein, Opinions and Aphorisms. On Science in Cosmic
Religion. With other Opinions and Aphorisms, New York, Covici / Friede
Publishers, 1931, p. 97)
Prface xiii
of pointing at Bergsons influence on both of them, but of naming their
radical empiricism and the tropism towards systematization that animates
their writings. On the one hand, both accepted all experiences as valid
matters of facts, i.e., starting points for philosophical generalizations; on
the other, both wrote in order to recreate these fleeting experiential
anchorings in the readers mind. Unfortunately, Stebbing and Russell
couldnt agree less and the reputation of our thinkers suffered immensely
from these ad hominem arguments
1

To repeat: although the radical empiricist premise is plain in both cases,
Whiteheads is a little bit more shy with regard to its existential
implementation. The concrete many-sidedness of experience is of
primordial importance to him, but so is the discovery of a complete
formalism. We have here a trait that is constant in the development of his
thought: he has contemplated the logico-mathematical field sub specie
totalitatis in Cambridge, geometry as a physical science in London, and
metaphysics under the category of creativity in Harvard. Out of this
journey, two speculative loci appear of particular importance: the
ontological status of extension and of propositional functions.
2

The question of the lure of their thought-development is more
straightforward: James life and works is the product of an eschatological
quest linked to his archaeological agnosticism
3
(that went astray in his last
years); Whiteheads is piloted by an archaeological quest correlated to his
eschatological agnosticism (the same remark holds). In other words, James
is animated by a constant desire to cope with the (individual) total
existential risk. His philosophy is not only concerned with life as it is lived
and with its pragmatic improvement, it is pursued for its Emersonian
transfigurative virtue. James' own philosophical development displays with
great strength that this quest is quite dangerous because it puts our entire
existence (even our post-mortem existence) at risk. In XXth century
parlance: neurosis has to be abolished at the risk of psychosis. At all costs.

1
Lizzie Susan Stebbing, The Notion of Truth in Bergsons Theory of
Knowledge, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, XIII, 1913, pp. 224-256.
Cf. Philippe Devaux, Le bergsonisme de Whitehead, Revue Internationale de
Philosophie, vol. XV, no. 56-57, fasc. 3-4, 1961, pp. 217-236.
2
See the interesting, but partial, analyses of James A. Bradley: The Speculative
Generalization of the Function. A Key to Whitehead, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie,
64, 2002, pp. 253-271.
3
The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, categories, supposed
necessities; and of looking toward last things, fruits, consequences, facts (P 54-
55).
xiv Michel Weber
One has to leave behind oneself the old social cloak imposed by the
political forces of this world and enhance one's awareness of the
importance of the present moment, of its duty and visionary weights. This
involves in practice the destruction of all opinions, the destruction of all
lies.
Besides Plato, Hume provides an early background and Huxley a
powerful recent exemplification for this argument. Here is what Hume
wrote in his 1758 essay:
Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human
affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many
are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men
resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When
we inquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find that,
as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have
nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only
that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the most
despotic and the most military governments as well as to the most free
and most popular.
1

His concern is amplified by techno-scientific progress, as Huxley argued in
1946:
There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianisms should
resemble the old. Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial
famine, mass imprisonment and mass deportation, is not merely
inhumane (nobody cares much about that nowadays); it is
demonstrably inefficientand in an age of advanced technology,
inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost. A really efficient
totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of
political bosses and their army of managers control a population of
slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their
servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day
totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editor and
schoolteachers. But their methods are still crude and unscientific.
2


1
David Hume, Of the First Principles of Government, 1758
2
Aldous Huxley, Foreword [1946] of Brave New World [1932], With an
introduction by David Bradshaw, Hammersmith, HarperCollins, 1994).
Prface xv
Hence, all social narratives that prevent liberation from the not always
obvious oppressive powers have to be obliterated.
Even though Whitehead is obviously, for his part, hoping for some
transfigurative virtue, he remains more discrete on these shores. The basic
engine of his radical empiricist speculations is formal: to question the
meaning of simple obvious statements in order to attain higher orders of
abstractions. What do we mean by space-time, by immediate sense-
perception, by simultaneity? For sure, nothing can be omitted,
1
but
how do we manage the wealth of data if not through discursive thinking?
These are some of the questions that will be treated here.

Whitehead's PancreativismThe Basics has provided tools to understand
Whitehead secundum Whitehead. We now seek to bring him in dialogue
with James. It will be a pragmatic dialogue looking for two types of
synergy: to establish the relevance of a Jamesian background to read
Whitehead, and to adumbrate how Whitehead can help us understand the
stakes of James works. In order to keep our argument tight, the book
follows a triadic structure: the first three chapters adopt the vantage point
of Whitehead to assess James; the next three chapters seek to understand
Whitehead with the help of James main intuitions; the last three chapters
provide some applications of that synergy.
The general train of thought of this monograph has been established in the
years 19992004, when I was a regular contributor to the Streams of
William James, created and nurtured by Randall Albright, who was the
leading figure of the William James Society (WJS) before the publication of
the Society became William James Studies (2006). Over the years, I have
contracted many intellectual debts, the most enduring ones being perhaps to
Pierfrancesco Basile, Ronny Desmet and Anderson Weekes. I would also
like to dedicate this book, as imperfect as it is, to the memory of
T. L. S. Sprigge (19322007), with whom I have created the European
William James Project in 2001, Peter H. Hare (19352008), famous for his
dogmatic pluralism (!), and Sergio Franzese (19632010), whose untimely
death has left an aching void in Italian process pragmatism. All three were

1
In order to discover some of the major categories under which we can classify the
infinitely various components of experience, we must appeal to evidence relating
to every variety of occasion. Nothing can be omitted, experience drunk and
experience sober, experience sleeping and experience waking, experience
drowsy and experience wide-awake, experience self-conscious and experience
self-forgetful, experience intellectual and experience physical []. (AI 226; cf.
AI 222)
xvi Michel Weber
looking forward to celebrate the centenary of the death of William James
and were planning scholarly events that their departure to Hades eventually
prevented.
Finally, before launching our argument, it is important to remember once
again Whiteheads precious warning: everything that is simple (or clear) is
false but usablewhile everything that is complex (or obscure) is adequate
but unusable.
1
Similarly, James has claimed that the art of being wise is
the art of knowing what to overlook. (PP II 369) Speculative philosophy is
no easy task.

