( 1 ) Page 22:(v) eternal objects, or pure potentials for the specific Determination of Fact, or Forms of Definiteness.
( 2 ) Page 22: Among these eight categories of existence, actual entities and eternal objects stand out with a certain extreme finality. The other types of existence have a certain intermediate character. The eighth category includes an indefinite progression of categories, as we proceed from 'contrasts' to 'contrasts of contrasts,' and on indefinitely to higher grades of contrasts.
( 3 ) Page 22:(iii) That in the becoming of an actual entity, novel prehensions, nexus, subjective forms, propositions, multiplicities. and contrasts, also become; but there are no novel eternal objects.
( 4 ) Page 23:(v) That no two actual entities originate from an identical universe; though the difference between the two universes only consists in some actual entities, included in one and not in the other, and in the sub- ordinate entities which each actual entity introduces into the world. The eternal objects are the same for all actual entities. The nexus of actual entities in the universe correlate to a concrescence is termed 'the actual world' correlate to that concrescence. (vi) That each entity in the universe of a given concrescence can, so far as its own nature is concerned, be implicated in that concrescence in one or other of many modes; but in fact it is implicated only in one mode: that the particular mode of implication is only rendered fully determinate by that concrescence, though it is conditioned by the correlate universe. This indetermination, rendered determinate in the real concrescence, is the meaning of 'potentiality.' It is a conditioned indetermination, and is therefore called a 'real potentiality.'
( 5 ) Page 23: (vii ) That an eternal object can be described only in terms of its potentiality for 'ingression' into the becoming of actual entities; and that its analysis only discloses other eternal objects. It is a pure potential. The term 'ingression' refers to the particular mode in which the potentiality of an eternal object is realized in a particular actual entity, contributing to the definiteness of that actual entity.
( 6 ) Page 23:(xi) That every prehension consists of three factors : (a) the 'subject' which is prehending, namely, the actual entity in which that prehension is a concrete element; (b) the 'datum' which is prehended; (c) the 'subjective form' which is how that subject prehends that datum. Prehensions of actual entities i.e., prehensions whose data involve actual entities are termed 'physical prehensions'; and prehensions of eternal objects are termed 'conceptual prehensions.' consciousness is not necessarily involved in the subjective forms of either type of prehension.
( 7 ) Page 24:(xv) That a proposition is the unity of certain actual entities in their potentiality for forming a nexus, with its potential relatedness partially defined by certain eternal objects which have the unity of one complex eternal [36] object. The actual entities involved are termed the 'logical subjects ' the complex eternal object is the 'predicate.'
( 8 ) Page 25:(xix) That the fundamental types of entities are actual entities, and eternal objects; and that the other types of entities only express how all entities of the two fundamental types are in community with each other, in the actual world. . .[38]
( 9 ) Page 25:(xx) That to 'function' means to contribute determination to the actual entities in the nexus of some actual world. Thus the determinateness and self-identity of one entity cannot be abstracted from the community of the diverse functionings of all entities. 'Determination' is analysable into 'definiteness' and 'position ' where 'definiteness is the illustration of select eternal objects, and 'position' is relative status in a nexus of actual entities.
( 10 ) Page 25:(xxiv) The functioning of one actual entity in the self-creation of another actual entity is the 'objectification' of the former for the latter actual entity. The functioning of an eternal object in the self-creation of an actual entity is the 'ingression' of the eternal object in the actual entity. (xxv) The final phase in the process of concrescence, constituting an actual entity, is one complex, fully determinate feeling. This final phase is termed the 'satisfaction.' It is fully determinate (a) as to its genesis, (b) as to its objective character for the transcendent creativity, and (c) as to its prehension positive or negative of every item in its universe.
( 11 ) Page 26: (iv) The Category of Conceptual Valuation. From each physical feeling there is the derivation of a purely [40] conceptual feeling whose datum is the eternal object determinant of the definiteness of the actual entity, or of the nexus, physically felt.
( 12 ) Page 26: (v) The Category of Conceptual Reversion. There is secondary origination of conceptual feelings with data which are partially identical with, and partially diverse from, the eternal objects forming the data in the first phase of the mental pole. The diversity is a relevant diversity determined by the subjective aim.
( 13 ) Page 27:(vi) The Category of Transmutation. When (in accordance with category [iv], or with categories [iv] and [v] ) one and the same conceptual feeling is derived impartially by a prehending subject from its analogous simple physical feelings of various actual entities in its actual world, then, in a subsequent phase of integration of these simple physical feelings together with the derivate conceptual feeling. the prehending subject may transmute the datum of this conceptual feeling into a characteristic of some nexus containing those prehended actual entities among its members, or of some part of that nexus. In this way the nexus (or its part), thus characterized, is the objective datum of a feeling entertained by this prehending subject. It is evident that the complete datum of the transmuted feeling is a contrast, namely, 'the nexus, as one, in contrast with the eternal object.' This type of contrast is one of the meanings of the notion 'qualification of physical substance by quality.' This category is the way in which the philosophy of organism, which is an atomic theory of actuality, meets a perplexity which is inherent in all monadic cosmologies. Leibniz in his Monadology)' meets the same difficulty by a theory of 'confused' perception. But he fails to make clear how 'confusion' originates.
( 14 ) Page 29:[44] This repudiation directly contradicts Kant's 'First Analogy of Experience' in either of its ways of phrasing ( 1st or 2nd edition).In the philosophy of organism it is not 'substance' which is permanent, but 'form.' Forms suffer changing relations; actual entities 'perpetually perish' subjectively, but are immortal objectively. Actuality in perishing acquires objectivity, while it loses subjective immediacy. It loses the final causation which is its internal principle of unrest, and it acquires efficient causation whereby it is a ground of obligation characterizing the creativity. Actual occasions in their 'formal' constitutions are devoid of all indetermination. Potentiality has passed into realization. They are complete and determinate matter of fact, devoid of all indecision. They form the ground of obligation. But eternal objects, and propositions, and some more complex sorts of contrasts, involve in their own natures indecision. They are, like all entities, potentials for the process of becoming. Their ingression expresses the definiteness of the actuality in question. But their own natures do not in themselves disclose in what actual entities this potentiality of ingression is realized. Thus they involve indetermination in a sense more complete than do the former set.
( 15 ) 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).
( 16 ) 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.'
( 17 ) Page 34: A nexus enjoys 'social order' where (i) there is a common element of form illustrated in the definiteness [51] of each of its included actual entities, and (ii) this common element of form arises in each member of the nexus by reason of the conditions imposed upon it by its prehensions of some other members of the nexus, and (iii ) these prehensions impose that condition of reproduction by reason of their inclusion of positive feelings of that common form. Such a nexus is called a 'society,' and the common form is the 'defining characteristic' of the society. The notion of 'defining characteristic' is allied to the Aristotelian notion off 'substantial form.' The common element of form is simply a complex eternal object exemplified in each member of the nexus. But the social order of the nexus is not the mere fact of this common form exhibited by all its members. The reproduction of the common form throughout the nexus is due to the genetic relation the members of the nexus among each other, and to the additional fact that genetic relations include feelings of the common form. Thus the defining characteristic is inherited throughout the nexus, each member deriving it from those other members of the nexus which are antecedent to its own concrescence. A nexus enjoys 'personal order' when (a) it is a 'society.' and (b) when the genetic relatedness of its members orders these members 'serially.' By this 'serial ordering' arising from the genetic relatedness, it is meant that any member of the nexus--excluding the first and the last, if there be such constitutes a 'cut' in the nexus, so that (a) this member inherits from all members on one side of the cut, and from no members on the other side of the cut, and (b) if A and B are two members of the nexus and B inherits from A, then the side of B's cut, inheriting from B. forms part of the side of A's cut, inheriting from A, and the side of A's cut from which A inherits forms part of the side of B's cut from. Which B inherits. Thus the nexus forms a single line of inheritance of its defining characteristic. Such a nexus is called an 'enduring object.' It might have been termed a 'person,' in the legal sense [52] of that term. But unfortunately 'person' suggests the notion of consciousness, so that its use would lead to misunderstanding. The nexus 'sustains a character.' and this is one of the meanings of the Latin word persona. But an 'enduring object,' qua 'person,' does more than sustain a character. For this sustenance arises out of the special genetic relations among the members of the nexus. An ordinary physical object, which has temporal endurance, is a society. In the ideally simple case, it has personal order and is an 'enduring object.' A society may (or may not) be analysable into many strands of 'enduring objects.', This will be the case for most ordinary physical objects. These enduring objects and 'societies,' analysable into strands of enduring objects, are the permanent entities which enjoy adventures of change throughout time and space. For example, they form the subject-matter of the science of dynamics. Actual entities perish, but do not change; they are what they are. A nexus which (i) enjoys social order, and (ii ) is analysable into strands of enduring objects may be termed a 'corpuscular society.' :A society may be more or less corpuscular, according to the relative importance of the defining characteristics of the various enduring objects compared to that , of the defining characteristic of the whole corpuscular nexus.
( 18 ) Page 40: The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience at a great period of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive systematization, have made his writings an inexhaustible mine of suggestion. Thus in one sense by stating my belief that the train of thought in these lectures is platonic, I am doing no more than expressing the hope that it falls within the European tradition. But I do mean more: I mean that if we had to render Plato's general point of view with the least changes made necessary by the intervening two thousand years of human experience in social organization, in aesthetic attainments, in science, and in religion, we should have to set about the construction of a philosophy of organism. In such a philosophy the actualities constituting the process of the world are conceived as exemplifying the ingression (or 'participation' ) of other things which constitute the potentialities of definiteness for any actual existence. The things which are temporal arise by their participation in the things which are eternal. The two sets are mediated by a thing which combines the actuality of what is temporal with the timelessness of what is potential. This final entity is the divine element in the world, by which the barren inefficient disjunction of abstract potentialities obtains primordially the efficient conjunction of ideal realization. This ideal realization of potentialities in a primordial actual entity constitutes the metaphysical stability whereby the actual process exemplifies general principles of metaphysics, and attains the ends proper to specific types of emergent order. By reason of the actuality of this primordial valuation of pure potentials, each eternal object has a definite, effective relevance to each concrescent process. Apart from such orderings, there would be a complete disjunction of eternal objects unrealized in the temporal world. Novelty would be meaningless, and inconceivable. We are here extending and rigidly applying Hume's principle, that ideas of reflection are derived from actual facts. '
( 19 ) Page 41: In Cartesian language, the essence of an actual entity consists solely in the fact that it is a prehending thing (i.e., a substance whose whole essence or nature is to prehend),6 A 'feeling' belongs to the positive species [66] of 'prehensions.' There are two species of prehensions, the 'positive species' and the 'negative species.' An actual entity has a perfectly definite bond with each item in the universe. This determinate bond is its prehension of that item. A negative prehension is the definite exclusion of that item from positive contribution to the subject's own real internal constitution. This doctrine involves the position that a negative prehension expresses a bond. A positive prehension is the definite inclusion of that item into positive contribution to the subject's own real internal constitution. This positive inclusion is called its 'feeling' of that item. Other entities are required to express how any one item is felt. All actual entities in the actual world, relatively to a given actual entity as 'subject ' are necessarily 'felt' by that subject, though in general vaguely. An actual entity as felt is said to be 'objectified' for that subject. Only a selection of eternal objects are 'felt' by a given subject, and these eternal objects are then said to have 'ingression' in that subject. But those eternal objects which are not felt are not therefore negligible. For each negative prehension has its own subjective form, however trivial and faint. It adds to the emotional complex, though not to the objective data. The emotional complex is the subjective form of the final 'satisfaction.'
( 20 ) Page 44: The term 'Platonic form' has here been used as the [70] briefest way of indicating the entities in question. But these lectures are not an exegesis of Plato's writings, the entities in question are not necessarily restricted to those which he would recognize as 'forms.' Also the term 'idea' has a subjective suggestion in modern philosophy, which is very misleading for my present purposes, and in any case it has been used in many senses and has become ambiguous. The term 'essence,' as used by the critical Realists, also suggests their use of it, which diverges from what I intend. Accordingly, by way of employing a term devoid of misleading suggestions, I use the phrase 'eternal object' for what in the preceding paragraph of this section I have termed a 'platonic form.' Any entity whose conceptual recognition does not involve a necessary reference to any definite actual entities of the temporal world is called an 'eternal object.'
( 21 ) 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.
( 22 ) Page 44: An eternal object is always a potentiality for actual entities; but in itself, as conceptually felt, it is neutral as to the fact of its physical ingression in any particular actual entity of the temporal world. 'potentiality' is the correlative of 'givenness.' The meaning of 'givenness' is that what is 'given' might not have been 'given , and that what is not 'given' might have been 'given .'
( 23 ) Page 45:(i) by reason of its qualification by the determinateness of the actual world, and (ii) by its conceptual prehensions of the indeterminateness of eternal objects. The process is constituted by the influx of eternal objects into a novel determinateness of feeling which absorbs the actual world into a novel actuality.
( 24 ) Page 45: Returning to the correlation of 'givenness' and 'potentiality,' we see that 'givenness' refers to 'potentiality,' and 'potentiality' to 'givenness'; also we see that the completion of 'givenness' in actual fact converts the 'not-given' for that fact into 'impossibility' for that fact. The individuality of an actual entity involves an exclusive limitation. This element of 'exclusive limitation' is the definiteness essential for the synthetic unity of an actual entity. This synthetic unity forbids the notion of mere addition to the included elements. It is evident that 'givenness' and 'potentiality' are both meaningless apart from a multiplicity of potential entities. These potentialities are the 'eternal objects.' Apart from 'potentiality' and 'givenness,' there can be no nexus of actual things in process of supersession by novel actual things. The alternative is a static monistic universe, without unrealized potentialities; since 'potentiality' is then a meaningless term.
( 25 ) 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.
( 26 ) Page 46: There is not, however, one entity which is merely the class of all eternal objects. For if we conceive any class of eternal objects, there are additional eternal objects which presuppose that class but do not belong to it. For this reason, at the beginning of this section, the phrase 'the multiplicity of platonic forms' was used, instead of the more natural phrase 'the class of platonic forms.' A multiplicity is a type of complex thing which has the unity derivative from some qualification which participates in each of its components severally; but a multiplicity has no unity derivative merely from its various components.
