Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

The primitive form of physical experience is emotional—blind emotion—received as felt elsewhere in another occasion and conformally appropriated as a subjective passion. In the language appropriate to the higher stages of experience, the primitive element is sympathy, that is, feeling the feeling in another and feeling conformally with another. We are so used to considering the high abstraction, ‘the stone as green,’ that we have difficulty in eliciting into consciousness the notion of ‘green’ as the qualifying character of an emotion. Yet, the aesthetic feelings, whereby there is pictorial art, are nothing else than products of the contrasts latent in a variety of colours qualifying emotion, contrasts which are made possible by their patterned relevance to each other. The separation of the emotional experience from the presentational intuition is a high abstraction of thought. Thus the primitive experience is emotional feelings, felt in its relevance to a world beyond. The feeling is blind and the relevance is vague. Also feeling, and reference to an exterior world pass into appetition, which is the feeling of determinate relevance to a world about to be. In the phraseology of physics, this primitive experience is ‘vector feeling,’ that is to say, feeling from a beyond which is determinate and pointing to a beyond which is to be determined. But the feeling is subjectively rooted in the immediacy of the present occasion: it is what the occasion feels for itself, as derived from the past and as merging into the future. In this vector transmission of primitive feeling the primitive provision of width for contrast is secured by pulses of emotion, which in the coordinate division of occasions (cf. Part IV) appear as wave-lengths and vibrations. In any particular cosmic epoch, the order of nature has secured the necessary differentiation of function, so as to avoid incompatibilities, by shepherding the sensa characteristic of that epoch each into association with a definite pulse. Thus the transmission of each sensum is associated with its own wave-length. In physics, such transmission can be conceived as corpuscular or undulatory, according to the special importance of particular features in the instance considered. The higher phases of experience increase the dimension of width, and elicit contrasts of higher types. The clash of uncoordinated emotions in the lower categories are avoided: the aspect of inhibition and of transitory satisfaction is diminished. Experience realizes itself as an element in what is ever-lasting (cf. Part V, Ch. II), and as embodying in itself the everlasting component of the universe. This gain does not necessarily involve consciousness. Also it involves enhanced subjective emphasis. The occasion

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has become less of a detail and more of a totality, so far as its subjective experience is concerned. The feeling of this width, with its enhancement of permanence, takes the form of blind zest, which can become self-defeating by excess of subjective emphasis. The inhibitions of zest by lack of adequate width to combine the contraries inherent in the environment lead to the destruction of the type of order concerned. Every increase of sensitivity requires an evolution towards adaptation. It must be remembered, however, that emotion in human experience, or even in animal experience, is not bare emotion. It is emotion interpreted, integrated, and transformed into higher categories of feeling. But even so, the emotional appetitive elements in our conscious experience are those which most closely resemble the basic elements of all physical experience.

SECTION IV

The distinction between the various stages of concrescence consists in the diverse modes of ingression of the eternal objects involved. The immanent decision, whereby there is a supervening of stages in an actual entity, is always the determinant of a process of integration whereby completion is arrived at—at least, such ‘formal’ completion as is proper to a single actual entity. This determination originates with conceptual prehensions which enter into integration with the physical prehensions modifying both the data and the subjective forms.

The limitation whereby there is a perspective relegation of eternal objects to the background is the characteristic of decision. Transcendent decision includes God’s decision. He is the actual entity in virtue of which the entire multiplicity» of eternal objects obtains its graded relevance to each stage of concrescence. Apart from God, there could be no relevant novelty. Whatever arises in actual entities from God’s decision, arises first conceptually, and is transmuted into the physical world (cf. Part III). In ‘transcendent decision’ there is transiPiEeSUBLECTIVIS T PRINCIPLE . 249tion from the past to the immediacy of the present; and in ‘immanent decision’ there is the process of acquisition of subjective form and the integration of feelings. In this process the creativity, universal throughout actuality, is characterized by the datum from the past; and it meets this dead datum—universalized into a character of creativity—by the vivifying novelty of subjective form selected from the multiplicity of pure potentiality. In the process, the old meets the new, and this meeting constitutes the satisfaction of an immediate particular individual.

Eternal objects in any one of their modes of subjective ingression are then functioning in the guise of subjective novelty meeting the objective datum from the past. This word ‘feeling’ is a mere technical term; but it has been chosen to suggest that functioning through which the concrescent actuality appropriates the datum so as to make it its own. There are three successive phases of feelings, namely, a phase of conformal feelings, one of ‘conceptual’ feelings, and one of ‘comparative’ feelings, including ‘propositional’ feelings in this last species. In the conformal feelings the how of feeling reproduces what is felt. Some conformation is necessary as a basis of vector transition, whereby the past is synthesized with the present. The one eternal object in its two-way function, as a determinant of the datum and as a determinant of the subjective form, is thus relational. In this sense the solidarity of the universe is based on the relational functioning of eternal objects. The two earlier phases can be put together as the ‘supplemental’ phase.

An eternal object when it has ingression through its function of objectifying the actual world, so as to present the datum for prehension, is functioning ‘datively.’ Hence, to sum up, there are four modes of functioning whereby an eternal object has ingression into the constitution of an actual entity: (i) as dative ingression, (ii) in conformal physical feeling, (il1) in conceptual feeling, (iv) in comparative feeling.

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