1
Seek simplicity and distrust it. (CN 163) Exactness is a fake. (Immortality,
in ESP 96.)

1
Introduction
Whiteheads Reading of James and Its Context
When Bertrand Russell visited Harvard in 1936, there were two heroes in
his lecturesPlato and James.
1
Although this claim should be carefully
examined in itself, the exact same could be said of his former mentor
Whitehead. Precisely the same year, Whitehead wrote the following to his
assistant Hartshorne, on the occasion of the publication of a Festschrift
dedicated to him:
My general impression of the whole book [] confirms my
longstanding belief that in the oncoming generation America will be at
the centre of worthwhile philosophy. European philosophy has gone
dry, and cannot make any worthwhile use of the results of nineteenth
century scholarship. It is in chains to the sanctified presuppositions
derived from later Greek thought. It is in much the same position as
mediaeval scholasticism in the year 1400 A.D. My belief is that the
effective founders of the Renaissance are Charles Peirce and William
James. Of these men, W.J. is the analogue to Plato, and C.P. to
Aristotle, though the time-order does not correspond, and the analogy
must not be pressed too far. Have you read Ralph Perrys book (2

1
So has I. B. Cohen told H. Putnam: cf. Hilary Putnam, Pragmatism. An Open
Question, Oxford / Cambridge, Blackwell, 1995, p. 6. With that regard, it is
interesting to remember that in Russells 1950 essay Eminent Men I have
Known, James is said to be the most personally impressive philosopher, and
this was in spite of a complete naturalness and absence of all apparent
consciousness of being a great man (Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays
[1950], London, Routledge, 1995, pp. 181-187). Russell is explicitely excluding
philosophers still alive from this assesment: Whitehead, with many others, is not
mentioned at all, either because the essay was written before 1949, or because
Russell was not in the mood to mention his former colleague and friend (and
although in various places he has insisted on the importance of Whitehead for
the development of his own thought).
2 Michel Weber
vols.) on James? It is a wonderful disclosure of the living
repercussions of late 19
th
century thought on a sensitive genius. It is
reminiscent of the Platonic Dialogues. W.J.s pragmatic descendants
have been doing their best to trivialize his meanings in the notions of
Radical Empiricism, Pragmatism, Rationalization. But I admit W.J.
was weak on Rationalization. Also he expressed himself by the
dangerous method of over-statement.
1

Whitehead makes three outstanding claims here. Primo, a third Renaissance
is taking place in America in the XXth century; secundo, it makes plain
that philosophy has to be in medias res; tertio, Peirce might be the brain of
this revolution, but James is its hart. The Peircean turning-about of 1878
and its Jamesian echo in 1907 seek to undo the supernaturalism of the
second Renaissance (Mersenne, Descartes, Gassendi) and to recover,
volens nolens, the totality disclosed by the naturalism of Ficinus (Theologia
Platonica de immortalitate animae, 1482), Pico della Mirandola (De
hominis dignitate, 1486), Bruno (La cena de le ceneri, 1584), Campanella
(Civitas Solis, 1623) and Andreae (Christianopolis, 1619). Naturalistic
humanism is back.
According to the author of Process and Reality, philosophical movements
articulate themselves around two main characters: the genius who
inaugurates them, and the systematiser who gives form and expands the
founding intuitions of the former (PR 57 and 73). Whitehead was too
humble to consider himself as more than a systematiser of others
intuitions, and the complete list of the thinkers he praises (in one way or
another) would be quite long: the early Whitehead is particularly sensitive
to the recent foundational developments in algebra and geometry (G.
Peano, G. Cantor; H. Grassmann, W. Hamilton, G. Boole, G. Riemann;
Leibnizs and Russells shadows should not be forgotten); his middle
period especially tackles electromagnetism (M. Faraday, J.C. Maxwell),
extending to Einsteins theories of relativity (including H. Poincars and
H. Minkowskis and H. Poincars inflections) and the nascent quantum
mechanics (M. Planck, N. Bohr); the late Whitehead also shows the

1
The letter, that was first printed in George Louis Klines A.N. Whitehead: Essays
on His Philosophy (Englewood-Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963), is reprinted in
full in Lowe II, 345 sq. The Festschrift in question is: Filmer Stuart Cuckow
Northrop (et al.), Philosophical Essays for Alfred North Whitehead. [A
Collection of Papers by Nine Younger American Philosophers, Former Students
of A. N. Whitehead, Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University], London,
Longmans, Green and Co., 1936.
Whiteheads Reading of James and its Context 3
influence of contemporary thinkers: S. Alexander, H. Bergson, F.H.
Bradley, C.D. Broad, J. Dewey, L.J. Henderson, W. James, J. McTaggart,
G.H. Mead, T. P. Nunn, G. Santayana and J. Ward. In the background, the
systems of Aristotle, Descartes, Galileo, Hume, Kant, Leibniz, Locke,
Newton and Plato stand out as well.
This chapter attempts to quote all the explicit occurrences of James in
Whiteheads corpus and to weave them into a synthetic argument.
1
It
argues from the texts themselves, factually putting into brackets previous
inquiries dealing with Whiteheads Jamesian legacy. The argument unfolds
in three sections: (i) general background, (ii) stylistic similarities, (iii)
specific impacts.
1.1. General Background
The above list of thinkers is not exhaustive at all, and, according to the
circumstances, Whitehead puts emphasis on one supreme master of
thought (PR 39) rather than another. There is, however, an obvious
fourfold influence on his later speculations, as he himself testified:
In Western literature there are four great thinkers, whose services
to civilized thought rest largely upon their achievements in
philosophical assemblage; though each of them made important
contributions to the structure of philosophic system. These men are
Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz, and William James. (MT 2)
Let us review each philosopher.
1.1.1. Plato
Plato is constantly acclaimed for his numerous flashes of insight and the
openness with which he systematically expands them:

1
This chapter constitutes an expansion of my Whiteheads Reading of James and
Its Context, Streams of William James, Volume 4, Issue 1, Spring 2002, pp. 18-
22 and Volume 5, Issue 3, Fall 2003, pp. 26-31. See also my Whitehead et
James: conditions de possibilit et sources historiques d'un dialogue
systmatique, in A. Benmakhlouf et S. Poinat (d.), Quine, Whitehead, et leurs
contemporains, Noesis, 13, 2009, pp. 251-268. A synoptic survey of
Whiteheads references to James can furthermore be found in Scott Sinclairs
William James as American Plato?, William James Studies, Vol. 4, 2009, pp.
111-129.
4 Michel Weber
Plato's contribution to the basic notions connecting Science and
Philosophy, as finally settled in the later portion of his life, has virtues
entirely different from that of Aristotle, although of equal use for the
progress of thought. It is to be found by reading together the
Thetetus, the Sophist, the Timus, and the fifth and tenth books of
the Laws; and then by recurrence to his earlier work, the Symposium.
He is never entirely self-consistent, and rarely explicit and devoid of
ambiguity. He feels the difficulties, and expresses his perplexities. No
one could be perplexed over Aristotle classifications; whereas Plato
moves about amid a fragmentary system like a man dazed by his own
penetration. (AI 146-147)
hence:
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical
tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not
mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have
doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general
ideas scattered through them. His personal endowments, his wide
opportunities for experience at a great period of civilization, his
inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive
systematization, have made his writing an inexhaustible mine of
suggestion. (PR 39)
Notice his derogatory assessment of the systematization of Plato
(something German scholars have been prone to attempt, as he repeatedly
remarked). Whitehead found the Timus, which he studied very carefully,
definitively more inspiring than Newtons Scholium, for the simple reason
that the former would have welcomed XXth science into its framework,
whereas the later could not
1

The difficulty of communication in words is but little realized. If I
had to write something about your personality, of course I couldbut
how much would remain that couldnt be put into words. So, when the
rare balance of knowledge and perception appears, as in William
Jamesone who could communicate so much more than mostit is

