Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

The philosophy of organism in its appeal to the facts can thus support itself by an appeal to the insight of John Locke, who in British philosophy is the analogue to Plato, in the epoch of his life, in personal endowments, in width of experience, and in dispassionate statement of conflicting intuitions.

This doctrine of organism is the attempt to describe the world as a process of generation of individual actual entities, each with its own absolute self-attainment. This concrete finality of the individual is nothing else than a decision referent beyond itself. The ‘perpetual perishing’ (ef. Locke, B II, C XIV, D 1) of individual absoluteness is thus foredoomed. But the ‘perishing’ of absoluteness is the attainment of ‘objective immortality.’ This last conception expresses the further element in the doctrine of organism—that the process of generation is to be described in terms of actual entities.

CHAPTER II

THE EXTENSIVE CONTINUUM

SECTION I

WE must first consider the perceptive mode in which there is clear, distinct consciousness of the ‘extensive’ relations of the world. These relations include the ‘extensiveness’ of space and the ‘extensiveness’ of time. Undoubtedly, this clarity, at least in regard to space, is obtained only in ordinary perception through the senses. This mode of perception is here termed ‘presentational immediacy.’ In this ‘mode’ the contemporary world is consciously prehended as a continuum of extensive relations.

It cannot be too clearly understood that some chief notions of European thought were framed under the influence of a misapprehension, only partially corrected by the scientific progress of the last century. This mistake consists in the confusion of mere potentiality with actuality. Continuity concerns what is potential; whereas actuality is incurably atomic.

This misapprehension is promoted by the neglect of the principle that, so far as physcial relations are concerned, contemporary events happen in causal independence of each other. This principle will have to be explained later, in connection with an examination of process and of time. It receives an exemplification in the character of our perception of the world of contemporary actual entities. That contemporary world is objectified

1 This principle lies on the surface of the fundamental Hinsteinian formula for the physical continuum. 95

p. 96

for us as ‘realitas objectiva,’ illustrating bare extension with its various parts discriminated by differences of sense data. These qualities, such as colours, sounds, bodily feelings, tastes, smells, together with the perspectives introduced by extensive relationships, are the relational eternal objects whereby the contemporary actual entities are elements in our constitution. This is the type of objectification which (in Sect. VII of the previous chapter) has been termed ‘presentational objectification.’

In this way, by reason of the principle of contemporary independence, the contemporary world is objectified for us under the aspect of passive potentiality. The very sense-data by which its parts are differentiated are supplied by antecedent states of our own bodies, and so is their distribution in contemporary space. Our direct perception of the contemporary world is thus reduced to extension, defining (1) our own geometrical perspectives, and (ii) possibilities of mutual perspectives for other contemporary entities inter se, and (ili) possibilities of division. These possibilities of division constitute the external world a continuum. For a continuum is divisible; so far as the contemporary world is divided by actual entities, it is not a continuum, but is atomic. Thus the contemporary world is perceived with its potentiality for extensive division, and not in its actual atomic division.

The contemporary world as perceived by the senses is the datum for contemporary actuality, and is therefore continuous—divisible but not divided. The contemporary world is in fact divided and atomic, being a multiplicity of definite actual entities. These contemporary actual entities are divided from each other, and are not themselves divisible into other contemporary actual entities. This antithesis will have to be discussed later (cf. Part IV). But it is necessary to adumbrate it here.

This limitation of the way in which the contemporary actual entities are relevant to the ‘formal’ existence of the subject in question is the first example of the general

p. 97

principle, that objectification relegates into irrelevance, or into a subordinate relevance, the full constitution of the objectified entity. Some real component in the objectified entity assumes the réle of being how that particular entity is a datum in the experience of the subject. In this case, the objectified contemporaries are only directly relevant to the subject in their character of arising from a datum which is an extensive continuum. They do, in fact, atomize this continuum; but the aboriginal potentiality, which they include and realize, is what they contribute as the relevant factor in their objectifications. They thus exhibit the community of contemporary actualities as a common world with mathematical relations—where the term ‘mathematical’ is used in the sense in which it would have been understood by Plato, Euclid, and Descartes, before the modern discovery of the true definition of pure mathematics,

The bare mathematical potentialities of the extensive continuum require an additional content in order to assume the role of real objects for the subject. This content is supplied by the eternal objects, termed sense-data. These objects are ‘given’ for the experience of the subject. Their givenness does not arise from the ‘decision’ of the contemporary entities which are thus objectified. It arises from the functioning of the antecedent physical body of the subject; and this functioning can in its turn be analysed as representing the influence of the more remote past, a past common alike to the subject and to its contemporary actual entities. Thus these sense-data are eternal objects playing a complex relational rdle; they connect the actual entities of the past with the actual entities of the contemporary world, and thereby effect objectifications of the contemporary things and of the past things. For instance, we see the contemporary chair, but we see it with our eyes; and we touch the contemporary chair, but we touch it with our hands. Thus colours objectify the chair in one way, and objectify the eyes in another way, as elements in the experience of the subject.

p. 98