Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

We can now complete our account of presentational immediacy. In this perceptive mode the sensa are ‘given’ for the percipient, but this donation is not to be ascribed to the spatial object which is thereby presented, the stone, for example. Now it is a primary doctrine that what is ‘given’ is given by reason of objectifications of actual entities from the settled past. We therefore seek for the actual occasions to whose objectifications this donation is to be ascribed. In this procedure we are only agreeing with the spirit of Descartes’ fifty-second principle (Part I): “For this reason, when we perceive any attribute, we therefore conclude that some existing thing or substance to which it may be attributed, is necessarily present.” Common sense, physical theory, and physiological theory, combine to point out a historic route of inheritance, from actual occasion to succeeding actual occasion, first physically in the external environment, then physiologically—through the eyes in the case of visual data—up the nerves, into the brain. The donation— taking sight as an example—is not confined to definite sensa, such as shades of colour: it also includes geometrical relationships to the general environment. In this chain of inheritances, the eye is picked out to rise into perceptive prominence, because another historic route of physiological inheritance starts from it, whereby a later occasion (almost identical with the earlier) is illustrated by the sensum ‘eye-strain’ in the mode of presentational immediacy ; but this eye-strain is another allied story. In the visual datum for the percipient there are first these components of colour-sensa combined with geometrical relationships to the external world of the settled past: secondly, there are also in the datum the general geometrical relationships forming the completion of this potential scheme into the contemporary world, and into

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the future. The responsive phase absorbs these data as material for a subjective unity of feeling: the supplemental stage heightens the relevance of the coloursensa, and supplements the geometrical relationships of the past by picking out the contemporary region of the stone to be the contemporary representative of the efficacious historic routes. There then results in the mode of presentational immediacy, the perception of the region illustrated by the sensum termed ‘grey.’ The term ‘stone’ is primarily applied to a certain historic route in the past, which is an efficacious element in this train of circumstance. It is only properly applied to the contemporary region illustrated by ‘grey’ on the assumption that this contemporary region is the prolongation, of that historic route, into the presented locus. This assumption may, or may not, be true. Further, the illustration of the contemporary region of ‘grey’ may be due to quite other efficacious historic routes—for example, to lighting effects arranged by theatrical producers—and in such a ease, the term ‘stone’ may suggest an even more violent error than in the former example. What is directly perceived, certainly and without shadow of doubt, is a grey region of the presented locus. Any further interpretation, instinctive or by intellectual judgment, must be put down to symbolic reference.

This account makes it plain that the perceptive mode of presentational immediacy arises in the later, originative, integrative phases of the process of concrescence. The perceptive mode of causal efficacy is to be traced to the constitution of the datum by reason of which there is a concrete percipient entity. Thus we must assign the mode of causal efficacy to the fundamental constitution of an occasion so that in germ this mode belongs even to organisms of the lowest grade; while the mode of presentational immediacy requires the more sophistical activity of the later stages of process, so as to belong only to organisms of a relatively high grade. So far as we can judge, such high-grade organisms are relatively few, in

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comparison with the whole number of organisms in our immediate environment. Presentational immediacy is an outgrowth from the complex datum implanted by causal efficacy. But, by the originative power of the supplemental phase, what was vague, ill defined, and hardly relevant in causal efficacy, becomes distinct, well defined, and importantly relevant in presentational immediacy. In the responsive phase, the grey-colour, and the geometrical relations between the efficacious, bodily routes and the contemporary occasions, were subjective sensation associated with barely relevant geometrical relations: they represented the vivid sensational qualities in the enjoyment of which the percipient subject barely distinguished vague indirect relationships to the external world. The supplemental phase lifts the presented duration into vivid distinctness, so that the vague efficacity of the indistinct external world in the immediate past is precipitated upon the representative regions in the contemporary present. In the usual language, the sensations are projected. This phraseology is unfortunate; for there never were sensations apart from these geometrical relations. Presentational immediacy is the enhancement of the importance of relationships which were already in the datum, vaguely and with slight relevance. This fact, that ‘presentational immediacy’ deals with the same datum as does ‘causal efficacy,’ gives the ultimate reason why there is a common ‘ground’ for ‘symbolic reference.’ The two modes express the same datum under different proportions of relevance. The two genetic processes involving presentational immediacy must be carefully distinguished. There is first the complex genetic process in which presentational immediacy originates. This process extends downwards even to occasions which belong to the historic routes of certain types of inorganic enduring objects, namely, to those enduring objects whose aggregates form the subject-matter of the science of Newtonian Dynamics. Secondly, prehensions in the mode of presentational immediacy are involved as components in

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