1
Cf. PR 70-74. Luc Brisson and F. Walter Meyerstein could be said to have
followed Whiteheads vision with their book Inventing the Universe. Platos
Timaeus, The Big Bang, And the Problem of Scientific Knowledge [1991], State
University of New York Press, 1995).
Whiteheads Reading of James and its Context 5
perhaps an advantage that his system of philosophy remained
incomplete. To fill it out would necessarily have made it smaller. In
Platos Dialogues there is a richness of thought, suggestion, and
implication which reaches far. Later, when we came to be more
explicit concerning some of those implications, we have a shrinkage.
(D 271)
This cautiousness with regard to systematization does not mean however
that the whole enterprise is flawed. Whitehead is actually endowed with a
systematic mind, but he attempts only to systematize his own experience
for his own sake. There is, in other words, no dogmatic reductionism
involved. Plato, moreover, just like James, does not provide us only with
sporadic intuitions that are often apparently contradictory: they also bring
hints as to how to assemble them and to bringing them together, to join
their potentialities. Granted, these are sometimes as elusive, being akin to
cavalry charges, but the overall movement is holistic.
1

One last issue deserves to be mentioned (not addressed): the ontological
status of the eternal objects. Before and after Process and Reality,
Whitehead adopts a rhetorical mode of exposition that leads most
commentators to underline his Platonician stance. But in the magnum opus
itself, he agrees with Heraclitus and James: because we never descend
twice in the same experiential stream, no two ideas are ever exactly the
same (PP I 235).
1.1.2. Aristotle
Aristotle receives both due acknowledgement for his decisive impact on the
framing of the scientific mind and lament for the speculative cowardliness
he showed in key matters. Yes, Aristotle settled scientific inquiries with his
masterly analysis of the notion of generation [ and,] in his own person
expressed a useful protest against the Platonic tendency to separate a static
spiritual world from a fluent world of superficial experience. (PR 209)
Yes, he was the last metaphysician to have approached Gods concept
dispassionately (SMW 173). But if he invented science, he destroyed
philosophy (D 139) in so far as he was the apostle of substance and
attribute, and of the classificatory logic which this notion suggests.
(PR 209) This is exactly where the shoe pinches:

1
Whitehead believes that we can only partially weave into a train of thought what
we apprehend in flashes. (cf. ESP 127)
6 Michel Weber
If you conceive fundamental fact as a multiplicity of subjects
qualified by predicates, you must fail to give a coherent account of
experience. The disjunction of subjects is the presupposition from
which you start, and you can only account for conjunctive relations by
some fallacious sleight of hand, such as Leibnizs metaphor of his
monads engaged in mirroring. The alternative philosophic position
must commence with denouncing the whole idea of subject qualified
by predicate as a trap set for philosophers by the syntax of language.
(R 13)
Moreover, from an historical perspective, he has had a dogmatic influence
on Western thought as well as a deceitful one; his ignorance of
mathematics did not serve him well;
1
and his Logic was a more superficial
weapon than philosophers deemed it (AI 117).
1.1.3. Leibniz
For his part, Leibniz is not much discussed in Whitehead's corpus, which
basically means two things. On the one hand, his impact on the
philosophy of organism is so deep that it completely fades in Whitehead's
categorical landscape; on the other, Whitehead does not seem to have much
sympathy for the German philosophical mindKant being a notable
exception. This is after all nothing but a very personal affair: one feels at
unison with some authors, and totally foreign to others. But it is probably

1
In a sense, Plato and Pythagoras stand nearer to modern physical science than
does Aristotle. The two former were mathematicians, whereas Aristotle was the
son of a doctor, though of course he was not ignorant of mathematics. The
practical counsel to be derived from Pythagoras, is to measure, and thus to
express quality in terms of numerically determined quantity. But the biological
sciences, then and till our own time, have been overwhelmingly classificatory.
Accordingly, Aristotle by his Logic throws the emphasis on classification. The
popularity of Aristotelian Logic retarded the advance of physical science
throughout the Middle Ages. [] In the seventeenth century the influence of
Aristotle was at its lowest, and mathematics recovered the importance of its
earlier period. (SMW 28-29) Aristotle was clearly not a professional
mathematician, and he does not in his works show any acquaintance with the
higher brancheshe makes no allusion to conic sections, for examplebut he
was fond of mathematical illustrations, and he throws a flood of light on the first
principles of mathematics as accepted in his time. (Sir Thomas Little Heath, A
Manual of Greek Mathematics, New York, Dover Publications, Inc., 1963, p.
184)
Whiteheads Reading of James and its Context 7
as well part of the political tragedy of the late XIXth and XXth centuries:
there has been, alas, many conflicts involving German and British people
and Whitehead's youngest son Eric was killed in action in 1918.
1
(The issue
of the real or imagined hostility between individuals should be understood
from the perspective of class struggles: there is no real animosity between
British people and German people, only an engineered one serving the
interests of international capitalism.
2
)
1.1.4. James
Out of these four philosopher-scientists, Plato and James receive special
appraisal because of their intuitive capacities, orto use the concept that
has a medullar virtue in Whitehead's essaysbecause of their creativity. As
we will see in a moment, their style is usually closer to Whitehead's than
Aristotles and Leibnizs. The two latter are actually known for their
systematicity: both were aiming at a full understanding of all the details of
the God/World business, and consequently rigidified their writings as much
as they could. Non-contradiction was for them a major concern.
Having said this, we are forced to notice that the partition Whitehead uses
between intuitive and systematic thinkers does not really apply to
himself. He obviously considers that he is simply improving the coherence
of utterances of geniuses like Plato and James (failing to grasp the
importance of Peirce), something that puts him among the systematisers
or the coordinators of past achievements; but, when all is said and done,
he is, as his style demonstrates, not interested in sealing an ultimate system,
only keen to develop local systems as far as possible. In its turn every
philosophy will suffer a deposition. (PR 7). His efforts in imaginative
generalization make his thought belong to both sides.
This double tension really requires more development, but our short
pointillist chapter will be busy only with Whitehead's explicit evocations of
James (18421910). In other words, the broader question that is the

1
PNKs dedication runs as follows: To Eric Alfred Whitehead, Royal Flying
Corp, November 27, 1898 to March 13, 1918. Killed in action over the Fort de
Gobain giving himself that the city of his vision may not perish. The music of
his life was without discord, perfect in his beauty.
2
James Stuart Martin, All Honorable Men, Boston, Little, Brown and Co, 1950;
Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy, an expos of the Nazi-American
Money Plot, 19331949, New York, Delacorte Press, 1983; Harold James, The
German Slump. Politics and Economics, 19241936, Oxford, Clarendon Press,
1986.
8 Michel Weber
underground influence of James on Whiteheads speculations will not be
treated here: I will not comb the texts in order to reveal not-so-obvious
Jamesian foundations. The fact is that when a thinker has had a long and
enduring influence on another, most connections start working in the back
of the mind of the writer, who does not bother mentioning all of them
explicitly, or then simply quotes from memory.
Let us first pin point his personal appreciation of James with six major
exemplification.
In one of his 1910 Encyclopaedia Britannica entries, Whitehead refers the
reader to James Pragmatism (1907) on the old question of the one and the
many.
1
As far as we know, this is the earliest reference to James in
Whiteheads corpus. It is all the more significant that it occurs in a
mathematical discussion and that James book has been probably read at
Cambridge, when Whitehead, while teaching applied mathematics, was
apparently focusing his researches only on algebraic, geometrical and
logico-mathematical issues.
Science and the Modern World speaks of an adorable genius who
possessed the clear, incisive genius which could state in a flash the exact
point at issue. (SMW 2 and 147)
In a truly crucial passage of Process and Reality, his magnum opus, he
speaks of the authority of William James (PR 68; cf. our commentary
infra on the introduction of the epochal theory of time).
A 1936 paper claims that William James and John Dewey will stand out
as having infused philosophy with new life, and with a new relevance to
the modern world.
2

