To: cosmicforce who wrote (3123 ) 1/16/2001 2:27:58 PM From: Daniel Schuh Read Replies (1) | Respond to So, I went looking for this pithy quote from Alfred North Whitehead, but I couldn't remember enough of it to dig it up. It was something about how people want to just know stuff, not go around having to verify what they believe. Instead, I came up with a couple less pithy bits that may be Whitehead or maybe Charles Hartshorne that you might appreciate.[MT 130][Over the past few centuries] the development of natural science has gradually discarded every single feature of the original common-sense notion. Nothing whatever remains of it, considered as expressing the primary features in terms of which the universe is to be interpreted. The obvious common-sense notion has been entirely destroyed, so far as concerns its function as the basis for all interpretation. One by one, every item as been dethroned. . . . [Yet] this common-sense notion still reigns supreme in the workaday life of mankind. It dominates the marketplace, the playgrounds, the law courts, and in fact the whole sociological intercourse of mankind. It is supreme in literature and is assumed in all the humanistic sciences. (from websyte.com , which was just the first thing google turned up on Whitehead).
