Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

thought which is the basis of the philosophy of organism is confronted with various interpretations of the facts widely accepted in European tradition, literary, philosophic, and scientific. So far as concerns philosophy only a selected group can be explicitly mentioned. There is no point in endeavouring to force the interpretations of divergent philosophers into a vague agreement. What is important is that the scheme of interpretation here adopted can claim for each of its main positions the express authority of one, or the other, of some supreme master of thought—Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant. But ultimately nothing rests on authority; the final court of appeal is intrinsic reasonableness.

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 writing 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 esthetic 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

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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.

By this recognition of the divine element the general Aristotelian principle is maintained that, apart from things that are actual, there is nothing—nothing either in fact or in efficacy. This is the true general principle which also underlies Descartes’ dictum: “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.” * And again: “For every clear and distinct conception (perceptio) is without doubt something and hence cannot derive its origin from what is nought. . . .”* This general principle will be termed the ‘ontological principle. It is the principle that everything is positively somewhere in actuality, and in potency everywhere. In one of its applications this principle issues in the doctrine of ‘conceptualism.’ Thus

* Principles of Philosophy, Part I, 52; translation by Haldane and Ross. All quotations from Descartes are from this translation.

* Cf. Meditation IV, towards the end.

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the search for a reason is always the search for an actual fact which is the vehicle of the reason. The ontological principle, as here defined, constitutes the first step in the description of the universe as a solidarity * of many actual entities. Each actual entity is conceived as an act of experience arising out of data. It is a process of ‘feeling’ the many data, so as to absorb them into the unity of one individual ‘satisfaction.’ Here ‘feeling’ is the term used for the basic generic operation of passing from the objectivity of the data to the subjectivity of the actual entity in question. Feelings are variously specialized operations, effecting a transition into subjectivity. They replace the ‘neutral stuff’ of certain realistic philosophers. An actual entity is a process, and is not describable in terms of the morphology of a ‘stuff.’ This use of the term ‘feeling’ has a close analogy to Alexander’s* use of the term ‘enjoyment’; and has also some kinship with Bergson’s use of the term ‘intuition.’ A near analogy is Locke’s use of the term ‘idea,’ including ‘ideas of particular things’ (cf. his Hssay, III, III, 2, 6, and 7). But the word ‘feeling,’ as used in these lectures, is even more reminiscent of Descartes. For example: “Let it be so; still it is at least quite certain that it seems to me that I see light, that I hear noise and that I feel heat. That cannot be false; properly speaking it is what is in me called feeling (sentire); and used in this precise sense that is no other thing than thinking.” °

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).° A ‘feeling’ belongs to the positive species

®The word ‘solidarity’ has been borrowed from Professor Wildon Carr’s Presidential Address to the Aristotelian Society, Session 1917- 1918. The address—“The Interaction of Body and Mind”—develops the fundamental principle suggested by this word.

*Cf. his Space, Time and Deity, passim.

meh. VM editation II, Haldane and Ross translation. ° For the analogue to this sentence cf. Meditation VI; substitute ‘Hns prehendens’ for ‘Ens cogitans.’

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