Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

But the addition of diverse eternal objects is not of the essence of ‘supplementation’: the essence consists in the adjustment of subjective importance by functioning of subjective origin. The graduated emotional intensity of the subject is constituting itself by reference to the physical data, datively there and conformally felt. Al references to ‘attention’ usually refer to such supplementation in which the addition of diverse eternal objects is at a minimum; whereas references to ‘emotion’ usually refer to such supplementation complicated by profuse addition of diverse eternal objects. Supplementary feeling is emotional and purposeful, because it is what is felt by mere reason of the subjective appropriation of the objective data. But it is of the essence of supplementary feeling that it does not challenge its initial phase of conformal feeling by any reference to incompatibility. The stages of the subjective ingression of eternal objects involve essential compatibility. The process exhibits an inevitable continuity of functioning. Each stage carries in itself the promise of its successor, and each succeeding stage carries in itself the antecedent out of which it arose. For example the complexity of the datum carries in itself the transition from the conformal feelings to supplementary feelings in which contrasts, latent in the datum, achieve real unity between the components. Thus components in the datum, which qua dative, are diverse, become united in specific realized contrast. As elements in the datum, the components are individually given, with the potentiality for a contrast, which in the supplementary stage is either included or excluded. The conformal stage merely transforms the objective content into subjective feelings. But the supplementary stage adds, or excludes, the realization of the contrasts by which the original datum passes into its emotional unity.

This account enables us to conceive the stage of consciousness as a prolongation of the stage of supplementation. The concrescence is an individualization of the whole universe. Every eternal object, whether relevantCates DhwOrivis PRINCIPLE 251 or irrelevant to the datum, is still patient of its contrasts with the datum. The process by which such contrasts are admitted or rejected involves the stage of conceptual feeling; and consciousness is evidently only a further exhibition of this stage of supplementary feeling. Conceptual feelings do not necessarily involve consciousness. This point is elaborated in detail in Part ITI.

Again. in this explanation, ‘contrast’ has appeared as the general case; while ‘identification’ is a sub-species arising when one and the same eternal object is contrasted in its two modes of functioning.

Thus the two latter stages of feeling are constituted by the realization of specific modes of diversity and identity, the realization also involving an adjustment of intensities of relevance. Mere diversity, and mere identity, are generic terms. Two components in the constitution of an actual entity are specifically diverse and specifically identical by reason of the definite potential contrast involved in the diversity of the implicated eternal objects, and by reason of the definite self-identity of each eternal object. The specific identity arising from the synthesis of diverse modes of functioning of one eternal object is the ‘individual essence’ of that eternal object. But the concrescence reaches the goal required by the category of objective unity, that in any subject one entity can only be felt once. Nothing can be duplicated. The many potentialities for one entity must be synthetized into one fact. Hence arise the incompatibilities productive of elimination.

Properly speaking, modes of functioning are compared, thereby evoking specific contrasts and specific identifications. The two latter stages of feeling are the stages of comparison; these stages involve comparisons, and comparisons of comparisons; and the admission, or exclusion, of an indefinite complexity of potentialities for comparison, in ascending grades.

The ultimate attainment is ‘satisfaction.’ This is the final characterization of the unity of feeling of the onep. 252 actual entity, the ‘superject’ which is familiarly termed the ‘subject.’ In a sense this satisfaction is two-dimensional. It has a dimension of narrowness, and a dimension of width. The dimension of narrowness refers to the intensities of individual emotions arising out of individual components in the datum. In this dimension, the higher levels of coordination are irrelevant. The dimension of width arises out of the higher levels of coordination, by which the intensities in the dimension of narrowness become subordinated to a coordination which depends upon the higher levels of comparison. The savouring of the complexity of the universe can enter into satisfaction only through the dimension of width. The emotional depths at the low levels have their limits: the function of width is to deepen the ocean of feeling, and to remove the diminutions of depth produced by the interference of diverse emotions uncoordinated at a higher level. In the place of the Hegelian hierarchy of categories of thought, the philosophy of organism finds a hierarchy of categories of feeling.

SECTION V

The reformed subjectivist principle adopted by the philosophy of organism is merely an alternative statement of the principle of relativity (the fourth Category of Explanation). This principle states that it belongs to the nature of a ‘being’ that it is a potential for every ‘becoming.’ Thus all things are to be conceived as qualifications of actual occasions. According to the ninth Category of Explanation, how an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is. This principle states that the being of a res vera is constituted by its ‘becoming.’ The way in which one actual entity is qualified by other actual entities is the ‘experience’ of the actual world enjoyed by that actual entity, as subject. The subjectivist principle is that the whole universe consists of elements disclosed in the analysis of the experiences of subjects. Process is the becoming of experience.

BE teoUBS EeRIVIST “PRINCIPLE. 2253

It follows that the philosophy of organism entirely accepts the subjectivist bias of modern philosophy. It also accepts Hume’s doctrine that nothing is to be received into the philosophical scheme which is not discoverable as an element in subjective experience. This is the ontological principle. Thus Hume’s demand that causation be describable as an element in experience is, on these principles, entirely justifiable. The point of the criticisms of Hume’s procedure is that we have direct intuition of inheritance and memory: thus the only prob: lem is, so to describe the general character of experience that these intuitions may be included. It is here that Hume fails. Also those modern empiricists who substitute ‘law’ for ‘causation’ fail even worse than Hume. For ‘law’ no more satisfies Hume’s tests than does ‘causation.’ There is no ‘impression’ of law, or of lawfulness. Even allowing memory, according to Humian principles what has happened in experience has happened in experience, and that is all that can be said. Everything else is bluff, combined with the fraudulent insertion of ‘probability’ into a conclusion which demands ‘blank ignorance.’