Symbolism, its Meaning and Effect Quotes

“We all know Aesop’s fable of the dog who dropped a piece of meat to grasp at its reflection in the water.  We must not, however, judge too severely of error.  In the initial stages of mental progress, error in symbolic reference is the discipline which promotes imaginative freedom.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT

“Presentational immediacy is our immediate perception of the contemporary external world, appearing as an element constitutive of our own experience.  In this appearance the world discloses itself to be a community of actual things, which are actual in the same sense as we are.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT

“There are deeper types of symbolism, in a sense artificial, and yet such that we could not get on without them.  Language, written or spoken, is such a symbolism.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT

“The word “experience” is one of the most deceitful in philosophy.  Its adequate discussion would be the topic for a treatise.  I can only indicate those elements in my analysis of it which are relevant to the present train of thought.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT

“It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to
recognize that the major advances in civilization
are processes which all but wreck the societies in
which they occur :—like unto an arrow in the
hand of a child.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism, its Meaning and Effect: Barbour-Page Lectures, University of Virginia 1927

“It will be evident to you that I am here controverting the most cherished tradition of modern philosophy, shared alike by the school of empiricists which derives from Hume, and the school of transcendental idealists which derives from Kant.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT

“Such a conception is paradoxical if you will persist in thinking of the actual world as a collection of passive actual substances with their private characters or qualities.  In that case, it must be nonsense to ask, how one such substance can form a component in the make-up of another such substance.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT

“The nineteenth century exaggerated the power of the historical method, and assumed as a matter of course that every character should be studied only in its embryonic stage.  Thus, for example, “Love” has been studied among the savages and latterly among the morons.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT