SOURCE: "Mead and Alexander on Time," in Beyond Humanism: Essays in the Philosophy of Nature, University of Nebraska Press, 1968, pp. 242-52.

In the following essay, which was originally published in 1937, Hartshorne contrasts Mead's philosophy of time with that of S. Alexander, concluding that Alexander's theory is "the only carefully elaborated, honest attempt . . . to work out a non-psychic metaphysics which the twentieth century has so far witnessed. "

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...