( 1 ) Page xiv: The history of philosophy discloses two cosmologies which at periods have dominated European thought, Plato's Timaeus, and the different cosmology of the seventeenth century, whose chief authors were Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Locke. In attempting an enterprise of the same kind, it is wise to follow the clue that perhaps the true solution consists in a fusion of the two previous schemes, with modifications demanded by self, consistency and the advance of knowledge. The cosmology explained in these lectures has been framed in accordance with this reliance on the positive value of the philosophical tradition. One test of success is adequacy in the comprehension of the variety of experience within the limits of one scheme of ideas. The endeavour to satisfy this condition is illustrated by comparing Chapters III, VII, and X of Part II, respectively entitled 'The Order of Nature,' 'The Subjectivist Principle' and 'Process,' with Chapter V of Part III, entitled 'The Higher Phases of Experience,' and with Chapter V of Part IV, entitled 'Measurement,' and with Chapter II of Part V, entitled 'God and the World.' These chapters should be recognizable as the legitimate outcome of the one scheme of ideas stated in the second chapter of Part l.
( 2 ) Page 7: The attraction of Spinoza's philosophy lies in its modification of Descartes' position into greater coherence. He starts with one substance, causa sui, and considers its essential attributes and its individualized modes, i.e., the 'affectiones substantiae.' The gap in the system is the arbitrary introduction of the 'modes.' And yet, a multiplicity of modes is a fixed requisite, if the scheme is to retain any direct relevance to the many occasions in the experienced world. The philosophy of organism is closely allied to Spinoza's scheme of thought. But it differs by the abandonment of the subject-predicate forms of thought, so far as concerns the presupposition that this form is a direct embodiment of the most ultimate characterization of fact. The result is that the 'substance-quality' concept is avoided; and that morphological description is replaced by description of dynamic process. Also Spinoza's 'modes' now become the sheer actualities; so that though analysis of them increases our understanding, it does not lead us to the discovery of any higher grade of reality. The coherence, which the system seeks to preserve, is the discovery that the process, or concrescence, of any one actual entity involves the other actual entities among its components. In this way the obvious solidarity of the world receives its explanation. In all philosophic theory there is an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents. It is only then capable of characterization through its accidental embodiments, and apart from these accidents is devoid of [11] actuality. In the philosophy of organism this ultimate is termed 'creativity'; and Cod is its primordial, non-temporal accident. In monistic philosophies, Spinoza's or absolute idealism, this ultimate is God, who is also equivalently termed 'The Absolute.' In such monistic schemes, the ultimate is illegitimately allowed a final, 'eminent' reality, beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents. In this general position the philosophy of organism seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought. One side makes process ultimate; the other side makes fact ultimate.
( 3 ) Page 12: The truth itself is nothing else than how the composite natures of the organic actualities of the world obtain adequate representation in the divine nature. Such representations compose the 'consequent nature' of God, which evolves in its relationship to the evolving world without derogation to the eternal completion of its primordial conceptual nature. In this way the 'ontological principle' is maintained-since there can be no determinate truth, correlating impartially the partial experiences of many actual entities, apart from one actual entity to which it can be referred. The reaction of the temporal world on the nature of God is considered subsequently in part V: it is there termed 'the consequent nature of God.'
( 4 ) Page 18: 'Actual entities' also termed 'actual occasions' are the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything [28] more real. They differ among themselves: God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space. But, though there are gradations of importance, an diversities of function, yet in the principles which actuality exemplifies all are on the same level. The final facts are, all alike, actual entities; and these actual entities are drops of experience, complex and interdependent.
( 5 ) Page 19: In its recurrence to the notion of a plurality of actual entities the philosophy of organism is through and through Cartesian. The 'ontological principle' broadens and extends a general principle laid down by John Locke in his Essay (Bk. II, Ch. xxiii, sect. 7), when he asserts that "power" is "a great part of our complex ideas of substances." The notion of 'substance' is transformed into that of actual entity'; and the notion of 'power' is transformed into the principle that the reasons for things are always to be found in the composite nature of definite actual entities in the nature of God for reasons of the highest absoluteness, and in the nature of definite temporal actual entities for reasons which refer to a particular environment. The ontological principle can be summarized as: no actual entity, then no reason.
( 6 ) Page 31:[46] THE primordial created fact is the unconditioned conceptual valuation of the entire multiplicity of eternal objects. This is the 'primordial nature' of God. By reason of this complete valuation, the objectification of God in each derivate actual entity results in a graduation of the relevance of eternal objects to the concrescent phases of that derivate occasion. There will be additional ground of relevance for select eternal objects by reason of their ingression into derivate actual entities belonging to the actual world of the concrescent occasion in question. But whether or no this be the case, there is always the definite relevance derived from God. Apart from God, eternal objects unrealized in the actual world would be relatively nonexistent for the concrescence in question. For effective relevance requires agency of comparison, and agency belongs exclusively to actual occasions. This divine ordering is itself matter of fact, thereby conditioning creativity. Thus possibility which transcends realized temporal matter of fact has a real relevance to the creative advance.' God is the primordial creature, but the description of his nature is not exhausted by this conceptual side of it. His 'consequent nature' results from his physical prehensions of the derivative actual entities (cf. Part v).
( 7 ) Page 31: 'Creativity' is another rendering of the Aristotelian 'matter,' and of the modern 'neutral stuff.' But it is divested of the notion of passive receptivity, either of 'form,' or of external relations; it is the pure notion of the activity conditioned by the objective immortality of [47] the actual world--a world which is never the same twice, though always with the stable element of divine ordering. Creativity is without a character of its own in exactly the same sense in which the Aristotelian 'matter' is without a character of its own. It is that ultimate notion of the highest generality at the base of actuality. It cannot be characterized, because all characters are more special than itself. But creativity is always found under conditions, and described as conditioned. The non-temporal act of all-inclusive unfettered valuation is at once a creature of creativity and a condition for creativity. It shares this double character with all creatures. By reason of its character as a creature, always in concrescence and never in the past, it receives a reaction from the world; this reaction is its consequent nature. It is here termed 'God'; because the contemplation of our natures, as enjoying real feelings derived from the timeless source of all order, acquires that 'subjective form' of refreshment and companionship at which religions aim. This function of creatures, that they constitute the shifting character of creativity, is here termed the 'objective immortality' of actual entities. Thus God has objective immortality in respect to his primordial nature and his consequent nature. The objective immortality of his consequent nature is considered later (cf. Part v); we are now concerned with his primordial nature.
( 8 ) Page 32: God's immanence in the world in respect to his primordial nature is an urge towards the future based upon an appetite in the present. Appetition is at once the conceptual valuation of an immediate physical feeling combined with the urge towards realization of the datum conceptually prehended. For example, 'thirst' is an immediate physical feeling integrated with the conceptual prehension of its quenching.
( 9 ) Page 32: In what sense can unrealized abstract form be relevant? what is its basis of relevance? 'Relevance' must express some real fact of togetherness among forms. The ontological principle can be expressed as: All real togetherness is togetherness in the formal constitution of an actuality. So if there be a relevance of what in the temporal world is unrealized, the relevance must express a fact of togetherness in the formal constitution of a non-temporal actuality. But by the principle of relativity there can only be one non-derivative actuality, unbounded by its prehensions of an actual world. Such a primordial superject of creativity achieves, in its unity of satisfaction, the complete conceptual valuation of all eternal objects. This is the ultimate, basic adjustment of the togetherness of eternal objects on which creative order depends. It is the conceptual adjustment of all appetites in the form of aversions and adversions. It constitutes the meaning of relevance. Its status as an actual efficient fact is recognized by terming it the 'primordial nature of God.'
