Abstract
THIS, the first of the Woodbridge Memorial Lectures, is a fine tribute to an American thinker recently dead, by one who shares a great deal of his philosophy and even more of his eminently civilized and humane attitude, his wide sympathies and his felicity of exposition. Prof. Sheldon classifies what he considers the important tendencies of recent philosophical thought, though without despising or distorting them, so as to bring out their relationship with his own views. His view of the nature of the opposition between rival philosophies is that each describes a genuine and important aspect of the world or general tendency of things, while apt to neglect others. Philosophers are generally right in what they assert, but wrong so far as they deny the reality or importance of the neglected aspects. Thus 'idealism' expresses the aspirations and insight of men as moral agents; 'materialism' the basic facts of existence, which the idealist despises (perhaps rightly) but ignores to his cost. Older attempts to effect a synthesis of these two extremes he calls 'scholasticism'—a recognition of the reality of both material and ideal as each playing a complementary part in an eternal divinely ordered scheme; for the scholastic order is fixed, reality eternal and temporal process entirely subordinate. Many recent thinkers (including the author) attempt a synthesis in terms of process, incremental change or evolution. Prof. Sheldon includes also in his scheme mysticism and scepticism, which are opposed in another dimension, as it were; and distinguishes two divergent forms of idealism, monistic and pluralistic.
Process and Potarity
By Prof. Wilmon Henry Sheldon. Pp. xvi + 153. (New York: Columbia University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1944.) 13s. 6d. net.
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RITCHIE, A. Process and Potarity. Nature 156, 376–377 (1945). https://doi.org/10.1038/156376a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/156376a0
