Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

Newton in his description of space and time has confused what is ‘real’ potentiality with what is actual fact. He has thereby been led to diverge from the judgment of ‘the vulgar’ who ‘conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation they bear to sensible objects.’ The philosophy of organism starts by agreeing with ‘the vulgar’ except that the term ‘sensible object’ is replaced by ‘actual entity’; so as to free our notions from participation in an epistomological theory as to sense-perception. When we further consider how to adjust Newton’s other descriptions to the organic theory, the surprising fact emerges that we must identify the atomized quantum of extension correlative to an actual entity, with Newton’s absolute place and absolute duration. Newton’s proof that motion does not apply to absolute place, which in its nature is immovable, also holds. Thus an actual entity never moves: it is where it is and what it is. In order to emphasize this characteristic by a phrase connecting the notion of ‘actual entity’ more closely with our ordinary habits of thought, I will also use the term ‘actual occasion’ in the place of the term ‘actual entity.’ Thus the actual world is built up of actual occasions; and by the ontological principle whatever things there are in any sense of ‘existence,’ are derived by abstraction from actual occasions. I shall use the term ‘event’ in the more general sense of a nexus of actual occasions, inter-related in some determinate fashion in one extensive quantum. An actual occasion is the limiting type of an event with only one member.

It is quite obvious that meanings have to be found for the notions of ‘motion’ and of ‘moving bodies.’ For the present, this enquiry must be postponed to a later chapter

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(cf. Part IV and also Ch. III of this Part). It is sufficient to say that a molecule in the sense of a moving body, with a history of local change, is not an actual occasion; it must therefore be some kind of nexus of actual occasions. In this sense it is an event, but not an actual occasion. The fundamental meaning of the notion of ‘change’ is ‘the difference between actual occasions comprised in some determinate event.’

A further elucidation of the status of the extensive continuum in the organic philosophy is obtained by comparison with Descartes’ doctrine of material bodies. It is at once evident that the organic theory is much closer to Descartes’ views than to Newton’s. On this topic Spinoza is practically a logical systematization of Descartes, purging him of inconsistencies. But this attainment of logical coherence is obtained by emphasizing just those elements in Descartes which the philosophy of organism rejects. In this respect, Spinoza performs the same office for Descartes that Hume does for Locke. The philosophy of organism may be conceived as a recurrence to Descartes and to Locke, in respect to just those elements in their philosophies which are usually rejected by reason of their inconsistency with the elements which their successors developed. Thus the philosophy of organism is pluralistic in contrast with Spinoza’s monism; and is a doctrine of experience prehending actualities, in contrast with Hume’s sensationalist phenomenalism.

First let us recur to Descartes at the stage of thought antecedent to his disastrous classification of substances into two species, bodily substance and mental substance. At the beginning of Meditation J, he writes:

“For example, there is the fact that I am here, seated by the fire, attired in a dressing gown, having this paper in. my hands and other similar matters. And how could I deny that these hands and this body are mine, were it not perhaps that I compare myself to certain persons, devoid of sense. . . . But they are mad, and I should notp. 115 be any less insane were I to follow examples so extravagant.

“At the same time I must remember that I am a man, and that consequently I am in the habit of sleeping, and in my dreams representing to myself the same things or sometimes even less probable things, than do those who are insane in their waking moments. . . . At the same time we must at least confess that the things which are represented to us in sleep are like painted representations which can only have been formed as the counterparts of something real and true [ad similitudinem rerum verarum], and that in this way those general things at least, i.e. eyes, a head, hands, and a whole body, are not imaginary things, but things really existent. . . . And for the same reason, although these general things, to wit [a body],° eyes, a head, hands, and such like may be imaginary, we are bound at the same time to confess that there are at least some other objects yet more simple and more universal, which are real and true [vera esse]; and of these just in the same way as with certain real colours, all these images of things which dwell in our thoughts, whether true and real or false and fantastic, are formed.

“To such a class of things pertains corporeal nature in general, and its extension, the figure of extended things, their quantity or magnitude and number, as also the place in which they are, the time which measures their duration, andsoon... .”

In Meditation IT, after a slight recapitulation, he continues, speaking of God: “Then without doubt I exist also if he deceives me, and let him deceive me as much as he will, he can never cause me to be nothing so long as I think that I am something. So that after having reflected well and carefully examined all things, we must come to the definite conclusion that this proposition: ‘I am, I exist,’ is necessarily true each time that I pronounce it, or that I mentally conceive it.”

® Haldane and Ross enclose in square brackets phrases appearing in the French version, and not in the Latin. I have compared with the Latin.

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At the end of the quotation from Meditation I, Descartes uses the phrase res vera in the same sense as that in which I have used the term ‘actual. It means ‘existence’ in the fullest sense of that term, beyond which there is no other. Descartes, indeed, would ascribe to God ‘existence’ in a generically different sense. In the philosophy of organism, as here developed, God’s existence is not generically different from that of other actual entities, except that he is ‘primordial’ in a sense to be gradually explained.