( 10 ) Page 33: The technical term 'conceptual prehension' is entirely neutral, devoid of all suggestiveness. But such terms present great difficulties to the understanding, by reason of the fact that they suggest no particular exemplifications. Accordingly, we seek equivalent terms which have about them the suggestiveness of familiar fact. We have chosen the term 'appetition,' which suggests exemplifications in our own experience, also in lower forms of life such as insects and vegetables. But even in human experience 'appetition' suggests a degrading notion of this basic activity in its more intense operations. We are closely concerned with what Bergson calls 'intuition' with some differences however Bergson's 'intuition' is an 'impute' operation; it is an integral feeling derived from the synthesis of the conceptual prehension with the physical prehension from which it has been derived according to the 'category of conceptual Reproduction' (categoreal obligation Iv). It seems that Bergson's term 'intuition' has the same meaning as 'physical purpose' in part III of these lectures. also Bergson's 'intuition' seems to abstract from the subjective form of emotion and purpose. This subjective form is an essential element in the notion of 'conceptual prehension,' as indeed in that of any prehension. It is an essential element in 'physical purpose' (cf. Part III). If we consider these 'pure' mental operations in their most intense operations, we should choose the term 'vision.' A conceptual prehension is a direct vision of some possibility of good or of evil-- of some possibility as to how actualities may be definite. There is no reference to particular actualities, or to any particular actual world. The phrase 'of good or of evil' has been added to include a reference to the subjective form; the mere word 'vision' abstracts from this factor in a conceptual prehension. If we say that God's primordial nature is a completeness of 'appetition, we give due weight to the subjective form at a cost. If we say that God's primordial nature is 'intuition ' we suggest mentality which is 'impure' by reason of synthesis with physical prehension. If we say that God's primordial nature is 'vision ', we suggest a maimed view of the subjective form, divesting it of yearning after concrete fact no particular facts, but after some actuality. There is deficiency in God's primordial nature which the term 'vision' obscures. One advantage of the term 'vision' is that it connects this doctrine of God more closely with philosophical tradition. 'Envisagement' is perhaps a safer term than 'vision.' To sum up: God's 'primordial nature' is abstracted from his commerce with 'particulars,' and is therefore devoid of those 'impure' intellectual cogitations which involve propositions (of. Part III).It is God in abstraction, alone with himself. As such it is a mere factor in God, deficient in actuality.
( 11 ) Page 36:Finally, in the cosmological scheme here outlined one implicit assumption of the philosophical tradition is repudiated. The assumption is that the basic elements of experience are to be described in terms of one, or all, of the three ingredients, consciousness, thought, sense-perception. The last term is used in the sense of 'conscious perception in the mode of presentational immediacy.' Also in practice sense-perception is narrowed down to visual perception. According to the philosophy of organism these three components are unessential elements in experience, either physical or mental. Any instance of experience is dipolar, whether that instance be God or an actual occasion of the world. The origination of God is from the mental pole, the origination of an actual occasion is from the physical pole; but in either case these elements, consciousness, thought, sense-perception, belong to the derivative 'impure' phases of the concrescence, if in any effective sense they enter at all. This repudiation is the reason why, in relation to the topic under discussion, the status of presentational immediacy is a recurrent theme throughout the subsequent parts of these lectures.
( 12 ) Page 44: In this definition the 'conceptual recognition' must of course be an operation constituting a real feeling belonging to some actual entity. The point is that the actual subject which is merely conceiving the eternal object is not thereby in direct relationship to some other actual entity, apart from any other peculiarity in the composition of that conceiving subject. This doctrine applies also to the primordial nature of God, which is his complete envisagement of eternal objects; he is not thereby directly related to the given course of history. The given course of history presupposes his primordial nature, but his primordial nature does not presuppose it.
( 13 ) Page 46: [73] The scope of the ontological principle is not exhausted by the corollary that 'decision' must be referable to an actual entity. Everything must be somewhere; and here 'somewhere' means 'some actual entity.' Accordingly the general potentiality of the universe must be somewhere; since it retains its proximate relevance to actual entities for which it is unrealized. This 'proximate relevance' reappears in subsequent concrescence as final causation regulative of the emergence of novelty. This 'somewhere' is the non-temporal actual entity. Thus 'proximate relevance' means 'relevance as in the primordial mind of God.
( 14 ) Page 46: It is a contradiction in terms to assume that some explanatory fact can float into the actual world out of nonentity. Nonentity is nothingness. Every explanatory fact refers to the decision and to the efficacy of an actual thing. The notion of 'subsistence' is merely the notion of how eternal objects can be components of the primordial nature of God. This is a question for subsequent discussion (cf. Part v).But eternal objects, as in God's primordial nature, constitute the platonic world of ideas.
( 15 ) Page 47: The doctrine of the philosophy of organism is that, however far the sphere of efficient causation be pushed in the determination of components of a concrescence its data, its emotions, its appreciations, its purposes, its phases of subjective aim beyond the determination of these components there always remains the final reaction of the self-creative unity of the universe. This final reaction completes the self-creative act by putting the decisive stamp of creative emphasis upon the determinations of efficient cause. Each occasion exhibits its measure of creative emphasis in proportion to its measure of subjective intensity. The absolute standard of such intensity is that of the primordial nature of God, which is neither great nor small because it arises out of no actual world. It has within it no components which are standards of comparison. But in the temporal world for occasions of relatively slight experient intensity, their decisions of creative emphasis are individually negligible compared to the determined components which they receive and transmit. But the final accumulation of all such decisions--the decision of God's nature and the decisions of all occasions--constitutes that special element in the flux of forms in history, which is 'given' and incapable of rationalization beyond the fact that within it every component which is determinable is internally determined.
( 16 ) Page 49: In this passage it is assumed 11 that Descartes the Ego in question is a particular, characterized only by universals. Thus his impression is to use Hume's word are characterizations by universals. Thus there is no perception of a particular actual entity. He arrives at the belief in the actual entity by 'the faculty of judgment.' But on this theory he has absolutely no analogy upon which to found any such inference with the faintest shred of probability. Hume, accepting Descartes' account of perception (in this passage), which also belongs to Locke in some sections of his Essay, easily draws the sceptical conclusion. Santayana irrefutably exposes the full extent to which this scepticism must be carried. The philosophy of organism recurs to Descartes' alternative theory of 'realitas objectiva,' and endeavours to interpret it in termĪ of a consistent ontology. Descartes endeavoured to combine the two theories; but his unquestioned acceptance of the subject-predicate dogma forced him [78] into a representative theory of perception, involving a 'judicium' validated by our assurance of the power and the goodness of God. The philosophy of organism in its account of prehension takes its stand upon the Cartesian terms 'realitas objectiva,' 'inspectio,' and 'intuitio.' The two latter terms are transformed into the notion of a 'positive prehension,' and into operations described in the various categories of physical and conceptual origination. A recurrence to the notion of 'God' is still necessary to mediate between physical and conceptual prehensions, but not in the crude form of giving a limited letter of credit to a 'judicium.'
( 17 ) Page 65:(b) the 'real' potentiality, which is conditioned by the data provided by the actual world. General potentiality is absolute, and real potentiality is relative to some actual entity, taken as a standpoint whereby the actual world is defined. It must be remembered that the phrase 'actual world' is like 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow,' in that it alters its meaning according to standpoint. The actual world must always mean the community of all actual entities, including the primordial actual entity called 'God' and the temporal actual entities. Curiously enough, even at this early stage of metaphysical discussion, the influence of the 'relativity theory' of modem physics is important. According to the classical 'uniquely serial' view of time, two contemporary actual entities define the same actual world. According to the modem view no two actual entities define the same actual world. Actual entities are called 'contemporary' when neither belongs to the 'given' actual world defined by the other. The differences between the actual worlds of a pair of contemporary entities, which are in a certain sense 'neighbours,' are negligible for most human purposes. Thus the difference between the 'classical' and the 'relativity' view of time only rarely has any important relevance. I shall always adopt the relativity view; for one reason, because it seems better to accord with the general philosophical doctrine of relativity which is presupposed in the philosophy of organism; and for another reason, because with rare exceptions the classical doctrine can be looked on as a special case of the relativity doctrine a case which does not seem to accord with experimental evidence. In other words, the classical view seems to limit a general philosophical doctrine; it is the larger assumption; and its consequences, taken in conjunction with other scientific principles, seem to be false.