( 27 ) Page 48: The antithetical terms 'universals' and 'particulars' are the usual words employed to denote respectively entities which nearly, though not quite,9 correspond to the entities here termed 'eternal objects,' and 'actual entities.' These terms, 'universals' and 'particulars,' both in the suggestiveness of the two words and in their current philosophical use, are somewhat misleading. The ontological principle, and the wider doctrine of universal relativity, on which the present metaphysical discussion is founded, blur the sharp distinction between what is universal and what is particular. The notion of a universal is of that which can enter into the description of many particulars; whereas the notion of a particular is that it is described by universals, and does not itself enter into the description of any other particular. According to the doctrine of relativity which is the basis of the metaphysical system of the present lectures, both these notions involve a misconception. An actual entity cannot be described, even inadequately, by universals; because other actual entities do enter into the description of any one actual entity. Thus every so-called 'universal' is particular in the sense of being just what it is, diverse from everything else; and every so-called 'particular' is universal in the sense of entering into the constitutions of other actual entities. The contrary opinion led to the collapse of Descartes' many substances into Spinoza's one substance; to Leibniz's windowless monads with their pre-established harmony; to the sceptical reduction of Hume's philosophy a reduction first effected by Hume himself, [77] and reissued with the most beautiful exposition by Santayana in his scepticism and Animal Faith.
( 28 ) Page 50: The principle of universal relativity directly traverses Aristotle's dictum, 'A substance is not present in a subject.' on the contrary, according to this principle an actual entity is present in other actual entities. In fact if we allow for degrees of relevance, and for negligible relevance, we must say that every actual entity is present in every other actual entity. The philosophy of organism [80] is mainly devoted to the task of making clear the notion of 'being present in another entity.' This phrase is here borrowed from Aristotle: it is not a fortunate phrase, and in subsequent discussion it will be replaced by the term 'objectification.' The Aristotelian phrase suggests the crude notion that one actual entity is added to another simpliciter. This is not what is meant. One role of the eternal objects is that they are those elements which express how any one actual entity is constituted by its synthesis of other actual entities, and how that actual entity develops from the primary dative phase into its own individual actual existence, involving its individual enjoyments and appetitions. An actual entity is concrete because it is such a particular concrescence of the universe.
( 29 ) Page 52:[82] The 'prehension' of one actual entity by another actual entity is the complete transaction, analysable into the objectification of the former entity as one of the data for the latter, and into the fully clothed feeling whereby the datum is absorbed into the subjective satisfaction 'clothed' with the various elements of its 'subjective form.' But this definition can be stated more generally so as to include the case of the prehension of an eternal object by an actual entity; namely, The 'positive prehension' of an entity by an actual entity is the complete transaction analysable into the ingression, or objectification, of that entity as a datum for feeling, and into the feeling whereby this datum is absorbed into the subjective satisfaction. I also discard Locke's term 'idea.' Instead of that term, the other things, in their limited roles as elements for the actual entity in question, are called 'objects' for that thing. There are four main types of objects, namely, 'eternal objects,' 'propositions,' 'objectified' actual entities and nexus. These 'eternal objects' are Locke's ideas as explained in his Essay( II, I, I ), where he writes:
( 30 ) Page 58:[9l] In this important passage, Locke enunciates the main doctrines of the philosophy of organism, namely: the principle of relativity; the relational character of eternal objects whereby they constitute the forms of the objectifications of actual entities for each other; the composite character of an actual entity (i.e., a substance);the notion of 'power' as making a principal ingredient in that of actual entity (substance). In this latter notion, Locke adumbrates both the ontological principle, and also the principle that the 'power' of one actual entity on the other is simply how the former is objectified in the constitution of the other. Thus the problem of perception and the problem of power are one and the same, at least so far as perception is reduced to mere prehension of actual entities. Perception, in the sense of consciousness of such prehension, requires the additional factor of the conceptual prehension of eternal objects, and a process of integration of the two factors (cf. Part III ).
( 31 ) Page 58: In 'causal objectification' what is felt subjectively by the objectified actual entity is transmitted objectively to the concrescent actualities which supersede it. In Locke's phraseology the objectified actual entity is then exerting 'power.' In this type of objectification the eternal objects, relational between object and subject, express the formal constitution of the objectified actual entity. .
( 32 ) Page 58: In 'presentational objectification' the relational eternal objects fall into two sets, one set contributed by the 'extensive' perspective of the perceived from the position of the perceiver, and the other set by the antecedent concrescent phases of the perceiver. What is ordinarily termed 'perception' is consciousness of presentational objectification. But according to the philosophy of organism there can be consciousness of both types of objectification. There can be such consciousness of both [92] types because, according to this philosophy, the knowable is the complete nature of the knower, at least such phases of it as are antecedent to that operation of knowing. . . Locke misses one essential doctrine, namely, that the doctrine of internal relations makes it impossible to attribute 'change' to any actual entity. Every actual entity is what it is, and is with its definite status in the universe, determined by its internal relations to other actual entities. 'change' is the description of the adventures of eternal objects in the evolving universe of actual things. .
( 33 ) Page 59: [93] The fundamental notion of the philosophy of organism is expressed in Locke's phrase, "it is past doubt there must be some real constitution, on which any collection of simple ideas coexisting must depend." Locke makes it plain (cf. II, II, I ) that by a 'simple idea' he means the ingression in the actual entity (illustrated by 'a piece of wax,' 'a piece of ice,' 'a rose' ) of some abstract quality which 'is not complex (illustrated by 'softness,' 'warmth,' 'whiteness' ) . For Locke such simple ideas, coexisting in an actual entity, require a real constitution for that entity. Now in the philosophy of organism, passing beyond Locke's explicit statement, the notion of a real constitution is taken to mean that the eternal objects function by introducing the multiplicity of actual entities as constitutive of the actual entity in question. Thus the constitution is 'real' because it assigns its status in the real world to the actual entity. In other words the actual entity, in virtue of being what it is, is also where it is. It is somewhere because it is some actual thing with its correlated actual world. This is the direct denial of the Cartesian doctrine, ". . . an existent thing which requires nothing but itself in order to exist." It is also inconsistent with Aristotle's phrase, "neither asserted of a subject nor present in a subject."
( 34 ) Page 60:I am certainly not maintaining that Locke grasped explicitly the implications of his words as thus developed for the philosophy of organism. But it is a short step from a careless phrase to a flash of insight; nor is it unbelievable that Locke saw further into metaphysical problems than some of his followers. But abandoning the question of what Locke had in his own mind, the 'organic doctrine' demands a 'real essence' in the sense of a complete analysis of the relations, and interrelations of the actual entities which are formative of the actual entity in question, and an 'abstract essence' in which the specified actual entities are replaced by the notions of unspecified entities in such a combination; this is the notion of an unspecified actual entity. Thus the real [94] essence involves real objectifications of specified actual entities; the abstract essence is a complex eternal object. There is nothing self-contradictory in the thought of many actual entities with the same abstract essence; but there can only be one actual entity with the same real essence. For the real essence indicates 'where' the entity is, that is to say, its status in the real world; the abstract essence omits the particularity of the status.
( 35 ) Page 61:It cannot be too clearly understood that some chief notions of European thought were framed under the influence of a misapprehension, only partially corrected by the scientific progress of the last century. This mistake consists in the confusion of mere potentiality with actuality. Continuity concerns what is potential; whereas actuality is incurably atomic. This misapprehension is promoted by the neglect of the principle that, so far as physical relations are concerned, contemporary events happen in causal independence of each other.1 This principle will have to be explained later, in connection with an examination of process and of time. It receives an exemplification in the character of our perception of the world of contemporary actual entities. That contemporary world is objectified [96] for us as 'realitas objectiva,' illustrating bare extension with its various parts discriminated by differences of sense-data. These qualities, such as colours, sounds, bodily feelings, tastes, smells, together with the perspectives introduced by extensive relationships, are the relational eternal objects whereby the contemporary actual entities are elements in our constitution. This is the type of objectification which (in sect. VII of the previous chapter) has been termed 'presentational objectification.' In this way, by reason of the principle of contemporary independence, the contemporary world is objectified for us under the aspect of passive potentiality. The very sense-data by which its parts are differentiated are supplied by antecedent states of our own bodies, and so is their distribution in contemporary space. Our direct perception of the contemporary world is thus reduced to extension, defining
( 36 ) Page 62:(iii ) possibilities of division. These possibilities of division constitute the external world a continuum. For a continuum is divisible; so far as the contemporary world is divided by actual entities, it is not a continuum, but is atomic. Thus the contemporary world is perceived with its potentiality for extensive division, and not in its actual atomic division. The contemporary world as perceived by the senses is the datum for contemporary actuality, and is therefore continuous divisible but not divided. The contemporary world is in fact divided and atomic, being a multiplicity of definite actual entities. These contemporary actual entities are divided from each other, and are not themselves divisible into other contemporary actual entities. This antithesis will have to be discussed later (cf. Part Iv). But it is necessary to adumbrate it here. -This limitation of the way in which the contemporary actual entities are relevant to the 'formal' existence of the subject in question is the first example of the general [97] principle, that objectification relegates into irrelevance, or into a subordinate relevance, the full constitution of the objectified entity. Some real component in the objectified entity assumes the role of being how that particular entity is a datum in the experience of the subject. In this case the objectified contemporaries are only directly relevant to the subject in their character of arising from a datum which is an extensive continuum. They do, in fact, atomize this continuum; but the aboriginal potentiality, which they include and realize, is what they con-tribute as the relevant factor in their objectifications. They thus exhibit the community of contemporary actualities as a common world with mathematical relations where the term 'mathematical' is used in the sense in which it would have been understood by Plato, Euclid, and Descartes, before the modern discovery of the true definition of pure mathematics. The bare mathematical potentialities of the extensive continuum require an additional content in order to assume the role of real objects for the subject. This content is supplied by the eternal objects termed sense-data. These objects are 'given' for the experience of the subject. Their givenness does not arise from the 'decision' of the contemporary entities which are thus objectified. It arises from the functioning of the antecedent physical body of the subject; and this functioning can in its turn be analyzed as representing the influence of the more remote past, a past common alike to the subject and to its contemporary actual entities. Thus these sense-data are eternal objects playing a complex relational role; They connect the actual entities of the past with the actual entities of the contemporary world, and thereby effect objectifications of the contemporary things and of the past things. For instance, we see the contemporary chair, but we see it with our eyes; and we touch the contemporary chair, but we touch it with our hands. Thus colours objectify the chair in one way. and objectify the eyes in another way, as elements in the experience of the subject. [98] Also touch objectifies the chair in one way, and objectifies the hands in another way, as elements in the experience of the subject. But the eyes and the hands are in the past (the almost immediate past) and the chair is in the present. The chair. thus objectified, is the objectification of a contemporary nexus of actual entities in its unity as one nexus. This nexus is illustrated as to its constitution by the spatial region, with its perspective relations. This region is, in fact. atomized by the members of the nexus. By the operation of the category of Transmutation (cf. Parts III and Iv), in the objectification an abstraction is made from the multiplicity of members and from all components of their formal constitutions, except the occupation of this region. This prehension, in the particular example considered, will be termed the prehension of a 'chair- image.' Also the intervention of the past is not confined to antecedent eyes and hands. There is a more remote past throughout nature external to the body. The direct relevance of this remote past, relevant by reason of its direct objectification in the immediate subject, is practically negligible, so far as concerns prehensions of a strictly physical type.
( 37 ) Page 64: The conclusion of this discussion is that the ingression of the eternal objects termed 'sense-data' into the experience of a subject cannot be construed as the simple objectification of the actual entity to which, in ordinary speech, we ascribe that sense-datum as a quality. The ingression involves a complex relationship, whereby the sense-datum emerges as the 'given' eternal object by which some past entities are objectified ( for ex-ample, colour seen with the eyes and bad temper inherited from the viscera) and whereby the sense-datum also enters into the objectification of a society of actual entities in the contemporary world. Thus a sense-datum has ingression into experience by reason of its forming the what of a very complex multiple integration of prehensions within that occasion. For example, the ingression of a visual sense-datum involves the causal objectification of various antecedent bodily organs and the presentational objectification of the shape seen, this shape being a nexus of contemporary actual entities. In this account of the ingression of sense-data, the animal body is nothing more than the most intimately relevant part of the antecedent settled world. To sum up this account: when we perceive a con-temporary extended shape which we term a 'chair,' the sense- [101] data involved are not necessarily elements in the 'real internal constitution' of this chair-image: they are elements in some way of feeling in the 'real internal constitutions' of those antecedent organs of the human body with which we perceive the 'chair.' The direct recognition of such antecedent actual entities, with which we perceive contemporaries, is hindered and, apart from exceptional circumstances, rendered impossible by the spatial and temporal vagueness which infect such data. Later (cf. Part III, Chs. III to V) the whole question of this perception of a nexus vaguely, that is to say, without distinction of the actual entities composing it, is discussed in terms of the theory of prehensions, and in relation to the category of Transmutation.
( 38 ) Page 65:(i) That the actual world, in so far as it is a community of entities which are settled, actual, and already become, conditions and limits the potentiality for creativeness beyond itself. This 'given' world provides determinate data in the form of those objectifications of themselves which the characters of its actual entities can provide. This is a limitation laid upon the general potentiality provided by eternal objects, considered merely in respect to the generality of their natures. Thus, relatively to any actual entity, there is a 'given' world of settled actual entities and a 'real' potentiality, which is the datum for creativeness beyond that standpoint. This datum, which is the primary phase in the process constituting an actual entity, is nothing else than the actual world itself in its character of a possibility for the process of being felt. This exemplifies the metaphysical principle that every 'being' is a potential for a 'becoming.' The actual world is the 'objective content' of each new creation. Thus we have always to consider two meanings of [l02] potentiality:
( 39 ) Page 65:(a) the 'general' potentiality, which is the bundle of possibilities, mutually consistent or alternative, provided by the multiplicity of eternal objects, and
( 40 ) 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."
