Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

Greeks meant by their term ‘even’ ({ooc). On either side of such a locus, there is the interior of one oval and the exterior of another oval, so that the locus is ‘even’ in respect to the contrasted notions of ‘concavity’ and ‘convexity.’ It is an extra ‘assumption’—provable or otherwise according to the particular logical development of the subject which may have been adopted— that all ‘even’ loci are ‘flat,’ and that all ‘flat’ loci are ‘even.’

The second question for discussion concerns the physical importance of ‘external connection.’ So long as the atomic character of actual entities is unrecognized, the application of Zeno’s method of argument makes it difficult to understand the notion of continuous transmission which reigns in physical science. But the concept of ‘actual occasions,’ adopted in the philosophy of organism, allows of the following explanation of physical transmission.

Let two actual occasions be termed ‘contiguous’ when the regions constituting their ‘standpoints’ are externally connected. Then by reason of the absence of intermediate actual occasions, the objectification of the antecedent occasion in the later occasion is peculiarly complete. There will be a set of antecedent, contiguous occasions objectified in any given occasion; and the abstraction which attends every objectification will merely be due to the necessary harmonizations of these objectifications. The objectifications of the more distant past will be termed ‘mediate’; the contiguous occasions will have ‘immediate’ objectification. The mediate objectifications will be transmitted through various routes of successive immediate objectifications. Thus the notion of continuous transmission in science must be replaced by the notion of immediate transmission through a route of successive quanta of extensiveness. These quanta of extensiveness are the basic regions of successive contiguous occasions. It is not necessary for the philosophy of organism entirely to deny that there

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is direct objectification of one occasion in a later occasion which is not contiguous to it. Indeed, the contrary opinion would seem the more natural for this doctrine. Provided that physical science maintains its denial of ‘action at a distance,’ the safer guess is that direct objectification is practically negligible except for contiguous occasions; but that this practical negligibility is a characteristic of the present cosmic epoch, without any metaphysical generality. Also a further distinction should be introduced. Physical prehensions fall into two species, pure physical prehensions and hybrid physical prehensions. A pure physical prehension is a prehension whose datum is an antecedent occasion objectified in respect to one of its own physical prehensions. A hybrid prehension has as its datum an antecedent occasion objectified in respect to a conceptual prehension. Thus a pure physical prehension is the transmission of physical feeling, while hybrid prehension is the transmission of mental feeling.

There is no reason to assimilate the conditions for hybrid prehensions to those for pure physical prehensions. Indeed the contrary hypothesis is the more natural. For the conceptual pole does not share in the coordinate divisibility of the physical pole, and the extensive continuum is derived from this coordinate divisibility. Thus the doctrine of immediate objectification for the mental poles and of mediate objectification for the physical poles seems most consonant to the philosophy of organism in its application to the present cosmic epoch. This conclusion has some empirical support, both from the evidence for peculiar instances of telepathy, and from the instinctive apprehension of a tone of feeling in ordinary social intercourse.

But of course such immediate objectification is also reinforced, or weakened, by routes of mediate objectification. Also pure and hybrid prehensions are integrated and thus hopelessly intermixed. Hence it will only be in exceptional circumstances that an immediate hybridp. 470 prehension has sufficient vivid definition to receive a subjective form of clear conscious attention.

SECTION V

We have now traced the main characteristics of that real potentiality from which the first phase of a physical occasion takes its rise. These characteristics remain inwoven in the constitution of the subject throughout its adventure of self-formation. The actual entity is the product of the interplay of physical pole with mental pole. In this way, potentiality passes into actuality, and extensive relations mould qualitative content and objectifications of other particulars into a coherent finite experience.

In general, consciousness is negligible; and even the approach to it in vivid propositional feelings has failed to attain importance. Blind physical purposes reign. It is now obvious that blind prehensions, physical and mental, are the ultimate bricks of the physical universe. They are bound together within each actuality by the subjective unity of aim which governs their allied genesis and their final concrescence. They are also bound together beyond the limits of their peculiar subjects by the way in which the prehension in one subject become the objective datum for the prehension in a later subject, thus objectifying the earlier subject for the later subject. The two types of interconnection of prehensions are themselves bound together in one common scheme, the relationship of extension.

It is by means of ‘extension’ that the bonds between prehensions take on the dual aspect of internal relations, which are yet in a sense external relations. It is evident that if the solidarity of the physical world is to be relevant to the description of its individual actualities, it can only be by reason of the fundamental internality of the relationships in question. On the other hand, if the individual discreteness of the actualities is to have its weight, there must be an aspect in these relationshipsPia, LO:C1 471 from which they can be conceived as external, that is, as bonds between divided things. The extensive scheme serves this double purpose.

The Cartesian subjectivism in its application to physical science became Newton’s assumption of individually existent physical bodies, with merely external relationships. We diverge from Descartes by holding that what he has described as primary attributes of physical bodies, are really the forms of internal relationships between actual occasions, and within actual occasions. Such a change of thought is the shift from materialism to organism, as the basic idea of physical science.