( 18 ) Page 67:[103] (ii) The second metaphysical assumption is that the real potentialities relative to all standpoints are coordinated as diverse determinations of one extensive continuum. This extensive continuum is one relational complex in which all potential objectifications find their niche. It underlies the whole world, past, present, and future. Considered in its full generality, apart from the additional conditions proper only to the cosmic epoch of electrons, protons, molecules, and star-systems, the properties of this continuum are very few and do not include the relationships of metrical geometry. An extensive continuum is a complex of entities united by the various allied relationships of whole to part, and of overlapping so as to possess common parts, and of contact, and of other relationships derived from these primary relationships. The notion of a 'continuum' involves both the property of indefinite divisibility and the property of unbounded extension. There are always entities beyond entities, because nonentity is no boundary." This extensive continuum expresses the solidarity of all possible standpoints throughout the whole process of the world. It is not a fact prior to the world; it is the first determination of order--that is, of real potentiality arising out of the general character of the world. In its full generality beyond the present epoch, it does not involve shapes, dimensions, or measurability; these are additional determinations of real potentiality arising from our cosmic epoch. This extensive continuum is 'real,' because it expresses a fact derived from the actual world and concerning the contemporary actual world. All actual entities are related according to the determinations of this continuum; and all possible actual entities in the future must exemplify these determinations in their relations with the already actual world. The reality of the future is bound up with the reality of this continuum. It is the reality of what is potential, in its character of a real component of what is actual. Such a real component must be interpreted in [l04] terms of the relatedness of prehensions. This task will be undertaken in chapter V of part IV of these lectures. Actual entities atomize the extensive continuum. This continuum is in itself merely the potentiality for division; an actual entity effects this division. The objectification of the contemporary world merely expresses that world in terms of its potentiality for subdivision and in terms of the mutual perspectives which any such subdivision will bring into real effectiveness. These are the primary governing data for any actual entity; for they express how all actual entities are in the solidarity of one world. With the becoming of any actual entity what was previously potential in the space-time continuum is now the primary real phase in something actual. For each process of concrescence a regional standpoint in the world defining a limited potentiality for objectifications, has been adopted. In the mere extensive continuum there is no principle to determine what regional quanta shall be atomized, so as to form the real perspective standpoint for the primary data constituting the basic phase in the concrescence of an actual entity. The factors in the actual world whereby this determination is effected will be discussed at a later stage of this investigation. They constitute the initial phase of the 'subjective aim.' This initial phase is a direct derivate from God's primordial nature. In this function, as in every other, God is the organ of novelty, aiming at intensification.
( 19 ) Page 74: In Meditation II, after a slight recapitulation, he continues, speaking of God :
( 20 ) Page 75:phrase res vera in the same sense as that in which I have used the term 'actual.' It means 'existence' in the fullest sense of that term, beyond which there is no other. Descartes, indeed, would ascribe to God 'existence' in a generically different sense. In the philosophy of organism, as here developed, God's existence is not generically different from that of other actual entities, except that he is 'primordial' in a sense to be gradually explained . '.Descartes does not explicitly frame the definition of actuality in terms of the ontological principle, as given in section IV of this chapter, that actual occasions form the ground from which all other types of existence are derivative and abstracted; but he practically formulates an equivalent in subject-predicate phraseology, when he writes : "For this reason, when we perceive any attribute, we therefore conclude that some existing thing or substance to which it may be attributed, is necessarily present " 7 For Descartes the word 'substance' is the equivalent of my phrase 'actual occasion.' I refrain from the term 'substance ' for one reason because it suggests the subject-predicate notion, and for another reason because Descartes and Locke permit their substances to undergo adventures of changing qualifications, and thereby create difficulties. In the quotation from the second Meditation: "I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time that I pronounce it, or that I mentally conceive it," Descartes adopts the position that an act of experience is the primary type of actual occasion. But in his subsequent developments he assumes that his mental substances endure change. Here he goes beyond his argument. For each time he pronounces 'I am, I exist ' the actual occasion, which is the ego, is different; and the 'he' which is common to the two egos is an eternal object or, alternatively, the nexus of successive occasions. Also in the quotation from the first [117] Meditation he begins by appealing to an act of experience "I am here, seated by the fire. . . ." He then associates this act of experience with his body "these hands and body are mine." He then finally appeals for some final notion of actual entities in the remarkable sentence: "And for the same reason, although these general things, to wit, [a body], eyes, a head, hands, and such like, may be imaginary, we are bound at the same time to confess that there are at least some other objects yet more simple and more universal, which are real and true; and of these . . . all these images of things which dwell in out thoughts, whether true and real or false and fantastic, are formed."
( 21 ) Page 87:(iii) it has the superjective character, which is the pragmatic value of its specific satisfaction qualifying the transcendent creativity. In the case of the primordial actual entity, which is God, there is no past. Thus the ideal realization of conceptual feeling takes the precedence. God's differs from other actual entities in the fact that Hume's principle, of the derivate character of conceptual feelings, does not hold for him. There is still, however, the same threefold character:
( 22 ) Page 87:(i) The 'primordial nature' of God is the concrescence of a unity of conceptual feelings, including among their data all eternal objects. The concrescence is directed by the subjective aim, that the subjective forms of the feelings shall be such as to constitute the eternal objects into relevant lures of feeling severally appropriate for all realizable basic conditions.
( 23 ) Page 88:(ii) The 'consequent nature' of God is the physical prehension by God of the actualities of the evolving universe. His primordial nature directs such perspectives of objectification that each novel actuality in the temporal world contributes such elements as it can to a realization in God [135] free from inhibitions of intensity by reason of discordance.
( 24 ) Page 88:(iii) The 'superjective nature' of God is the character of the pragmatic value of his specific satisfaction qualifying the transcendent creativity in the various temporal instances.
( 25 ) Page 88: This is the conception of God, according to which he is considered as the outcome of creativity, as the foundation of order, and as the goad towards novelty. 'Order' and 'novelty' are but the instruments of his subjective aim which is the intensification of 'formal immediacy.' It is to be noted that every actual entity, including God, is something individual for its own sake; and thereby transcends the rest of actuality. And also it is to be noted that every actual entity, including God, is a creature transcended by the creativity which it qualifies. A temporal occasion in respect to the second element of its character, and God in respect to the first element of his character satisfy Spinoza's definition of substance, that it is causa sui. To be causa sui means that the process of concrescence is its own reason for the decision in respect to the qualitative clothing of feelings. It is finally responsible for the decision by which any lure for feeling is admitted to efficiency. The freedom inherent in the universe is constituted by this element of self-causation.
( 26 ) Page 88: In the subsequent discussion, 'actual entity' will be taken to mean a conditioned actual entity of the temporal world, unless God is expressly included in the discussion. The term 'actual occasion' will always exclude God from its scope.
( 27 ) Page 93: The Scholium betrays its abstractness by affording no hint of that aspect of self-production, of generation, of physics, of natura naturans, which is so prominent in nature. For the Scholium, nature is merely, and completely, there, externally designed and obedient. The full sweep of the modern doctrine of evolution would have confused the Newton of the Scholium. but would have enlightened the Plato of the Timaeus. So far as Newton is concerned, we have his own word for this statement. In a letter to Bentley, he writes: "when I wrote my treatise about our system, I had an eye upon such principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a Deity' " 7 The concept in Newton's mind is that of a fully articulated system requiring a definite supernatural origin with that articulation. This is the form of the cosmological argument, now generally abandoned as invalid; because our notion of causation concerns the relations of states of things within the actual world, and can only be illegitimately extended to a transcendent derivation. The notion of God, which will be discussed later (cf. Part v), is that of an actual entity immanent in the actual world, but transcending any finite cosmic epoch--a being at once actual, eternal, immanent, and transcendent. The transcendence of God is not peculiar to him.
( 28 ) Page 94:
( 29 ) Page 95: There is another point in which the organic philosophy only repeats Plato. In the Timaeus the origin of the present cosmic epoch is traced back to an aboriginal disorder, chaotic according to our ideals. This is the evolutionary doctrine of the philosophy of organism. Plato's notion has puzzled critics who are obsessed with the Semitic theory of a wholly transcendent God creating out of nothing an accidental universe. Newton held the Semitic theory. The Scholium made no provision for the evolution of matter very naturally, since the topic lay outside its scope. The result has been that the non-evolution of matter has been a tacit presupposition throughout modern thought. Until the last few years the sole alternatives were: either the material universe, with its present type of order, is eternal; or else it came into being, and will pass out of being, according to the fiat of Jehovah. Thus, on all sides, Plato's allegory of the evolution of a new type of order based on new types of dominant societies became a daydream, puzzling to commentators. Milton, curiously enough, in his paradise Lost wavers between the Timaeus and the Semitic doctrine. This is only another instance of the intermixture of classical and Hebrew notions on which his charm of thought depends.
( 30 ) Page 105: The primordial appetitions which jointly constitute God's purpose are seeking intensity, and not preservation. Because they are primordial, there is nothing to preserve. He, in his primordial nature, is unmoved by love for this particular, or that particular; for in this foundational process of creativity, there are no preconstituted particulars. In the foundations of his being, God is indifferent alike to preservation and to novelty. [16l] He cares not whether an immediate occasion be old or new, so far as concerns derivation from its ancestry. His aim 16 for it is depth of satisfaction as an intermediate step towards the fulfillment of his own being. His tenderness is directed towards each actual occasion, as it arises.