( 41 ) Page 85: The breath of feeling which creates a new individual fact has an origination not wholly traceable to the mere data. It conforms to the data in that it feels the data. But the how of feeling, though it is germane to the data, is not fully determined by the data. The relevant feeling is not settled, as to its inclusions or exclusions of 'subjective form,' by the data about which the feeling is concerned. The concrescent process is the elimination of these indeterminations of subjective forms. The quality of feeling has to be definite in respect to the eternal objects with which feeling clothes itself in its self-definition.
( 42 ) Page 86:
( 43 ) Page 86: An example of the lure for feeling is given by Hume himself. In the first section of his Treatise he lays down the proposition, "That all our simple ideas in their first appearance, are derived from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent." It must be remembered that in the organic philosophy the 'data of objectifications' are the nearest analogue to Hume's 'simple impressions.' Thus, modifying Hume's principle, the only lure to conceptual feeling is an exact conformation to the qualities realized in the objectified actualities. But Hume (loc. cit.) notes an exception which carries with it the exact principle which has just been laid down, namely, the principle of relevant potentials, unrealized in the datum and yet constituent of an 'objective lure' by proximity to the datum. The point is that 'order' in the actual world introduces a derivative 'order' among eternal objects. Hume writes:
( 44 ) Page 87: This passage requires no comment, except for its final clause. Hume puts the 'instance' aside as being 'particular and singular'; it is exactly this estimate which is challenged by the philosophy of organism. The analysis of concrescence, here adopted, conceives that there is an origination of conceptual feeling admitting or rejecting whatever is apt for feeling by reason of its germaneness to the basic data. The gradation of eternal objects in respect to this germaneness is the objective lure for feeling; the concrescent process admits a selection from this 'objective lure' into subjective efficiency. This is the subjective 'ideal of itself' which guides the process. Also the basic data are constituted by the actual world which 'belongs to' that instance of concrescent process. Feelings are 'vectors'; for they feel what is there and transform it into what is here. The term 'potential difference' is an old one in physical science, and recently it has been introduced in physiology with a meaning diverse from, though generically allied to, its older meaning in physics. The ultimate fact in the constitution of an actual entity which suggests this term is the objective lure for feeling. In the comparison of two actual entities, the contrast between their objective lures is their 'potential difference'; and all other uses of this phrase are abstractions derivative from this ultimate meaning.
( 45 ) 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.
( 46 ) Page 92: A society does not in any sense create the complex of eternal objects which constitutes its defining characteristic. It only elicits that complex into importance for its members, and secures the reproduction of its membership. In speaking of a society unless the context expressly requires another interpretation 'membership' will always refer to the actual occasions, and not to subordinate enduring objects composed of actual occasions such as the life of an electron or of a man. These latter societies are the strands of 'personal' order which enter into many societies; generally speaking, whenever we are concerned with occupied space, we are dealing with this restricted type of corpuscular societies; and whenever we are thinking of the physical field in empty space, we are dealing with societies of the wider type. It seems as if the careers of waves of light illustrate the transition from the more restricted type to the wider type.
( 47 ) Page 114:@In the first place, those eternal objects which will be classified under the name 'sensa' constitute the lowest category of eternal objects. Such eternal objects do not express a manner of relatedness between other eternal objects. They are not contrasts, or patterns. Sensa are necessary as components in any actual entity, relevant in the realization of the higher grades. But a sensum does not, for its own realization, require any eternal object of a lower grade, though it does involve the potentiality of pattern and does gain access of intensity from some realization of status in some realized pattern. Thus a sensum requires, as a rescue from its shallowness of zero width, some selective relevance of wider complex eternal objects which include it as a component; but it does not involve the relevance of any eternal objects which it presupposes. Thus, in one sense, a sensum is simple; for its realization does not involve the concurrent realization of certain definite eternal objects, which are its definite simple components. But, in another sense, each sensum is complex; for it cannot be dissociated from its potentiality for ingression into any actual entity, and from its potentiality of contrasts and of patterned relationships with other eternal objects. Thus each sensum shares the characteristic common to all eternal objects, that it introduces the notion of the logical variable, in both forms, the unselective 'any' and the selective 'some.'
( 48 ) Page 114: Narrowness in the lowest category achieves such intensity as belongs to such experience, but fails by reason of deficiency of width. Contrast elicits depth, and only shallow experience is possible when there is a lack of patterned contrast. Hume notices the comparative failure of the higher faculty of imagination in respect to mere sensa. He exaggerates this comparative failure into a dogma of absolute inhibition to imagine a novel sensum; whereas the evidence which he himself adduces, of the imagination of a new shade of colour to fill a gap in a graduated scale of shades, shows that a contrast between given shades can be imaginatively extended so as to generate the imagination of the missing shade. But Hume's example also shows that imagination finds its easiest freedom among the higher categories of eternal objects. A pattern is in a sense simple: a pattern is the 'manner' of a complex contrast abstracted from the specific eternal objects which constitute the 'matter' of the contrast. But the pattern refers unselectively to any eternal objects with the potentiality of being elements in the 'matter' of some contrast in that 'manner.'
( 49 ) Page 115: A pattern and a sensum are thus both simple in the sense that neither involves other specified eternal objects in its own realization. The manner of a pattern is the individual essence of the pattern. But no individual essence is realizable apart from some of its potentialities of relationship, that is, apart from its relational essence. But a pattern lacks simplicity in another sense, in which [176] a sensum retains simplicity. The realization of a pattern necessarily involves the concurrent realization of a group of eternal objects capable of contrast in that pattern. The realization of the pattern is through the realization of this contrast. The realization might have occurred by means of another contrast in the same pattern; but some complex contrast in that pattern is required. But the realization of a sensum in its ideal shallowness of intensity, with zero width, does not require any other eternal object, other than its intrinsic apparatus of individual and relational essence; it can remain just itself, with its unrealized potentialities for patterned contrasts. An actual entity with this absolute narrowness has an ideal faintness of satisfaction, differing from the ideal zero of chaos, but equally impossible. For realization means ingression in an actual entity, and this involves the synthesis of all ingredients with data derived from a complex universe. Realization is ideally distinguishable from the ingression of contrasts, but not in fact.
( 50 ) Page 120: In the transmission of inheritance from A to B, to C, to D, A is objectified by the eternal object S as a datum for B; where s is a sensum or a complex pattern of sensa. Then B is objectified for C. But the datum for B is thereby capable of some relevance for c, namely, A as objectified for B becomes reobjectified for C; and so on to D, and throughout the line of objectifications. Then for the ultimate subject M the datum includes A as thus transmitted, B as thus transmitted, and so on. The final objectifications for M are effected by a set S1 of eternal objects which is a modification of the original group S. The modification consists partly in relegation of elements into comparative irrelevance, partly in enhancement of relevance for other elements, partly in supplementation by eliciting into important relevance some eternal objects not in the original S. Generally there will be vagueness in the distinction between A, and B, and C, and D, etc., in their function as components in the datum for M. Some of the line, A and C for instance, may stand out [184] with distinctness by reason of some peculiar feat of original supplementation which retains its undimmed importance in subsequent transmission. Other members of the chain may sink into oblivion. For example, in touch there is a reference to the stone in contact with the hand, and a reference to the hand; but in normal, healthy, bodily operations the chain of occasions along the arm sinks into the background, almost into complete oblivion. Thus M, which has some analytic consciousness of its datum, is conscious of the feeling in its hand as the hand touches the stone. According to this account, perception in its primary form is consciousness of the causal efficacy of the external world by reason of which the percipient is a concrescence from a definitely constituted datum. The vector character of the datum is this causal efficacy.
( 51 ) Page 122: The epithet 'delusive ' which fits many, if not all, of these examples of presentational immediacy, is evidence that the mediating eternal object is not to be ascribed to the donation of the perceived region. It must have acquired its ingression in this mode from one of the originative phases of the percipient occasion. To this extent, the philosophy of organism is in agreement with the seventeenth-century doctrine of primary and secondary qualities, the mediating eternal object being, in this mode of ingression, a secondary quality. But in the philosophy of organism the doctrine does not have the consequences which follow in the earlier philosophies.
( 52 ) Page 133:red, colour, sense-datum, manner of connectedness of diverse sense-data. The other point is the contrast between 'simplicity' and 'complexity.' We may doubt whether 'simplicity' is ever more than a relative term, having regard to some definite procedure of analysis. I hold this to be the case; and by reason of this opinion find yet another reason for discarding Hume's doctrine which would debar imagination from the free conceptual production of any type of eternal objects, such as Hume calls 'simple.' But there is no such fact as absolute freedom; every actual entity possesses only such freedom as is inherent in the primary phase 'given' by its standpoint of relativity to its actual universe. Freedom, givenness, potentiality, are notions which presuppose each other and limit each other.
( 53 ) Page 148:another rendering of the 'ontological principle.' It follows from the ontological principle, thus interpreted, that the notion of a 'common world' must find its exemplification in the constitution of each actual entity, taken by itself for analysis. For an actual entity cannot be a member of a 'common world,' except in the sense that the 'common world' is a constituent of its own constitution. It follows that every item of the universe, including all the other actual entities, is a constituent in the constitution of any one actual entity. This conclusion has already been employed under the title of the 'principle of relativity.' This principle of relativity is the axiom by which the ontological principle is rescued from issuing in an extreme monism. Hume adumbrates this principle in his notion of 'repetition.' Some principle is now required to rescue actual entities from being undifferentiated repetitions, each of the other, with mere numerical diversity. This requisite is supplied by the 'principle of intensive relevance.' The notion of intensive relevance is fundamental for the meaning of such concepts as 'alternative possibilities,' 'more or less' 'important or negligible.' The principle asserts that any item of the universe, however preposterous as an abstract thought, or however remote as an actual entity, has its own gradation of relevance, as prehended, in the constitution of any one actual entity: it might have had more relevance; and it might have had less relevance, including the zero of relevance involved in the negative prehension, but in fact it has just that relevance whereby it finds its status in the constitution of that actual entity. It will be remembered that Hume finds it necessary to introduce the notion of variations in 'force and vivacity.' He is here making a particular application and, as I believe, an unsuccessful application of the general principle of intensive relevance. There is interconnection between the degrees of relevance of different items in the same actual entity. This fact of interconnection is asserted in the 'principle of [225] compatibility and contrariety.' There are items which, in certain respective gradations of relevance, are contraries to each other; so that those items, with their respective intensities of relevance, cannot coexist in the constitution of one actual entity. If some group of items, with their variety of relevance, can coexist in one actual entity, then the group, as thus variously relevant, is a compatible group. The various specific essences of one genus, whereby an actual entity may belong to one or other of the species but cannot belong to more than one, illustrate the incompatibility between two groups of items. Also in so far as a specific essence is complex, the specific essence is necessarily composed of compatible items, if there has been any exemplification of that species. But 'feelings' are the entities which are primarily 'compatible' or 'incompatible.' All other usages of these terms are derivative. The words 'real' and 'potential' are, in this exposition, taken in senses which are antithetical. In their primary senses, they qualify the 'eternal objects.' These eternal objects determine how the world of actual entities enters into the constitution of each one of its members via its feelings.
( 54 ) Page 149:And they also express how the constitution of any one actual entity is analysable into phases, related as presupposed and presupposing. eternal objects express how the predecessor-phase is absorbed into the successor-phase without limitation of itself, but with additions necessary for the determination of an actual unity in the form of individual satisfaction. The actual entities enter into each others' constitutions under limitations imposed by incompatibilities 4 of feelings. Such incompatibilities relegate various elements in the constitutions of felt objects to the intensive zero, which is termed 'irrelevance.' The preceding phases enter into their successors with additions which eliminate the indeterminations. The how of the limitations, and the how of the additions, are alike the realization of eternal objects in the constitution of the actual entity in question. An eternal object in abstraction from any one particular actual entity is a potentiality for ingression into actual entities. In its ingression into any one actual entity, either as relevant or as irrelevant, it retains its potentiality of indefinite diversity of modes of ingression, a potential indetermination rendered determinate in this instance. The definite ingression into a particular actual entity is not to be conceived as the sheer evocation of that eternal object from 'not-being' into 'being'; it is the evocation of determination cut of indetermination. Potentiality becomes reality; and yet retains its message of alternatives which the actual entity has avoided. In the constitution of an actual entity: whatever component is red, might have been green; and whatever component is loved, might have been coldly esteemed. The term 'universal' is unfortunate in its application to eternal objects; for it seems to deny, and in fact it was meant to deny, that the actual entities also fall within the scope of the principle of relativity. If the term 'eternal objects' is disliked, the term 'potentials' would be suitable. The eternal objects are the pure potentials of the universe; and the actual entities differ from each other in their realization of potentials. Locke's term 'idea,' in his primary use of it in the first two books of the Essay, means the determinate ingression of an eternal object into the actual entity in question. But he also introduces the limitation to conscious mentality, which is here abandoned. Thus in the philosophy of organism, Locke's first use of the term 'idea' is covered by the doctrine of the 'ingression' of eternal objects into actual entities; and his second use of the same term is covered by the doctrine of the 'objectification' of actual entities. The two doctrines cannot be explained apart from each other: they constitute explanations of the two fundamental principles-- [227] the ontological principle and the principle of relativity. The four stages constitutive of an actual entity have been stated above in Part II, Chapter III, Section I. They can be named, datum, process,
( 55 ) Page 150:satisfaction, decision. The two terminal stages have to do with 'becoming' in the sense of the transition from the settled actual world to the new actual entity relatively to which that settlement is defined. But such 'definition' must be found as an element in the actual entities concerned. The 'settlement' which an actual entity 'finds' is its datum. It is to be conceived as a limited perspective of the 'settled' world provided by the eternal objects concerned. This datum is 'decided' by the settled world. It is 'prehended' by the new superseding entity. The datum is the objective content of the experience. The decision, providing the datum, is a transference of self-limited appetition; the settled world provides the 'real potentiality' that its many actualities be felt compatibly; and the new concrescence starts from this datum. The perspective is provided by the elimination of incompatibilities. The final stage, the 'decision,' is how the actual entity, having attained its individual 'satisfaction ' thereby adds a determinate condition to the settlement for the future beyond itself. Thus the 'datum' is the 'decision received,' and the 'decision' is the 'decision transmitted.' Between these two decisions, received and transmitted, there lie the two stages 'process' and 'satisfaction.' The datum is indeterminate as regards the final satisfaction. The 'process' is the addition of those elements of feeling whereby these indeterminations are dissolved into determinate linkages attaining the actual unity of an individual actual entity. The actual entity, in becoming itself, also solves the question as to what it is to be. Thus process is the stage in which the creative idea works towards the definition and attainment of a determinate individuality. Process is the growth and attainment of a final end. The progressive definition of the final end is the efficacious condition for its attainment. The determinate unity of an actual entity is bound together by the final causation towards an ideal progressively defined by its progressive relation to the determinations and indeterminations of the datum. The ideal, itself felt, defines what 'self' shall arise from the datum; and the ideal is also an element in the self which thus arises.
