Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

The philosophy of organism provides for this relevance by means of two doctrines, (i) the doctrine of God embodying a basic completeness of appetition, and (11) the doctrine of each occasion effecting a concrescence of the universe, including God. Then, by the category of conceptual reproduction, the vector prehensions of God’s appetition, and of other occasions, issue in the mental pole of conceptual prehensions; and by integration of this pole with the pure physical prehensions there arise the primitive physical feelings of sensa, with their subjective forms emotional and purposive. These feelings, with their primitive simplicity, arise into distinctness by reason of the elimination effected by this integration of the vector prehensions with the conceptual appetitions. Such primitive feelings cannot be separated from their subjective forms. The subject never loses its triple character of recipient, patient, and agent. These primitive feelp. 482ings have already been considered under the name of ‘physical purposes’ (cf. Part III, Ch. V). They correspond to Hume’s ‘impressions of sensation.’ But they do not originate the process of experience.

We see that a feeling of presentational immediacy comes into being by reason of an integration of a conceptual feeling drawn from bodily efficacy with a bare regional feeling which is also a component in a complex feeling of bodily efficacity. Also this bare regional feeling is reinforced with the general regional feeling which is the whole of our direct physical feeling of the contemporary world; and the conceptual feeling is reinforced by the generation of physical purpose. This integration takes the form of the creative imputation of the complex eternal object, ingredient in the bodily efficacity, onto some contemporary focal region felt in the strain-feeling. Also the subjective form is transmitted from the conceptual valuation and the derivate ‘physical purpose.’ But this subjective form is that suitable to the bodily efficacity out of which it has arisen. Thus the mere region with its imputed eternal object is felt as though there had been a feeling of its efficacity. But there is no mutual efficacity of contemporary regions. This transference of subjective form is termed ‘symbolic transference.’ *

An additional conceptual feeling, with its valuation, arises from this physical feeling of presentational immediacy. It is the conceptual feeling of a region thus characterized. This is the aesthetic valuation proper to the bare objective datum of the presentational immediacy. But this valuation is less primitive than that gained from the conceptual prehension by symbolic transference. The primitive subjective form includes a valuation as though the contemporary region, by its own proper constitution, were causally effective on the percipient sub-

* Cf. my three Barbour-Page lectures Symbolism, at the University of Virginia, New York, Macmillan, 1927, and Cambridge University Press; and also above, Part II, Ch. VIII.

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ject. The secondary valuation is the aesthetic appreciation of the bare fact: this bare fact is merely that region, thus qualified. Thus the contemporary world, as felt through the senses, is valued for its own sake, by means of a later conceptual feeling; but it is also valued for its derivation from antecedent efficacity, by means of transmutation from earlier conceptual feeling combined with derivate ‘physical purpose.’

But none of these operations can be segregated from nature into the subjective privacy of a mind. Mental and physical operations are incurably intertwined; and both issue into publicity, and are derived from publicity. The vector character of prehension is fundamental.

SECTION III

It is the mark of a high-grade organism to eliminate, by negative prehension, the irrelevant accidents in its environment, and to elicit massive attention to every variety of systematic order. For this purpose, the category of transmutation is the master-principle. By its operation each nexus can be prehended in terms of the analogies among its own members, or in terms of analogies among the members of other nexts but yet relevant to it. In this way the organism in question suppresses the mere multiplicities of things, and designs its own contrasts. The canons of art are merely the expression, in specialized forms, of the requisites for depth of experience. The principles of morality are allied to the canons of art, in that they also express, in another connection, the same requisites. Owing to the principle that contemporary actual entities occur in relative independence, the nextis of contemporary actual entities are peculiarly favourable for this transference of systematic qualities from other nexiis to themselves. For a difficulty arises in the operation of the category of transmutation, when a characteristic prevalent among the individual entities of one nexus is to be transferred to another nexus treated as a unity. The difficulty is that the individual actualip. 484ties of the recipient nexus are also respectively objectified in the percipient subject by systematic characteristics which equally demand the transference to their own nexus; but this is the nexus which should be the recipient of the other transference. Thus there are competing qualities struggling to effect the objectification of the same nexus. The result is attenuation and elimination.

When the recipient nexus is composed of entities contemporary with the percipient subject, this difficulty vanishes. For the contemporary entities do not enter into the constitution of the percipient subject by objectification through any of their own feelings. Thus their only direct connection with the subject is their implication in the same extensive scheme. Thus a nexus of actual entities, contemporary with the percipient subject, puts up no alternative characteristics to inhibit the transference to it of characteristics from antecedent nexus.