Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

The same concept has been applied in other connections where it even more obviously fails. It is said that ‘men are rational.’ This is palpably false: they are only intermittently rational—merely liable to rationality. Again the phrase ‘Socrates is mortal’ is only another way of saying that ‘perhaps he will die.’ The intellect of Socrates is intermittent: he occasionally sleeps and he can be drugged or stunned.

The simple notion of an enduring substance sustaining persistent qualities, either essentially or accidentally, expresses a useful abstract for many purposes of life. But whenever we try to use it as a fundamental statement of the nature of things, it proves itself mistaken. It arose from a mistake and has never succeeded in any of its applications. But it has had one success: it has entrenched itself in language, in Aristotelian logic, and in metaphysics. For its employment in language and in logic, there is—as stated above—a sound pragmatic defence. But in metaphysics the concept is sheer error. This error does not consist in the employment of the word ‘substance’; but in the employment of the notion of an actual entity which is characterized by essential qualities, and remains numerically one amidst the changes of accidental relations and of accidental qualities. The contrary doctrine is that an actual entity never changes, and that it is the outcome of whatever can be ascribed to it in the way of quality or relationship. There then remain two alternatives for philosophy: (i) a monistic universep. 123 with the illusion of change; and (ii) a pluralistic universe in which ‘change’ means the diversities among the actual entities which belong to some one society of a definite type.

SECTION VI

We can now, in a preliminary way, summarize some of the agreements and disagreements between the philosophy of organism and the seventeenth-century founders of the modern philosophic and scientific traditions.

It is the basis of any realistic philosophy, that in perception there is a disclosure of objectified data, which are known as having a community with the immediate experience for which they are data. This ‘community’ is a community of common activity involving mutual implication. This premise is asserted as a primary fact, implicitly assumed in every detail of our organization of life. It is implicitly asserted by Locke in his statement (II, X XIII, 7, heading), ‘Power, a great part of our complex ideas of substance.” The philosophy of organism extends the Cartesian subjectivism by affirming the ‘ontological principle’ and by construing it as the definition of ‘actuality.’ This amounts to the assumption that each actual entity is a locus for the universe. Accordingly Descartes’ other statement, that every attribute requires a substance is merely a special, limited example of this more general principle.

Newton, in his treatment of space, transforms potentiality into actual fact, that is to say, into a creature, instead of a datum for creatures. According to the philosophy of organism, the extensive space-time continuum is the fundamental aspect of the limitation laid upon abstract potentiality by.the actual world. A more complete rendering of this limited, ‘real’ potentiality is the ‘physical field.” A new creation has to arise from the actual world as much as from pure potentiality: it arises from the total universe and not solely from its mere abstract elements. It also adds to that universe. Thusp. 124 every actual entity springs from that universe which there is for it. Causation is nothing else than one outcome of the principle that every actual entity has to house its actual world.

According to Newton, a portion of space cannot move. We have to ask how this truth, obvious from Newton’s point of view, takes shape in the organic theory. Instead of a region of space, we should consider a bit of the physical field. This bit, expressing one way in which the actual world involves the potentiality for a new creation, acquires the unity of an actual entity. The physical field is, in this way, atomized with definite divisions: it becomes a “nexus” of actualities. Such a quantum (i.e. each actual division) of the extensive continuum is the primary phase of acreature. This quantum is constituted by its totality of relationships and cannot move. Also the creature cannot have any external adventures, but only the internal adventure of becoming. Its birth is its end.

This is a theory of monads; but it differs from Leibniz’s in that his monads change. In the organic theory, they merely become. Each monadic creature is a mode of the process of ‘feeling’ the world, of housing the world in one unit of complex feeling, in every way determinate. Such a unit is an ‘actual occasion’; it is the ultimate creature derivative from the creative process.

The term ‘event’ is used in a more general sense. An event is a nexus of actual occasions inter-related in some determinate fashion in some extensive quantum: it is either a nexus in its formal completeness, or it is an objectified nexus. One actual occasion is a limiting type of event. The most general sense of the meaning of change is ‘the differences between actual occasions in one event.’ For example, a molecule is a historic route of actual occasions; and such a route is an ‘event.’ Now the motion of the molecule is nothing else than the differences between the successive occasions of its life-history in respect to the extensive quanta from which they arise;

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and the changes in the molecule are the consequential differences in the actual occasions.

The organic doctrine is closer to Descartes than to Newton. Also it is close to Spinoza; but Spinoza bases his philosophy upon the monistic substance, of which the actual occasions are inferior modes. The philosophy of organism inverts this point of view.

As to the direct knowledge of the actual world as a datum for the immediacy of feeling, we first refer to Descartes in Meditation I, “These hands and this body are mine’’; also to Hume in his many assertions of the type, we see with our eyes. Such statements witness to direct knowledge of the antecedent functioning of the body in sense-perception. Both agree—though Hume more explicitly—that sense-perception of the contemporary world is accompanied by perception of the ‘withness’ of the body. It is this withness that makes the body the starting point for our knowledge of the cireumambient world. We find here our direct knowledge of ‘causal efficacy.’ Hume and Descartes in their theory of direct perceptive knowledge dropped out this withness of the body; and thus confined perception to presentational immediacy. Santayana, in his doctrine of ‘animal faith,’ practically agrees with Hume and Descartes as to this withness of the actual world, including the body. Santayana also excludes our knowledge of it from givenness. Descartes calls it a certain kind of ‘understanding’ ; Santayana calls it ‘animal faith’ provoked by ‘shock’; and Hume calls it ‘practice.’