( 56 ) Page 153: The process whereby an actual entity, starting from its objective content, attains its individual satisfaction, will be more particularly analysed in Part III. The primary character of this process is that it is individual to the actual entity; it expresses how the datum, which involves the actual world, becomes a component in the one actual entity. There must therefore be no further reference to other actual entities; the elements available for the explanation are simply, the objective content, eternal objects, and the selective concrescence of feelings whereby an actual entity becomes itself. It must be remembered that the objective content is analysable into actual entities under limited perspectives provided by their own natures; these limited perspectives involve eternal objects in grades of relevance. If the 'process' were primarily a process of understanding, we should have to note that 'grades of relevance' are only other eternal objects in grades of relevance, and so on indefinitely. But we have not the sort of understandings which embrace such indefinite progressions. Accordingly there is here a vicious regress, if the process be essentially a process of understanding. But this is not the primary [233] description of it; the process is a process of 'feeling.' In feeling, what is felt is not necessarily analysed; in understanding, what is understood is analysed, in so far as it is understood. Understanding is a special form of feeling. Thus there is no vicious regress in feeling, by reason of the indefinite complexity of what is felt. Kant, in his
( 57 ) Page 154:'Transcendental Aesthetic', emphasizes the doctrine that in intuition a complex datum is intuited as one. Again the selection involved in the phrase 'selective concrescence' is not a selection among the components of the objective content; for, by hypothesis, the objective content is a datum. The compatibilities and incompatibilities which impose the perspective, transforming the actual world into the datum, are inherent in the nature of things. Thus the selection is a selection of relevant eternal objects whereby what is a datum from without is transformed into its complete determination as a fact within. The problem which the concrescence solves is, how the many components of the objective content are to be unified in one felt content with its complex subjective form. This one felt content is the 'satisfaction,' whereby the actual entity is its particular individual self; to use Descartes' phrase, 'requiring nothing but itself in order to exist.' In the conception of the actual entity in its phase of satisfaction, the entity has attained its individual separation from other things; it has absorbed the datum, and it has not yet lost itself in the swing back to the 'decision' whereby its appetition becomes an element in the data of other entities superseding it. Time has stood still if only it could.
( 58 ) Page 154: Thus process is the admission of eternal objects in their new role of investing the datum with the individuality of the subject. The datum, qua mere datum, includes the many individualities of the actual world. The satisfaction includes these many individualities as subordinate contributors to the one individuality. The process admits or rejects eternal objects which by their absorption into the subjective forms of the many feelings [234] effect this integration. The attainment of satisfaction relegates all eternal objects which are not 'felt' either as determinants of definiteness in the data, or as determinants of definiteness in the subjective form of the satisfaction, into the status of contraries to the eternal objects which are thus felt. Thus all indeterminations respecting the potentialities of the universe are definitely solved so far as concerns the satisfaction of the subject in question.
( 59 ) Page 154: The process can be analysed genetically into a series of subordinate phases which presuppose their antecedents. Neither the intermediate phases, nor the datum which is the primary phase of all, determine the final phase of determinate individualization. Thus an actual entity, on its subjective side, is nothing else than what the universe is for it, including its own reactions. The reactions are the subjective forms of the feelings, elaborated into definiteness through stages of process. An actual entity achieves its own unity by its determinate feelings respecting every item of the datum. Every individual objectification in the datum has its perspective defined by its own eternal objects with their own relevance compatible with the relevance of other objectifications. Each such objectification, and each such complex of objectifications, in the datum is met with a correspondent feeling, with its determinate subjective form, until the many become one experience, the satisfaction. The philosophies of substance presuppose a subject which then encounters a datum, and then reacts to the datum. The philosophy of organism presupposes a datum which is met with feelings, and progressively attains the unity of a subject. But with this doctrine, 'superject' would be a better term than 'subject.' Locke's 'ideas of reflection' are the feelings, in so far as they have entered into consciousness.
( 60 ) Page 155: It is by reference to feelings that the notion of 'immediacy' obtains its meaning. The mere objectification of actual entities by eternal objects lacks 'immediacy.' It is 'repetition'; and this is a contrary to 'immediacy.' [235] But 'process' is the rush of feelings whereby second-handedness attains subjective immediacy; in this way, subjective form overwhelms repetition, and transforms it into immediately felt satisfaction; objectivity is absorbed into subjectivity. It is useful to compare this analysis of the construction of an act of experience with Kant's. In the first place Kant's act of experience is essentially knowledge. Thus whatever is not knowledge is necessarily inchoate, and merely on its way to knowledge. In comparing Kant's procedure with that of the philosophy of organism, it must be remembered that an 'apparent' objective content is the end of Kant's process, and thus takes the place of 'satisfaction' in the process as analysed in the philosophy of organism. In Kant's phraseology at the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason, this 'apparent' objective content is referred to as 'objects.' He also accepts Hume's sensationalist account of the datum. Kant places this sentence at the commencement of the Critique: "Objects therefore are given to us through our sensibility. Sensibility alone supplies us with intuitions. These intuitions become thought through the under-standing, and hence arise conceptions " 6 This is expanded later in a form which makes Kant's adhesion to Hume's doctrine of the datum more explicit:
( 61 ) Page 158: a quality inhering in a substance. The second premise divides qualities and primary substances into two mutually exclusive classes. The two premises together are the foundation of the traditional distinction between universals and particulars. The philosophy of organism denies the premises on which this distinction is founded. It admits two ultimate classes of entities, mutually exclusive. One class consists of 'actual entities ' which in the philosophical tradition are mis-described as 'particulars, and the other class consists of forms of definiteness, here named 'eternal objects ' which in comparison with actual entities are mis-described as 'universals.' These mis-descriptions have already been considered (part II, Ch. I, sect. v).
( 62 ) Page 162: Thus consciousness involves the rise into importance of the contrast between the eternal objects designated by the words 'any' and 'just that.' conscious perception is, therefore, the most primitive form of judgment. The organic philosophy holds that consciousness only arises in a late derivative phase of complex integrations. If an actual occasion be such that phases of this sort are negligible in its concrescence, then in its experience there is no knowledge; owing to the fact that consciousness is a subjective form belonging to the later phases, the prehensions which it directly irradiates are those of an 'impure' type. Consciousness only illuminates the more primitive types of prehension so far as these prehensions are still elements in the products of integration. Thus those elements of our experience which stand out clearly and distinctly in our consciousness are not its basic facts; they are the derivative modifications which arise in the process. For [246] example, consciousness only dimly illuminates the prehensions in the mode of causal efficacy, because these prehensions are primitive elements in our experience. But prehensions in the mode of presentational immediacy are among those prehensions which we enjoy with the most vivid consciousness. These prehensions are late derivatives in the concrescence of an experient subject. The consequences of the neglect of this law, that the late derivative elements are more clearly illuminated by consciousness than the primitive elements, have been fatal to the proper analysis of an experient occasion. In fact, most of the difficulties of philosophy are produced by it. Experience has been explained in a thoroughly topsy-turvy fashion, the wrong end first. In particular, emotional and purposeful experience have been made to follow upon Hume's impressions of sensation.
( 63 ) Page 163:The distinction between the various stages of concrescence consists in the diverse modes of ingression of the eternal objects involved. The immanent decision, whereby there is a supervening of stages in an actual entity, is always the determinant of a process of integration whereby completion is arrived at--at least, such 'formal' completion as is proper to a single actual entity. This determination originates with conceptual prehensions which enter into integration with the physical prehensions, modifying both the data and the subjective forms.
( 64 ) 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.
( 65 ) Page 164:eternal objects in any one of their modes of subjective ingression are then functioning in the guise of subjective novelty meeting the objective datum from the past. This word 'feeling' is a mere technical term; but it has been chosen to suggest that functioning through which the concrescent actuality appropriates the datum so as to make it its own. There are three successive phases of feelings, namely, a phase of 'conformal' feelings, one of 'conceptual' feelings, and one of 'comparative' feelings, including 'propositional' feelings in this last species. In the conformal feelings the how of feeling reproduces what is felt. Some conformation is necessary as a basis of vector transition, whereby the past is synthesized with the present. The one eternal object in its two-way function, as a determinant of the datum and as a determinant of the subjective form, is thus relational. In this sense the solidarity of the universe is based on the relational functioning of eternal objects. The two latter phases can be put together as the 'supplemental' phase.
( 66 ) Page 164:An eternal object when it has ingression through its function of objectifying the actual world, so as to present the datum for prehension, is functioning 'datively.' Hence, to sum up, there are four modes of functioning whereby an eternal object has ingression into the constitution of an actual entity: (i) as dative ingression, (ii) in conformal physical feeling, (iii) in conceptual feeling, (iv) in comparative feeling. [250] But the addition of diverse eternal objects is not of the essence of 'supplementation': the essence consists in the adjustment of subjective importance by functioning of subjective origin. The graduated emotional intensity of the subject is constituting itself by reference to the physical data, datively there and conformally felt. All references to 'attention' usually refer to such supplementation in which the addition of diverse eternal objects is at a minimum; whereas references to 'emotion' usually refer to such supplementation complicated by profuse addition of diverse eternal objects. Supplementary feeling is emotional and purposeful, because it is what is felt by mere reason of the subjective appropriation of the objective data. But it is of the essence of supplementary feeling that it does not challenge its initial phase of conformal feeling by any reference to incompatibility. The stages of the subjective ingression of eternal objects involve essential compatibility. The process exhibits an inevitable continuity of functioning. Each stage carries in itself the promise of its successor, and each succeeding stage carries in itself the antecedent out of which it arose. For example, the complexity of the datum carries in itself the transition from the conformal feelings to supplementary feelings in which contrasts, latent in the datum, achieve real unity between the components. Thus components in the datum, which qua dative, are diverse, become united in specific realized contrast. As elements in the datum, the components are individually given, with the potentiality for a contrast, which in the supplementary stage is either included or excluded. The conformal stage merely transforms the objective content into subjective feelings. But the supplementary stage adds, or excludes, the realization of the contrasts by which the original datum passes into its emotional unity. This account enables us to conceive the stage of consciousness as a prolongation of the stage of supplementation. The concrescence is an individualization of the whole universe. Every eternal object, whether relevant [25l] or irrelevant to the datum, is still patient of its contrasts with the datum. The process by which such contrasts are admitted or rejected involves the stage of conceptual feeling; and consciousness is evidently only a further exhibition of this stage of supplementary feeling. Conceptual feelings do not necessarily involve consciousness. This point is elaborated in detail in part III.
( 67 ) Page 165:Again in this explanation 'contrast' has appeared as the general case; while 'identification' is a subspecies arising when one and the same eternal object is contrasted in its two modes of functioning. Thus the two latter stages of feeling are constituted by the realization of specific modes of diversity and identity, the realization also involving an adjustment of intensities of relevance. Mere diversity, and mere identity, are generic terms. Two components in the constitution of an actual entity are specifically diverse and specifically identical by reason of the definite potential contrast involved in the diversity of the implicated eternal objects, and by reason of the definite self-identity of each eternal object. The specific identity arising from the synthesis of diverse modes of functioning of one eternal object is the 'individual essence' of that eternal object. But the concrescence reaches the goal required by the Category of Objective Unity, that in any subject one entity can only be felt once. Nothing can be duplicated. The many potentialities for one entity must be synthesized into one fact. Hence arise the incompatibilities productive of elimination.
( 68 ) Page 170:The second 'ground' for symbolic reference is the connection between the two modes effected by the identity of an eternal object ingredient in both of them. It will be remembered that the former 'ground' was the identity of the extensive region throughout such stages of direct perception and synthesis, when there was a diversity of eternal objects, for example, eye-region, visual sensa, eye-strain. But now we pass to a diversity of regions combined with an identity of the eternal object, for example, visual sensa given by efficacy of eye-region, and the region of the stone perceived in the mode of presentational immediacy under the illustration of the same visual sensa. In this connection the 'make-believe' character of modern empiricism is well shown by putting into juxtaposition two widely separated passages I from Hume's Treatise: "Impressions may be divided into two kinds, those of sensation, and those of refection. The first kind arises in the soul originally, from unknown causes." And "If it be perceived by the eyes, it must be a colour; . . .
( 69 ) Page 184: [280] A living occasion is characterized by a flash of novelty among the appetitions of its mental pole. Such 'appetitions ' i.e. 'conceptual prehensions,' can be 'pure' or 'impure.' An 'impure' prehension arises from the integration of a 'pure' conceptual prehension with a physical prehension originating in the physical pole. The datum of a pure conceptual prehension is an eternal object; the datum of an impure prehension is a proposition, otherwise termed a 'theory.'
( 70 ) Page 184: The integration of a conceptual and physical prehension need not issue in an impure prehension: the eternal object as a mere potentiality, undetermined as to its physical realization, may lose its indetermination, i.e., its universality, by integration with itself as an element in the realized definiteness of the physical datum of the physical prehension. In this case we obtain what in part III is termed a 'physical purpose.' In a physical purpose the subjective form has acquired a special appetition-- adversion or aversion-- in respect to that eternal object as a realized element of definiteness m that physical datum. This acquisition is derived from the conceptual prehension. The 'abruptness' of mental operations is here illustrated. The physical datum in itself illustrates an indefinite number of eternal objects. The 'physical purpose' has focused appetition upon an abruptly selected eternal object.
