Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

The primary element in the ‘lure for feeling’ is the subject’s prehension of the primordial nature of God. Conceptual feelings are generated, and by integration with physical feelings a subsequent phase of propositional feelings supervenes. The lure for feeling develops with the concrescent phases of the subject in question. I have spoken of it elsewhere (cf. Science and The Modern World, Ch. XI).

“Tt is this realized extension of eternal relatedness beyond the mutual relatedness of the actual occasions which prehends into each oceasion the full sweep of eternal relatedness. I term this abrupt realization the ‘graded envisagement’ which each occasion prehends into its synthesis. This envisagement is how the actual includes what (in one sense) is ‘not-being’ as a positive factor in its own achievement. It is the source of error, of truth, of art, of ethics, and of religion. By it, fact is confronted with alternatives.”

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SECTION VI

All metaphysical theories which admit a disjunction between the component elements of individual experience on the one hand and on the other hand the component elements of the external world, must inevitably run into difficulties over the truth and falsehood of propositions, and over the grounds for judgment. The former difficulty is metaphysical, the latter epistemological. But all difficulties as to first principles are only camouflaged metaphysical difficulties. Thus also the epistemological difficulty is only solvable by an appeal to ontology. The first. difficulty poses the question as to the account of truth and falsehood, and the second difficulty poses the question as to the account of the intuitive perception of truth and falsehood. The former concerns propositions, the latter concerns judgments. There is a togetherness of the component elements in individual experience. This ‘togetherness’ has that special peculiar meaning of ‘togetherness in experience.’ It is a togetherness of its own kind, explicable by reference to nothing else. For the purpose of this discussion it is indifferent whether we speak of a ‘stream’ of experience, or of an ‘occasion’ of experience. With the former alternative there is togetherness in the stream, and with the latter alternative there is togetherness in the occasion. In either case, there is the unique ‘experiential togetherness.’

The consideration of experiential togetherness raises the final metaphysical question: whether there is any other meaning of ‘togetherness.’ The denial of any alternative meaning, that is to say, of any meaning not abstracted from the experiential meaning, is the ‘subjectivist’ doctrine. This reformed version of the subjectivist doctrine is the doctrine of the philosophy of organism.

The contrary doctrine, that there is a ‘togetherness’ not derivative from experiential togetherness, leads to the disjunction of the components of subjective experience from the community of the external world. This disp. 289junction creates the insurmountable difficulty for epistemology. For intuitive judgment is concerned with togetherness in experience, and there is no bridge between togetherness in experience, and togetherness of the non-experiential sort.

This difficulty is the point of Kant’s ‘transcendental’ criticism. He adopted a subjectivist position, so that the temporal world was merely experienced. But according to his form of the subjectivist doctrine, in the Critique of Pure Reason, no element in the temporal world could itself be an experient. His temporal world, as in that Critique, was in its essence dead, phantasmal, phenomenal. Kant was a mathematical physicist, and his cosmological solution was sufficient for the abstractions to which mathematical physics is confined.

The difficulties of the subjectivist doctrine arise when it is combined with the ‘sensationalist’ doctrine concerning the analysis of the components which are together in experience. According to that analysis in such a component the only elements not stamped with the particularity of that individual ‘occasion’—or ‘stream’—of experience are universals such as ‘redness’ or ‘shape.’ With the sensationalist assumption, or with any generalization of that doctrine, so long as the elements in question are universals, the only alternatives are, either Bradley’s doctrine of a single experient, the absolute, or Leibniz’s doctrine of many windowless monads. Kant, in his final metaphysics, must either retreat to Leibniz, or advance to Bradley. Either alternative stamps experience with a certain air of illusioriness. The Leibnizian solution can mitigate the illusioriness only by recourse to a pious dependence upon God. This principle was invoked by Descartes and by Leibniz, in order to help cut their epistemology. It is a device very repugnant to a consistent rationality. The very possibility of knowledge should not be an accident of God’s goodness; it should depend on the interwoven natures of things. After all, God’s knowledge has equally to be explained.

p. 290

The philosophy of organism admits the subjectivist doctrine (as here stated), but rejects the sensationalist doctrine: hence its doctrine of the objectification of one actual occasion in the experience of another actual occasion. Each actual entity is a throb of experience including the actual world within its scope. The problems of efficient causation and of knowledge receive a common explanation by reference to the texture of actual occasions. The theory of judgment in the philosophy of organism can equally well be described as a ‘correspondence’ theory or as a ‘coherence’ theory. It is a correspondence theory, because it describes judgment as the subjective form of the integral prehension of the conformity, or of the non-conformity, of proposition and an objectified nexus. The prehension in question arises from the synthesis of two prehensions, one physical and the other mental. The physical prehension is the prehension of the nexus of objectified actual occasions. The mental prehension is the prehension of the proposition. This latter prehension is necessarily ‘impure,’ and it arises from a history of antecedent synthesis whereby a pure conceptual prehension transfers its datum as a predicate of hypothetical relatedness for the actualities in the datum of some physical prehension (cf. Part III). But the origination of a propositional prehension does not concern us in this description of judgment. The sole point is the synthesis of a physical prehension and propositional prehension into an ‘intellectual’ prehension (cf. Part III) whose subjective form involves judgment.

This judgment is concerned with a conformity of two components within one experience. It is thus a ‘coherence’ theory. It is also concerned with the conformity of a proposition, not restricted to that individual experience, with a nexus whose relatedness is derived from the varlous experiences of its own members and not from that of the judging experiment. In this sense there is a ‘correspondence’ theory. But, at this point of the argument, a distinction must be made. We shall say that ap. 291 proposition can be true or false, and that a judgment can be correct, or incorrect, or suspended. With this distinction we see that there is a ‘correspondence’ theory of the truth and falsehood of propositions, and a ‘coherence’ theory of the correctness, incorrectness and suspension, of judgments.