Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

eternal object can be more, or less, proximate to an eternal object in realized ingression—that is to say, in comparison with any other unfelt eternal object—is left unanswered by this category of reversion. In conformity with the ontological principle, this question can be answered only by reference to some actual entity. Every eternal object has entered into the conceptual feelings of God. Thus, a more fundamental account must ascribe the reverted conceptual feeling in a temporal subject to its conceptual feeling derived, according to Category IV, from the hybrid physical feeling of the relevancies conceptually ordered in God’s experience. In this way, by the recognition of God’s characterization of the creative act, a more complete rational explanation is attained. The category of reversion is then abolished; and Hume’s principle of the derivation of conceptual experience from physical experience remains without any exception.

SECTION IV

The two categories of the preceding section concerned the efficacy of physical feelings, pure or hybrid, for the origination of conceptual feelings in a later phase of their own subject. The present section considers analogous feelings with diverse subjects ‘scattered’ throughout members of a nexus. It considers a single subject, subsequent to the nexus, prehending this multiplicity of scattered feelings as the data for a corresponding multiplicity of its own simple physical feelings, some pure and some hybrid. It then formulates the process by which in that subject an analogy between these various feelings—constituted by one eternal object, of whatever complexity, implicated in the various analogous data of these feelings —is, by a supervening process of integration, converted into one feeling having for its datum the specific contrast between the nexus as one entity and that eternal object. This contrast is what is familiarly known as the qualification of the nexus by that eternal object. An interp. 383mediate stage in this process of integration is the formation in the final subject of one conceptual feeling with that eternal object as its datum. This conceptual feeling has an impartial relevance to the above-mentioned various simple physical feelings of the various members of the nexus. It is this impartiality of the conceptual feeling which leads to the integration in which the many members of the nexus are collected into the one nexus which they form, and in which that nexus is set in contrast to the one eternal object which has emerged from their analogies.

Thus pure, and hybrid, physical feelings, issuing into a single conceptual feeling, constitute the preliminary phase of this transmutation in the prehending subject. The integration of these feelings in that subject leads to the transmuted physical feeling of a nexus as qualified by that eternal object which is the datum of the single conceptual feeling. In this way the world is physically felt as a unity, and is felt as divisible into parts which are unities, namely, nexus. Each such unity has its own characteristics arising from the undiscriminated actual entities which are members of that nexus. In some cases objectification of the nexus has only indirect reference to the characteristics of its individual atomic actualities. In such a case the objectification may introduce new elements into the world, fortunate or unfortunate. Usually the objectification gives direct information, so that the prehending subject shapes itself as the direct outcome of the order prevalent in the prehended nexus. Transmutation is the way in which the actual world is felt as a community, and is so felt in virtue of its prevalent order. For it arises by reason of the analogies between the various members of the prehended nexus, and eliminates their differences. Apart from transmutation our feeble intellectual operations would fail to penetrate into the dominant characteristics of things. We can only understand by discarding. Transmutation depends upon a categoreal condition.

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Category VI. The Category of Transmutation. When (in accordance with Category IV, or with Categories IV and V) one, and the same, conceptual feeling is derived impartially by a prehending subject from its analogous simple physical feelings of various actual entities, then in a subsequent phase of integration—of these simple physical feelings together with the derivate conceptual feeling —the prehending subject may transmute the datum of this conceptual feeling into a contrast with the nexus of those prehended actual entities, or of some part of that nexus; so that the nexus (or its part), thus qualified, is the objective datum of a feeling entertained by this prehending subject.

Such a transmutation of simple physical feelings of many actualities into one physical feeling of a nexus as one, is called a ‘transmuted feeling.’ The origination of such a feeling depends upon intensities, valuations, and eliminations conjointly favourable.

In order to understand this categoreal condition, it must be noted that the integration of simple physical feelings into a complex physical feeling only provides for the various actual entities of the nexus being felt as separate entities requiring each other. We have to account for the substitution of the one nexus in place of its component actual entities. This is Leibniz’s problem which arises in his Monodology. He solves the problem by an unanalysed doctrine of ‘confusion.’ Some category is required to provide a physical feeling of a nexus as one entity with its own categoreal type of existence. This one physical feeling in the final subject is derived by transmutation from the various analogous physical feelings entertained by the various members of the nexus, together with their various analogous conceptual feelings (with these various members as subjects) originated from these physical feelings, either directly according to Category IV, or indirectly according to Category V. The analogy of the physical feelings consists in the fact that their definite character exhibits the same ingredientp. 385 eternal object. The analogy of the conceptual feelings consists in the fact that this one eternal object, or one reversion from this eternal object, is the datum for the various relevant conceptual feelings entertained respectively by members of the nexus. The final prehending subject prehends the members of the nexus, (i) by ‘pure’ physical feelings in which the members are severally objectified by these analogous physical feelings, and (i1) by hybrid physical feelings in which the members are severally objectified by these analogous conceptual feelings.