( 71 ) Page 185: Again, consider strong religious emotion consider a Christian meditating on the sayings in the Gospels. He is not judging 'true or false'; he is eliciting their value as elements in feeling. In fact, he may ground his judgment of truth upon his realization of value. But such a procedure is impossible, if the primary function of propositions is to be elements in judgments. The 'lure for feeling' is the final cause guiding the concrescence of feelings. By this concrescence the multifold datum of the primary phase is gathered into the unity of the final satisfaction of feeling. The 'objective lure' is that discrimination among eternal objects introduced into the universe by the real internal constitutions of the actual occasions forming the datum of the concrescence under review. This discrimination also involves eternal objects excluded from value in the temporal occasions of that datum, in addition to involving the eternal objects included for such occasions.
( 72 ) Page 185: For example, consider the Battle of Waterloo. This battle resulted in the defeat of Napoleon, and in a constitution of our actual world grounded upon that defeat. But the abstract notions, expressing the possibilities of another course of history which would have followed upon his victory, are relevant to the facts which actually happened. We may not think it of practical importance that imaginative historians should dwell upon such hypothetical alternatives. But we confess their relevance in thinking about them at all, even to the extent of dismissing them. But some imaginative writers do not dismiss such ideas. Thus, in our actual world of today, there is a penumbra of eternal objects, constituted by relevance to the Battle of waterloo. Some people do admit elements from this penumbral complex into effective feeling, and others wholly exclude them. Some are conscious of this internal decision of admission or rejection; for others the ideas float into their minds as daydreams without consciousness of deliberate decision; for others, their emotional tone, of gratification or regret, of friendliness or hatred, is obscurely influenced by this penumbra of alternatives, without any conscious analysis of its content. The elements of this penumbra are propositional prehensions, and not pure conceptual prehensions; for their implication of the particular nexus which is the Battle of waterloo is an essential factor.
( 73 ) Page 186:A 'singular' proposition is the potentiality of an actual world including a definite set of actual entities in a nexus of reactions involving the hypothetical ingression of a definite set of eternal objects. A 'general' proposition only differs from a 'singular' proposition by the generalization of 'one definite set of [283] actual entities' into 'any set belonging to a certain sort of sets.' If the sort of sets includes all sets with potentiality for that nexus of reactions, the proposition is called 'universal.'
( 74 ) Page 186: The definite set of actual entities involved are called the 'logical subjects of the proposition'; and the definite set of eternal objects involved are called the 'predicates of the proposition.' The predicates define a potentiality of relatedness for the subjects. The predicates form one complex eternal object: this is 'the complex predicate.' The 'singular' proposition is the potentiality of this complex predicate finding realization in the nexus of reactions between the logical subjects, with assigned stations in the pattern for the various logical subjects.
( 75 ) Page 188:A proposition, in abstraction from any particular actual entity which may be realizing it in feeling, is a manner of germaneness of a certain set of eternal objects to a certain set of actual entities. Every proposition presupposes those actual entities which are its logical subjects. It also presupposes certain definite actual entities, or a certain type of actual entities, within a wide systematic nexus. In an extreme case, this nexus may comprise any actual entity whatsoever.
( 76 ) Page 188:In conclusion, there are four main types of entities in the universe, of which two are primary types and two are hybrid types. The primary types are actual entities and pure potentials (eternal objects); the hybrid types are feelings and propositions (theories).Feelings are the 'real' components of actual entities. Propositions are only realizable as one sort of 'objective' datum for feelings.
( 77 ) Page 191: In the 'organic' doctrine, a clear distinction between a judgment and a proposition has been made. A judgment is a feeling in the 'process' of the judging subject, and it is correct or incorrect respecting that subject. It enters, as a value, into the satisfaction of that subject; and it can only be criticized by the judgments of actual entities in the future. A judgment concerns the universe in process of prehension by the judging subject. It will primarily concern a definite selection of objectified actual entities, and of eternal objects; and it affirms the physical objectification for the judging subject of those actual entities by the ingression of those eternal objects; so that there is one objectified nexus of those actual entities, judged to be really interconnected, and qualified, by those eternal objects. This judgment affirms, correctly or incorrectly}, a real fact in the constitution of the judging subject. Here there is no room for any qualification of the categorical character of the judgment. The judgment is made about itself by the judging subject, and is a feeling in the constitution of the judging subject. The actual entities, with which the judgment is explicitly concerned, comprise the 'logical' subjects of the judgment, and the selected eternal objects form the 'qualities' and 'relations' which are affirmed of the logical subjects. This affirmation about the logical subjects is obviously 'affirmation' in a sense derivative from the meaning of 'affirmation' about the judging subject. Identification of the two senses will lead to error. In the latter sense there is abstraction from the judging subject. The subjectivist principle has been transcended, and the judgment has shifted its emphasis from the objectified nexus [292] to the truth-value of the proposition in question.
( 78 ) Page 192:Further, the judging subject and the logical subjects [293] refer to a universe with the general metaphysical character which represents its 'patience' for those subjects, and also its 'patience' for those eternal objects. In each judgment the universe is ranged in a hierarchy of wider and wider societies, as explained above (cf. Part II, Ch. III). It follows that the distinction between the logical subjects, with their qualities and relations, and the universe as systematic background, is not quite so sharply defined as the previous explanation suggests. For it is a matter of convention as to which of the proximate societies are reckoned as logical subjects and which as background. Another way of stating this shading off of logical subjects into background is to say that the patience of the universe for a real fact in a judging subject is a hierarchical patience involving systematic gradations of character. This discussion substantiates the statement made above (cf. Part I, Ch. I, Sect. V),that a verbal statement is never the full expression of a proposition. We now recur to the distinction between a proposition and a judgment.
( 79 ) Page 193:A proposition emerges in the analysis of a judgment; it is the datum of the judgment in abstraction from the judging subject and from the subjective form. A judgment 1 is a synthetic feeling, embracing two subordinate feelings in one unity of feeling. Of these subordinate feelings one is propositional, merely entertaining the proposition which is its datum. The same proposition can constitute the content of diverse judgments by diverse judging entities respectively. The possibility of diverse judgments by diverse actual entities, having the same content (of 'proposition' in contrast with 'nexus'), requires that the same complex of logical subjects, objectified via the same eternal objects, can enter as a partial constituent into the 'real' essences of diverse actual entities. The judgment is a decision of feeling, the proposition is what is felt; but it is only part of the datum felt.
( 80 ) Page 194:A 'relation' between occasions is an eternal object illustrated in the complex of mutual prehensions by virtue of which those occasions constitute a nexus.
( 81 ) Page 194:There will, in general, be an indefinite number of eternal objects thus illustrated in the mutual prehensions of the occasions of any one nexus, that is to say, there are an indefinite number of relations realized between the occasions of any particular nexus.
( 82 ) Page 194:A 'general principle' is an eternal object which is only illustrated through its 'instances,' which are also eternal objects. Thus the realization of an instance is also the realization of the general principle of which that eternal object is an instance. But the converse is not true; namely, the realization of the general principle does not involve the realization of any particular instance, though [296] it does necessitate the realization of some instance. Thus the instances each involve the general principle, but the general principle only involves at least one instance. In general, the instances of a general principle are mutually exclusive, so that the realization of one instance involves the exclusion of the other instances. For example, colour is a general principle and colours are the instances. So if all sensible bodies exhibit the general principle, which is colour, each body exhibits some definite colour. Also each body exhibiting a definite colour is thereby 'coloured.'
( 83 ) Page 197:Thus a proposition is an example of what Locke calls an 'idea determined to particular existences.' It is the potentiality of such an idea; the realized idea, admitted to decision in a given subject, is the judgment, which may be a true or false idea about the particular things. The discussion of this question must be resumed (cf. Part III) when conceptual activity is examined. But it is evident that a proposition is a complex entity which [300] stands between the eternal objects and the actual occasions. Compared to eternal objects a proposition shares in the concrete particularity of actual occasions; and compared to actual occasions a proposition shares in the abstract generality of eternal objects. Finally, it must be remembered that propositions enter into experience in other ways than through judgment-feelings.
( 84 ) Page 205: In every inductive judgment, there is therefore contained a presupposition of the maintenance of the general order of the immediate environment, so far as concerns actual entities within the scope of the induction. The inductive judgment has regard to the statistical probabilities inherent in this given order. The anticipations are devoid of meaning apart from the definite cosmic order which they presuppose. Also survival requires order, and to presuppose survival, apart from the type of order which that type of survival requires, is a contradiction. It is at this point that the organic philosophy differs from any form of Cartesian 'substance-philosophy.' For if a substance requires nothing but itself in order to exist, its survival can tell no tale as to the survival of order in its environment. Thus no conclusion can be drawn respecting the external relationships of the surviving substance to its future environment. For [312] the organic philosophy, anticipations as to the future of a piece of rock presuppose an environment with the type of order which that piece of rock requires. Thus the completely unknown environment never enters into an inductive judgment. The induction is about the statistical probabilities of this environment, or about the graded relevance to it of eternal objects.
( 85 ) Page 207: But there is another factor from which, in combination with the four premises, a non-statistical judgment of probability can be derived. The principle of the graduated 'intensive relevance' of eternal objects to the primary physical data of experience expresses a real fact as to the preferential adaptation of selected eternal objects to novel occasions originating from an assigned environment.
( 86 ) Page 211: A feeling can be considered in respect to (i) the actual occasions felt, (ii) the eternal objects felt, (iii) the feelings felt, and (iv) its own subjective forms of intensity. In the process of concrescence the diverse feelings pass on to wider generalities of integral feeling.
( 87 ) Page 214: But 'blindness' of the process, so far, retains an indetermination. There must be either a determinate negation of intellectual 'sight,' or an admittance of intellectual 'sight.' The negation of intellectual sight is the dismissal into irrelevance of eternal objects in their abstract status of pure potentials. 'what might be' has the capability of relevant contrast with 'what is.' If the pure potentials, in this abstract capacity, are dismissed from relevance, the second sub-phase is trivial. The process then constitutes a blind actual occasion, 'blind' in the sense that no intellectual operations are involved; though conceptual operations are always involved. Thus there is always mentality in the form of 'vision,' but not always mentality in the form of conscious 'intellectuality.'
( 88 ) Page 214: But if some eternal objects, in their abstract capacity, are realized as relevant to actual fact, there is an actual occasion with intellectual operations. The complex of such intellectual operations is sometimes termed the 'mind' of the actual occasion; and the actual occasion is also termed 'conscious.' But the term 'mind' conveys the suggestion of independent substance. This is not meant here: a better term is the 'consciousness' belonging to the actual occasion. An eternal object realized in respect to its pure potentiality as related to determinate logical subjects is termed a 'propositional feeling' in the mentality of the actual occasion in question. The consciousness belonging to an actual occasion is its sub-phase of intellectual supplementation, when that sub-phase is not purely trivial. This sub-phase is the eliciting, into feeling, of the full contrast between mere propositional potentiality and realized fact.
( 89 ) Page 219: In the genetic theory, the cell is exhibited as appropriating for the foundation of its own existence, the various elements of the universe out of which it arises. Each process of appropriation of a particular element is termed a prehension. The ultimate elements of the universe. thus appropriated, are the already constituted actual entities, and the eternal objects. All the actual entities are positively prehended, but only a selection of the eternal objects. In the course of the integrations of these various prehensions, entities of other categoreal types become relevant; and some new entities of these types, such as novel propositions and generic contrasts, come into existence. These relevant entities of these other types are also prehended into the constitution of the concrescent cell. This genetic process has now to be traced in its main outlines.
( 90 ) 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.
( 91 ) 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.'
( 92 ) Page 227:The same principle of explanation also holds in the case of a conceptual prehension, in which the datum is an eternal object. In the first phase of this conceptual prehension, there is this eternal object to be felt as a mere abstract capacity for giving definiteness to a physical feeling. But also there are the feelings of the objectifications of innumerable actual entities. Some of these physical feelings illustrate this same eternal object as an element providing their definiteness. There are in this way diverse prehensions of the same eternal object; and by the first category these various prehensions must be [347] consistent, so as to pass into the integration of the subsequent phase in which there is one coherent complex feeling, namely, a conceptual feeling of that eternal object. This subjective insistence on consistency may, from the beginning, replace the positive feelings by negative prehensions.
( 93 ) Page 227:The fact that there is integration at all arises from the condition expressed by the category of objective Identity. The same entity, be it actual entity or be it eternal object, cannot be felt twice in the formal constitution of one concrescence. The incomplete phases with their many feelings of one object are only to be interpreted in terms of the final satisfaction with its one feeling of that one object. Thus objective identity requires integration of the many feelings of one object into the one feeling of that object. The analysis of an actual entity is only intellectual, or, to speak with a wider scope, only objective. Each actual entity is a cell with atomic unity. But in analysis it can only be understood as a process; it can only be felt as a process, that is to say, as in passage. The actual entity is divisible; but is in fact undivided. The divisibility can thus only refer to its objectifications in which it transcends itself. But such transcendence is self -revelation.
( 94 ) Page 228:This diversity of status, combined with the real unity of the components, means that the real synthesis of two component elements in the objective datum of a feeling [349] must be infected with the individual particularities of each of the relata. Thus the synthesis in its completeness expresses the joint particularities of that pair of relata, and can relate no others. A complex entity with this individual definiteness, arising out of determinateness of eternal objects, will be termed a 'contrast.' A contrast cannot be abstracted from the contrasted relata.
( 95 ) Page 228:The most obvious examples of a contrast are to be found by confining attention purely to eternal objects. The contrast between blue and red cannot be repeated as that contrast between any other pair of colours, or any pair of sounds, or between a colour and a sound. It is just the contrast between blue and red, that and nothing else. Certain abstractions from that contrast, certain values inherent in it, can also be got from other contrasts. But they are other contrasts, and not that contrast; and the abstractions are not 'contrasts' of the same categoreal type.
( 96 ) Page 229:One use of the term 'contrast' is to mean that particularity of conjoint unity which arises from the realized togetherness of eternal objects. But there is another, and more usual, sense of 'particularity.' This is the sense in which the term 'particular' is applied to an actual entity.