( 31 ) Page 105: Thus God's purpose in the creative advance is the evocation of intensities. The evocation of societies is purely subsidiary to this absolute end. The characteristic of a living society is that a complex structure of inorganic societies is woven together for the production of a non-social nexus characterized by the intense physical experiences of its members. But such an experience is derivate from the complex order of the material animal body, and not from the simple 'personal order' of past occasions with analogous experience. There is intense experience without the shackle of reiteration from the past. This is the condition for spontaneity of conceptual reaction. The conclusion to be drawn from this argument is that life is a characteristic of 'empty space' and not of space 'occupied' by any corpuscular society. In a nexus of living occasions, there is a certain social deficiency. Life lurks in the interstices of each living cell, and in the interstices of the brain.
( 32 ) Page 107:17 This account of a living personality requires completion by reference to its objectification in the consequent nature of God. cf. Part v, Ch. II.
( 33 ) Page 108: It must also be noted that the pure mental originality works by the canalization of relevance arising from the primordial nature of God. Thus an originality in the temporal world is conditioned, though not determined, by an initial subjective aim supplied by the ground of all order and of all originality.
( 34 ) Page 110:[168] So far the discussion has chiefly concentrated upon the discrimination of the modes of functioning which in germ, or in mere capacity, are represented in the constitution of each actual entity. The presumption that there is only one genus of actual entities constitutes an ideal of cosmological theory to which the philosophy of organism endeavours to conform. The description of the generic character of an actual entity should include God, as well as the lowliest actual occasion, though there is a specific difference between the nature of God and that of any occasion. Also the differences between actual occasions, arising from the characters of their data, and from the narrowness and widths of their feelings, and from the comparative importance of various stages, enable a classification to be made whereby these occasions are gathered into various types. From the metaphysical standpoint these types are not to be sharply discriminated; as a matter of empirical observation, the occasions do seem to fall into fairly distinct classes.
( 35 ) Page 111: The immanence of God gives reason for the belief that pure chaos is intrinsically impossible. At the other end of the scale, the immensity of the world negatives the belief that any state of order can be so established that beyond it there can be no progress. This belief in a final order, popular in religious and philosophic thought, seems to be due to the prevalent fallacy that all types of seriality necessarily involve terminal instances. It follows that Tennyson's phrase,
( 36 ) Page 144:[218] A COMPARISON of the different ways in which Descartes and Locke respectively conceived the scope of their investigations at once discloses the very important shift which Locke introduced into the tradition of philosophic thought. Descartes asked the fundamental metaphysical question, what is it to be an actual entity? He found three kinds of actual entities, namely, cogitating minds, extended bodies, and God. His word for an actual entity was 'substance.' The fundamental proposition, whereby the analysis of actuality could be achieved, took the form of predicating a quality of the substance in question. A quality was either an accident or an essential attribute. In the Cartesian philosophy there was room for three distinct kinds of change: one was the change of accidents of an enduring substance; another was the origination of an individual substance; and the third was the cessation of the existence of an enduring substance. Any individual belonging to either of the first two kinds of substances did not require any other individual of either of these kinds in order to exist. But it did require the concurrence of God. Thus the essential attributes of a mind were its dependence on God and its cogitations; and the essential attributes of a body were its dependence on God and its extension. Descartes does not apply the term 'attribute' to the 'dependence on God'; but it is an essential element in his philosophy. It is quite obvious that the accidental relationships between diverse individual substances form a great difficulty for Descartes. If they are to be included in his scheme of the actual [219] world, they must be qualities of a substance. Thus a relationship is the correlation of a pair of qualities, one belonging exclusively to one individual and the other exclusively to the other individual. The correlation itself must be referred to God as one of his accidental qualities. This is exactly Descartes' procedure in his theory of representative ideas. In this theory, the perceived individual has one quality; the perceiving individual has another quality which is the 'idea' representing this quality; God is aware of the correlation; and the perceiver's knowledge of God guarantees for him the veracity of his idea. It is unnecessary to criticize this very artificial account of what common sense believes to be our direct knowledge of other actual entities. But it is the only account consistent with the metaphysical materials provided by Descartes, combined with his assumption of a multiplicity of actual entities.
( 37 ) Page 158: Descartes held, with some flashes of inconsistency arising from the use of 'realitas objectiva', the subjectivist principle as to the datum. But he also held that this mitigation of the subjectivist* principle enabled the 'process' within experience to include a sound argument for the existence of God; and thence a sound argument for the general veridical character of those presumptions [240] as to the external world which somehow arise in the process.
( 38 ) Page 164:The limitation whereby there is a perspective relegation of eternal objects to the background is the characteristic of decision. Transcendent decision includes God's decision. He is the actual entity in virtue of which the entire multiplicity of eternal objects obtains its graded relevance to each stage of concrescence. Apart from God, there could be no relevant novelty. Whatever arises in actual entities from God's decision, arises first conceptually, and is transmuted into the physical world (cf. Part III). In 'transcendent decision' there is transition from the past to the immediacy of the present; and in 'immanent decision' there is the process of acquisition of subjective form and the integration of feelings. In this process the creativity, universal throughout actuality, is characterized by the datum from the past; and it meets this dead datum universalized into a character of creativity by the vivifying novelty of subjective form selected from the multiplicity of pure potentiality. In the process, the old meets the new, and this meeting constitutes the satisfaction of an immediate particular individual.
( 39 ) Page 189:The primary element in the 'lure for feeling' is the subject's prehension of the primordial nature of God. Conceptual feelings are generated, and by integration with physical feelings a subsequent phase of propositional feelings supervenes. The lure for feeling develops with the concrescent phases of the subject in question. I have spoken of it elsewhere (cf. Science and the Modern world, Ch. XI ) .
( 40 ) Page 190: The difficulties of the subjectivist doctrine arise when it is combined with the 'sensationalist' doctrine concerning the analysis of the components which are together in experience. According to that analysis in such a component the only elements not stamped with the particularity of that individual 'occasion' or 'stream' of experience are universals such as 'redness' or 'shape.' with the sensationalist assumption, or with any generalization of that doctrine, so long as the elements in question are universals, the only alternatives are, either Bradley's doctrine of a single experient, the absolute, or Leibniz's doctrine of many windowless monads. Kant, in his final metaphysics, must either retreat to Leibniz, or advance to Bradley. Either alternative stamps experience with a certain air of illusoriness. The Leibnizian solution can mitigate the illusoriness only by recourse to a pious dependence upon God. This principle was invoked by Descartes and by Leibniz, in order to help out their epistemology. It is a device very repugnant to a consistent rationality. The very possibility of knowledge should not be an accident of God's goodness; it should depend on the interwoven natures of things. After all, God's knowledge has equally to be explained.
( 41 ) Page 207: This principle expresses the prehension by every creature of the graduated order of appetitions constituting the primordial nature of God. There can thus be an intuition of an intrinsic suitability of some definite outcome from a presupposed situation. There will be nothing statistical in this suitability. It depends upon the fundamental graduation of appetitions which lies at the base of things, and which solves all indeterminations of transition.
( 42 ) Page 207: It must not be thought that these non-statistical judgments are in any sense religious. They lie at a far lower level of experience than do the religious emotions. The secularization of the concept of God's functions in the world is at least as urgent a requisite of thought as is the secularization of other elements in experience. The concept of God is certainly one essential element in religious feeling. But the converse is not true; the concept of religious feeling is not an essential element in the concept of God's function in the universe. In this respect religious literature has been sadly misleading to philosophic theory, partly by attraction and partly by repulsion.