We have quoted supra MT 2s commendation of Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz,
and James; here is what is said of the latter:

1
Alfred North Whitehead, sub verso Mathematics, in ESP 278. As far as James
is concerned, this question is relevant since his The Knowing of Things
Together, 1895 (an essay, belonging to his idealistic phase, that is also known
under the title The Tigers of India and has been reprinted in MT 43 sq. and
CER 371 sq.).
2
Alfred North Whitehead, Remarks to the Eastern Division of the American
Philosophical Association, Proceedings and Addresses of the American
Philosophical Association, X, 1936, pp. 178-186. Reprinted in The
Philosophical Review, XLVI, 1937, pp. 178-186, and later in ESP (without the
first paragraph, and under the title Analysis of Meaning), pp. 122-131, here p.
123.
Whiteheads Reading of James and its Context 9
Finally, there is William James, essentially a modern man. His
mind was adequately based upon the learning of the past. But the
essence of his greatness was his marvellous sensitivity to the ideas of
the present. He knew the world in which he lived, by travel, by
personal relations with its leading men, by the variety of his own
studies. He systematized; but above all he assembled. His intellectual
life was one protest against the dismissal of experience in the interest
of system. He had discovered intuitively the great truth with which
modern logic is now wrestling. (MT 3)
Interestingly enough, Whitehead speaks of Thucydides and Gibbon in a
similar fashion: all three displayed an extended practical experience
allowing them to understand the deep significance of contemporary events
(D 121-122 and 225). The radical importance of direct, lived, immediately
given experience is, for instance, at the root of his criticism of Hume:
philosophy must build on life as it is lived, not be developed
independentlyand supplementedby ad hoc hypotheses drawn from
habitual experience.
1
Later on, in the same book, he adds:
Harvard is justly proud of the great period of its philosophic
department about thirty years ago. Josiah Royce, William James,
Santayana, George Herbert Palmer, Mnsterberg, constitute a group to
be proud of. Among them Palmer's achievements centre chiefly in
literature and in his brilliance as a lecturer. The group is a group of

1
Hume can find only one standard of propriety, and that is, repetition. Repetition
is capable of more or less: the more often impressions are repeated, the more
proper it is that ideas should copy them. Fortunately, and without any reason so
far as Hume can discover, complex impressions, often repeated, are also often
copied by their corresponding complex ideas. Also the frequency of ideas
following upon the frequency of their correlate impressions is also attended by
an expectation of the repetition of the impression. Hume also believes, without
any reason he can assign, that this expectation is pragmatically justified. It is
this pragmatic justification, without metaphysical reason, which constitutes the
propriety attaching to repetition. This is the analysis of the course of thought
involved in Hume's doctrine of the association of ideas in its relation to
causation, and in Hume's final appeal to practice. It is a great mistake to attribute
to Hume any disbelief in the importance of the notion of cause and effect.
Throughout the Treatise he steadily affirms its fundamental importance; and
finally, when he cannot fit it into his metaphysics, he appeals beyond his
metaphysics to an ultimate justification outside any rational systematization.
This ultimate justification is practice.(PR 133)
10 Michel Weber
men individually great. But as a group they are greater still. It is a
group of adventure, of speculation, of search for new ideas. To be a
philosopher is to make some humble approach to the main
characteristic of this group of men. (MT 174)
In 1936, he also wrote:
my belief is that the effective founders of the American
Renaissance are Charles Peirce and William James. Of these men, W.
J. is the analogue to Plato, and C. P. to Aristotle, though the time-order
does not correspond, and the analogy must not be pressed too far.
1

There is no other published evidence that Whitehead read James before he
was offered a position at Harvard: James is simply not cited anymore
before the 1925 Lowell lectures (whose expansion became SMW). For his
part, Paul Weiss, who has been one of Whiteheads assistant in Harvard, is
convinced that he looked into James only when he settled down in the U.
S.
2
Evidence cannot be found either in his personal notes or manuscripts,
since they have been destroyed after his death, upon his request, by his wife
Evelyn.
3
Whitehead was exceptionally comfortable in Harvard. Even
though he remained a British Victorian, as he used to call himself with
humour and modesty, most of his hopes for civilization relied upon the
ideals and the dynamism of American society.
4
(Dwelling within the elite
of the Ivy League, he was obviously not aware at all of the struggles of
the lower classes.
5
)
It is not entirely clear what happened to his (rather extended) library.
Some twenty-two of his books are now in the Milton S. Eisenhower

1
Whitehead, Letter to Charles Hartshorne, January 2, 1936, in Lowe II, 345. The
quote is contextualized supra.
2
Paul Weiss, personnal communication to the author, 08/08/2001.
3
Lowe, A. N. Whitehead. The Man and His Work, Vol. I, p. 246.
4
There is an ideal of human liberty, activity, and coperation dimly adumbrated
in the American Constitution. It has never been realized in its perfection; and by
its lack of characterization of the variety of possibilities open for humanity, it is
limited and imperfect. And yet, such as it is, the Constitution vaguely discloses
the immanence in this epoch of that one energy of idealization, whereby bare
process is transformed into glowing history. (MT 120)
5
Howard Zinn, A Peoples History of the United States: 1492Present, New York,
HarperCollins, 1980.
Whiteheads Reading of James and its Context 11
Library (Johns Hopkins University), as a part of the Victor Lowes legacy.
1

Among them, one can find the Longmans, Green and Co. edition (London,
1929) of the Varieties of Religious Experiencewhich he might thus have
read only in the late twenties.
2

The first thing to be said with regard to his personal edition of the
Varieties is that Whitehead has most certainly read them before delivering
the Lowell Lectures of 1926 (that became Religion in the Making). One of
two things: either he has rediscovered Jamesian themes by himselflike
the idea that religion is solitariness
3
or he has read the Varieties no later
than on the occasion of writing his Lectures, which means that the volume
housed in Johns Hopkins is not the first edition he has worked on.
Furthermore, CN (1920) already mentions Bergson and, since Bergson and
James philosophical developments are so intertwined,
4
it probably makes

