Science and the Modern World

Science and the Modern World opens Whitehead's turn from mathematics to metaphysics, challenging the picture of the world as enduring bits of inert matter. In its place it begins to set out a process philosophy in which reality is composed of momentary events of becoming rather than static substances.

The mature development of this view, fully articulated in Process and Reality, holds that actual occasions of experience each prehend, or feel and incorporate, their entire past and creatively respond before perishing into data for the next. Every actuality, however minute, has an experiential, value-laden inside; the universe is a creative advance of interrelated happenings.

It is a major rigorous ancestor of contemporary claims that consciousness is fundamental and that everything is interconnected. Its panexperientialism is a primary resource for modern panpsychism, its relational ontology underwrites holistic and ecological spirituality, and its process theology — a God in time, affected by the world and persuasive rather than coercive — proved congenial to New Thought.