Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

But Locke, throughout his Essay, rightly insists that the chief ingredient in the notion of ‘substance’ is the notion of ‘power.’ The philosophy of organism holds that in order to understand ‘power,’ we must have a correct notion of how each individual actual entity contributes to the datum from which its successors arise and to which they must conform. The reason why the doctrine of power is peculiarly relevant to the enduring things, which the philosophy of Locke’s day conceived as individualized substances, is that any likeness between the successive occasions of an historic route procures a corresponding identity between their contributions to the datum of any subsequent actual entity; and it therefore secures a corresponding intensification in the imposition of conformity. The principle is the same as that which holds for the more sporadic occasions in empty space; but the uniformity along the historic route increases the degree of conformity which that route exacts from the future. In particular each historic route of like occasions tends to prolong itself, by reason of the weight of uniform inheritance derivable from its members. The philosophy of organism abolishes the detached mind. Mental activity is one of the modes of feeling belonging to all actual entities in some degree, but only amounting to conscious intellectuality in some actual entities. This higher grade of mental activity is the intellectual self-analysis of the entity in an earlier stage of incompletion, effected by intellectual feelings produced in a later stage of concrescence.**

The perceptive constitution of the actual entity presents the problem, How can the other actual entities, each with its own formal existence, also enter objectively into the perceptive constitution of the actual entity in question? This is the problem of the solidarity of the universe. The classical doctrines of universals and particulars, of subject and predicate, of individual substances not present in other individual substances, of

2° Ci. Part IIT, Che V.

p. 89

the externality of relations, alike render this problem incapable of solution. The answer given by the organic philosophy is the doctrine of prehensions, involved in concrescent integrations, and terminating in a definite, complex unity of feeling. To be actual must mean that all actual things are alike objects, enjoying objective immortality in fashioning creative actions; and that all actual things are subjects, each prehending the universe from which it arises. The creative action is the universe always becoming one in a particular unity of self-experience, and thereby adding to the multiplicity which is the universe as many. This insistent concrescence into unity is the outcome of the ultimate self-identity of each entity. No entity—be it ‘universal’ or ‘particular’—can play disjoined réles. Self-identity requires that every entity have one conjoined, self-consistent function, whatever be the complexity of that function.

SECTION VII

There is another side of Locke, which is his doctrine of ‘power.’ This doctrine is a better illustration of his admirable adequacy than of his consistency; there is no escape from Hume’s demonstration that no such doctrine is compatible with a purely sensationalist philosophy. The establishment of such a philosophy, though derivative from Locke, was not his explicit purpose. Every philosophical school in the course of its history requires two presiding philosophers. One of them under the influence of the main doctrines of the school should survey experience with some adequacy, but inconsistently. The other philosopher should reduce the doctrines of the school to a rigid consistency; he will thereby effect a reductio ad absurdum. No school of thought has performed its full service to philosophy until these men have appeared. In this way the school of sensationalist empiricism derives its importance from Locke and Hume.

Locke introduces his doctrine of ‘power’ as follows (II, XXI, 1): “This idea how got—The mind being

p. 90

every day informed, by the senses, of the alteration of those simple ideas it observes in things without, and taking notice how one comes to an end and ceases to be, and another begins to exist, which was not before; reflecting also on what passes within itself, and observing a constant change of its ideas, sometimes by the impression of outward objects on the senses, and sometimes by the determination of its own choice; and concluding, from what it has so constantly observed to have been, that the like changes will for the future be made in the same thing by like agents, and by the like ways; considers in one thing the possibility of having any of its simple ideas changed, and in another the possibility of making that change; and so comes by that idea which we call ‘power.’ Thus we say, fire has a power to melt gold; . . . and gold has a power to be melted: . . . In which and lke cases, the power we consider is in reference to the change of perceivable ideas: for we cannot observe any alteration to be made in, or operation upon, anything, but by the observable change of its sensible ideas; nor conceive any alteration to be made, but by conceiving a change of some of its ideas. . . . Power thus considered is twofold; viz. as able to make, or able to receive, any change: the one may be called ‘active,’ and the other ‘passive,’ power. . . . I confess power includes in it some kind of relation,—a relation to action or change; as, indeed, which of our ideas, of what kind soever, when attentively considered, does not. For our ideas of extension, duration and number, do they not all contain in them a secret relation of the parts? Figure and motion have something relative in them much more visibly. And sensible qualities, as colours and smells, etc., what are they but the powers of different bodies in relation to our perception! . . . Our idea therefore of power, I think, may well have a place amongst other simple ideas, and be considered as one of them, being one of those that make a principal ingredient in our complex ideas of substances, as we shall hereafter have occasion to observe.”

p. 91