1
Lowe is the author of the only bibliography of Whitehead (see a previous
footnote), a work that he carried on for more than twenty years with the support
of Whiteheads family. Unfortunately, he died before the completion of the
second volume, that was posthumously published by a non-Whiteheadian
colleague. For an inventory of his papers, consult the Alfred North Whitehead
Collection Ms. 282 and 284, Special Collections, Milton S. Eisenhower Library,
The Johns Hopkins University.
2
Here is what we have been told with regard to Whitehead's copy of James's
Varieties: Whitehead's copy of James's Varieties contains only one marginal
comment. At the end of the second full paragraph on p. 431, Whitehead placed a
vertical line next to the text that begins But high-flying speculations like those
of either dogmatic or idealistic theology... Outside the line, he comments,
why. He has marked many other passages of text, but without comments.
(Margaret Burri, Curator of Manuscripts, Johns Hopkins University, personnal
communication to the author, 05/10/2001.)
3
Religion is the art and theory of the internal life of man, so far as it depends on
the man himself and on what is permanent in the nature of things. This doctrine
is the direct negation of the theory that religion is primarily a social fact. []
Religion is solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious.
(RM 16)
4
On the cross-influences of James and Bergson, see the meticulous inquiries of
Milic Capek: The Reappearance of the Self in the Last Philosophy of William
James, The Philosophical Review 62, 1953, pp. 526-544; La signification
actuelle de la philosophie de James, Revue de Mtaphysique et de Morale, 67
anne, 1962, pp. 291-321; and La pense de Bergson en Amrique, Revue
internationale de philosophie 31, 1977, pp. 329-350.
12 Michel Weber
sense to claim that if he knew one he knew the other. The story is here that
it is through his personal friend, Herbert Wildon Carr, author of Henri
Bergson. The Philosophy of Change,
1
that Whitehead got intellectually
acquainted with the Parisian philosopher. Besides, Carr was the Honorary
Secretary of the Aristotelian Society, where he lectured on Bergson and
where Bergson himself lectured probably with Whitehead attending.
Whitehead joined the Society in 1915. Furthermore, there was a
correspondence between Whiteheads friend and Aristotelian Society
member Haldane and Bergson with regard to Haldanes book on Einsteins
theories of relativity, which included a discussion of PNK and CN.
2

More than this, one could argue that he has always had time for a little bit
of eclecticism and that Does Consciousness Exist (1904) might have
attracted his attention at the time of its publication or perhaps when it was
included in the ERE (1912). To flesh out a little bit what could appear as a
purely gratuitous speculation, let us evoke the case of Whiteheads interest
in theology: if one considers only the published evidence, one is forced to
conclude that before the 1925 Lowell Lectures, the philosopher could not
be bothered with that field. However, we learn from his Dialogues with
Price that during eight of these years in Cambridge [U. K.], he was
reading theology. This was all extracurricular, but so thorough that he
amassed a sizable theological library. At the expiry of these eight years he
dismissed the subject and sold the books. (D 13) And it is the case as well
that during his student days, when he was a member of the elitist
Cambridge Apostles discussion group, religious questions were
discussed, together with all sorts of philosophical subject. Lowe reviews
that topic,
3
but does not mention discussions of psychological concepts
besides telepathy.
G. Sarton, the well-known historian of science has claimed that original
ideas are exceedingly rare and the most that philosophers have done in the
course of time is to erect a new combination of them.
4
This could be the

1
London/Edinburgh, T. C. & E. C. Jack, 1911.
2
See for instance the letter of Bergson to Haldane, Paris, 14 july 1921, to be found
at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, MS 5915 / ff. 68-70.
3
Victor A. Lowe, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 112-145.
4
George Sarton, quoted by John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Cosmological
Anthropic Principle, Oxford, New York, Melbourne, Oxford University Press,
1986; Issued with correction as an Oxford University Press Paperback, 1988, p.
27. He has perhaps read Sainte Beuves Portraits littraires: On retombe
toujours, on tourne dans un certain cercle, autour d'un petit nombre de solutions
Whiteheads Reading of James and its Context 13
case in his discipline; in the history of metaphysics, however, we see every
so often the daring expression of direct personal insights into the
ontological texture of our world. Starting from that pure experience, the
blissful philosopher attempts to engineer a novel system of thought as
worthy as possible of the founding event. The problem is that attempts at
rationalization will probably borrow conceptualities and/or itself spur much
secondary thinking. The unmediated dialogue between experience and
reason could then be broken to generate second-order speculations
drifting from their shimmering experiential soil. Here lies the pathology of
thought. But when speculations (first-order or second-order) are
(re)directed toward the full thickness of lived experience, rationalization
brings forth contrasts and intensity in experience. There is a nobleness of
reason; and it is linked with the fate of normal consciousness. Perhaps any
fair assessment of the impact of the borrowings made by a given author
needs to be preceded by ahypotheticalanswer to these basic
hermeneutical puzzlings.
The remaining of this chapter intends to display the stylistic similarities
between the two philosophers and the specific impacts of James on
Whitehead.
1.2. Stylistic Similarities
Whitehead and James have different philosophical temperaments and
backgroundsthe former remained basically an introverted British
Victorian whereas the later was through and through an extrovert
cosmopolitan, but a similar worldview takes shape in their works. In the
first volume of Whiteheads Pancreativism, we have seen that two main
features characterize the late Whiteheads style: circumambulation and
constructive discrimination. Uphill, we additionally found his radical
empiricism and, downhill, his non dogmatism. All four traits are also
Jamesian and underline the atemporal congeniality between the two
philosophers.
Whitehead adopts a methodological radical empiricism and considers
pluralism as a matter of fact:

qui se tiennent en prsence et en chec depuis le commencement. On a coutume
de s'tonner que l'esprit humain soit si infini dans ses combinaisons et ses
portes; j'avouerais bien bas que je m'tonne qu'il le soit si peu. (Bibliothque
de la Pliade, 1954, vol. II, p. 466)
14 Michel Weber
Fragmentary individual experiences are all that we know [] all
speculation must start from these disjecta membra as its sole datum. It
is not true that we are directly aware of a smooth running world, which
in our speculations we are to conceive as given. In my view the
creation of the world is the first unconscious act of speculative
thought; and the first task of a self-conscious philosophy is to explain
how it has been done.
There are roughly two rival explanations. One is to assert the
world as a postulate. The other way is to obtain it as a deduction, not a
deduction through a chain of reasoning, but a deduction through a
chain of definitions which, in fact, lifts thought on to a more abstract
level in which the logical ideas are more complex, and their relations
are more universal. (AE 163-4)
His motto is as well to forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and
stubborn facts.
1
We find ourselves in a buzzing world, amid a democracy
of fellow creatures,
2
and philosophy has to do justice to phenomena as
they are given: you may polish up commonsense, you may contradict in
detail, you may surprise it. But ultimately your whole task is to satisfy it.
(AE 107) Now what exactly is given is itself a matter of debate in
philosophy. Significantly enough, rather than theorizing the question,
Whitehead gives a Jamesian extensive definition:
In order to discover some of the major categories under which we
can classify the infinitely various components of experience, we must
appeal to evidence relating to every variety of occasion. Nothing can
be omitted, experience drunk and experience sober, experience
sleeping and experience waking, experience drowsy and experience
wide-awake, experience self-conscious and experience self-forgetful,
experience intellectual and experience physical, experience religious
and experience sceptical, experience anxious and experience care-free,
experience anticipatory and experience retrospective, experience
happy and experience grieving, experience dominated by emotion and

