Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

Such a wider generality is a feeling of a complex of feelings, including their specific elements of identity and contrast. This process of the integration of feeling proceeds until the concrete unity of feeling is obtained. In this concrete unity all indetermination as to the realization of possibilities has been eliminated. The many entities of the universe, including those originating in the concrescence itself, find their respective réles in this final unity. This final unity is termed the ‘satisfaction.’ The ‘satisfaction’ is the culmination of the concrescence into a completely determinate matter of fact. In any of its antecedent stages the concrescence exhibits sheer indep. 323termination as to the nexus between its many components.

SECTION III

An actual occasion is nothing but the unity to be ascribed to a particular instance of concrescence. This concrescence is thus nothing else than the ‘real internal constitution’ of the actual occasion in question. The analysis of the formal constitution of an actual entity has given three stages in the process of feeling: (i) the responsive phase, (ii) the supplemental stage, and (iii) the satisfaction.

The satisfaction is merely the culmination marking the evaporation of all indetermination; so that, in respect to all modes of feeling and to all entities in the universe, the satisfied actual entity embodies a determinate attitude of ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Thus the satisfaction is the attainment of the private ideal which is the final cause of the concrescence. But the process itself lies in the two former phases. The first phase is the phase of pure reception of the actual world in its guise of objective datum for aesthetic synthesis. In this phase there is the mere reception of the actual world as a multiplicity of private centres of feeling, implicated in a nexus of mutual presupposition. The feelings are felt as belonging to the external centres, and are not absorbed into the private immediacy. The second stage is governed by the private ideal, gradually shaped in the process itself; whereby the many feelings, derivatively felt as alien, are transformed into a unity of aesthetic appreciation immediately felt as private. This is the incoming of ‘appetition,’ which in its higher exemplifications we term ‘vision.’ In the language of physical science, the ‘scalar’ form overwhelms the original ‘vector’ form: the origins become subordinate to the individual experience. The vector form is not lost, but is submerged as the foundation of the scalar superstructure.

In this second stage the feelings assume an emotional

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character by reason of this influx of conceptual feelings. But the reason why the origins are not lost in the private emotion is that there is no element in the universe capable of pure privacy. If we could obtain a complete analysis of meaning, the notion of pure privacy would be seen to be self-contradictory. Emotional feeling is still subject to the third metaphysical principle, that. to be ‘something’ is ‘to have the potentiality for acquiring real unity with other entities.’ Hence, ‘to be a real component of an actual entity’ is in some way ‘to realize this potentiality.’ Thus ‘emotion’ is ‘emotional feeling’; and ‘what is felt’ is the presupposed vector situation. In physical science this principle takes the form which should never be lost sight of in fundamental speculation, that scalar quantities are constructs derivative from vector quantities. In more familiar language, this principle can be expressed by the statement that the notion of ‘passing on’ is more fundamental than that of a private individual fact. In the abstract language here adopted for metaphysical statement, ‘passing on’ becomes ‘creativity,’ in the dictionary sense of the verb creare, ‘to bring forth, beget, produce.’ Thus, according to the third principle, no entity can be divorced from the notion of creativity. An entity is at least a particular form capable of infusing its own particularity into creativity. An actual entity, or a phase of an actual entity, is more than that; but, at least, it is that.

Locke’s ‘particular ideas’ are merely the antecedent actual entities exercising their function of infusing with their own particularity the ‘passing on, which is the primary phase of the ‘real internal constitution’ of the actual entity in question. In obedience to a prevalent misconception, Locke termed this latter entity the ‘mind’; and discussed its ‘furniture,’ when he should have discussed ‘mental operations’ in their capacity of later phases in the constitutions of actual entities. Locke himself flittingly expresses this fundamental vector function of his ‘ideas.’ In a paragraph, forming a portion of a quotation alreadyp. 325 made, he writes: “I confess power includes in it some kind of relation,—a relation to action or change; as indeed, which of our ideas, of what kind soever, when attentively considered, does not?” *

SECTION IV

The second phase, that of supplementation, divides itself into two subordinate phases. Both of these phases may be trivial; also they are not truly separable, since they interfere with each other by intensification or inhibition. If both phases are trivial, the whole second phase is merely the definite negation of individual origination; and the process passes passively to its satisfaction. The actual entity is then the mere vehicle for the transference of inherited constitutions of feeling. Its private immediacy passes out of the picture. Of these two sub-phases, the former—so far as there is an order—is that of aesthetic supplement, and the latter is that of intellectual supplement.

In the aesthetic supplement there is an emotional appreciation of the contrasts and rhythms inherent in the unification of the objective content in the concrescence of one actual occasion. In this phase perception is heightened by its assumption of pain and pleasure, beauty and distaste. It is the phase of inhibitions and intensifications. It is the phase in which blue becomes more intense by reason of its contrasts, and shape acquires dominance by reason of its loveliness. What was received as alien, has been recreated as private. This is the phase of perceptivity, including emotional reactions to perceptivity. In this phase, private immediacy has welded the data into a new fact of blind feeling. Pure aesthetic supplement has solved its problem. This phase requires an influx of conceptual feelings and their integration with the pure physical feelings.

But ‘blindness’ of the process, so far, retains an indetermination. There must be either a determinate nega-

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tion of intellectual ‘sight,’ or an admittance of intellectual ‘sight.’ The negations of intellectual sight is the dismissal into irrelevance, of eternal objects in their abstract status of pure potentials. ‘What might be’ has the capability of relevant contrast with ‘what is.’ If the pure potentials, in this abstract capacity, are dismissed from relevance, the second sub-phase is trivial. The process then constitutes a blind actual occasion, ‘blind’ in the sense that no intellectual operations are involved; though conceptual operations are always involved. Thus there is always mentality in the form of ‘vision,’ but not always mentality in the form of conscious ‘intellectuality.’

But if some eternal objects, in their abstract capacity, are realized as relevant to actual fact, there is an actual occasion with intellectual operations. The complex of such intellectual operations is sometimes termed the ‘mind’ of the actual occasion; and the actual occasion is also termed ‘conscious.’ But the term ‘mind’ conveys the suggestion of independent substance. This is not meant here: a better term is the ‘consciousness’ belonging to the actual occasion.