Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

In this process, the negative prehensions which effect the elimination are not merely negligible. The process through which a feeling passes in constituting itself, also records itself in the subjective form of the integral feeling. The negative prehensions have their own subjective forms which they contribute to the process. A feeling bears on itself the scars of its birth; it recollects as a subjective emotion its struggle for existence; it retains the impress of what it might have been, but is not. It is for this reason that what an actual entity has avoided as a datum for feeling may yet be an important part of its equipment. The actual cannot be reduced to mere matter of fact in divorce from the potential.

The same principle of explanation also holds in the case of a conceptual prehension, in which the datum is an eternal object. In the first phase of this conceptual prehension, there is this eternal object to be felt as a mere abstract capacity for giving definiteness to a physical feeling. But also there are the feelings of the objectifications of innumerable actual entities. Some of these physical feelings illustrate this same eternal object as an element providing their definiteness. There are in this way diverse prehensicns of the same eternal object; and by the first category these various prehensions must be —p. 347 consistent, so as to pass into the integration of the subsequent phase in which there is one coherent complex feeling, namely, a conceptual feeling of that eternal object. This subjective insistence on consistency may, from the beginning, replace the positive feelings by negative prehensions.

SECTION VII

In the explanations of the preceding section, only the first category has been explicitly alluded to. It must now be pointed out how the other categories have been tacitly presupposed.

The fact that there is integration at all arises from the condition expressed by the category of objective identity. The same entity, be it actual entity or be it eternal object, cannot be felt twice in the formal constitution of one concrescence. The incomplete phases with their many feelings of one object are only to be interpreted in terms of the final satisfaction with its one feeling of that one object. Thus objective identity requires integration of the many feelings of one object into the one feeling of that object. The analysis of an actual entity is only intellectual, or, to speak with a wider scope, only objective. Each actual entity is a cell with atomic unity. But in analysis it can only be understood as a process; it can only be felt as a process, that is to say, as in passage. The actual entity is divisible; but is in fact undivided. The divisibility can thus only refer to its objectifications in which it transcends itself. But such transcendence is self-revelation.

Thus the process of integration, which lies at the very heart of the concrescence, is the urge imposed on the concrescent unity of that universe by the three categories of subjective unity, of objective identity, and of objective diversity. The oneness of the universe, and the oneness of each element in the universe, repeat themselves to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature, each creature including in itself the whole ofp. 348 history and exemplifying the self-identity of things and their mutual diversities.

The third category is concerned with the antithesis to oneness, namely, diversity. An actual entity is not merely one; it is also definitely complex. But, to be definitely complex is to include definite diverse elements in definite ways. The category of objective diversity expresses the inexorable condition—that a complex unity must provide for each of its components a real diversity of status, with a reality which bears the same sense as its own reality and is peculiar to itself. In other words, a real unity cannot provide sham diversities of status for its diverse components.

This category is in truth only a particular application of the second category. For a ‘status’ is after all something; and, according to the category of objective identity, it cannot duplicate its réle. Thus if the ‘status’ be the status of this, it cannot in the same sense be the status of that. The prohibition of sham diversities of status sweeps away the ‘class theory’ of particular substances, which was waveringly suggested by Locke (II, XXIII, 1), was more emphatically endorsed by Hume (Treatise, Part I, Sect. 6), and has been adopted by Hume’s followers. For the essence of a class is that it assigns no diversity of function to the members of its extension. The members of a class are diverse members in virtue of mere logical disjunction. The ‘class,’ thus appealed to, is a mere multiplicity. But in the prevalent discussion of classes, there are illegitimate transitions to the notions of a ‘nexus’ and of a ‘proposition.’ The appeal to a class to perform the services of a proper entity is exactly analogous to an appeal to an imaginary terrier to kill a real rat.

SECTION VIII

This diversity of status, combined with the real unity of the components, means that the real synthesis of two component elements in the objective datum of a feelingp. 349 must be infected with the individual particularities of each of the relata. Thus the synthesis in its completeness expresses the joint particularities of that pair of relata, and can relate no others. A complex entity with this individual definiteness, arising out of determinateness of eternal objects, will be termed a ‘contrast.’ A contrast cannot be abstracted from the contrasted relata.

The most obvious examples of a contrast are to be found by confining attention purely to eternal objects. The contrast between blue and red cannot be repeated as that contrast between any other pair of colours, or any pair of sounds, or between a colour and a sound. It is just the contrast between blue and red, that and nothing else. Certain abstractions from that contrast, certain values inherent in it, can also be got from other contrasts. But they are other contrasts, and not that contrast; and the abstractions are not ‘contrasts’ of the same categoreal type.