Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. Alfred North Whitehead opens this philosophical inquiry by contrasting shallow, historically changing symbols with the deeper forms that shape thought and life itself. From medieval architecture, ritual, and heraldry to language and algebra, he shows how signs, words, and expressions stand for meanings beyond themselves, and how perception itself works symbolically when a seen shape is instantly recognized as a chair. Yet this process is fallible: direct experience is immediate and in itself infallible, while symbolism can mislead belief, feeling, and action. Whitehead therefore defines symbolism as the way one part of experience calls forth awareness of another, with the percipient playing an active role in an ongoing, self-producing process. The book then builds a realist philosophy of perception through the linked modes of presentational immediacy and causal efficacy. Presentational immediacy gives vivid awareness of the contemporary world through color, sound, spatial order, and bodily feeling, but only as an abstracted appearance, not a private image. Causal efficacy reveals the resistant, conditioning force of the past, making time a field of conformation rather than mere succession. Against Hume and Kant, Whitehead argues that causal relations are genuinely present in experience, and that truth is discovered in the structure of actual facts, not imposed upon them by thought.