Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

There is, however, a fundamental misconception to be found in Locke, and in prevalent doctrines of perception. It concerns the answer to the question, as to the description of the primitive types of experience. Locke assumes that the utmost primitiveness is to be found in senseperception. The seventeenth-century physics, with the complexities of primary and secondary qualities, should have warned philosophers that sense-perception was involved in complex modes of functioning. Primitive feeling is to be found at a lower level. The mistake was natural for mediaeval and Greek philosophers: for they had not modern physics before them as a plain warning. In sense-perception we have passed the Rubicon, dividing direct perception from the higher forms of mentality, which play with error and thus found intellectual empires.

p. 174

The more primitive types of experience are concerned with sense-reception, and not with sense-perception. This statement will require some prolonged explanation. But the course of thought can be indicated by adopting Bergson’s admirable phraseology, sense-reception is ‘unspatialized,’ and sense-perception is ‘spatialized.’ In sense-reception the sensa are the definiteness of emotion: they are emotional forms transmitted from occasion to occasion. Finally in some occasion of adequate complexity, the category of transmutation endows them with the new function of characterizing nexus.

SECTION III

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 for 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 logip. 175cal variable, in both forms, the unselective ‘any’ and the selective ‘some.’

It is possible that this definition of ‘sensa’ excludes some cases of contrast which are ordinarily termed ‘sensa’ and that it includes some emotional qualities which are ordinarily excluded. Its convenience consists in the fact that it is founded on a metaphysical principle, and not on an empirical investigation of the physiology of the human body.

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, show 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.’

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 whichp. 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.

The simplest grade of actual occasions must be conceived as experiencing a few sensa, with the minimum of patterned contrast. The sensa are then experienced emotionally, and constitute the specific feelings whose intensities sum up into the unity of satisfaction. In such occasions the process is deficient in its highest phases; the process is the slave to the datum. There is the individualizing phase of conformal feeling, but the originative phases of supplementary and conceptual feelings, are negligible.

SECTION IV

According to this account, the experience of the simplest grade of actual entity is to be conceived as the unoriginative response to the datum with its simple content of sensa. The datum is simple, because it presents the objectified experiences of the past under the guise of simplicity. Occasions A, B, and C enter into the experience of occasion M as themselves experiencing

p. 177