1
William James writing to Henry James, as quoted by SMW 3.
2
PR 50 specifying, in a footnote, this epithet is, of course, borrowed from
William James.
Whiteheads Reading of James and its Context 15
experience under self-restraint, experience in the light and experience
in the dark, experience normal and experience abnormal. (AI 226)
1

Let us furthermore note that the pragmatic consequences of concepts are
quite often evoked in his corpus
2
and that the pragmatic function of reason
is central in his eponymous book (FR, passim): the function of Reason is to
promote the art of life. There is however only one occurrence giving his
definition of pragmatism:
This doctrine places philosophy on a pragmatic basis. But the
meaning of pragmatism must be given its widest extension. In much
modern thought, it has been limited by arbitrary specialist
assumptions. There should be no pragmatic exclusion of self-evidence
by dogmatic denial. Pragmatism is simply an appeal to that
self-evidence which sustains itself in civilized experience. Thus
pragmatism ultimately appeals to the wide self-evidence of
civilization, and to the self-evidence of what we mean by
civilization. (MT 106)
Adventures of Ideas remarks that each mode of consideration is a sort of
searchlight elucidating some of the facts, and retreating the remainder into
an omitted background (AI 43). It would be of course a topic of its own to
precisely discriminate the variations of meaning of the concept in James
and Whiteheads respective minds.
To exemplify the circumambulative practice in a paragraph is difficult,
because it is made of waves of arguments that are, by definition, spread

1
An alternative formulation can be found in students notes taken during
Whiteheads classes: You must survey all the sides of the universe, the
variations in our value experience, we must look at all rare moments when we
were near angels and near pigs, and the rare moments when our value notion is
so indiscriminating that it is a mere throb of immediacy, a vague feeling as when
we fall asleep. (Frederick Olson, Alfred North Whitehead Lecture. Student
Notes 19361937, Unpublished, to consult at Harvards Pusey: HUC
8923.368.3) The polar themes of clarity and vagueness are essential in
Whitehead: cf. the well-known quote of Russells Portraits from Memory and
Other Essays, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1956, p. 40 (You think the
world is what it looks in fine weather at noon day; I think it is what it seems like
in the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleepclaimed
Whitehead.)
2
Cf. the pragmatic test of SMW 50, RM 27, PR 13, 181, 337; or the pragmatic
appeal to the future, pragmatic appeal to consequences and the like (passim).
16 Michel Weber
over his entire corpus and do not even always use the same concepts. A
rather straightforward example is nevertheless provided by the Function of
Reasons definitions of the art of life (cf. pp. 4, 8, 18, 22, 26). In his Aims
of Education one also finds an interesting argument for a renewed
educational expertise essentially consisting of a more focused training in
key disciplines: students should get acquainted with a few essential (and
interconnected) mathematical tools by actually applying them to various
concrete problems. By so doing, the mind grows far better than with
classical training. Mechanical learning of fragments of knowledge does not
bring the mastering of knowledge. Of course, he is especially concerned
with the mathematical curriculum, but his argument is intended to have a
broader expressiveness. By the same token, Whitehead insists on the notion
of rhythm:
In approaching every work of art we have to comport ourselves
suitably in regard to two factors, scale and pace. It is not fair to the
architect if you examine St. Peters at Rome with a microscope, and
the Odyssey becomes insipid if you read it at the rate of five lines a
day. (AE 70)
This notion could furthermore be used to rebuild his entire percolative
ontology: the creative process is rhythmic: it swings from the publicity of
many things to the individual privacy; and it swings back from the private
individual to the publicity of the objectified individual. (PR 151)
Constructive discrimination expresses a typical mode of understanding of
the nature and function of language. When carving discriminalities, we
have to keep in mind the full concreteness of experience. According to
Whitehead,
Philosophers can never hope finally to formulate []
metaphysical first principles. Weakness of insight and deficiencies of
language stand in the way inexorably. Words and phrases must be
stretched towards a generality foreign to their ordinary usage; and
however such elements of language be stabilized as technicalities, they
remain metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap. (PR 4)
With that regard, while discussing James's Varieties of Religious
Experience, he insisted that the difficulty of communication in words is but
little realized (see D 271, quoted supra p. 20). Plato, James and
metaphysical intuitions are again in the hot seat. The existence of some
nonrational remainder (VRE 456) is directly linked to the linguistic
position just discussed. When Whitehead claims that he is
Whiteheads Reading of James and its Context 17
also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey.
One of my preoccupations has been to rescue their type of thought
from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has
been associated with it. (PR xii; cf. AI 223)
he has obviously in mind a dialectic similar to the one we have named with
the trinomial rational/irrational/nonrational. The concept of irrational
pictures the discrepancies of status of a given proposition treated in
different thought systems; the concept of nonrational points at the fact
that, whatever our rational efforts are (whatever the thought system), the
fully-fledged concreteness remains beyond it. Logic has been shaken by the
existence of formally undecidable propositions; metaphysics has still to
draw all the consequences from the ultimate rational opacity of the brute
facts (WB 90 and 143). His reinstatement of vagueness is already
noticeable in the vague gestalts of On Some Omissions of Introspective
Psychology (1884) and in his insistence on the unclassified residuum in
his 1890 article on psychical research (see WB 299 sq. and 137).
Anyway, from a broader perspective, one has to acknowledge that to
profess irrationalism per se is to claim that reason has no public weight
whereas the authors here mentioned are reluctant to confer that weight only
in the private sphere. The public use of reason remains fully justified.
Hence the professed non-dogmatism from which Whitehead never
departed, even at the speculative height that is PR:
There remains the final reflection, how shallow, puny, and
imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. In
philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to
finality of statement is an exhibition of folly. (PR xiv)
Speculative language is not glossolalia, it makes the most of what one has
to transform the emotional vividness of experience into the concreteness of
a shared world. Natural language is intrinsically ambiguous and
intentional; it is far from being a pure logical entity, and, as a matter of
fact, its countless equivocations have been very often disparaged. Of
course, it is worth distinguishing the faculty of language (that can actualise
itself in gestures, postures, screams, etc.) from orality, and orality from
literature, and, within the literary corpus, prose from poetry... (A
Porphyrian tree that can be reformed and complexified as one could wish).
The same linguistic constraints do not hang over living speech and
weighted writing. The former is truly eventful, its constitutive temporality
explains its linearity (that can be of course modulated through repetitions
and other rhetorical patterns). This chapter has been mainly concerned with
the latter, which is like the systematic thunder after the experiential
18 Michel Weber
lightning. Writing facilitates reflection, analysis, abstractions of all sorts.
Making possible a very technical and variegated use of style, writing
somewhat drags language away from temporality and linearity. Its
multifarious semantic potential is directly correlated with the stylistic
managing of polysemiality and interanimation. In other words, out of the
three degrees of freedom that have been sketched on their way towards
concreteness, style stands out as the catalyst of the semantic process. Solely
style can make the reader fall under the authors spell and thereby lead
him/her at the outskirts of an intuitive vision that remains nevertheless
private. The intentionality opening the propositional entanglement to the
world shields language from the danger of barren coherence. For instance,
a dictionary does not, properly speaking, define anything; it is just a tissue
of mutual cross-references. To the contrary, the efficacy of language comes
from its self-effacing ability in front of what it lures us. The organization of
a conceptual network revealing the ontological surplus asks a peculiar
gesture made of invocatory repetitions and daring crosscheckings;
eventually, it is an art of the void that is requested. That evocative capacity
is a sort of implosive capacity: language has to die to give birth to meaning.
If it remains there, like an apathetic screen, meaning has not been
conveyed. The intuitive grasping of the power of language is a nocturnal
experience that sees the revelation of its faculty of making things rise from
their absence. Semantic, the function of language is also apophantic, power
of manifestation of total anthropo-cosmic experiences.
1