( 97 ) Page 229:One actual entity has a status among other actual entities, not expressible wholly in terms of contrasts between eternal objects. For example, the complex nexus of ancient imperial Rome to European history is not wholly expressible in universals. It is not merely the contrast of a sort of city, imperial, Roman, ancient, with a sort of history of a sort of continent, sea-indented, river-diversified, with alpine divisions, begirt by larger continental masses and oceanic wastes, civilized, barbarized, christianized, commercialized, industrialized. The nexus in question does involve such a complex contrast of universals. But it involves more. For it is the nexus of that Rome with that Europe. We cannot be conscious of this nexus purely by the aid of conceptual feelings. This nexus is implicit, below consciousness, in our physical feelings. In part we are conscious of such physical feelings, and of that particularity of the nexus between particular actual entities. This consciousness takes the form of our consciousness of particular spatial and temporal relations between things directly perceived. But, as in the case of Rome and Europe, so far as concerns the mass of our far-reaching knowledge, the particular nexus between the particular actualities in question is only indicated by constructive reference to the physical feelings of which we are conscious.
( 98 ) Page 231:In two extreme cases the initial data of a feeling have a unity of their own. In one case, the data reduce to a single actual entity, other than the subject of the feeling; and in the other case the data reduce to a single eternal object. These are called 'primary feelings.' A particular feeling divorced from its subject is nonsense.
( 99 ) Page 232:The essential novelty of a feeling attaches to its subjective form. The initial data, and even the nexus which is the objective datum, may have served other feelings with other subjects. But the subjective form is the immediate novelty; it is how that subject is feeling that objective datum. There is no tearing this subjective form from the novelty of this concrescence. It is enveloped in the immediacy of its immediate present. The fundamental example of the notion 'quality inhering in particular substance' is afforded by 'subjective form inhering in feeling.' If we abstract the form from the feeling, we are left with an eternal object as the remnant of subjective form.
( 100 ) Page 232:There are an indefinite number of types of feeling according to the complexity of the initial data which the feeling integrates, and according to the complexity of the objective datum which it finally feels. But there are three primary types of feeling which enter into the formation of all the more complex feelings. These types are: (i) that of simple physical feelings, (ii) that of conceptual feelings, and (iii) that of transmuted feelings. In a simple physical feeling, the initial datum is a single actual entity; in a conceptual feeling, the objective datum is an eternal object in a transmuted feeling, the objective datum is a nexus of actual entities. Simple physical feelings and transmuted feelings make up the class of physical feelings.
( 101 ) Page 233:In the analysis of a feeling, whatever presents itself as also ante rem is a datum, whatever presents itself as [356] exclusively in re is subjective form, whatever presents itself in re and post rem is 'subject-superject.' This doctrine of 'feeling' is the central doctrine respecting the becoming of an actual entity. In a feeling the actual world, selectively appropriated, is the presupposed datum, not formless but with its own realized form selectively germane, in other words 'objectified.' The subjective form is the ingression of novel form peculiar to the new particular fact, and with its peculiar mode of fusion with the objective datum. The subjective form in abstraction from the feeling is merely a complex eternal object. In the becoming, it meets the 'data' which are selected from the actual world. In other words, the data are already 'in being.' There the term 'in being' is for the moment used as equivalent to the term 'in realization.'
( 102 ) Page 235:The genetic growth of this prehension can then be traced by considering the transmission of the various elements of the datum from the actual world, and in the case of eternal objects their origination in the conceptual prehensions. There is then a growth of prehensions, with integrations, eliminations, and determination of subjective forms. But the determination of successive phases of subjective forms, whereby the integrations have the characters that they do have, depends on the unity of the subject imposing a mutual sensitivity upon the prehensions. Thus a prehension, considered genetically, can never free itself from the incurable atomicity [360] of the actual entity to which it belongs. The selection of a subordinate prehension from the satisfaction as described above involves a hypothetical, propositional point of view. The fact is the satisfaction as one. There is some arbitrariness in taking a component from the datum with a component from the subjective form, and in considering them, on the ground of congruity, as forming a subordinate prehension. The justification is that the genetic process can be thereby analysed. If no such analysis of the growth of that subordinate prehension can be given, then there has been a faulty analysis of the satisfaction. This relation between the satisfaction and the genetic process is expressed in the eighth and ninth categories of explanation (cf. Part I, Ch. II, sect. II).
( 103 ) Page 238: A simple physical feeling enjoys a characteristic which has been variously described as 're-enaction,' 'reproduction,' and 'conformation.' This characteristic can be more accurately explained in terms of the eternal objects involved. There are eternal objects determinant of the definiteness of the objective datum which is the 'cause,' and eternal objects determinant of the definiteness of the subjective form belonging to the 'effect.' When there is re-enaction there is one eternal object with two-way functioning, namely, as partial determinant of the objective datum, and as partial determinant of the subjective form. In this two-way role, the eternal object is functioning relationally between the initial data on the one hand and the concrescent subject on the other It is playing one self-consistent role in obedience to the category of objective Identity.
( 104 ) Page 239: Conceptual feelings and simple causal feelings constitute the two main species of 'primary' feelings. All other feelings of whatever complexity arise out of a process of integration which starts with a phase of these [366] primary feelings. There is, however, a difference between the species. An actual entity in the actual world of a subject must enter into the concrescence of that subject by some simple causal feeling, however vague, trivial, and submerged. Negative prehensions may eliminate its distinctive importance. But in some way, by some trace of causal feeling, the remote actual entity is prehended positively. In the case of an eternal object, there is no such necessity. In any given concrescence, it may be included positively by means of a conceptual feeling; but it may be excluded by a negative prehension. The actualities have to be felt, while the pure potentials can be dismissed. So far as concerns their functionings as objects, this is the great distinction between an actual entity and an eternal object. The one is stubborn matter of fact; and the other never loses its 'accent' of potentiality.
( 105 ) Page 239: A conceptual feeling is feeling an eternal object in the primary metaphysical character of being an 'object,' that is to say, feeling its capacity for being a realized determinant of process. Immanence and transcendence are the characteristics of an object: as a realized determinant it [367] is immanent; as a capacity for determination it is transcendent; in both roles it is relevant to something not itself. There is no character belonging to the actual apart from its exclusive determination by selected eternal objects. The definiteness of the actual arises from the exclusiveness of eternal objects in their function as determinants. If the actual entity be this, then by the nature of the case it is not that or that. The fact of incompatible alternatives is the ultimate fact in virtue of which there is definite character. A conceptual feeling is the feeling of an eternal object in respect to its general capacity as a determinant of character, including thereby its capacity of exclusiveness. In the technical phraseology of these lectures, a conceptual feeling is a feeling whose 'datum' is an eternal object. Analogously a negative prehension is termed 'conceptual' when its datum is an eternal object. In a conceptual feeling there is no necessary progress from the 'initial data' to the 'objective datum.' The two may be identical, except in so far as conceptual feelings with diverse sources of origination acquire integration.
( 106 ) Page 240: But in the formation of this integrated datum there must be determination of exactly how this eternal object has ingress into that datum conjointly with the remaining eternal objects and actual entities derived from the other feelings. This determination is effected by the subjective forms of the component conceptual feelings. Again it is to be remembered that, by the first categoreal condition, this subjective form is not independent of the other feelings in the earlier phase, and thus is such as to effect this determination. Also the integral feeling has its subjective form with its pattern of intensiveness. This patterned intensiveness regulates the distinctive relative importance of each element of the datum as felt in that feeling. This intensive regulation of that eternal object, as felt in the integrated datum, is determined by the subjective form of the conceptual feeling. Yet again, by reference to the first, and seventh, categoreal conditions, this intensive form of the conceptual feeling has dependence also in this respect on the other feelings of the earlier phase. Thus, according as the valuation of the conceptual feeling is a 'valuation up' or a 'valuation down,' the importance of the eternal object as felt in the integrated feeling is enhanced, or attenuated. Thus the valuation is both qualitative, determining how the eternal object is to be utilized, and is also intensive, determining what importance that utilization is to assume.
( 107 ) Page 241: (ii) The valuation determines in what status the eternal object has ingression into the integrated nexus physically felt.
( 108 ) Page 241: (iii) The valuation values up, or down, so as to determine the intensive importance accorded to the eternal object by the subjective form of the integral feeling.
( 109 ) Page 241: Consciousness concerns the subjective form of a feeling. But such a subjective form requires a certain type of objective datum. A subjective form in abstraction loses its reality, and sinks into an eternal object capable of determining a feeling into that distinctive type of definiteness. But when the eternal object 'informs' a feeling it can only so operate in virtue of its conformation to the other components which jointly constitute the definiteness of the feeling. The moral of this slight discussion must now be applied to the notion of 'consciousness.' consciousness is an element in feeling which belongs to its subjective form. But there can only be that sort of subjective form when the objective datum has an adequate character. Further, the objective datum can only assume this character when it is derivate from initial data which carry in their individual selves the reciprocal possibilities of this objective synthesis.
( 110 ) Page 243:the fourth category of explanation, that no entity can be abstracted from its capacity to function as an object in the process of the actual world. 'To function as an object' is 'to be a determinant of the definiteness of an actual occurrence.' According to the philosophy of organism, a pure concept does not involve consciousness, at least in our human experience. Consciousness arises when a synthetic feeling integrates physical and conceptual feelings. Traditional philosophy in its account of conscious perception has exclusively fixed attention on its pure conceptual side; and thereby has made difficulties for itself in the theory of knowledge. Locke, with his naive good sense, assumes that perception involves more than this conceptual side; though he fails to grasp the inconsistency of this assumption with the extreme subjectivist sensational doctrine. Physical feelings form the non-conceptual element in our awareness of [372] nature.1 Also, all awareness, even awareness of concepts, requires at least the synthesis of physical feelings with conceptual feeling. In awareness actuality, as a process in fact, is integrated with the potentialities which illustrate either what it is and might not be, or what it is not and might be. In other words, there is no consciousness without reference to definiteness, affirmation, and negation. Also affirmation involves its contrast with negation, and negation involves its contrast with affirmation. Further, affirmation and negation are alike meaningless apart from reference to the definiteness of particular actualities. Consciousness is how we feel the affirmation-negation contrast. Conceptual feeling is the feeling of an unqualified negation; that is to say, it is the feeling of a definite eternal object with the definite extrusion of any particular realization. Consciousness requires that the objective datum should involve (as one side of a contrast) a qualified negative determined to some definite situation. It will be found later (cf. Ch. IV) that this doctrine implies that there is no consciousness apart from propositions as one element in the objective datum.
( 111 ) 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.
( 112 ) Page 248:The initial problem is to discover the principles according to which some eternal objects are prehended positively and others are prehended
( 113 ) Page 248: Category IV. The Category of Conceptual Valuation. From each physical feeling there is the derivation of a purely conceptual feeling whose datum is the eternal object exemplified in the definiteness of the actual entity, or oft the nexus, physically felt.
( 114 ) Page 249: The question, how, and in what sense, one unrealized [382] eternal object can be more, or less, proximate to an eternal object in realized ingression that is to say, in comparison with any other unfelt eternal object--is left unanswered by this Category of Reversion.
( 115 ) 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.
( 116 ) Page 250: The two categories of the preceding section concerned the efficacy of physical feelings, pure or hybrid, for the origination of conceptual feelings in a later phase of their own subject. The present section considers analogous feelings with diverse subjects 'scattered' throughout members of a nexus. It considers a single subject, subsequent to the nexus, prehending this multiplicity of scattered feelings as the data for a corresponding multiplicity of its own simple physical feelings, some pure and some hybrid. It then formulates the process by which in that subject an analogy between these various feelings constituted by one eternal object, of whatever complexity, implicated in the various analogous data of these feelings is, by a supervening process of integration, converted into one feeling having for its datum the specific contrast between the nexus as one entity and that eternal object. This contrast is what is familiarly known as the qualification of the nexus by that eternal object. An inter- [383] mediate stage in this process of integration is the formation in the final subject of one conceptual feeling with that eternal object as its datum. This conceptual feeling has an impartial relevance to the above-mentioned various simple physical feelings of the various members of the nexus. It is this impartiality of the conceptual feeling which leads to the integration in which the many members of the nexus are collected into the one nexus which they form, and in which that nexus is set in contrast to the one eternal object which has emerged from their analogies.
( 117 ) Page 250: Thus pure, and hybrid, physical feelings, issuing into a single conceptual feeling, constitute the preliminary phase of this transmutation in the prehending subject. The integration of these feelings in that subject leads to the transmuted physical feeling of a nexus as qualified by that eternal object which is the datum of the single conceptual feeling. In this way the world is physically felt as a unity, and is felt as divisible into parts which are unities, namely, nexus. Each such unity has its own characteristics arising from the undiscriminated actual entities which are members of that nexus. In some cases objectification of the nexus has only indirect reference to the characteristics of its individual atomic actualities. In such a case the objectification may introduce new elements into the world, fortunate or unfortunate. Usually the objectification gives direct information, so that the prehending subject shapes itself as the direct outcome of the order prevalent in the prehended nexus. Transmutation is the way in which the actual world is felt as a community, and is so felt in virtue of its prevalent order. For it arises by reason of the analogies between the various members of the prehended nexus, and eliminates their differences. Apart from transmutation our feeble intellectual operations would fail to penetrate into the dominant characteristics of things. We can only understand by discarding. Transmutation depends upon a categoreal condition.