( 43 ) Page 220: The terminal unity of operation, here called the 'satisfaction,' embodies what the actual entity is beyond itself. In Locke's phraseology, the 'powers' of the actual entity are discovered in the analysis of the satisfaction. In Descartes' phraseology, the satisfaction is the actual entity considered as analysable in respect to its existence [336] 'objective.' It is the actual entity as a definite, determinate, settled fact, stubborn and with unavoidable consequences. The actual entity as described by the morphology of its satisfaction is the actual entity 'spatialized,' to use Bergson's term. The actual entity, thus spatialized, is a given individual fact actuated by its own 'substantial form.' Its own process, which is its own internal existence, has evaporated, worn out and satisfied; but its effects are all to be described in terms of its 'satisfaction.' The 'effects' of an actual entity are its interventions in concrescent processes other than its own. Any entity, thus intervening in processes transcending itself, is said to be functioning as an 'object.' According to the fourth category of Explanation it is the one general metaphysical character of all entities of all sorts, that they function as objects. It is this metaphysical character which constitutes the solidarity of the universe. The peculiarity of an actual entity is that it can be considered both 'objectively' and 'formally.' The 'objective' aspect is morphological so far as that actual entity is concerned: by this it is meant that the process involved is transcendent relatively to it, so that the esse of its satisfaction is sentiri. The 'formal' aspect is functional so far as that actual entity is concerned: by this it is meant that the process involved is immanent in it. But the objective consideration is pragmatic. It is the consideration of the actual entity in respect to its consequences. In the present chapter the emphasis is laid upon the formal consideration of an actual entity. But this formal consideration of one actual entity requires reference to the objective intervention of other actual entities. This objective intervention of other entities constitutes the creative character which conditions the concrescence in question. The satisfaction of each actual entity is an element in the givenness of the universe: it limits boundless, abstract possibility into the particular real potentiality from which each novel concrescence originates. The 'boundless, abstract possibility' means the creativity [337] considered solely in reference to the possibilities of the intervention of eternal objects, and in abstraction from the objective intervention of actual entities belonging to any definite actual world, including God among the actualities abstracted from.
( 44 ) Page 222:If the subject-predicate form of statement be taken to be metaphysically ultimate, it is then impossible to express this doctrine of feelings and their superject. It is better to say that the feelings aim at their subject, than to say that they are aimed at their subject. For the latter mode of expression removes the subject from the scope of the feeling and assigns it to an external agency. Thus the feeling would be wrongly abstracted from its own final cause. This final cause is an inherent element in the feeling, constituting the unity of that feeling. An actual entity feels as it does feel in order to be the actual entity which it is. In this way an actual entity satisfies Spinoza's notion of substance: it is causa sui. The creativity is not an external agency with its own ulterior purposes. All actual entities share with God this characteristic of self-causation. For this reason every actual entity also shares with God the characteristic of transcending all other actual entities, including God. The [340] universe is thus a creative advance into novelty. The alternative to this doctrine is a static morphological universe.
( 45 ) Page 224:The ground, or origin, of the concrescent process is the multiplicity of data in the universe, actual entities and eternal objects and propositions and nexus. Each new phase in the concrescence means the retreat of mere propositional unity before the growing grasp of real unity of feeling. Each successive propositional phase is a lure to the creation of feelings which promote its realization. Each temporal entity, in one sense, originates from its mental pole, analogously to God himself. It derives from God its basic conceptual aim, relevant to its actual world, yet with indeterminations awaiting its own decisions. This subjective aim, in its successive modifications, remains the unifying factor governing the successive phases of interplay between physical and conceptual feelings. These decisions are impossible for the nascent creature antecedently to the novelties in the phases of its concrescence. But this statement in its turn requires amplification. With this amplification the doctrine, that the primary phase of a temporal actual entity is physical, is recovered. A 'physical feeling' is here defined to be the feeling of another actuality. If the other actuality be objectified by its conceptual feelings, the physical feeling of the subject in question is termed 'hybrid.' Thus the primary phase is a hybrid physical feeling of cod, in respect to God's conceptual feeling which is immediately relevant to the universe 'given' for that concrescence. There is then, according to the category of conceptual valuation, i.e., categoreal obligation IV, a derived conceptual feeling which reproduces for the subject the data and valuation of God's conceptual feeling. This conceptual feeling is the initial conceptual aim referred to in the preceding statement. In this sense, God can be termed the creator of each temporal actual entity. But the phrase is apt to be misleading by [344] its suggestion that the ultimate creativity of the universe is to be ascribed to God's volition. The true metaphysical position is that God is the aboriginal instance of this creativity, and is therefore the aboriginal condition which qualifies its action. It is the function of actuality to characterize the creativity, and God is the eternal primordial character. But, of course, there is no meaning to 'creativity' apart from its 'creatures,' and no meaning to 'God' apart from the 'creativity' and the 'temporal creatures,' and no meaning to the 'temporal creatures' apart from 'creativity' and 'God.'
( 46 ) Page 231:Thus, just as the 'feeling as one' cannot bear the abstraction from it of the subject, so the 'data as one' cannot bear the abstraction from it of every feeling which feels it as such. According to the ontological principle, the impartial nexus is an objective datum in the consequent nature of God; since it is somewhere and yet not by any necessity of its own nature implicated in the [353] feelings of any determined actual entity of the actual world. The nexus involves realization somewhere. This is the first use of the term nexus.
( 47 ) Page 244: [373] ACCORDING to the ontological principle there is nothing which floats into the world from nowhere. Everything in the actual world is referable to some actual entity. It is either transmitted from an actual entity in the past, or belongs to the subjective aim of the actual entity to whose concrescence it belongs. This subjective aim is both an example and a limitation of the ontological principle. It is an example, in that the principle is here applied to the immediacy of concrescent fact. The subject completes itself during the process of concrescence by a self-criticism of its own incomplete phases. In another sense the subjective aim limits the ontological principle by its own autonomy. But the initial stage of its aim is an endowment which the subject inherits from the inevitable ordering of things, conceptually realized in the nature of God. The immediacy of the concrescent subject is constituted by its living aim at its own self-constitution. Thus the initial stage of the aim is rooted in the nature of God, and its completion depends on the self-causation of the subject-superject. This function of God is analogous to the remorseless working of things in Greek and in Buddhist thought. The initial aim is the best for that impasse. But if the best be bad, then the ruthlessness of God can be personified as Ate, the Goddess of mischief. The chaff is burnt. What is inexorable in God, is valuation as an aim towards 'order'; and 'order' means 'society permissive of actualities with patterned intensity of feeling arising from adjusted contrasts. In this sense God is the principle of concretion; namely, he is that actual entity from which each temporal concrescence receives that initial aim from which its self-causation starts. That aim determines the initial gradations of relevance of eternal objects for conceptual feeling; and constitutes the autonomous subject in its primary phase of feelings with its initial conceptual valuations, and with its initial physical purposes. Thus the transition of the creativity from an actual world to the correlate novel concrescence is conditioned by the relevance of God's all-embracing conceptual valuations to the particular possibilities of transmission from the actual world, and by its relevance to the various possibilities of initial subjective form available for the initial feelings. In this way there is constituted the concrescent subject in its primary phase with its dipolar constitution, physical and mental, indissoluble.
( 48 ) Page 245:If we prefer the phraseology, we can say that God and the actual world jointly constitute the character of the creativity for the initial phase of the novel concrescence. The subject, thus constituted, is the autonomous n}aster of its own concrescence into subject-superject. It passes from a subjective aim in concrescence into a superject with objective immortality. At any stage it is subject-superject. According to this explanation, self-determination is always imaginative in its origin. The deterministic efficient causation is the inflow of the actual world in its own proper character of its own feelings, with their own intensive strength, felt and re-enacted by the novel concrescent subject. But this re-enaction has a mere character of conformation to pattern. The subjective valuation is the work of novel conceptual feeling; and in proportion to its importance, acquired in complex processes of integration and reintegration, this autonomous conceptual element modifies the subjective forms throughout the whole range of feeling in that concrescence and thereby guides the integrations.
( 49 ) Page 246: There are evidently two subspecies of hybrid feelings : (i) those which feel the conceptual feelings of temporal actual entities, and (ii) those which feel the conceptual feelings of God.
( 50 ) Page 246: The objectification of God in a temporal subject is effected by the hybrid feelings with God's conceptual feelings as data.
( 51 ) Page 247: Those of God's feelings which are positively prehended are those with some compatibility of contrast, or of identity, with physical feelings transmitted from the temporal world. But when we take God into account, then we can assert without any qualification Hume's principle, that all conceptual feelings are derived from physical feelings. The limitation of Hume's principle introduced by the consideration of the category of conceptual Reversion (cf. Sect. III of this chapter) is to be construed as referring merely to the transmission from the temporal world, leaving God out of account.
( 52 ) Page 247:from the intervention of God, there could be nothing new in the world, and no order in the world. The course of creation would be a dead level of ineffectiveness, with all balance and intensity progressively excluded by the cross currents of incompatibility. The novel hybrid feelings derived from God, with the derivative sympathetic conceptual valuations, are the foundations of progress. [378]
( 53 ) Page 247: Conceptual feelings are primarily derivate from physical feelings, and secondarily from each other. In this statement, the consideration of God's intervention is excluded. When this intervention is taken into account, all conceptual feelings must be derived from physical feelings. Unfettered conceptual valuation, 'infinite' in Spinoza's sense of that term, is only possible once in the universe; since that creative act is objectively immortal as an inescapable condition characterizing creative action.