1.3. Specific Impacts
As far as we know, only four explicit conceptual points of contact illustrate
the dialogue of Whitehead with James: the epochal theory of time, the
concept of feeling, the functional concept of consciousness, and the
definition of the concept of religion.
1.3.1. Epochal Theory of Time
There has beenand still ismuch fuss about the ins and out of
Whitehead's adoption of an ontological atomism or epochal theory of
time.
2
The first point to clarify is that he does not shift from a continuist

1
On the concept of apophansis, see, e.g., Heideggers Sein und Zeit, Tbingen,
Niemeyer, 1927, p. 33.
2
L.S. Ford, for one, has repeatedly published on the matter but, as V. Lowe
remarked straight away: the result should be presented as no more than a
Whiteheads Reading of James and its Context 19
ontology to an atomistic one: his early inquiries outspokenly refuse to
question the mystery of the coming-to-be and passing-away; it is only when
the philosopher decides to further question the conditions of possibility of
genuine eventfulness that he passes the gates into the ontological field.
Now, the reason for adopting a (refurbished) ontological atomism is plural
but can be easily triangulated with Leibniz monadology, Plancks quantic
thunder, and James interpretation of Zenos everlasting antinomies.
In support of his contention that there is a becoming of continuityand
no continuity of becoming (PR 35)Whitehead especially refers to
James SPP:
These conclusions are required by the consideration of Zeno's
arguments, in connection with the presumption that an actual entity is
an act of experience. The authority of William James can be quoted in
support of this conclusion. He writes: Either your experience is of no
content, of no change, or it is of a perceptible amount of content or
change. Your acquaintance with reality grows literally by buds or
drops of perception. Intellectually and on reflection you can divide
these into components, but as immediately given, they come totally or
not at all. James also refers to Zeno. In substance I agree with his
argument from Zeno; though I do not think that he allows sufficiently
for those elements in Zeno's paradoxes which are the product of
inadequate mathematical knowledge. But I agree that a valid argument
remains after the removal of the invalid parts. (PR 68)
1

Whitehead basically agrees with James reading of Zeno, but adds that if
the parts that are the product of inadequate mathematical knowledge are
corrected by infinitesimal calculus, then a valid argument remains.
Whiteheads full answer comes with his cautious articulation of genetic and
morphogenetic analyses: the former deals with the concrescing actuality
and does not allow the use of infinitesimals; the latter applies to the past

logically possible history (Lowe, Ford's Discovery about Whitehead,
International Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 17, 1977, pp. 251-264, p. 226
reviewing Fords The Emergence of Whitehead's Metaphysics, 19251929,
Albany, New York, State University of New York Press, 1984).
1
Whitehead quotes Some Problems in Philosophy, Ch. X; the footnote adds: my
attention was drawn to this passage by its quotation in Religion in The
Philosophy of William James, by Professor J. S. Bixler. The source is likely to
have been Bixlers Religion in the Philosophy of William James, Boston,
Marshall Jones Co., 1926.
20 Michel Weber
actualities and provides the conditions of possibility of the infinite
divisibility of actualities in transition. Curiously, he does not raise here the
more fundamental issue that is the theorisation of the fitness (the
matchness?) of mathematics to the concrete.
Process and Reality is entirely built upon the adoption of ontological
percolation. From the perspective of the postmodern significance of
Whitehead's thought, the atomization of the act of experience is of
tremendous importance. It seals a mutual requirement between epochality,
liberty and novelty, thereby allowing a complete reformation of the old-
fashioned philosophical substantialism and of its heir, scientific
materialism. Independently existing substances with simple location are
replaced by strings of buds of experience (Whitehead speaks of nexuses of
actual entities). More precisely, the actual entities are hierarchized in
societies, and in societies of societies, allowing both for the irruption of the
unheard and its echoing in an ever-fluctuating cosmic tissue. As a result,
the laws of physics are the mere outcome of the social environment
(PR 204): The characteristic laws of inorganic matter are mainly the
statistical averages resulting from confused aggregates. (SMW 110) Let us
note, by the way, that James Principles of Psychology also featured a
revival of the Humean thesis of the relativity and contingency of the laws
of nature: The Laws of Nature are nothing but the immutable habits which
the different elementary sorts of matter follow in their actions and reactions
upon each other. (PP I 104)
1.3.2. Contiguism
According to Whitehead, it is obvious that pragmatism is nonsense apart
from final causation. (FR 26) The problem of the meshing of the
discontinuous and the continuous is vital for psychology as well as
philosophy, for epistemology as well as ontology. How is it possible to
categorialize the socialization of present and past actualities, of final and
efficient causation, of freedom and determinism? James saw as well that
novelty seems to violate continuity and that continuity seems to involve
infinitely shaded gradation (SPP 153):
The same returns not, save to bring the different. Time keeps
building into new moments, every one of which presents a content
which in its individuality never was before and will never be again.
(SPP 147-148)
Hence his use of the concept of contiguity in a radical empiricist way (e.g.,
ERE 108, PU 359 and MT 175 but also WB 246), that is implicitely
introduced when Whitehead socializes his epochal actualities, and that I
Whiteheads Reading of James and its Context 21
have extensively (no pun intended) used myself. Whiteheads technical
answer lies in the asymmetrical structure secured by vector-like
relationships. His more intuitive conceptualisation lies in his extended use
of the concept of feeling. Transitions are felt relations.
On the occasion of the examination of Bradley's notion of feeling, a
concept that expresses for him the primary activity at the basis of
experience, the connection is established with James:
I may add that William James also employs the word in much the
same sense in his Psychology. For example in the first chapter he
writes, Sensation is the feeling of first things. And in the second
chapter he writes, In general, this higher consciousness about things
is called Perception, the mere inarticulate feeling of their presence is
Sensation, so far as we have it at all. To some degree we seem able to
lapse into this inarticulate feeling at moments when our tension is
entirely dispersed. (AI 231)
The concept of feeling occupies a decisive place in Whitehead's lexicon.
Feelings are the internal-external (vectorial) relationships that grant both
the interdependence of all actual entities and their idiosyncratic atomicity.
Referring to Bradleys inclusive whole, he qualifies that naked awareness
as an experience itself in its origin and with the minimum of analysis
(AI 231). The proximity with the Jamesian concept of pure experience is
plain obvious.
1.3.3. Consciousness
The renewal of the concepts of consciousness and ego-soul is of course in
the continuation of the aforementioned issue of the ontological conditions
of possibility of a total cosmic processualization. Whitehead has done his
homework here:
The two modern philosophers who most consistently reject the
notion of a self-identical Soul-Substance are Hume and William
James. But the problem remains for them, as it does for the philosophy
of organism, to provide an adequate account of this undoubted
personal unity, maintaining itself amidst the welter of circumstance.
(AI 186-187)
In other words, if you allow the destruction of the substantialistic platform,
a difficult conceptual reconstructionthe replacement of the entitative
concept of consciousness by a functional if not a serial onehas to take
place in order to interpret the continuity evidenced by our experience. The
22 Michel Weber
death of the Cartesian Ego is evoked in length by Whitehead. Although it
is an exaggeration to attribute a general change in a climate of thought to
any one piece of writing, or to any one author (SMW 143), he goes on in
comparing Descartes' Discourse on Method with James Does
Consciousness Exist:
No doubt Descartes only expressed definitely and in decisive form
what was already in the air of his period. Analogously, in attributing to
William James the inauguration of a new stage in philosophy we
should be neglecting other influences of his time. But, admitting this,
there still remains a certain fitness in contrasting his essay, Does
Consciousness Exist published in 1904, with Descartes' Discourse on
Method, published in 1637. James clears the stage of the old
paraphernalia; or rather he entirely alters its lighting. Take for example
these two sentences from his essay: To deny plumply that
'consciousness' exists seems so absurd on the face of itfor
undeniably 'thoughts' do existthat I fear some readers will follow me
no farther. Let me then immediately explain that I mean only to deny
that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it
does stand for a function. (SMW 143)
As usual, Whitehead is very level-headed in his reading. He further
critically remarks:
In the essay in question, the character which James assigns to
consciousness is fully discussed. But he does not unambiguously
explain what he means by the notion of an entity, which he refuses to
apply to consciousness. In the sentence which immediately follows the
one which I have already quoted, he says: There is, I mean, no
aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which
material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are
made; but there is a function in experience which thoughts perform,
and for the performance of which this quality of being is invoked. That
function is knowing. 'Consciousness' is supposed necessary to explain
the fact that things not only are, but get reported, are known.
Thus James is denying that consciousness is a 'stuff'.
The term 'entity,' or even that of 'stuff,' does not fully tell its own
tale. The notion of 'entity' is so general that it may be taken to mean
anything that can be thought about. You cannot think of mere nothing;
and the something which is an object of thought may be called an
Whiteheads Reading of James and its Context 23
entity. In this sense, a function is an entity. Obviously, this is not what
James had in his mind. (SMW 144)
What James argument lacks, says Whitehead, is a clear definition and a
sharp analysis of the concept of substance that is discarded. But Whitehead
is identifying here a blind spot laming as well his own writings: one
cannot find in the Whiteheadian corpus a discussion of the proximity and
differences existing between the shades of meaning of the Greek and
Medieval concepts of substance and of the Modern one. The Greek concept
insists on what is permanent in change (basically, it is the question of the
ousia); the Modern one insists rather on what exists/stands by itself and is
directly correlated with a theological hypothesis (God as an independent
existent unaffected by time). Whitehead does not really distinguish
between these two concepts and mainly attacks the modern one from the
perspective of its neglect of time (fallacy of simple location) and because
of the bifurcations it installs. Now, some scholars have argued that it is
totally illegitimate to apply the criticism designed for the Modern concept
to the Greek or Medieval one, that could be read, it seems, in a process
fashion.
1
This point made, let us go on:
In agreement with the organic theory of nature which I have been
tentatively putting forward in these lectures, I shall for my own
purposes construe James as denying exactly what Descartes asserts in
his Discourse and his Meditations. Descartes discriminates two species
of entities, matter and soul. The essence of matter is spatial extension;
the essence of soul is its cogitation, in the full sense which Descartes
assigns to the word cogitare. (SMW 144)
Following James in this, Whitehead thus focuses only on the Modern
concept. He concludes:
The reason why I have put Descartes and James in close
juxtaposition is now evident. Neither philosopher finished an epoch by
a final solution of a problem. Their great merit is of the opposite sort.
They each of them open an epoch by their clear formulation of terms
in which thought could profitably express itself at particular stages of
knowledge, one for the seventeenth century, the other for the twentieth

