The Process of a Living Reality - How Does It Work? It's Time to Know Better

We are entering upon an age of reconstruction, in religion, in science, and in political thought. Such ages, if they are to avoid mere ignorant oscillation between extremes, must seek truth in its ultimate depth. There can be no vision of this depth of truth apart from a philosophy which takes full account of those ultimate abstractions, whose inter-connections it is the business of mathematics to explore. . .. The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact. - ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

But what abstract discipline can ethics, or aesthetics, or any non-physical interest of philosophers fall back upon? Mathematics does not apply to all phenomena. Certainly the "values" of ethics, as they are conceived to present, defy mathematical treatment .... How, then,. can we hope for the sort of abstract analysis of values which might lead to the discovery of really fundamental ideas? The indispensable tool of all philosophy is logic. Pure logic, of which pure mathematics is a branch, can deal with any subject matter whatever; it is not limited to just such concepts and premises as will define the sciences of quantity. But its possibilities in application to ethics, aesthetics, history, etc., are as yet entirely unexplored. Analyses of such concepts as "historic fact," "value," "life," and many others have never been undertaken. We have never seriously tried to find the conceptual elements out of which a science of ethics, for instance, could be made. - SUSANNE LANGER