Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

The process whereby an actual entity, starting from its objective content, attains its individual satisfaction, will be more particularly analysed in Part III. The primary character of this process is that it is individual to the actual entity; it expresses how the datum, which involves the actual world, becomes a component in the one actual entity. There must therefore be no further reference to other actual entities; the elements available for the explanation are simply, the objective content, eternal objects, and the selective concrescence of feelings whereby an actual entity becomes itself. It must be remembered that the objective content is analysable into actual entities under limited perspectives provided by their own natures; these limited perspectives involve eternal objects in grades of relevance. If the ‘process’ were primarily a process of understanding, we should have to note that ‘grades of relevance’ are only other eternal objects in grades of relevance, and so on indefinitely. But we have not the sort of understandings which embrace such indefinite progressions. Accordingly there is here a vicious regress, if the process be essentially a process of understanding. But this is not the primaryp. 233 description of it; the process is a process of ‘feeling.’ In feeling, what is felt is not necessarily analysed; in understanding, what is understood is analysed, in so far as it is understood. Understanding is a special form of feeling. Thus there is no vicious regress in feeling, by reason of the indefinite complexity of what is felt. Kant, in his Transcendental Aesthetic, emphasizes the doctrine that in intuition a complex datum is intuited as one.

Again the selection involved in the phrase ‘selective concrescence’ is not a selection among the components of the objective content; for, by hypothesis, the objective content is a datum. The compatibilities and incompatibilities which impose the perspective, transforming the actual world into the datum, are inherent in the nature of things. Thus the selection is a selection of relevant eternal objects whereby what is a datum from without is transformed into its complete determination as a fact within. The problem which is the concrescence solves is, how the many components of the objective content are to be unified in one felt content with its complex subjective form. This one felt content is the ‘satisfaction, whereby the actual entity is its particular individual self; to use Descartes’ phrase, ‘requiring nothing but itself in order to exist.’ In the conception of the actual entity in its phase of satisfaction, the entity has attained its individual separation from other things; it has absorbed the datum, and it has not yet lost itself in the swing back to the ‘decision’ whereby its appetition becomes an element in the data of other entities superseding it. Time has stood still—if only it could.

Thus process is the admission of eternal objects in their new role of investing the datum with the individuality of the subject. The datum, qua mere datum, includes the many individualities of the actual world. The satisfaction includes these many individualities as subordinate contributors to the one individuality. The process admits or rejects, eternal objects which by their absorption into the subjective forms of the many feelingsp. 234 effect this integration. The attainment of satisfaction relegates all eternal objects which are not ‘felt’ either as determinants of definiteness in the data or as determinants of definiteness in the subjective form of the satisfaction, into the status of contraries to the eternal objects which are thus felt. Thus all indeterminations respecting the potentialities of the universe are definitely solved so far as concerns the satisfaction of the subject in question.

The process can be analysed genetically into a series of subordinate phases which presuppose their antecedents. Neither the intermediate phases, nor the datum which is the primary phase of all, determine the final phase of determinate individualization. Thus an actual entity, on its subjective side, is nothing else than what the universe is for it, including its own reactions. The reactions are the subjective forms of the feelings, elaborated into definiteness through stages of process. An actual entity achieves its own unity by its determinate feelings respecting every item of the datum. Every individual objectification in the datum has its perspective defined by its own eternal objects with their own relevance compatible with the relevance of other objectifications. Each such objectification, and each such complex of objectifications, in the datum is met with a correspondent feeling, with its determinate subjective form, until the many become one experience, the satisfaction. The philosophies of substance presuppose a subject which then encounters a datum, and then reacts to the datum. The philosophy of organism presupposes a datum which is met with feelings, and progressively attains the unity of a subject. But with this doctrine, ‘superject’ would be a better term than ‘subject.’ Locke’s ‘ideas of reflection’ are the feelings, in so far as they have entered into consciousness.

It is by reference to feelings that the notion of ‘immediacy’ obtains its meaning. The mere objectification of actual entities by eternal objects lacks ‘immediacy.’ It is ‘repetition’; and this is a contrary to ‘immediacy.’

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But ‘process’ is the rush of feelings whereby secondhandedness attains subjective immediacy; in this way, subjective form overwhelms repetition, and transforms it into immediately felt satisfaction; objectivity is absorbed into subjectivity. It is useful to compare this analysis of the construction of an act of experience with Kant’s. In the first place Kant’s act of experience is essentially knowledge. Thus whatever is not knowledge is necessarily inchoate, and merely on its way to knowledge. In comparing Kant’s procedure with that of the philosophy of organism, it must be remembered that an ‘apparent’ objective content is the end of Kant’s process, and thus takes the place of ‘satisfaction’ in the process as analysed in the philosophy of organism. In Kant’s phraseology at the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason, this ‘apparent’ objective content is referred to as ‘objects. He also accepts Hume’s sensationalist account of the datum. Kant places this sentence at the commencement of the Critique: “Objects therefore are given to us through our sensibility. Sensibility alone supplies us with intuitions. These intuitions become thought through the understanding, and hence arise conceptions.” ° This is expanded later in a form which makes Kant’s adhesion to Hume’s doctrine of the datum more explicit: “And here we see that the impressions of the senses give the first impulse to the whole faculty of knowledge with respect to them, and thus produce experience which consists of two very heterogeneous elements, namely, matter for knowledge, derived from the senses (eine materie zur Erkenntniss aus den Sinnen) and a certain form according to which it is arranged, derived from the internal source of pure intuition and pure thought, first brought into action by the former, and then producing concepts.” * Also: “Thoughts with-

8 “Vermittelst der Sinnlickkert also werden uns Gegenstinde gegeben, und sie allein liefert uns Anschanungen; durch den Verstand aber werden sie gedacht, und von ihm entspringen Begriffe.” Translation in the text is Max Miiller’s. 7 Cf. Transcendal Analytic, Ch. II, Sect. I (Max Miiller).

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