Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

Locke upholds the direct conscious apprehension of ‘things without’ (e.g. Hssay, II, XXI, 1), otherwise termed ‘exterior things’ (II, XXIII, 1), or ‘this or that particular existence’ (III, III, 6), and illustrated by an individual nurse and an individual mother (III, III, 7).

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In the philosophy of organism the nexus, which is the basis for such direct apprehension, is provided by the physical feelings. The philosophy of organism here takes the opposite road to that taken alike by Descartes and by Kant. Both of these philosophers accepted (Descartes with hesitations, and Kant without question) the traditional subjectivist sensationalism, and assigned the intuition of ‘things without’ peculiarly to the intelligence.

Hume’s addition consists in expressing and discussing, with the utmost clarity, the traditional sensationalist dogma. Thus for Hume, as for Locke when he remembers to speak in terms of this doctrine, an ‘impression’ is the conscious apprehension of a universal. For example, he writes (Treatise, Part I, Ch. I), “That idea of red, which we form in the dark, and that impression which strikes our eyes in sunshine, differ only in degree, not in nature.’ This means that a consistent sensationalism cannot distinguish between a percept and a concept. Hume had not in his mind (at least when philosophizing, though he admits it for other sorts of ‘practice’ ) the fourth category of explanation, that no entity can be abstracted from its capacity to function as an object in the process of the actual world. ‘To function as an object’ is ‘to be a determinant of the definiteness of an actual occurrence.’ According to the philosophy of organism, a pure concept does not involve consciousness, at least in our human experience. Consciousness arises when a synthetic feeling integrates physical and conceptual feelings. Traditional philosophy in its account of conscious perception has exclusively fixed attention on its pure conceptual side; and thereby has made difficulties for itself in the theory of knowledge. Locke, with his naive good sense, assumes that perception involves more than this conceptual side; though he fails to grasp the inconsistency of this assumption with the extreme subjectivist sensationalist doctrine. Physical feelings form the non-conceptual element in our awareness of

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nature.’ Also, all awareness, even awareness of concepts, requires at least the synthesis of physical feelings with conceptual feeling. In awareness actuality, as a process in fact, is integrated with the potentialities which illustrate either what it is and might not be, or what it is not and might be. In other words, there is no consciousness without reference to definiteness, affirmation, and negation. Also affirmation involves its contrast with negation, and negation involves its contrast with affirmation. Further, affirmation and negation are alike meaningless apart from reference to the definiteness of particular actualities. Consciousness is how we feel the affirmation-negation contrast. Conceptual feeling is the feeling of an unqualified negation; that is to say, it is the feeling of a definite eternal object with the definite extrusion of any particular realization. Consciousness requires that the objective datum should involve (as one side of a contrast) a qualified negative determined to some definite situation. It will be found later (cf. Ch. IV) that this doctrine implies that there is no consciousness apart from propositions as one element in the objective datum. *Cf. The Concept of Nature, Ch. I,

CHAPTER III
THE TRANSMISSION OF FEELINGS

SECTION I

AccorDING to the ontological principle there is nothing which floats into the world from nowhere. Everything in the actual world is referable to some actual entity. It is either transmitted from an actual entity in the past, or belongs to the subjective aim of the actual entity to whose concrescence it belongs. This subjective aim is both an example and a limitation of the ontological principle. It is an example, in that the principle is here applied to the immediacy of concrescent fact. The subject completes itself during the process of concrescence by a self-criticism of its own incomplete phases. In another sense the subjective aim limits the ontological principle by its own autonomy. But the initial stage of its aim is an endowment which the subject inherits from the inevitable ordering of things, conceptually realized in the nature of God. The immediacy of the concrescent subject is constituted by its living aim at its own self-constitution. Thus the initial stage of the aim is rooted in the nature of God, and its completion depends on the self-causation of the subject-superject. This function of God is analogous to the remorseless working of things in Greek and in Buddhist thought. The initial aim is the best for that impasse. But if the best be bad, then the ruthlessness of God can be personified as Até, the goddess of mischief. The chaff is burnt. What is inexorable in God, is valuation as an aim towards ‘order’; and ‘order’ means ‘society’ permissive of actualities with patterned intensity of feeling arising from adjusted con-

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trasts. In this sense God is the principle of concretion ; namely, he is that actual entity from which each temporal concrescence receives that initial aim from which its self-causation starts. That aim determines the initial gradations of relevance of eternal objects for conceptual feeling; and constitutes the autonomous subject in its primary phase of feelings with its initial conceptual valuations, and with its initial physical purposes. Thus the transition of the creativity from an actual world to the correlate novel concrescence is conditioned by the relevance of God’s all-embracing conceptual valuations to the particular possibilities of transmission from the actual world, and by its relevance to the various possibilities of initial subjective form available for the initial feelings. In this way there is constituted the concrescent subject in its primary phase with its dipolar constitution, physical and mental, indissoluble.

If we prefer the phraseology, we can say that God and the actual world jointly constitute the character of the creativity for the initial phase of the novel concrescence. The subject, thus constituted, is the autonomous master of its own concrescence into subject-superject. It passes from a subjective aim in concrescence into a superject with objective immortality. At any stage it is subjectsuperject. According to this explanation, self-determination is always imaginative in its origin. The deterministie efficient causation is the inflow of the actual world in its own proper character of its own feelings, with their own intensive strength, felt and re-enacted by the novel concrescent subject. But this re-enaction has a mere character of conformation to pattern. The subjective valuation is the work of novel conceptual feeling; and in proportion to its importance, acquired in complex processes of integration and reintegration, this autonomous conceptual element modifies the subjective forms throughout the whole range of feeling in that concrescence and thereby guides the integrations.

In so far as there is negligible autonomous energy, the

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