Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

As we pass to the inorganic world, causation never for a moment seems to lose its grip. What is lost is originativeness, and any evidence of immediate absorption in the present. So far as we can see, inorganic entities are vehicles for receiving, for storing in a napkin, and for restoring without loss or gain.

In the actual world we discern four grades of actual occasions, grades which are not to be sharply distinguished from each other. First, and lowest, there are the actual occasions in so-called ‘empty space’; secondly, there are the actual occasions which are moments in the life-histories of enduring non-living objects, such as electrons or other primitive organisms; thirdly, there are the actual occasions which are moments in the life-histories of enduring living objects; fourthly, there are the actual occasions which are moments in the life-histories of enduring objects with conscious knowledge.

We may imaginatively conjecture that the first grade is to be identified with actual occasions for which ‘presented durations’ are negligible elements among their data, negligible by reason of negligible presentational immediacy. Thus no intelligible definition of rest and motion is possible for historic routes including them, because they correspond to no inherent spatiatization of the actual world.

The second grade is to be identified with actual occasions for which ‘presented durations’ are important elements in their data, but with a limitation only to bep. 270 observed in the lower moments of human experience. In such occasions the data of felt sensa, derived from the more primitive data of causal efficacy, are projected onto the contemporary ‘presented locus’ without any clear illustration of special regions in that locus. The past has been lifted into the present, but the vague differentiations in the past have not been transformed into any precise differentiations within the present. The enhancement of precision has not arrived.

The third grade is to be identified with occasions in which presentational immediacy has assumed some enhanced precision, so that ‘symbolic transference’ has lifted into importance precisely discriminated regions in the ‘presented duration.’ The delicate activities of self-preservation are now becoming possible by the transference of the vague message of the past onto the more precisely discriminated regions of the presented duration. Symbolic transference is dependent upon the flashes of conceptual originality constituting life.

The fourth grade is to be identified with the canalized importance of free conceptual functionings, whereby blind experience is analysed by comparison with the imaginative realization of mere potentiality. In this way, experience receives a reorganization in the relative importance of its components by the joint operation of imaginative enjoyment and of judgment. The growth of reason is the increasing importance of critical judgment in the discipline of imaginative enjoyment.

SECTION V

One reason for the philosophical difficulties over causation is that Hume, and subsequently Kant, conceived the causal nexus as, in its primary character, derived from the presupposed sequence of immediate presentations. But if we interrogate experience, the exact converse is the case; the perceptive mode of immediate presentation affords information about the percepta in the more aboriginal mode of causal efficacy.

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Thus symbolic reference, though in complex human experience it works both ways, is chiefly to be thought of as the elucidation of percepta in the mode of causal efficacy by the fluctuating intervention of percepta in the mode of presentational immediacy.

The former mode produces percepta which are vague, not to be controlled, heavy with emotion: it produces the sense of derivation from an immediate past, and of passage to an immediate future; a sense of emotional feeling, belonging to oneself in the past, passing into oneself in the present, and passing from oneself in the present towards oneself in the future; a sense of influx of influence from other vaguer presences in the past, localized and yet evading local definition, such influence modifying, enhancing, inhibiting, diverting, the stream of feeling which we are receiving, unifying, enjoying, and transmitting. This is our general sense of existence, as one item among others, in an efficacious actual world.

By diversion of attention we can inhibit its entry into consciousness; but, whether mentally analysed or no, it remains the given uncontrolled basis upon which our character weaves itself. Our bodies are largely contrivances whereby some central actual occasion may inherit these basic experiences of its antecedent parts. Thus organic bodies have their parts coordinated by a peculiar vividness in their mutual inheritance. In a sense, the difference between a living organism and the inorganic environment is only a question of degree; but it is a difference of degree which makes all the difference —in effect, it is a difference of quality.

The percepta in the mode of presentational immediacy have the converse characteristics. In comparison, they are distinct, definite, controllable, apt for immediate enjoyment, and with the minimum of reference to past, or to future. We are subject to our percepta in the mode of efficacy, we adjust our percepta in the mode of immediacy. But, in fact, our process of self-construction for the achievement of unified experience produce a newp. 272 product, in which percepta in one mode, and percepta in the other mode, are synthesized into one subjective feeling. For example, we are perceiving before our eyes a grey stone.

We shall find that generally—though not always—the adjectival words express information derived from the mode of immediacy, while the substantives convey our dim percepts in the mode of efficacy. For example, ‘grey’ refers to the grey shape immediately before our eyes: this percept is definite, limited, controllable, pleasant or unpleasant, and with no reference to past or to future. It is this sort of percept which has led to Descartes’ definition of substances as ‘requiring nothing but themselves in order to exist,’ and to his notion of ‘extension’ as the principle attribute of a genus of substances. It has also led to Hume’s notion of ‘impressions of sensations’ arising from unknown sources, and in complete independence so far as any discernable nexus is concerned. But the other element in the compound percept has a widely different character. The word ‘stone’ is selected, no doubt, because its dictionary meaning will afford some help in understanding the particular percepta meant. But the word is meant to refer to particular feelings of efficacy in the immediate past, combined with anticipations for the immediate future; this feeling is vaguely localized, and conjectually identified with the very definite localization of the ‘grey’ perceptum.

Thus, so far as concerns conscious judgment, the symbolic reference is the acceptance of the evidence of percepta, in the mode of immediacy, as evidence for the localization and discrimination of vague percepta in the mode of efficacy. So far as bodily feelings are concerned, there is some direct check on this procedure; but, beyond the body, the appeal is to the pragmatic consequences, involving some future state of bodily feelings which can be checked up.

But throughout this discussion of perception there has been excessive emphasis on the mental phase in the

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