Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

immutable, so also is the order of the parts of space. Suppose those parts to be moved out of their places, and they will be moved (if the expression may be allowed) out of themselves. For times and spaces are, as it were, the places as well of themselves as of all other things. All things are placed in time as to order of situation. It is from their essence or nature that they are places; and that the primary places of things should be movable, is absurd. These are, therefore, the absolute places; and translations out of those places are the only absolute motions. . . . Now no other places are immovable but those that, from infinity to infinity, do all retain the same given positions one to another; and upon this account must ever remain unmoved; and do thereby constitute, what I call, immovable space. The causes by which true and relative motions are distinguished, one from the other, are the forces impressed upon bodies to generate motion. True motion is neither generated nor altered, but by some force impressed upon the body moved: but relative motion may be generated or altered without any force impressed upon the body. For it is sufficient only to impress some force on other bodies with which the former is compared, that by their giving way, that relation may be changed, in which the relative rest or motion of this other body did consist. . . . The effects which distinguish absolute from relative motion are, the forces of receding from the axis of circular motion. For there are no such forces in a circular motion purely relative, but, in a true and absolute circular motion, they are greater or less, according to the quantity of motion. . . Wherefore relative quantities are not the quantities themselves, whose names they bear, but those sensible measures of them (either accurate or inaccurate) which are commonly used instead of the measured quantities themselves.) 9°30?

I have quoted at such length from Newton’s Scholium because this document constitutes the clearest, most definite, and most influential statement among the cos-

mological speculations of mankind, speculations of a type which first assume scientific importance with the Pythagorean school preceding and inspiring Plato. Newton is presupposing four types of entities which he does not discriminate in respect to their actuality: for him minds are actual things, bodies are actual things, absolute durations of time are actual things, and absolute places are actual things. He does not use the word ‘actual’; but he is speaking of matter of fact, and he puts them all on the same level in that respect. The result is to land him in a clearly expressed but complex and arbitrary scheme of relationships between spaces inter se; between durations inter se; and between minds, bodies, times and places, for the conjunction of them all into the solidarity of the one universe. For the purposes of science it was an extraordinarily clarifying statement, that is to say, for all the purposes of science within the next two hundred years, and for most of its purposes since that period. But, as a fundamental statement, it lies completely open to sceptical attack; and also, as Newton himself admits, diverges from common sense—“the vulgar conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation they bear to sensible objects.” Kant only saved it by reducing it to the description of a construct by means of which ‘pure intuition’ introduces an order for chaotic data; and for the schools of transcendentalists derived from Kant this construct has remained in the inferior position of a derivative from the proper ultimate substantial reality. For them it is an element in ‘appearance’ ; and appearance is to be distinguished from reality. The philosophy of organism is an attempt, with the minimum of critical adjustment, to return to the conceptions of the ‘vulgar.’ In the first place, the discussion must fasten on the notion of a ‘sensible object,’ to quote Newton’s phrase. We may expand Newton’s phrase, and state that the common sense of mankind conceives that all its notions ultimately refer to actual entities, or as Newton terms them, ‘sensible objects.’ Newton, basing himself upon

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current physical notions, conceived ‘sensible objects’ to be the material bodies to which the science of dynamics applies. He was then left with the antithesis between ‘sensible objects’ and empty space. Newton, indeed, as a private opinion, conjectured that there is a material medium pervading space. But he also held that there might not be such amedium. For him the notion ‘empty space’—that is, mere spatiality—had sense, conceived as an independent actual existence ‘from infinity to infinity.’ In this he differed from Descartes. Modern physics sides with Descartes. It has introduced the notion of the ‘physical field” Also the latest speculations tend to remove the sharp distinction between the ‘occupied’ portions of the field and the ‘unoccupied’ portion. Further, in these lectures (cf. Ch. III of Part II), a distinction is introduced, not explicitly in the mind either of the ‘vulgar’ or of Newton. This distinction is that between (i) an actual entity, (ii) an enduring object, (iii) a corpuscular society, (iv) a non-corpuscular society, (v) a non-social nexus. A non-social nexus is what answers to the notion of ‘chaos.’ The extensive continuum is that general relational element in experience whereby the actual entities experienced, and that unit experience itself, are united in the solidarity of one common world. The actual entities atomize it, and thereby make real what was antecedently merely potential. The atomization of the extensive continuum is also its temporalization; that is to say, it is the process of the becoming of actuality into what in itself is merely potential. The systematic scheme, in its completeness embracing the actual past and the potential future, is prehended in the positive experience of each actual entity. In this sense, it is Kant’s ‘form of intuition’; but it is derived from the actual world qua datum, and thus is not ‘pure’ in Kant’s sense of that term. It is not productive of the ordered world, but derivative from it. The prehension of this scheme is one more example that actual fact includes in its own constitutionp. 113 real potentiality which is referent beyond itself. The former example is ‘appetition.’

SECTION IV