( 118 ) Page 251: In order to understand this categoreal condition, it must be noted that the integration of simple physical feelings into a complex physical feeling only provides for the various actual entities of the nexus being felt as separate entities requiring each other. We have to account for the substitution of the one nexus in place of its component actual entities. This is Leibniz's problem which arises in his Monadology. He solves the problem by an unanalysed doctrine of 'confusion.' Some category is required to provide a physical feeling of a nexus as one entity with its own categoreal type of existence. This one physical feeling in the final subject is derived by transmutation from the various analogous physical feelings entertained by the various members of the nexus, together with their various analogous conceptual feelings (with these various members as subjects ) originated from these physical feelings, either directly according to category Iv, or indirectly according to Category V. The analogy of the physical feelings consists in the fact that their definite character exhibits the same ingredient [385] eternal object. The analogy of the conceptual feelings consists in the fact that this one eternal object, or one reversion from this eternal object, is the datum for the various relevant conceptual feelings entertained respectively by members of the nexus. The final prehending subject prehends the members of the nexus, (i) by 'pure' physical feelings
( 119 ) Page 252:in which the members are severally objectified by these analogous physical feelings, and (ii) by hybrid physical feelings in which the members are severally objectified by these analogous conceptual feelings. In the prehending subject, these analogous, pure physical feelings originate a conceptual feeling, according to category IV; and, according to category V, there may be a reverted conceptual feeling. There will be only one direct conceptual feeling; for the simple physical feelings (in the final subject) are analogous in the sense of exemplifying the same eternal object. (If there be no reversion, this analogy extends over the pure and the hybrid physical feelings. If there be important reversion, this analogy only extends over the hybrid feelings with the reverted conceptual feelings as data. This latter case is only important when the reverted feelings involve the predominantly intense valuation.) Thus these many physical feelings of diverse actualities originate in the final subject one conceptual feeling. This single conceptual feeling has therefore an impartial reference throughout the actualities of the nexus. Also reverted conceptual feelings in the nexus are, in this connection, negligible unless they preserved this impartiality of reference throughout the nexus. Excluding for the moment the consideration of reverted feelings in the actualities of the nexus, the hybrid physical feelings in the prehending subject also, by category Iv, generate one conceptual feeling with impartial reference; also it is the same conceptual feeling as that generated by the pure physical feelings (in the final subject). Thus (with no reversion) the influence of the hybrid physical feelings [386] is to enhance the intensity of the conceptual feeling derived from the pure physical feelings. But there may be reversions to be considered, that is to say, reversions with impartial reference throughout the nexus. The reversion may originate in the separate actualities of the nexus, or in the final prehending subject, or there may be a double reversion involving both sources. Thus we must allow for the possibility of diverse reverted feelings, each with impartial reference. In so far as there is concordance and the reversions are dominant, there will issue one conceptual feeling of enhanced intensity. When there is discordance among these various conceptual feelings, there will be elimination, and in general no transmutation. But when, from some (or all) of these sources of impartial conceptual feelings, one dominant impartial conceptual feeling emerges with adequate intensity, transmutation will supervene.
( 120 ) Page 252: This impartiality of reference has then been transmuted into the physical feeling of that nexus, whole or partial, contrasted with some one eternal object. It will be noted that this one impartial conceptual feeling is an essential element of the process, whereby an impartial reference to the whole nexus is introduced. Otherwise there would be no element to transmute particular relevancies to the many members into general relevance to the whole.
( 121 ) Page 253:The eternal object which characterizes the nexus in this physical feeling may be an eternal object characterizing the analogous physical feelings, belonging to all, or some, of the members of the nexus. In this case, the nexus as a whole derives a character which in some way belongs to its various members.
( 122 ) Page 253: Again in the transmuted feeling only part of the original nexus may be objectified, and the eternal object may have been derived from members of the other part of the original nexus. This is the case for perception in the mode of 'presentational immediacy,' to be further discussed in a later chapter (part Iv, Ch. v; cf. also [387] Part II, Ch. II, Sect. I, and Part II, Ch. IV, Sect. VII, and Part II, Ch. V
( 123 ) Page 253: Also the eternal object may be the datum of a reverted conceptual feeling, only indirectly derived from the members of the original nexus. In this case, the transmuted feeling of the nexus introduces novelty; and in unfortunate cases this novelty may be termed 'error.' But all the same, the transmuted feeling, whatever be its history of transmutation, is a definite physical fact whereby the final subject prehends the nexus. For example, considering the example of presentational immediacy, colour-blindness may be called 'error'; but nevertheless, it is a physical fact. A transmuted feeling comes under the definition of a physical feeling.
( 124 ) Page 256:A proposition enters into experience as the entity forming the datum of a complex feeling derived from the integration of a physical feeling with a conceptual feeling.1 Now a conceptual feeling does not refer to the actual world, in the sense that the history of this actual world has any peculiar relevance to its datum. This datum is an eternal object; and an eternal object refers only to the purely general any among undetermined actual entities. In itself an eternal object evades any selection among actualities or epochs. You cannot know what is red by merely thinking of redness. You can o y n things by adventuring amid physical experiences in this actual world. This doctrine is the ultimate ground of empiricism, namely, that eternal objects t I no tales as to their ingressions.
( 125 ) 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
( 126 ) Page 257:the truth or falsehood of an eternal object. The very diversity of eternal objects has for its reason their diversity of functioning in this actual world.
( 127 ) 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.
( 128 ) Page 257:But a proposition, while preserving the indeterminateness of an eternal object, makes an incomplete abstraction from determinate actual entities. It is a complex entity, with determinate actual entities among its components. These determinate actual entities, considered formaliter and not as in the abstraction of the proposition, do afford a reason determining the truth or falsehood of the proposition. But the proposition in itself, apart from recourse to these reasons, tells no tale about itself; and in this respect it is indeterminate like the eternal objects.
( 129 ) Page 257:A propositional feeling (as has been stated) arises from a special type of integration synthesizing a physical feeling with a conceptual feeling. The objective datum of the physical feeling is either one actual entity, if the feeling be simple, or is a determinate nexus of actual entities, if the physical feeling be more complex. The datum of the conceptual feeling is an eternal object which is referent (qua possibility)$to any actual entities, where the any is absolutely general and devoid of selection. In the integrated objective datum the physical feeling provides its determinate set of actual entities, indicated by their felt physical relationships to the subject of the feeling. These actual entities are the logical subjects of the proposition. The absolute generality of the notion of any, inherent in an eternal object, is thus eliminated in the fusion. In the proposition, the eternal object, in respect to its possibilities as a determinant of nexus, is restricted to these logical subjects. The proposition may have the restricted generality of referring to any among these provided logical subjects; or it may have the singularity of referring to the complete set of provided logical subjects as potential relata, each with its assigned status, in the complex pattern which is the eternal object. The proposition is the potentiality of the eternal object, as a determinant of definiteness, in some determinate mode of restricted reference to the logical subjects. This eternal object is the 'predicative pattern' of the proposition. The set of logical subjects is either completely singled out as these logical subjects in this predicative pattern or is collectively singled out as any of these logical subjects in this pattern, or as some of these logical subjects in this pattern. Thus the physical feeling indicates the logical subjects and provides them respectively with that individual definition necessary to assign the hypothetic status of each in the predicative pattern. The conceptual feeling provides the predicative pattern. Thus in a proposition the logical subjects are reduced to the status of food for a possibility. Their real role in actuality is abstracted from; they are no longer factors in fact, except for the purpose of their physical indication. Each logical subject becomes a bare 'it' among actualities, with its assigned hypothetical relevance to the predicate. It is evident that the datum of the conceptual feeling reappears as the predicate in the proposition which is the datum of the integral, propositional feeling. In this synthesis the eternal object has suffered the elimination of its absolute generality of reference. The datum of the physical feeling has also suffered elimination. For the peculiar objectification of the actual entities, really effected in the physical feeling, is eliminated, except in so far as it is required for the services of the indication. The objectification remains only to indicate that definiteness which the logical subjects must have in order to be hypothetical food for that predicate. This necessary indication of the logical subjects requires the actual world as a systematic environment. For there can be no definite position in pure abstraction. The proposition is the possibility of that predicate applying in that assigned way to those logical subjects. In every proposition, as such and without going beyond it, there is complete indeterminateness so far as concerns its own realization in a propositional feeling, and as regards its own truth. The logical subjects are, nevertheless, in fact actual entities which are definite in their realized mutual relatedness. Thus the proposition is in fact true, or false. But its own [395] truth, or its own falsity, is no business of a proposition. That question concerns only a subject entertaining a propositional feeling with that proposition for its datum. Such an actual entity is termed a 'prehending subject' of the proposition. Even a prehending subject is not necessarily judging the proposition. That particular case has been discussed earlier in chapter IX of part II. In that chapter the term 'judging subject' was used in place of the wider term 'prehending subject.' To summarize this discussion of the general nature of a proposition: A proposition shares with an eternal object the character of indeterminateness, in that both are definite potentialities for actuality with undetermined realization in actuality. But they differ in that an eternal object refers to actuality with absolute generality, whereas a proposition refers to indicated logical subjects. Truth and falsehood always require some element of sheer givenness.
( 130 ) Page 258:eternal objects cannot demonstrate what they are except in some given fact. The logical subjects of a proposition supply the element of givenness requisite for truth and falsehood.
( 131 ) Page 260:A propositional feeling can arise only in a late phase of the process of the prehending subject. For it requires, in earlier phases: (a) a physical feeling whose objective datum includes the requisite logical subjects; and (b) a physical feeling involving a certain eternal object among the determinants of the definiteness of its datum; and (c) the conceptual feeling of this eternal object, necessarily derivate from the physical feeling under heading (b), according to categoreal condition IV; and perhaps (d),some conceptual feeling which is a reversion from the former conceptual feeling, according to categoreal condition v, involving another eternal object as its datum.
( 132 ) Page 260:[398] The 'predicative pattern' is either the eternal object which is the datum of the conceptual feeling under the heading (c),or it is the eternal object which is the datum of the conceptual feeling under the heading (d). In the former case, the second conceptual feeling, namely, that under the heading (d), is irrelevant to the consideration of the propositional feeling. In either case, that conceptual feeling whose datum is the predicative pattern is called the 'predicative feeling.'
( 133 ) Page 260:In this account of the origin of the predicative feeling, we are in general agreement with Locke and Hume, who hold that every conceptual feeling has a physical basis. But Hume lays down the principle that all eternal objects are first felt physically, and thus would only allow of the origination of the predicative feeling under heading (c). However he makes two concessions which ruin his general principle. For he allows the independent origination of intermediate 'shades' in a scale of shades, and also of new 'manners' of pattern. Both of these cases are allowed for by the principle of 'reversion,' which is appealed to under heading (d).The propositional feeling arises in the later phase in which there is integration of the 'indicative feeling' with the 'predicative feeling.' In this integration the two data are synthesized by a double elimination involving both data. The actual entities involved in the datum of the indicative feeling are reduced to a bare multiplicity in which each is a bare 'it' with the elimination of the eternal object really constituting the definiteness of that nexus. But the integration rescues them from this mere multiplicity by placing them in the unity of a proposition with the given predicative pattern. Thus the actualities, which were first felt as sheer matter of fact, have been transformed into a set of logical subjects with the potentiality for realizing an assigned predicative pattern. The predicative pattern has also been limited by elimination. For as a datum in the conceptual feeling, it held its possibility for realization in respect to absolutely any actual entities; but in [399] the proposition its possibilities are limited to just these logical subjects.
( 134 ) Page 262: But if the primary physical feeling involves no reversion in any stage, then the predicate of the proposition is that eternal object which constitutes the definiteness of that nexus. In this case, the proposition is, without qualification, true. The authentic perceptive feeling will then be termed 'direct.' Thus there are 'indirect' perceptive feelings (when 'reversion' is involved), and 'direct' perceptive feelings; and feelings of both these species are termed 'authentic.' In the case of these 'authentic' feelings, the predicate has realization in the nexus, physically or ideally, apart from any reference to the prehending subject.
( 135 ) Page 267: A feeling is termed a 'belief,' or is said to include an element of 'belief,' when its datum is a proposition, and its subjective form includes, as the defining element in its emotional pattern, a certain form, or eternal object, associated with some gradation of intensity. This eternal object is 'belief-character.' when this character enters into the emotional pattern. then, according to the intensity involved, the feeling, whatever else it be. is to some degree a belief.
( 136 ) Page 271:The intuitive judgment is the comparative feeling with its datum constituted by the generic contrast between the nexus involved in the indicative feeling and the proposition involved in the imaginative feeling. In this generic contrast each actual entity has its contrast of two-way functioning. One way is its functioning in the exemplified pattern of the nexus, and the other way is its functioning in the potential pattern of the proposition. If in addition to the contrast between exemplification and potentiality, there be identity as to pattern and predicate, then by the category of objective Unity there is also the single complex eternal object in its two-way functioning, namely, as exemplified and as potential. In this case, the proposition coheres with the nexus and this coherence is its truth. Thus 'truth' is the absence of incompatibility or of any 'material contrast' in the patterns of the nexus and of the proposition in their generic contrast. The sole contrast, involving the category of objective Diversity, is merely that between exemplification and potentiality, and in all other respects the coherence is governed by the category of objective Identity.
( 137 ) Page 272:It is a great mistake to describe the subjective form of an intuitive judgment as necessarily including definite belief or disbelief in the proposition. Three cases arise. The generic contrast which is the datum of the intuitive judgment may exhibit the predicate of the proposition as exemplified in the objectified nexus. In this case, the subjective form will include definite belief. Secondly, the predicate may be exhibited as incompatible with the [416] eternal objects exemplified in the objectified nexus. In this case, the subjective form will include definite disbelief. But there is a third case, which is in fact the more usual one: the predicate may be exhibited as irrelevant, wholly or partially, to the eternal objects exemplified in the objectified nexus. In this case, the subjective form need exhibit neither belief nor disbelief. It may include one or the other of these decisions, but it need not do so. This third case will be termed the case of 'suspended judgment.' Thus an intuitive judgment may be a belief, or a disbelief, or a suspended judgment. It is the task of the inferential process sometimes to convert a suspended judgment into a belief, or a disbelief, so far as the final satisfaction is concerned.
( 138 ) Page 276:In the more primitive type of comparative feelings indetermination as to its own ingressions so prominent in intellectual feelings is the aspect of the eternal object which is pushed into the background. In such a type of physical purposes the integration of a physical feeling and a conceptual feeling does not involve the reduction of the objective datum of the physical feeling to a multiplicity of bare logical subjects. The objective datum remains the nexus that it is, exemplifying the eternal objects whose ingression constitutes its definiteness. Also the indeterminateness as to its own ingressions is eliminated from the eternal object which is the datum of the conceptual feeling. In the integral comparative feeling the datum is the contrast of the conceptual datum with the reality of the objectified nexus. The physical feeling is feeling a real fact; the conceptual feeling is valuing an abstract possibility. The new datum is the compatibility or incompatibility of the fact as felt with the eternal object as a datum in feeling. This synthesis of a pure abstraction with a real fact, as in feeling, is a generic contrast. In respect to physical purposes, the cosmological scheme which is here being developed requires us to hold that all actual entities include physical purposes. The constancy of physical purposes explains the persistence of the order of nature, and in particular of 'enduring objects.'
