Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

terminations. The how of the limitations, and the how of the additions, are alike the realization of eternal objects in the constitution of the actual entity in question. An eternal object in abstraction from any one particular actual entity is a potentiality for ingression into actual entities. In its ingression into any one actual entity, either as relevant or as irrelevant, it retains its potentiality of indefinite diversity of modes of ingression, a potential indetermination rendered determinate in this instance. The definite ingression into a particular actual entity is not to be conceived as the sheer evocation of that eternal object from ‘not-being’ into ‘being’; it is the evocation of determination out of indetermination. Potentiality becomes reality; and yet retains its message of alternatives which the actual entity has avoided. In the constitution of an actual entity:—whatever component is red, might have been green; and whatever component is loved, might have been coldly esteemed. The term ‘universal’ is unfortunate in its application to eternal objects; for it seems to deny, and in fact it was meant to deny, that the actual entities also fall within the scope of the principle of relativity. If the term ‘eternal objects’ is disliked, the term ‘potentials’ would be suitable. The eternal objects are the pure potentials of the universe; and the actual entities differ from each other in their realization of potentials. Locke’s term ‘idea,’ in his primary use of it in the first two books of the Essay, means the determinate ingression of an eternal object into the actual entity in question. But he also introduces the limitations to conscious mentality, which is here abandoned.

Thus in the philosophy of organism, Locke’s first use of the term ‘idea’ is covered by the doctrine of the ‘ingression’ of eternal objects into actual entities; and his second use of the same term is covered by the doctrine of the ‘objectification’ of actual entities. The two doctrines cannot be explained apart from each other: they constitute explanations of the two fundamental principles—p. 227 the ontological principle and the principle of relativity.

The four stages constitutive of an actual entity have been stated above in Part II, Chapter III, Section I. They can be named, datum, process, satisfaction, decision. The two terminal stages have to do with ‘becoming’ in the sense of the transition from the settled actual world to the new actual entity relatively to which that settlement is defined. But such ‘definition’ must be found as an element in the actual entities concerned. The ‘settlement’ which an actual entity ‘finds’ is its datum. It is to be conceived as a limited perspective of the ‘settled’ world provided by the eternal objects concerned. This datum is ‘decided’ by the settled world. It is ‘prehended’ by the new superseding entity. The datum is the objective content of the experience. The decision, providing the datum, is a transference of self-limited appetition; the settled world provides the ‘real potentiality’ that its many actualities be felt compatibly ; and the new concrescence starts from this datum. The perspective is provided by the elimination of incompatibilities. The final stage, the ‘decision,’ is how the actual entity, having attained its individual ‘satisfaction,’ thereby adds a determinate condition to the settlement for the future beyond itself. Thus the ‘datum’ is the ‘decision received,’ and the ‘decision’ is the ‘decision transmitted.’ Between these two decisions, received and transmitted, there lie the two stages, ‘process’ and ‘satisfaction.’ The datum is indeterminate as regards the final satisfaction. The ‘process’ is the addition of those elements of feeling whereby these indeterminations are dissolved into determinate linkages attaining the actual unity of an individual actual entity. The actual entity, in becoming itself, also solves the question as to what it is to be. Thus process is the stage in which the creative idea works towards the definition and attainment of a determinate individuality. Process is the growth and attainment of a final end. The progressive definip. 228tion of the final end is the efficacious condition for its attainment. The determinate unity of an actual entity is bound together by the final causation towards an ideal progressively defined by its progressive relation to the determinations and indeterminations of the datum. The ideal, itself felt, defines what ‘self’ shall arise from the datum; and the ideal is also an element in the self which thus arises.

According to this account, efficient causation expresses the transition from actual entity to actual entity; and final causation expresses the internal process whereby the actual entity becomes itself. There is the becoming of the datum, which is to be found in the past of the world; and there is the becoming of the immediate self from the datum. This latter becoming is the immediate actual process. An actual entity is at once the product of the efficient past, and is also, in Spinoza’s phrase, causa sui. Every philosophy recognizes, in some form or other, this factor of self-causation, in what it takes to be ultimate actual fact. Spinoza’s words have already been quoted. Descartes’ argument, from the very fact of thinking, assumes that this freely determined operation is thereby constitutive of an occasion in the endurance of an actual entity. He writes (Meditation IT): “T am, I exist, is necessarily true each time that I pronounce it, or that I mentally conceive it.” Descartes in his own philosophy conceives the thinker as creating the occasional thought. The philosophy of organism inverts the order, and conceives the thought as a constituent operation in the creation of the occasional thinker. The thinker is the final end whereby there is the thought. In this inversion we have the final contrast between a philosophy of substance and a philosophy of organism. The operations of an organism are directed towards the organism as a ‘superject,’ and are not directed from the organism as a ‘subject.’ The operations are directed from antecedent organisms and to the immediate organism. They are ‘vectors,’ in that they convey the manyp. 229 things into the constitution of the single superject. The creative process is rhythmic: it swings from the publicity of many things to the individual privacy; and it swings back from the private individual to the publicity of the objectified individual. The former swing is dominated by the final cause, which is the ideal; and the latter swing is dominated by the efficient cause which is actual.

SECTION IV