Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

The main line of thought has been (i) that each actual occasion has at the base of its own constitution the environment from which it springs; (ii) that in this function of the environment abstraction has been made from its indefinite multiplicity of forms of definiteness, so as to obtain a concordant experience of the elements retained; (111) that any actual occasion belonging to an assigned species requires an environment adapted to that species, so that the presupposition of a species involves a presupposition concerning the environment; (iv) that in every inductive judgment, and in every judgment of probability, there is a presupposition, implicit or explicit, of one, or more, species of actual occasions implicated in the situation considered, so that [by (iii)] there is a presupposition of some general type of environment.

Thus the basis of all probability and induction is the fact of analogy between an environment presupposed and an environment directly experienced.

The argument, as to the statistical basis of probability, then recurred to the doctrine of social order. According to this doctrine, all social order depends on the statistical dominance in the environment of occasions belongingp. 315 to the requisite societies. The laws of nature are statistical laws derived from this fact. Thus the judgment of probability can be derived from an intuition—in general vague and unprecise—as to the statistical basis of the presupposed environment. This judgment can be derived from the analogy with the experienced environment. There will be such factors in experience adequate to justify a judgment of the inductive type.

But there is another factor from which, in combination with the four premises, a non-statistical judgment of probability can be derived. The principle of the graduated ‘intensive relevance’ of eternal objects to the primary physical data of experience expresses a real fact as to the preferential adaptation of selected eternal objects to novel occasions originating from an assigned environment.

This principle expresses the prehension by every creature of the graduated order of appetitions constituting the primordial nature of God. There can thus be an intuition of an intrinsic suitability of some definite outcome from a presupposed situation. There will be nothing statistical in this suitability. It depends upon the fundamental graduation of appetitions which lies at the base of things, and which solves all indeterminations of transition.

In this way, there can be an intuition of probability respecting the origination of some novelty. It is evident that the statistical theory entirely fails to provide any basis for such judgments.

It must not be thought that these non-statistical judgments are in any sense religious. They lie at a far lower level of experience than do the religious emotions. The secularization of the concept of God’s functions in the world is at least as urgent a requisite of thought as is the secularization of other elements in experience. The concept of God is certainly one essential element in religious feeling. But the converse is not true; the concept of religious feeling is not an essential element in the conp. 316cept of God’s function in the universe. In this respect religious literature has been sadly misleading to philosophic theory, partly by attraction and partly by repulsion.

CHAPTER X
PROCESS

SECTION I

Twat ‘all things flow’ is the first vague generalization which the unsystematized, barely analysed, intuition of men has produced. It is the theme of some of the best Hebrew poetry in the Psalms; it appears as one of the first generalizations of Greek philosophy in the form of the saying of Heraclitus; amid the later barbarism of Anglo-Saxon thought it reappears in the story of the sparrow flitting through the banquetting hall of the Northumbrian king; and in all stages of civilization its recollection lends its pathos to poetry. Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system.

At this point we have transformed the phrase, ‘all things flow,’ into the alternative phrase, ‘the flux of things.’ In so doing, the notion of the ‘flux’ has been held up before our thoughts as one primary notion for further analysis. But in the sentence ‘all things flow,’ there are three words—and we have started by isolating the last word of the three. We move backward to the next word ‘things’ and ask, What sort of things flow? Finally we reach the first word ‘all’ and ask, What is the meaning of the ‘many’ things engaged in this common flux, and in what sense, if any, can the word ‘all’ refer to a definitely indicated set of these many things?

The elucidation of meaning involved in the phrase
‘all things flow,’ is one chief task of metaphysics.

p. 317

p. 318

But there is a rival notion, antithetical to the former. I cannot at the moment recall one immortal phrase which expresses it with the same completeness as the alternative notion has been rendered by Heraclitus. This other notion dwells on permanences of things—the solid earth, the mountains, the stones, the Egyptian Pyramids, the spirit of man, God.

The best rendering of integral experience, expressing its general form divested of irrelevant details, is often to be found in the utterances of religious aspiration. One of the reasons of the thinness of so much modern metaphysics is its neglect of this wealth of expression of ultimate feeling. Accordingly we find in the first two lines of a famous hymn a full expression of the union of the two notions in one integral experience:

Abide with me;
Fast falls the eventide.

Here the first line expresses the permanences, ‘abide,’ ‘me’ and the ‘Being’ addressed; and the second line sets these permanences amid the inescapable flux. Here at length we find formulated the complete problem of metaphysics. Those philosophers who start with the first line have given us the metaphysics of ‘substance’; and those who start with the second line have developed the metaphysics of ‘flux.’ But, in truth, the two lines cannot be torn apart in this way; and we find that a wavering balance between the two is a characteristic of the greater number of philosophers. Plato found his permanences in a static, spiritual heaven, and his flux in the entanglement of his forms amid the fluent imperfections of the physical world. Here I draw attention to the word ‘imperfection.’ In any assertion as to Plato I speak under correction; but I believe that Plato’s authority can be claimed for the doctrine that the things that flow are imperfect in the sense of ‘limited’ and of ‘definitely exclusive of much that they might be and are not.’ The lines quoted from the hymn are an almost perfect expresp. 319sion of the direct intuition from which the main position of the Platonic philosophy is derived. Aristotle corrected his Platonism into a somewhat difference balance. He was the apostle of ‘substance and attribute,’ and of the classificatory logic which this notion suggests. But, on the other side, he makes a masterly analysis of the notion of ‘generation.’ Aristotle in his own person expressed a useful protest against the Platonic tendency to separate a static spiritual world from a fluent world of superficial experience. The later Platonic schools stressed this tendency: just as the mediaeval Aristotelian thought allowed the static notions of Aristotle’s logic to formulate some of the main metaphysical problems in terms which have lasted till today.