SOURCE: “A. N. Whitehead: Physicist and Prophet,” in From the Uncollected Edmund Wilson, Ohio University Press, 1995, pp. 56-72.

In the following essay, originally published in 1927, Wilson evaluates Whitehead's philosophy, calling Whitehead “perhaps one of the greatest creative minds of our day.”

Alfred North Whitehead was born in 1861, the son of Canon Whitehead, Vicar of St. Peter's on the Isle of Thanet. In the current number of the Atlantic Monthly, he has given some account of his childhood and of that region of the Kentish coast from which he comes. The characteristics of the people who have to cope with the currents, fogs, and storms of the English Channel are, he tells us, “obstinacy and a tendency to lonely thought.” Of his father, he says that he was perhaps “the last of those East Kentish clergymen who were really homogeneous with their people, and therefore natural leaders on all...