( 139 ) Page 276:[422] The chain of stages in which a physical purpose originates is simpler than in the case of intellectual feelings: (i) there is a physical feeling; (ii) the primary conceptual correlate of the physical feeling is generated, according to categoreal condition Iv; (iii) this physical feeling is integrated with its conceptual correlate to form the physical purpose. Such physical purposes are called physical purposes of the first species. In such a physical purpose, the datum is the generic contrast between the nexus, felt in the physical feeling, and the eternal object valued in the conceptual feeling. This eternal object is also exemplified as the pattern of the nexus. Thus the conceptual valuation now closes in upon the feeling of the nexus as it stands in the generic contrast, exemplifying the valued eternal object. This valuation accorded to the physical feeling endows the transcendent creativity with the character of adversion, or of aversion. The character of adversion secures the reproduction of the physical feeling, as one element in the objectification of the subject beyond itself. Such reproduction may be thwarted by incompatible objectification derived from other feelings. But a physical feeling, whose valuation produces adversion, is thereby an element with some force of persistence into the future beyond its own subject. It is felt and re-enacted down a route of occasions forming an enduring object. Finally this chain of transmission meets with incompatibilities, and is attenuated, or modified, or eliminated from further endurance.
( 140 ) Page 278:We first note (i) that intensity of feeling due to any realized ingression of an eternal object is heightened when that eternal object is one element in a realized contrast between eternal objects, and (ii) that two or more contrasts may be incompatible for joint ingression, or may jointly enter into a higher contrast.
( 141 ) 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 favourable 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 ) .
( 142 ) Page 283: [433] THERE are two distinct ways of 'dividing' the satisfaction of an actual entity into component feelings, genetically and coordinately. Genetic division is division of the concrescence, coordinate division is division of the concrete. In the 'genetic' mode, the prehensions are exhibited in their genetic relationship to each other. The actual entity is seen as a process, there is a growth from phase to phase; there are processes of integration and of [434] reintegration. At length a complex unity of objective datum is obtained, in the guise of a contrast of actual entities, eternal objects, and propositions, felt with corresponding complex unity of subjective form. This genetic passage from phase to phase is not in physical time: the exactly converse point of view expresses the relationship of concrescence to physical time. It can be put shortly by saying, that physical time expresses some features of the growth, but not the growth of the features. The final complete feeling is the 'satisfaction.'
( 143 ) Page 290:eternal objects have the same dual reference. An eternal object considered in reference to the publicity [444] of things is a 'universal'; namely, in its own nature it refers to the general public facts of the world without any disclosure of the empirical details of its own implication in them. Its own nature as an entity requires ingression positive or negative in every detailed actuality; but its nature does not disclose the private details of any actuality.
( 144 ) Page 290:An eternal object considered in reference to the privacy of things is a 'quality' or 'characteristic'; namely, in its own nature, as exemplified in any actuality, it constitutes an element in the private definiteness of that actuality. It refers itself publicly; but it is enjoyed privately.
( 145 ) Page 290:The antithesis between publicity and privacy is reflected in the classification of eternal objects according to their primary modes of ingression into actual entities. An eternal object can only function in the concrescence of an actual entity in one of three ways: (i) it can be an element in the definiteness of some objectified nexus, or of some single actual entity, which is the datum of a feeling; (ii) it can be an element in the definiteness of the subjective form of some feeling; or (iii) it can be an element in the datum of a conceptual, or propositional, feeling. All other modes of ingression arise from integrations which presuppose these modes. Now the third mode is merely the conceptual valuation of the potential ingression in one of the other two modes. It is a real ingression into actuality; but it is a restricted ingression with mere potentiality withholding the immediate realization of its function of conferring definiteness.
( 146 ) Page 291:The two former modes of ingression thus constitute the ways in which the functioning of an eternal object is unrestrictedly realized. But we now ask whether either mode is indifferently open to each eternal object. The answer is the classification of eternal objects into two species, the 'objective' species, and the 'subjective' species.
( 147 ) Page 291:An eternal object of the objective species can only obtain ingression in the first mode, and never in the second mode. It is always. in its unrestricted realization, an element in the definiteness of an actual entity, or a nexus, which is the datum of a feeling belonging to the subject in question.
( 148 ) Page 291:Thus a member of this species can only function relationally: by a necessity of its nature it is introducing one actual entity, or nexus, into the real internal constitution of another actual entity. Its sole avocation is to be an agent in objectification. It can never be an element in [446] the definiteness of a subjective form. The solidarity of the world rests upon the incurable objectivity of this species of eternal objects. A member of this species inevitably introduces into the immediate subject other actualities. The definiteness with which it invests the external world may, or may not, conform to the real internal constitutions of the actualities objectified. But conformably, or non-conformably, such is the character of that nexus for that actual entity. This is a real physical fact, with its physical consequences. eternal objects of the objective species are the mathematical Platonic forms. They concern the world as a medium.
( 149 ) Page 291:A member of the subjective species is, in its primary character, an element in the definiteness of the subjective form of a feeling. It is a determinate way in which a feeling can feel. It is an emotion, or an intensity, or an adversion, or an aversion, or a pleasure, or a pain. It defines the subjective form of feeling of one actual entity. Al may be that component of A's constitution through which A is objectified for B. Thus when B feels A1, it feels 'A with that feeling.' In this way, the eternal object which contributes to the definiteness of A's feeling becomes an eternal object contributing to the definiteness of A as an objective datum in B's prehension of A. The eternal object can then function both subjectively and relatively. It can be a private element in a subjective form, and also an agent in the objectification. In this latter character it may come under the operation of the category of Transmutation and become a characteristic of a nexus as objectified for a percipient.
( 150 ) Page 291:In the first stage of B's physical feeling, the subjective form of B's feeling is conformed to the subjective form of A's feeling. Thus this eternal object in B's experience will have a two-way mode of functioning. It will be among the determinants of A for B, and it will be among [447] the determinants of B's way of sympathy with A. The intensity of physical energy belongs to the subjective species of eternal objects, but the peculiar form of the flux of energy belongs to the objective species.
( 151 ) Page 292:For example. 'redness' may first be the definiteness of an emotion which is a subjective form in the experience of A; it then becomes an agent whereby A is objectified for B, so that A is objectified in respect to its prehension with this emotion. But A may be only one occasion of a nexus, such that each of its members is objectified for B by a prehension with an analogous subjective form. Then by the operation of the Category of Transmutation, the nexus is objectified for B as illustrated by the characteristic 'redness.' The nexus will also be illustrated by its mathematical forms which are eternal objects of the objective species.
( 152 ) Page 292:Thus the coordinate division of an actual entity produces feelings whose subjective forms are partially eliminated and partially inexplicable. But this mode of division preserves undistorted the elements of definiteness introduced by eternal objects of the objective species. Thus in so far as the relationships of these feelings require an appeal to subjective forms for their explanation, the gap must be supplied by the introduction of arbitrary laws of nature regulating the relations of intensities. Alternatively, the subjective forms become arbitrary epiphenomenal facts, inoperative in physical nature, though claiming operative importance.
( 153 ) Page 292:The order of nature, prevalent in the cosmic epoch in question, exhibits itself as a morphological scheme involving eternal objects of the objective species. The most fundamental elements in this scheme are those eternal objects in terms of which the general principles of coordinate division itself are expressed. These eternal objects express the theory of extension in its most general aspect. In this theory the notion of the atomicity of actual entities, each with its concrescent privacy, has been entirely eliminated. We are left with the theory of extensive connection, of whole and part, of points, lines, and surfaces, and of straightness and flatness.
( 154 ) Page 312:There may be some further specialization into a particular organ of sensation; but in any case the 'withness' of the body is an ever-present, [475] though elusive, element in our perceptions of presentational immediacy. This 'withness' is the trace of the origination of the feeling concerned, enshrined by that feeling in its subjective form and in its objective datum. But in itself this 'withness of the body' can be isolated as a component feeling in the final 'satisfaction.' From this point of view, the body, or its organ of sensation, becomes the objective datum of a component feeling; and this feeling has its own subjective form. Also this feeling is physical, so that we must look for an eternal object, to be a determinant of the definiteness of the body, as objective datum. This component feeling will be called the feeling of bodily efficacy. It is more primitive than the feeling of presentational immediacy which issues from it. Both in common sense and in physiological theory, this bodily efficacy is a component presupposed by the presentational immediacy and leading up to it. Thus, in the immediate subject, the presentational immediacy is to be conceived as originated in a late phase, by the synthesis of the feeling of bodily efficacy with other feelings. We have now to consider the nature of the other feelings, and the complex eternal object concerned in the feeling of bodily efficacy.
( 155 ) Page 312:In the first place, this eternal object must be partially identified with the eternal object in the final feeling of presentational immediacy. The whole point of the connection between the two feelings is that the presentational immediacy is derivative from the bodily efficacy. The present perception is strictly inherited from the antecedent bodily functioning, unless all physiological teaching is to be abandoned. Both eternal objects are highly complex; and the complex elements of the second eternal object must at least be involved in the complex elements of the former eternal object.
( 156 ) Page 312:This complex eternal object is analysable into a sense-datum and a geometrical pattern. In physics, the geometrical pattern appears as a state of strain of that actual occasion in the body which is the subject of the [476] feeling. But this feeling of bodily efficacy in the final percipient is the reenaction of an antecedent feeling by an antecedent actual entity in the body. Thus in this antecedent entity there is a feeling concerned with the same sense-datum and a highly analogous state of strain. The feeling must be a 'strain' in the sense defined in the previous section. Now this strain involves a geometricized region, which in this case also involves a 'focal' , region as part of itself. This 'focal' region is a region of dense concurrence of straight lines defined by the 'seat.' It is the region onto which there is so-called 'projection.'
( 157 ) Page 312:These lines enter into feeling through a process of integration of yet simpler feelings which primarily concern the 'seat' of the pattern. These lines have a twofold function as determinants of the feeling. They define the 'strain' of the feeler, and they define the focal region which they thus relate to the feeler. In so far as we are merely considering an abstract pattern, we are dealing with an abstract eternal object. But as a determinant of a concrete feeling in a concrete percipient, we are dealing with the feeling as relating its subject (which includes the 'seat' in its volume) to a definite spatial region (the focal region) external to itself. This definite contemporary focal region is a nexus which is part of the objective datum. Thus the feeling of bodily efficacy is the feeling of the sense-datum as generally implicated in the whole region (of antecedent 'seats' and focal regions) geometrically defined by the inherited strains. This patterned region is peculiarly dominated by the final 'seat' in the body of the feeler, and by the final 'focal' region. Thus the sense-datum has a general spatial relation, in which two spatial regions are dominant. Feelings of this sort are inherited by many strands from the antecedent bodily nerves. But in considering one definite feeling of presentational immediacy, these many strands of transmission of bodily efficacy, in their final deliverance to the ultimate percipient, converge upon the same focal region as picked out by the many bodily 'strains.'
( 158 ) Page 316:We see that a feeling of presentational immediacy comes into being by reason of an integration of a conceptual feeling drawn from bodily efficacy with a bare regional feeling which is also a component in a complex feeling of bodily efficacy. Also this bare regional feeling is reinforced with the general regional feeling which is the whole of our direct physical feeling of the contemporary world; and the conceptual feeling is reinforced by the generation of physical purpose. This integration takes the form of the creative imputation of the complex eternal object, ingredient in the bodily efficacy, onto some contemporary focal region felt in the strain-feeling. Also the subjective form is transmitted from the conceptual valuation and the derivate 'physical purpose.' But this subjective form is that suitable to the bodily efficacy out of which it has arisen. Thus the mere region with its imputed eternal object is felt as though there had been a feeling of its efficacy. But there is no mutual efficacy of contemporary regions. This transference of subjective form is termed 'symbolic transference.' 1
( 159 ) Page 318:This gap in the experience of the percipient subject is bridged by presentational immediacy. This type of experience is the lesson of the past reflected into the present. The more important contemporary occasions are those in the near neighborhood. Their actual worlds [485] are practically identical with that of the percipient subject. The percipient prehends the nexus of contemporary occasions by the mediation of eternal objects which it inherits from its own past. Also it selects the contemporary nexus thus prehended by the efficacy of strains whose focal regions are important elements in the past of those nexus. Thus, for successful organisms, presentational immediacy though it yields no direct experience about the contemporary world, and though in unfortunate instances the experience which it does yield may be irrelevant does yield experience which expresses how the contemporary world has in fact emerged from its own past.
( 160 ) Page 321:Our partial consciousness of the objectifications of the presented duration constitutes our knowledge of the present world, so far as it is derived from the senses. Remembering that objectifications constitute the objective conditions from which an actual occasion (M) initiates its successive phases of feeling, we must admit that, in the most general sense, the objectifications express the causality by which the external world fashions the actual occasion in question. Thus the objectifications of the presented duration represent a recovery by its contemporaries of a very real efficacy in the determination of M. It is true that the eternal objects which effect this objectification belong to the feeling-tones which M derives from the past. But it is a past which is largely common to M and to the presented duration. Thus by the intermediacy of the past, the presented duration has its efficacy in the production of M. This efficacy does not derogate from the principle of the independence of contemporary occasions. For the contemporary occasions in the presented duration are only efficacious through the feeling-tones of their sources, and not through their own immediate feeling-tones.
( 161 ) 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.
( 162 ) 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.
( 163 ) Page 344:His conceptual actuality at once exemplifies and establishes the categoreal conditions. The conceptual feelings, which compose his primordial nature, exemplify in their subjective forms their mutual sensitivity and their subjective unity of subjective aim. These subjective forms are valuations determining the relative relevance of eternal objects for each occasion of actuality.
( 164 ) 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.