Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

Thus an enduring object gains the enhanced intensity of feeling arising from contrast between inheritance and novel effect, and also gains the enhanced intensity arising from the combined inheritance of its stable rhythmic character throughout its life-history. It has the weight of repetition, the intensity of contrast, and the balance between the two factors of the contrast. In this way the association of endurance with rhythm and physical vibration are to be explained. They arise out of the conditions for intensity and stability. The subjective aim is seeking width with its contrasts, within the unity of a general design. An intense experience is an aesthetic fact, andp. 427 its categoreal conditions are to be generalized from aesthetic laws in particular arts.

The categoreal conditions, appealed to above, can be summarized thus: *

“1. The novel consequent must be graded in relevance so as to preserve some identity of character with the ground.

2. The novel consequent must be graded in relevance so as to preserve some contrast with the ground in respect to that same identity of character.

These two principles are derived from the doctrine that an actual fact is a fact of aesthetic experience. All aesthetic experience is feeling arising out of the realization of contrast under identity.”

In the expansion of this account which has been given here, a third principle has been added, that new forms enter into positive realizations first as conceptual experience, and are then transmuted into physical experience. But conceptual experience does not in itself involve consciousness; its essence is valuation.

Between physical purposes and the conscious purposes introduced by the intellectual feelings there lie the propositional feelings which have not acquired consciousness in their subjective forms by association with intellectual feelings. Such propositional feelings mark a stage of existence intermediate between the purely physical stage and the stage of conscious intellectual operations. The propositions are lures for feelings, and give to feelings a definiteness of enjoyment and purpose which is absent in the blank evaluation .of physical feeling into physical purpose. In this blank evaluation we have merely the determination of the comparative creative efficacies of the component feelings of actual entities. In a propositional feeling there is the ‘hold up’—or, in its original sense, the epoch—of the valuation of the predicative pattern in its relevance to the definite logical subjects which are otherwise felt as definite elements in experience.

*Cf. my Religion in the Making, Ch. III.

p. 428

There is the arrest of the emotional pattern round this sheer fact as a possibility, with the corresponding gain in distinctness of its relevance to the future. The particular possibility for the transcendent creativity—in the sense of its advance from subject to subject—this particular possibility has been picked out, held up, and clothed with emotion. The stage of existence in which propositional feelings are important, apart from intellectual feelings, may be identified with Bergson’s stage of pure and instinctive intuition. There are thus three stages, the stage of pure physical purpose, the stage of pure instinctive intuition, and the stage of intellectual feelings. But these stages are not sharply distinguished. There are stages in which there are propositional feelings with every degree of importance or of unimportance; there are stages in which there are intellectual feelings with every degree of importance or of unimportance. Also even in a higher stage, there are whole recesses of feeling which in the final satisfaction acquire merely the characteristics of their own proper stage, physical or propositional.

PART IV
THE THEORY OF EXTENSION

I

ABSTRACT

Cuarter I. CoorpINATH DIVISION

SECTION

I.

Ik;

II.

IV.

Il. . Points, Regions, Loci; Irrelevance of Dimensions.

Genetic Division is Division of the Concrescence, Coordinate Division is Division of the Concrete; Physical Time Arises in the Coordinate Analysis of the Satisfaction; Genetic Process not the Temporal Succession; Spatial and Temporal Elements in the Extensive Quantum; The Quantum is the Extensive Region; Coordinate Divisibility; Subjective Unity Indivisible; Subjective Forms arise from Subjective Aim; World as a Medium, Extensively Divisible; Indecision as to Selected Quantum.

Coordinate Divisions and Feelings; Mental Pole Incurably One; Subjective Forms of Coordinate Divisions Depend on Mental Pole, Inexplicable Otherwise; A Coordinate Division is a Contrast, A Proposition, False, but Useful Matrix.

Coordinate Division, the World as an Indefinite Multiplicity; Extensive Order, Routes of Transmission; External Extensive Relationships, Internal Extensive Division, One Basic Scheme; Pseudo Sub-organisms, Pseudo Super-organisms, Professor de Laguna’s ‘Extensive Connection.’

Extensive Connection is the Systematic Scheme Underlying Transmission of Feelings and Perspective; Regulative Conditions; Descartes; Grades of Extensive Conditions, Dimensions.

Bifurcation of Nature; Publicity and Privacy.

. Classification of Eternal Objects; Mathematical Forms, Sensa. . Elimination of the Experient Subject, Concrescent Immediacy.

Cuapter IJ. ExTensIvE CONNECTION
Extensive Connection, General Description.

. Assumptions, i.e. Postulates, ie. Axioms and Propositions for a Deductive System. Extensive Abstraction, Geometrical Elements, Points, Segments.

p. 431

p. 432

CuHapter III. Frat Locr

SECTION

ite II.

i.

TI:

Il.

Ill.

Euclid’s Definition of ‘Straight Line.’

Weakness of Euclidean Definition; Straight Line as Shortest Distance, Dependence on Measurement; New Definition of Straight Lines, Ovals.

. Definition of Straight Lines, Flat Loci, Dimensions. . Contiguity. . Recapitulation.

CuaptTer [V. STRAINS

. Definition of a Strain, Feelings involving Flat Loci among the

Forms of Definiteness of their Objective Data; ‘Seat’ of a Strain; Strains and Physical Behaviour; Electromagnetic Occasions Involve Strains.

Presentational Immediacy Involves Strains; Withness of the Body, Projection, Focal Region; Transmission of Bodily Strains, Transmutation, Ultimate Percipient, Emphasis; Projection of the Sensa, Causal Efficacy Transmuted in Presentational Immediacy; Massive Simplification; Types of Energy; Hume; Symbolic Transference, Physical Purpose.

Elimination of Irrelevancies, Massive Attention to Systematic Crder; Design of Contrasts; Importance of Contemporary Independence; Advantage to Enduring Objects.

. Structural Systems, Discarding Individual Variations; Physical Matter Involves Strain-loci.

The Various Loci Involved; Causal Past, Causal Future, Contemporaries, Durations, Part of a Duration, Future of a Duration, Presented Duration, Strain-Locus,

CuHaptTer V. MEASUREMENT

Identification of Strain-Loci with Durations only Approximate; Definitions Compared; Seat of Strain, Projectors; Strain- Loci and Presentational Immediacy.

Strain-Locus Wholly Determined by Experient; Seat and Projectors Determine Focal Region; Animal Body Sole Agent in the Determination; Vivid Display of Real Potentiality of Contemporary World; New Definition of Straight Lines Explains this Doctrine; Ways of Speech, Interpretation of Direct Observation; Descartes’ Inspectio, Realitas Objectiva, Judicium.

Modern Doctrine of Private Psychological Fields; Secondary
Qualities, Sensa; Abandons Descartes’ Realitas Objectiva;

p. 433

SECTION Difficulties for Scientific Theory, All Observation in Private Psychological Fields; Llustration, Hume; Conclusion, Mathematical Form, Presentational Immediacy in One Sense Barren, in Another Sense has Overwhelming Significance.