SOURCE: "Mead and Alexander on Time," in Beyond Humanism, Willett, Clark & Company, 1937, pp. 242-52.

In the following essay, Hartshorne explicates and identifies weaknesses in Alexander's arguments in Space, Time and Diety.

George Herbert Mead was a great philosopher and certainly a humanist. Until his Philosophy of the Act has been published it will be too soon to pass judgment on his philosophy. But there are some aspects of his system which seem fairly well defined by his extant writings, and these aspects suggest the following criticisms. In his Philosophy of the Present Mead declares that each age creates its own past—not its own image of the past, for Mead seems to deny the validity of this distinction. The past is the best image we can construct on the basis of present experience in its past-pointing characteristics. The question then arises of how the past which we infer...