( 54 ) Page 250:In conformity with the ontological principle, this question can be answered only by reference to some actual entity. Every eternal object has entered into the conceptual feelings of God. Thus, a more fundamental account must ascribe the reverted conceptual feeling in a temporal subject to its conceptual feeling derived, according to category IV, from the hybrid physical feeling of the relevancies conceptually ordered in God's experience j In this way, by the recognition of God's characterization of the creative act, a more complete rational explanation is attained. The category of Reversion is then abolished; and Hume's principle of the derivation of conceptual experience from physical experience remains without any exception.
( 55 ) Page 256:[392] But now a new kind of entity presents itself. Such entities are the tales that perhaps might be told bout particular actualities. Such entities are neither actual entities, nor eternal objects, nor feelings. They are propositions. A proposition must be true or false. Herein a proposition differs from an eternal object; for no eternal object is ever true or false. This difference between propositions and eternal objects arises from the fact that truth and falsehood are always grounded upon a reason. But according to the ontological principle (the eighteenth 'category of explanation'), a reason is always a reference to determinate actual entities. Now an eternal object, in itself, abstracts from all determinate actual entities, including even God. It is merely referent to any such entities, in the absolutely general sense of any. Then there can be no reason upon which to found
( 56 ) Page 257:Thus the endeavour to understand eternal objects in complete abstraction from the actual world results in reducing them to mere undifferentiated nonentities. This is an exemplification of the categoreal principle, that the general metaphysical character of being an entity is 'to be a determinant in the becoming of actualities.' Accordingly the differentiated relevance of eternal objects to each instance of the creative process requires their conceptual realization in the primordial nature of God. He does not create eternal objects; for his nature requires them in the same degree that they require him. This is an exemplification of the coherence of the categoreal types of existence. The general relationships of eternal objects to each other, relationships of diversity and of pattern, are their relationships in God's conceptual realization.: Apart from this realization, there is mere isolation indistinguishable from nonentity.
( 57 ) Page 278:Thus there is the urge towards the realization of the maximum number of eternal objects subject to the restraint that they must be under conditions of contrast. But this limitation to 'conditions of contrast' is the demand for 'balance.' For 'balance' here means that no realized eternal object shall eliminate potential contrasts between other realized eternal objects. Such eliminations attenuate the intensities of feeling derivable from the ingressions of the various elements of the pattern. Thus so far as the immediate present subject is concerned, the origination of conceptual valuation according to category Iv is devoted to such a disposition of emphasis as to maximize the integral intensity derivable from the most favorable balance. The subjective aim is the selection of the balance amid the given materials. But one element in the immediate feelings of the concrescent [425] subject is comprised of the anticipatory feelings of the transcendent future in its relation to immediate fact. This is the feeling of the objective immortality inherent in the nature of actuality. Such anticipatory feelings involve realization of the relevance of eternal objects as decided in the primordial nature of God. In so far as these feelings in the higher organisms rise to important intensities there are effective feelings of the more remote alternative possibilities. Such feelings are the conceptual feelings which arise in accordance with the category of Reversion (Category V ) .
( 58 ) Page 283:Physical time makes its appearance in the 'coordinate' analysis of the 'satisfaction.' The actual entity is the enjoyment of a certain quantum of physical time. But the genetic process is not the temporal succession: such a view is exactly what is denied by the epochal theory of time. Each phase in the genetic process presupposes the entire quantum, and so does each feeling in each phase. The subjective unity dominating the process forbids the division of that extensive quantum which originates with the primary phase of the subjective aim. The problem dominating the concrescence is the actualization of the quantum in solido. The quantum is that standpoint in the extensive continuum which is consonant with the subjective aim in its original derivation from God. Here 'God' is that actuality in the world, in virtue of which there is physical 'law.'
( 59 ) Page 316:The philosophy of organism provides for this relevance by means of two doctrines, (i) the doctrine of God embodying a basic completeness of appetition, and (ii) the doctrine of each occasion effecting a concrescence of the universe, including God. Then, by the category of conceptual Reproduction, the vector prehensions of God's appetition, and of other occasions, issue in the mental pole of conceptual prehensions; and by integration of this pole with the pure physical prehensions there arise the primitive physical feelings of sensa, with their subjective forms, emotional and purposive. These feelings, with their primitive simplicity, arise into distinctness by reason of the elimination effected by this integration of the vector prehensions with the conceptual appetitions. Such primitive feelings cannot be separated from their subjective forms. The subject never loses its triple character of recipient, patient, and agent. These primitive feelings have already been considered under the name of 'physical purposes' (cf. Part III, Ch. V).They correspond to Hume's 'impressions of sensation.' But they do not originate the process of experience.
( 60 ) Page 325:The Cartesian doctrine of the 'realitas objectiva' attaching to presentational immediacy is entirely denied by the modern doctrine of private psychological fields. Locke's doctrine of 'secondary qualities' is a halfway house to the modern position, and indeed so is Descartes' own position considered as a whole. Descartes' doctrine on this point is obscure, and is interpretable as according with that of the philosophy of organism. But Locke conceives the sensa as purely mental additions to the facts of physical nature. Both philosophers conceive the physical world as in essential independence of the mental world, though the two worlds have ill-defined accidental relationships. According to the philosophy of organism, physical and mental operations are inextricably intertwined; also we find the sensa functioning as forms participating in the vector prehensions of one occasion by another; and finally in tracing the origin of presentational immediacy, we find mental operations transmuting the functions of sensa so as to transfer them from being participants in causal prehensions into participants in presentational prehensions. But throughout the whole story, the sensa are participating in nature as much as anything else. It is the function of mentality to modify the physical participation of eternal objects: the case of presentational prehensions is only one conspicuous example. The whole doctrine of mentality from the case of God downwards is that it is a modifying agency. But Descartes and Locke abandon the 'realitas objectiva' so far as sensa are concerned (but for Descartes, cf. Meditation I, "it is certain all the same that the colours of [497] which this is composed are necessarily real"), and hope to save it so fat as extensive relations are concerned. This is an impossible compromise. It was easily swept aside by Berkeley and Hume. (cf. Enquiry, sect. XII, part I Hume, with obvious truth, refers to Berkeley as the originator of this train of argument.) The modern doctrine of 'private psychological fields' is the logical result of Hume's doctrine, though it is a result which Hume 'as an agent' refused to accept. This modern doctrine raises a great difficulty in the interpretation of modern science. For all exact observation is made in these private psychological fields. It is then no use talking about instruments and laboratories and physical energy. What is really being observed are narrow bands of colour-sensa in the private psychological space of colour-vision. The impressions of sensation which collectively form this entirely private experience 'arise in the soul from unknown causes.' The spectroscope is a myth, the radiant energy is a myth, the observer's eye is a myth, the observer's brain is a myth, and the observer's record of his experiment on a sheet of paper is a myth. When, some months later. he reads his notes to a learned society, he has a new visual experience of black marks on a white background in a new private psychological field. And again, these experiences arise in his soul 'from unknown causes.' It is merely 'custom' which leads him to connect his earlier with his later experiences.
( 61 ) Page 340:Each new epoch enters upon its career by waging unrelenting war upon the aesthetic Gods of its immediate predecessor. Yet the culminating fact of conscious, rational life refuses to conceive itself as a transient enjoyment, transiently useful. In the order of the physical world its role is defined by its introduction of novelty. But, just as physical feelings are haunted by the vague insistence of causality, so the higher intellectual feelings are haunted by the vague insistence of another order, where there is no unrest, no travel, no shipwreck : 'There shall be no more sea.'
( 62 ) Page 341:In our cosmological construction we are, therefore, left with the final opposites, joy and sorrow, good and evil, disjunction and conjunction --that is to say, the many in one --flux and permanence, greatness and triviality, freedom and necessity, God and the world. In this list, the pairs of opposites are in experience with a certain ultimate directness of intuition, except in the case of the last pair. God and the world introduce the note of interpretation. They embody the interpretation of the cosmological problem in terms of a fundamental metaphysical doctrine as to the quality of creative origination, namely, conceptual appetition and physical realization. This topic constitutes the last chapter of cosmology.
