Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

The theory of a corpuscular society, made up of many enduring entities, fits the evidence no better. The same objections apply. The root fact is that ‘endurance’ is a device whereby an occasion is peculiarly bound by a single line of physical ancestry, while ‘life’ means noyelty, introduced in accordance with the Category of Conceptual Reversion. There are the same objections to many traditions as there are to one tradition. What has to be explained is originality of response to stimulus. This amounts to the doctrine that an organism is ‘alive’ when in some measure its reactions are inexplicable by any tradition of pure physical inheritance.

Explanation by ‘tradition’ is merely another phraseology for explanation by ‘efficient cause.’ We require explanation by ‘final cause.’ Thus a single occasion is alive when the subjective aim which determines its process of concrescence has introduced a novelty of definiteness not to be found in the inherited data of its primary phase. The novelty is introduced conceptually and disturbs the inherited ‘responsive’ adjustment of subjective forms. It alters the ‘values,’ in the artist’s sense of that term.

It follows from these considerations that in abstraction from its animal body an ‘entirely living’ nexus is notp. 160 properly a society at all, since ‘life’ cannot be a defining characteristic. It is the name for originality, and not for tradition. The mere response to stimulus is characteristic of all societies whether inorganic or alive. Action and reaction are bound together. The characteristic of life is reaction adapted to the capture of intensity, under a large variety of circumstances. But the reaction is dictated by the present and not by the past. It is the clutch at vivid immediacy.

SECTION X

Another characteristic of a living society is that it requires food. In a museum the crystals are kept under glass cases; in zoological gardens the animals are fed. Having regard to the universality of reactions with environment, the distinction is not quite absolute. It cannot, however, be ignored. The crystals are not agencies requiring the destruction of elaborate societies derived from the environment; a living society is such an agency. The societies which it destroys are its food. This food is destroyed by dissolving it into somewhat simpler social elements. It has been robbed of something. Thus, all societies require interplay with their environment; and in the case of living societies this interplay takes the form of robbery. The living society may, or may not, be a higher type of organism than the food which it disintegrates. But whether or no it be for the general good, life is robbery. It is at this point that with life morals become acute. The robber requires justification.

The primordial appetitions which jointly constitute God’s purpose are seeking intensity, and not preservation. Because they are primordial, there is nothing to preserve. He, in his primordial nature, is unmoved by love for this particular, or that particular; for in this foundational process of creativity, there are no preconstituted particulars. In the foundations of his being, God is indifferent alike to preservation and to novelty.

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He cares not whether an immediate occasion be old or new, so far as concerns derivation from its ancestry. His aim ** for it is depth of satisfaction as an intermediate step towards the fulfilment of his own being. His tenderness is directed towards each actual occasion, as it arises.

Thus God’s purpose in the creative advance is the evocation of intensities. The evocation of societies is purely subsidiary to this absolute end. The characteristic of a living society is that a complex structure of inorganic societies is woven together for the production of a non-social nexus characterized by the intense physical experiences of its members. But such an experience is derivate from the complex order of the material animal body, and not from the simple ‘personal order’ of past occasions with analogous experience. There is intense experience without the shackle of reiteration from the past. This is the condition for spontaneity of conceptual reaction. The conclusion to be drawn from this argument is that life is a characteristic of ‘empty space’ and not of space ‘occupied’ by any corpuscular society. In a nexus of living occasions, there is a certain social deficiency. Life lurks in the interstices of each living cell, and in the interstices of the brain. In the history of a living society, its more vivid manifestations wander to whatever quarter is receiving from the animal body an enormous variety of physical experience. This experience, if treated inorganically, must be reduced to compatibility by the normal adjustments of mere responsive reception. This means the dismissal of incompatible elements into negative prehensions.

The complexity of the animal body is so ordered that in the critical portions of its interstices the varied datum of physical experience is complex, and on the edge of a compatibility beyond that to be achieved by mere inorganic treatment. A novel conceptual prehension disturbs ne CiePartav.

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the subjective forms of the initial responsive phase. Some negative prehensions are thus avoided, and higher contrasts are introduced into experience.

So far as the functioning of the animal body is concerned, the total result is that the transmission of physical influence, through the empty space within it, has not been entirely in conformity with the physical laws holding for inorganic societies. The molecules within an animal body exhibit certain peculiarities of behaviour not to be detected outside an animal body. In fact, living societies illustrate the doctrine that the laws of nature develop together with societies which constitute an epoch. There are statistical expressions of the prevalent types of interaction. In a living cell, the statistical balance has been disturbed.