Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

Descartes does not explicitly frame the definition of actuality in terms of the ontological principle, as given in Section III 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.” * 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.

* Principles of Philosophy, Part I, 52.

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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 our thoughts whether true and real or false and fantastic, are formed.”

Notice the peculiarly intimate association with imme. diate experience which Descartes claims for his body, an association beyond the mere sense-perception of the contemporary world—‘“these hands and feet are mine.” In the philosophy of organism this immediate association is the recognition of them as distinguishable data whose formal constitutions are immediately felt in the origination of experience. In this function the animal body does not differ in principle from the rest of the past actual world; but it does differ in an intimacy of association by reason of which its spatial and temporal connections obtain some definition in the experience of the subject. What is vague for the rest of the world has obtained some additional measure of distinctness for the bodily organs. But, in principle, it would be equally true to say, ‘The actual world is mine.’

Descartes also asserts that ‘objects yet more simple and more universal, which are real and true’ are what the “mages of things which well in our thoughts’ are formed of. This does not seem to accord with his theory of perception, of a later date, stated in his Principles, Part IV, 196, 197, 198. In the later theory the emphasis is on the judicium, in the sense of ‘inference,’ and not in the sense of inspectio of realitas objectiva. But it does accord with the organic theory, that the objectifications of other actual occasions form the given data from which an actual occap. 118sion originates. He has also brought the body into its immediate association with the act of experience. Descartes, with Newton, assumes that the extensive continuum is actual in the full sense of being an actual entity. But he refrains from the additional material bodies which Newton provides. Also in his efforts to guard his representative ‘ideas’ from the fatal gap between mental symbol and actuality symbolized, he practically, in some sentences, expresses the doctrine of objectification here put forward. Thus: “Hence the idea of the sun will be the sun itself existing in the mind, not indeed formally, as it exists in the sky, but objectively, ie. in the way in which objects are wont to exist in the mind; and this mode of being is truly much less perfect than that in which things exist outside the mind, but it is not on that account mere nothing, as I have already said.” °

Both Descartes and Locke, in order to close the gap between idea representing and ‘actual entity represented,’ require this doctrine of ‘the sun itself existing in the mind.’ But though, as in this passage, they at times casually state it in order to push aside the epistemological difficulty, they neither of them live up to these admissions. They relapse into the tacit presupposition of the mind with its private ideas which are in fact qualities without intelligible connection with the entities represented.

But if we take the doctrine of objectification seriously, the extensive continuum at once becomes the primary factor in objectification. It provides the general scheme of extensive perspective which is exhibited in all the mutual objectifications by which actual entities prehend each other. Thus in itself, the extensive continuum is a scheme of real potentiality which must find exemplication in the mutual prehension of all actual entities. It also finds exemplification in each actual entity considered ‘formally.’ In this sense, actual entities are extensive,

“Cf. Reply to Objections I: I have already quoted this passage in my Science and The Modern World, note to Ch. IV.

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since they arise out of a potentiality for division, which in actual fact is not divided (cf. Part IV). It is for this reason, as stated above, that the phrase ‘actual occasion’ is used in the place of ‘actual entity.’

Descartes’ doctrine of the physical world as exhibiting an extensive plenum of actual entities is practically the same as the ‘organic’ doctrine. But Descartes’ bodies have to move, and this presupposition introduces new obscurities. It is exactly at this point that Newton provides a clear conception in comparison with that of Descartes. In the ‘organic’ doctrine, motion is not attributable to an actual occasion.