( 63 ) Page 342:GOD AND THE WORLD
( 64 ) Page 342:The notion of God as 'eminently real' is a favorite doctrine of Christian theology. The combination of the two into the doctrine of an aboriginal, eminently real, transcendent creator, at whose fiat the world came into being, and whose imposed will it obeys. is the fallacy which has infused tragedy into the histories of Christianity and of Mahometanism.
( 65 ) Page 342:When the western world accepted Christianity, Caesar conquered; and the received text of western theology was edited by his lawyers. The code of Justinian and the theology of Justinian are two volumes expressing [520] one movement of the human spirit. The brief Galilean vision of humility flickered throughout the ages, uncertainly. In the official formulation of the religion it has assumed the trivial form of the mere attribution to the Jews that they cherished a misconception about their Messiah. But the deeper idolatry, of the fashioning of God in the image of the Egyptian, Persian, and Roman imperial rulers, was retained. The church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar. In the great formative period of theistic philosophy, which ended with the rise of Mahometanism, after a continuance coeval with civilization, three strains of thought emerge which, amid many variations in detail, respectively fashion God in the image of an imperial ruler, God in the image of a personification of moral energy, God in the image of an ultimate philosophical principle. Hume's Dialogues criticize unanswerably these modes of explaining the system of the world. The three schools of thought can be associated respectively with the divine Caesars, the Hebrew prophets, and Aristotle. But Aristotle was antedated by Indian, and Buddhistic, thought; the Hebrew prophets can be paralleled in traces of earlier thought; Mahometanism and the divine Caesars merely represent the most natural. Obvious, idolatrous theistic symbolism, at all epochs and places.
( 66 ) Page 343:In the first place, God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked ,to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification.
( 67 ) Page 344:Thus, when we make a distinction of reason, and consider God in the abstraction of a primordial actuality, we must ascribe to him neither fullness of feeling, nor consciousness: He is the unconditioned actuality of conceptual feeling at the base of things; so that, by reason of this primordial actuality, there is an order in the relevance of eternal objects to the process of creation. His unity of conceptual operations is a free creative act, untrammeled by reference to any particular course of things. It is deflected neither by love, nor by hatred, for what in fact comes to pass. The particularities of the actual world presuppose it; while it merely presupposes the general metaphysical character of creative advance, of which it is the primordial exemplification. The primordial nature of God is the acquirement by creativity of a primordial character.
( 68 ) Page 344:There is another side to the nature of God which cannot be omitted. Throughout this exposition of the philosophy of organism we have been considering the primary action of God on the world.
( 69 ) Page 345: From this point of view, he is the principle of concretion the principle whereby there is initiated a definite outcome from a situation otherwise riddled with ambiguity. Thus, so far, the primordial side of the nature of God has alone been relevant.
( 70 ) Page 345:But God, as well as being primordial, is also consequent. He is the beginning and the end. He is not the beginning in the sense of being in the past of all members. He is the presupposed actuality of conceptual operation, in unison of becoming with every other creative act. Thus, by reason of the relativity of all things, there is a reaction of the world on God. The completion of God's nature into a fullness of physical feeling is derived from the objectification of the world in God. He shares with every new creation its actual world; and the concrescent creature is objectified in God as a novel element in cod's objectification of that actual world. This prehension into God of each creature is directed with the subjective aim, and clothed with the subjective form, wholly derivative from his all-inclusive primordial valuation. God's conceptual nature is unchanged, by reason of its final completeness. But his derivative [524] nature is consequent upon the creative advance of the world.
( 71 ) Page 345:Thus, analogously to all actual entities, the nature of God is dipolar. He has a primordial nature and a consequent nature. The consequent nature of God is conscious; and it is the realization of the actual world in the unity of his nature, and through the transformation of his wisdom. The primordial nature is conceptual, the consequent nature is the weaving of God's physical feelings upon his primordial concepts.
( 72 ) Page 345: One side of God's nature is constituted by his conceptual experience. This experience is the primordial fact in the world, limited by no actuality which it presupposes. It is therefore infinite, devoid of all negative prehensions. This side of his nature is free, complete, primordial, eternal, actually deficient, and unconscious. The other side originates with physical experience derived from the temporal world, and then acquires integration with the primordial side. It is determined, incomplete, consequent, 'everlasting ' fully actual, and conscious. His necessary goodness expresses the determination of his consequent nature.
( 73 ) Page 345:Conceptual experience can be infinite, but it belongs to the nature of physical experience that it is finite. An actual entity in the temporal world is to be conceived as originated by physical experience with its process of completion motivated by consequent, conceptual experience initially derived from God. God is to be conceived as originated by conceptual experience with his process of completion motivated by consequent, physical experience, initially derived from the temporal world.
( 74 ) Page 345:The perfection of God's subjective aim, derived from the completeness of his primordial nature, issues into the character of his consequent nature.
( 75 ) Page 346:The wisdom of subjective arm prehends every actuality for what it can be in such a perfected system its sufferings, its sorrows, its failures, its triumphs, its immediacies of joy woven by rightness of feeling into the harmony of the universal feeling, which is always immediate, always many, always one, always with novel advance, moving onward and never perishing. The revolts of destructive evil, purely self-regarding, are dismissed into their triviality of merely individual facts; and yet the good they did achieve in individual joy, in individual sorrow, in the introduction of needed contrast, is yet saved by its relation to the completed whole. The image and it is but an image the image under which this operative growth of God's nature is best conceived, is that of a tender care that nothing be lost.
( 76 ) Page 346:The consequent nature of God is his judgment on the world. He saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life. It is the judgment of a tenderness which loses nothing that can be saved. It is also the judgment of a wisdom which uses what in the temporal world is mere wreckage.
( 77 ) Page 346:Another image which is also required to understand his consequent nature is that of his infinite patience. The universe includes a threefold creative act composed of (i) the one infinite conceptual realization, (ii) the multiple solidarity of free physical realizations in the temporal world, (iii) the ultimate unity of the multiplicity of actual fact with the primordial conceptual fact. If we conceive the first term and the last term in their unity over against the intermediate multiple freedom of physical realizations in the temporal world, we conceive of the patience of God, tenderly saving the turmoil of the intermediate world by the completion of his own nature. The sheer force of things lies in the intermediate physical process: this is the energy of physical production. God's role is not the combat of productive force [526] with productive force, of destructive force with destructive force; it lies in the patient operation of the overpowering rationality of his conceptual harmonization. He does not create the world, he saves it: or, more accurately, he is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.
( 78 ) Page 346:The vicious separation of the flux from the permanence leads to the concept of an entirely static God, with eminent reality, in relation to an entirely fluent world, with deficient reality. But if the opposites, static and fluent, have once been so explained as separately to characterize diverse actualities, the interplay between the thing which is static and the things which are fluent involves contradiction at every step in its explanation.
( 79 ) Page 347:Undoubtedly, the intuitions of Greek, Hebrew, and Christian thought have alike embodied the notions of a static God condescending to the world, and of a world either thoroughly fluent, or accidentally static, but finally fluent-'heaven and earth shall pass away.' In some schools of thought, the fluency of the world is mitigated by the assumption that selected components in the world are exempt from this final fluency, and achieve a static survival. Such components are not separated by any decisive line from analogous components for which the assumption is not made. Further, the survival is construed in terms of a final pair of opposites, happiness for some, torture for others.
( 80 ) Page 347:[527] But civilized intuition has always, although obscurely, grasped the problem as double and not as single. There is not the mere problem of fluency and permanence. There is the double problem: actuality with permanence, requiring fluency as its completion; and actuality with fluency, requiring permanence as its completion. The first half of the problem concerns the completion of God's primordial nature by the derivation of his consequent nature from the temporal world. The second half of the problem concerns the completion of each fluent actual occasion by its function of objective immortality, devoid of 'perpetual perishing,' that is to say, 'everlasting.'
( 81 ) Page 347:This double problem cannot be separated into two distinct problems. Either side can only be explained in terms of the other. The consequent nature of God is the fluent world become 'everlasting' by its objective immortality in cod. Also the objective immortality of actual occasions requires the primordial permanence of God, whereby the creative advance ever reestablishes itself endowed with initial subjective aim derived from the relevance of God to the evolving world.
