Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

The philosophy of organism accepts the man’s statement, that the flash made him blink. But Hume intervenes with another explanation. He first poimts out that in the mode of presentational immediacy there is no percept of the flash making the man blink. In this mode there are merely the two percepts—the flash and the blink—combining the two latter of the three percepts under the one term ‘blink. Hume refuses to admit the man’s protestation, that the compulsion to blink is just what he did feel. The refusal is based on the dogma, that all percepts are in the mode of presentational immediacy—a dogma not to be upset by a mere appeal to direct experience. Besides Hume has another interpretation of the man’s experience: what the man really felt was his habit of blinking after flashes. The word ‘association’ explains it all, according to Hume. But how can a ‘habit’ be felt, when a ‘cause’ cannot be felt? Is there any presentational immediacy in the feeling of a ‘habit’? Hume by a sleight of hand confuses a ‘habit of feeling blinks after flashes’ with a ‘feeling of the habit of feeling blinks after flashes.’

We have here a perfect example of the practice of applying the test of presentational immediacy to procure the critical rejection of some doctrines, and of allowing other doctrines to slip out by a back door, so as to evade the test. The notion of causation arose because mankind lives amid experiences in the mode of causal efficacity.

SECTION IV
We will keep to the appeal to ordinary experience, and

p. 267

consider another situation, which Hume’s philosophy is ill equipped to explain. The ‘causal feeling’ according to that doctrine arises from the long association of well-marked presentations of sensa, one precedent to the other. It would seem therefore that inhibitions of sensa, given in presentational immediacy, should be accompanied by a corresponding absence of ‘causal feeling’; for the explanation of how there is ‘causal feeling’ presupposes the well-marked familiar sensa, in presentational immediacy. Unfortunately the contrary is the case. An inhibition of familiar sensa is very apt to leave usa prey to vague terrors respecting a circumambient world of causal operations. In the dark there are vague presences, doubtfully feared; in the silence, the irresistible causal efficacy of nature presses itself upon us; in the vagueness of the low hum of insects in an August woodland, the inflow into ourselves of feelings from enveloping nature overwhelms us; in the dim consciousness of half-sleep, the presentations of sense fade away, and we are left with the vague feeling of influences from vague things around us. It is quite untrue that the feelings of various types of influences are dependent upon the familiarity of well-marked sensa in immediate presentment. Every way of omitting the sensa still leaves us a prey to vague feelings of influence. Such feelings, divorced from immediate sensa, are pleasant, or unpleasant, according to mood; but they are always vague as to spatial and temporal definition, though their explicit dominance in experience may be heightened in the absence of sensa.

Further, our experience of our various bodily parts are primarily perceptions of them as reasons for ‘projected’ sensa: the hand is the reason for the projected touch-sensum, the eye is the reason for the projected sight-sensum. Our bodily experience is primarily an experience of the dependence of presentational immediacy upon causal efficacy. Hume’s doctrine inverts this relationship by making causal efficacy, as an experience, dependent upon presentational immediacy. ‘This docp. 268trine, whatever be its merits, is not based upon any appeal to experience.

Bodily experiences, in the mode of causal efficacy, are distinguished by their comparative accuracy of spatial definition. The causal influences from the body have lost the extreme vagueness of those which inflow from the external world. But, even for the body, causal efficacy is dogged with vagueness compared to presentational immediacy. These conclusions are confirmed if we descend to the scale of organic being. It does not seem to be the sense of causal awareness that the lower living things lack, so much as variety of sense-presentation, and then vivid distinctness of presentational immediacy. But animals, and even vegetables, in low forms of organism exhibit modes of behaviour directed towards self-preservation. There is every indication of a vague feeling of causal relationship with the external world, of some intensity, vaguely defined as to quality, and with some vague definition as to locality. A jellyfish advances and withdraws, and in so doing exhibits some perception of causal relationship with the world beyond itself; a plant grows downwards to the damp earth, and upwards towards the light. There is thus some direct reason for attributing dim, slow feelings of causal nexus, although we have no reason for any ascription of the definite percepts in the mode of presentational immediacy.

But the philosophy of organism attributes ‘feeling’ throughout the actual world. It bases this doctrine upon the directly observed fact that ‘feeling’ survives as a known element constitutive of the ‘formal’ existence of such actual entities as we can best observe. Also when we observe the causal nexus, devoid of interplay with sense-presentation, the influx of feeling with vague qualitative and ‘vector’ definition, is what we find. The dominance of the scalar physical quantity, inertia, in the Newtonian physics obscured the recognition of the truth that all fundamental physical quantities are vector and not scalar.

p. 269

When we pass to inorganic actual occasions, we have lost the two higher originative phases in the ‘process,’ namely, the ‘supplemental’ phase, and the ‘mental’ phase. They are lost in the sense that, so far as our observations go, they are negligible. The influx of objectifications of the actualities of the world as organized vehicles of feeling is responded to by a mere subjective appropriation of such elements of feeling in their received relevance. The inorganic occasions are merely what the causal past allows them to be.