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This is a scholarly exposition of two complex philosophical doctrines, bringing out certain similarities in their approach which hitherto had not been sufficiently noticed. As the subtitle suggests, Mr Eisendraht's study has some relevance to the concerns of analytical psychology. But although James wrote an encyclopedic work on psychology, knew of Freud and favourably reviewed one of his earlier books, he rejected the notion of the unconscious altogether. While the writings of Whitehead, on the other hand, do not reveal any explicit interest in either Freud or Jung, he in his own intuitive way arrived at insights very similar to Jung's at around the same time. This can be illustrated by the following quotations among many:
‘Consciousness is an ever shifting process of abstracting shifting quality from a massive process of essential existence. It emphasizes. And yet, if we forget the background the result is triviality.’
‘In our experience there is always the dim background from which we derive and to which we return. We are not enjoying a limited doll's house of clear and distinct things, secluded from all ambiguity. In the darkness beyond there ever looms the vagueness which is the universe begetting us.’
Both James and Whitehead considered feeling as an essential element in human experience, and for Whitehead feeling was tantamount with creative advance—the unifying moment. Both struggled against the separation of a world of ideas from the world of facts. For them, as Mr Eisendraht points out, ideas were efficacious in the world, were real things in the universe. Here we can find another parallel with Jung, with his concept of the unus mundus. ‘The energetic activity considered in physics’, Whitehead wrote, ‘is the emotional intensity entertained in life.’ Ultimately, then, philosophy has the same aim as mysticism, namely, to achieve closeness with the world.