( 82 ) Page 347:But objective immortality within the temporal world does not solve the problem set by the penetration of the finer religious intuition. 'Everlastingness' has been lost; and 'everlastingness' is the content of that vision upon which the finer religions are built the 'many' absorbed everlastingly in the final unity. The problems of the fluency of God and of the everlastingness of passing experience are solved by the same factor in the universe. This factor is the temporal world perfected by its reception and its reformation, as a fulfillment of the primordial appetition which is the basis of all order. In this way cod is completed by the individual, fluent satisfactions of finite fact, and the temporal occasions are completed by their everlasting union with their transformed selves, purged into conformation with the eternal order which is the final absolute 'wisdom.' The final summary can [528] only be expressed in terms of a group of antitheses, whose apparent self-contradictions depend on neglect of the diverse categories of existence. In each antithesis there is a shift of meaning which converts the opposition into a contrast.
( 83 ) Page 348:It is as true to say that God is permanent and the world fluent, as that the world is permanent and God is fluent.
( 84 ) Page 348:It is as true to say that God is one and the world many, as that the world is one and God many.
( 85 ) Page 348:It is as true to say that, in comparison with the world, God is actual eminently, as that, in comparison with God, the world is actual eminently.
( 86 ) Page 348:It is as true to say that the world is immanent in God, ,as that God is immanent in the world.
( 87 ) Page 348:It is as true to say that God transcends the world, as that the world transcends cod.
( 88 ) Page 348:It is as true to say that God creates the world, as that the world creates God.
( 89 ) Page 348:God and the world are the contrasted opposites in terms of which creativity achieves its supreme task of transforming disjoined multiplicity, with its diversities in opposition, into concrescent unity, with its diversities in contrast. In each actuality there are two concrescent poles of realization 'enjoyment' and 'appetition,' that is, the 'physical' and the 'conceptual.' For God the conceptual is prior to the physical, for the world the physical poles are prior to the conceptual poles.
( 90 ) Page 348:A physical pole is in its own nature exclusive, bounded by contradiction : a conceptual pole is in its own nature all-embracing, unbounded by contradiction. The former derives its share of infinity from the infinity of appetition; the latter derives its share of limitation from the exclusiveness of enjoyment. Thus, by reason of his priority of appetition, there can be but one primordial nature for God; and, by reason of their priority of enjoyment, there must be one history of many actualities in the physical world.
( 91 ) Page 348:[529] God and the world stand over against each other, expressing the final metaphysical truth that appetitive vision and physical enjoyment have equal claim to priority in creation. But no two actualities can be torn apart: each is all in all. Thus each temporal occasion embodies God, and is embodied in God. In God's nature, permanence is primordial and flux is derivative from the world: in the world's nature, flux is primordial and permanence is derivative from God. Also the world's nature is a primordial datum for God; and God's nature is a primordial datum for the world. Creation achieves the reconciliation of permanence and flux when it has reached its final term which is everlastingness --the Apotheosis of the world.
( 92 ) Page 348:Opposed elements stand to each other in mutual requirement. In their unity, they inhibit or contrast. God and the world stand to each other in this opposed requirement. God is the infinite ground of all mentality, the unity of vision seeking physical multiplicity. The world is the multiplicity of finites, actualities seeking a perfected unity world, reaches static completion.
( 93 ) Page 349:Neither God, nor the world reaches static completion. Both are in the grip of the ultimate metaphysical ground, the creative advance into novelty. Either of them, God and the world, is the instrument of novelty for the other.
( 94 ) Page 349:In every respect God and the world move conversely to each other in respect to their process. God is .primordially one, namely, he is the primordial unity of relevance of the many potential forms; in the process he acquires a consequent multiplicity, which the primordial character absorbs into its own unity. The world is primordially many, namely, the many actual occasions with their physical finitude; in the process it acquires a consequent unity, which is a novel occasion and is absorbed into the multiplicity of the primordial character. Thus God is to be conceived as one and as many in the converse sense in which the world is to be conceived as many and as one. The theme of cosmology, which is the basis of all religions, is the story of the dynamic effort of the world passing into everlasting unity, and of the static majesty of God's vision, accomplishing its purpose of completion by absorption of the world's multiplicity of effort.
( 95 ) Page 349:The consequent nature of God is the fulfillment of his experience by his reception of the multiple freedom of actuality into the harmony of his own actualization. It is God as really actual, completing the deficiency of his mere conceptual actuality.
( 96 ) Page 349:Every categoreal type of existence in the world presupposes the other types in terms of which it is explained. Thus the many eternal objects conceived in their bare isolated multiplicity lack any existent character. They require the transition to the conception of them as efficaciously existent by reason of God's conceptual realization of them.
( 97 ) Page 349:But God's conceptual realization is nonsense if thought of under the 'guise of a barren, eternal hypothesis. It is God's conceptual realization performing an efficacious role in multiple unifications of the universe, which are free creations of actualities arising out of decided situations. Again this discordant multiplicity of actual things, requiring each other and neglecting each other, utilizing and discarding, perishing and yet claiming life as obstinate matter of fact, requires an enlargement of the understanding to the comprehension of another phase in the nature of things. In this later phase, the many actualities are one actuality, and the one actuality is many actualities. Each actuality has its present life and its immediate passage into novelty; but its passage is not its death. This final phase of passage in God's nature is ever enlarging itself. In it the complete adjustment of the immediacy of joy and suffering reaches the final end of creation. This end is existence in the perfect unity of adjustment as means, and in the perfect multiplicity of the attainment of individual types of [53l] self-existence. The function of being a means is not disjoined from the function of being an end. The sense of worth beyond itself is immediately enjoyed as an overpowering element in the individual self-attainment. It is in this way that the immediacy of sorrow and pain is transformed into an element of triumph. This is the notion of redemption through suffering which haunts the world. It is the generalization of its very minor exemplification as the aesthetic value of discords in art.
( 98 ) Page 350:Thus the universe is to be conceived as attaining the active self-expression of its own variety of opposites of its own freedom and its own necessity, of its own multiplicity and its own unity, of its own imperfection and its own perfection. All the 'opposites' are elements in the nature of things, and are incorrigibly there. The concept of 'God' is the way in which we understand this incredible fact that what cannot be, yet is.
( 99 ) Page 350:Thus the consequent nature of God is composed of a multiplicity of elements with individual self-realization. It is just as much a multiplicity as it is a unity; it is just as much one immediate fact as it is an unresting advance beyond itself. Thus the actuality of God must also be understood as a multiplicity of actual components in process of creation. This is God in his function of the kingdom of heaven.
( 100 ) Page 350:Each actuality in the temporal world has its reception into God's nature. The corresponding element in God's nature is not temporal actuality, but is the transmutation of that temporal actuality into a living, ever-present fact. An enduring personality in the temporal world is a route of occasions in which the successors with some peculiar completeness sum up their predecessors. The correlate fact in God's nature is an even more complete unity of life in a chain of elements for which succession does not mean loss of immediate unison. This element in cod's nature inherits from the temporal counterpart [532] according to the same principle as in the temporal world the future inherits from the past. Thus in the sense in which the present occasion is the person now, and yet with his own past, so the counterpart in God is that person in God.
( 101 ) Page 350:But the principle of universal relativity is not to be stopped at the consequent nature of God. This nature itself passes into the temporal world according to its gradation of relevance to the various concrescent occasions. There are thus four creative phases in which the universe accomplishes its actuality. There is first the phase of conceptual origination, deficient in actuality, but infinite in its adjustment of valuation. Secondly, there is the temporal phase of physical origination, with its multiplicity of actualities. In this phase full actuality is attained; but there is deficiency in the solidarity of individuals with each other. This phase derives its determinate conditions from the first phase. Thirdly, there is the phase of perfected actuality, in which the many are one everlastingly, without the qualification of any loss either of individual identity or of completeness of unity. In everlastingness, immediacy is reconciled with objective immortality. This phase derives the conditions of its being from the two antecedent phases. In the fourth phase, the creative action completes itself. For the perfected actuality passes back into the temporal world, and qualifies this world so that each temporal actuality includes it as an immediate fact of relevant experience. For the kingdom of heaven is with us today. The action of the fourth phase is the love of God for the world. It is the particular providence for particular occasions. What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world. By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world. In this sense, God is the great companion-- the fellow-sufferer who understands.
( 102 ) Page 351:[533] We find here the final application of the doctrine of objective immortality. Throughout the perishing occasions in the life of each temporal creature, the inward source of distaste or of refreshment, the judge arising out of the very nature of things, redeemer or Goddess of mischief, is the transformation of Itself, everlasting in the Being of God. In this way, the insistent craving is justified the insistent craving that zest for existence be refreshed by the ever-present, unfading importance of our immediate actions, which perish and yet live for evermore.