1
See, e.g., Ivor Leclerc, The Nature of Physical Existence, London/New York,
George Allen and Unwin Ltd./Humanities Press Inc., 1972, or the last book of
William Norris Clarke, s. j.: The One and the Many. A Contemporary Thomistic
Metaphysics, Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 2001.
24 Michel Weber
century. In this respect, they are both to be contrasted with St. Thomas
Aquinas, who expressed the culmination of Aristotelian scholasticism.
In many ways neither Descartes nor James were the most
characteristic philosophers of their respective epochs. I should be
disposed to ascribe these positions to Locke and to Bergson
respectively, at least so far as concerns their relations to the science of
their times. (SMW 147)
The debate between Descartes and James is not a final one, but rather a
typical one for two main reasons. First, the vast majority of philosophical
texts use the understanding of the authors peers to contrast and sharpen a
personal vision.
When you are criticising the philosophy of an epochurges
Whitehead, do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual
positions which its exponents feel it necessary explicitly to defend.
There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all
the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such
assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are
assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to
them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of
philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes
the philosophy of the epoch. (SMW 48)
Second, in opposition with the dogmatic trend discoverable in some
thinkers, the debate, as it is settled by Descartes, James and Whitehead,
remains open.
There is one remaining question that ought to be treated: quid of the
possible influence of Jamesian panpsychism on the late Whitehead? The
simplest answer is: since there is no such thing as a Whiteheadian
panpsychism, trying to specify James impact at that level would be like
probing a conceptual mirage. It is mainly Hartshorne who has made that
misleading claimthat is totally foreign to Whiteheads corpus. As Lowe
says: Whitehead did not call his pluralistic metaphysics a panpsychism,
and was not happy when his studentmyself for onedid so.
1
A more
sophisticated assessment of that crucial question is postponed until section
6.2.2.

1
Victor A. Lowe, The Concept of Experience in Whiteheads Metaphysics, in
George L. Kline (ed.), Alfred North Whitehead, op. cit., pp. 124-133, p. 126.
Whiteheads Reading of James and its Context 25
1.3.4. Definition of Religion
James heuristic definition of religion is well-known:
Religion [] shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences
of individual man in their solitude, so far as they apprehend
themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the
divine. (VRE 31)
Whitehead has meditated that text (to which he refers in his Dialogues: cf.
supra) and so he writes in RM:
Religion is the art and theory of the internal life of man, so far as it
depends on the man himself and on what is permanent in the nature of
things. This doctrine is the direct negation of the theory that religion is
primarily a social fact. [] All collective emotions leave untouched
the awful ultimate fact, which is the human being, consciously alone
with itself, for its own sake. Religion is what the individual does with
his own solitariness. [] Religion is solitariness; and if you are never
solitary, you are never religious. (RM 16)
Both Whitehead and James discard religion qua institution as the object of
their thoughts. This does not mean that religious institutions are not worth
debating: it is simply another debate, a far more embarrassing one, that is
further qualified as subsidiary. Religion qua social construct does not have
the depth of meaning that religiousness has. What furthermore strikes the
reader is the common insistence on solitude. But what exactly happens then
to the all-embracing interconnectedness both authors argue for? James
understanding of the homo religiosus is the topic of chapter 5.