calculus and mathematical set theory. Whitehead had come from collaborating
with Russell on the monumental Principia Mathematica (1910–1913); not
surprisingly, his move back into metaphysics was regarded by Russell as
apostasy.^48 The very concepts which Bradley had critiqued—substance and
attribute, subject and predicate, particular and universal—Whitehead (1929:
76–80) declared the source of confusion. He replaced them with a scheme
resembling Platonic eternal Ideas and Leibnizian monads, but which Whitehead
calls the philosophy of organism. There are no atomic elements or particulars;
the world is a plurality of “Actual Entities,” analogous to biological cell
complexes, whose components are inseparable. These are related not through
causality or other familiar relationships but through “prehension,” an ana-
logue to emotional feelings and appetites on the human level. The connected-
ness of the universe as a whole has an anthropomorphic character of mutual
appetition and satisfaction, which Whitehead refers to as “social”; it is mani-
fested in a sort of vitalistic self-causation of creative process. Prehensions are
conceptual as well as physical; there is an ultimate feeling-connection in logical
propositions as in the physical universe. God is a derivative notion in this
scheme, but Whitehead finds a place for the traditional religious values and
for a species of immortality. Whitehead regards it as the task of philosophy to
convey how science, morality, and religion all pervade one another; his system
resembles the other products of British Idealism in doing just this.
Idealism was creative in England for two generations: the first generation
of reform into the research university, and the next generation, when Ideal-
ism was challenged by anti-Idealist philosophies. In both cases the form of
creativity came from mixtures and oppositions. Just as in the first generation
Idealism built upon criticism of the Utilitarian reform ideology, in the follow-
ing generation the leading systems would take the new cultural capital of
psychology, mathematics, and physics to continue the Idealist trajectory of
rationalized religion. Idea ingredients can always be combined in various ways;
it is the surrounding institutional context that motivates which selections will
dominate.
Idealism in the United States
In the United States, university reform dominated the period 1870–1900 (Ve-
sey, 1965; Jencks and Riesman, 1968; Collins, 1979; Geiger, 1993). Hundreds
of undergraduate colleges had sprung up in earlier decades, products of sec-
tarian religious competition and decentralized political jurisdictions. Most
colleges lacked higher faculties, since during the post-Revolutionary period
of democratization professional training had been de-credentialized into ap-
prenticeship with practitioners. There was a lively market for entrepreneurs
Intellectuals Take Control: The University Revolution^ •^671