Lancelot Law Whyte

“Every scientific generation, measured by its most vocal members, exaggerates the historical importance of its own members. ...there is a perpetual temptation to study the latest and to neglect the past.”

“Systematic errors of theory can seldom be discovered by direct attack; it is easier to uncover them by studying how and why physical theory took the path it did. That is why a clue to the future can sometimes be found in the past, and this is my reason for studying the history of atomism.”

“The most productive novelties often spring, in thought as in biological evolution, from more primitive and simpler forms, rather than from differentiated ones which, through their elaboration, have become too specialized to be adaptable to new tasks.”

“There are good reasons to expect... a return to a concreteness of basic ideas, to simpler fundamentals easily understood, to principles that will bring exact science closer to the human perspective.”

“Nothing is more surprising than the surprises of history, and nothing more untrustworthy than the uncritical extrapolation of the tendencies of the recent past.”

“The material particle or the conscious mind—has been discovered not to be sufficiently unchanging to be treated as a thing in isolation... but more often to be the opposite: a changing system in a changing environment.”

“Physics and psychology are going somewhere, but where they do not know. But... they are traveling from: Democritan permanent particles and the Cartesian mind necessarily aware. ...they are both traveling away from the same point of origin and in the same general direction: from the isolation of supposedly permanent "substances" towards the identification of changing relations potentially affecting everything; briefly, from substance to changing relations and structures.”

“Did ever the history of the intellect so little conceal so much?”

“No scientist has yet provided an acceptable definition of "mind" or "mental" that reveals the character of "unconscious mental processes," and no physicist a lucid definition of "elementary particles" that shows how they can appear or disappear, and why there are so many.”

“A clue to the future must lie in the past... every scientist, and everyone with intellectual curiosity, can learn something useful from a brief study of the history of atomism.”

“It is widely believed that only those who can master the latest quantum mathematics can understand anything of what is happening. That is not so, provided one takes the long view, for no one can see far ahead. Against a historical background, the layman can understand what is involved, for example, in the fascinating challenge of continuity and discontinuity expressed in the antithesis of field and particle.”

“The unitary system of thought has three main characteristics which distinguish it from many other systems: it deals with the form of systems rather than with their component parts; it recognizes a process of development as prior to the apparently static aspects of nature; and it is unitary, emphasizing one general form beneath all apparent dualism. (p. 21-22)”

“Thought is born of failure. When action satisfies there is no residue to hold the attention; to think is to confess a lack of adjustment which we must stop to consider. Only when the human organism fails to achieve an adequate response to its situation is there material for the process of thought, and the greater the failure the more searching they become. (p. 1)”

“The idea that time may be an active factor in causation has the mathematical significance that ' t ' (for the system in question) must appear explicitly in the formulation of the law. ...Such law may claim to express the fact of historic, irreversible duration.”