SOURCE: “The Philosophy of Whitehead,” in The Antioch Review, Vol. 8, No. 2, Summer, 1948, pp. 223-39.

In the following essay, Lowe surveys Whitehead's systematic philosophy, assessing it favorably.

Philosophy is the product of wonder. The effort after the general characterization of the world around us is the romance of human thought. The correct statement seems so easy, so obvious, and yet it is always eluding us. We inherit the traditional doctrine: we can detect the oversights, the superstitions, the rash generalizations of the past ages. We know so well what we mean and yet we remain so curiously uncertain about the formulation of any detail of our knowledge. … We have to analyze and to abstract, and to understand the natural status of our abstractions.

A civilization which cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility after a very limited period of progress.

These sentences shine with the self-evidence...