Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

integration with other prehensions which are usually, though not always in other modes. These integrations often involve various types of ‘symbolic reference.’ This symbolic reference is the interpretive element in human experience. Language almost exclusively refers to presentational immediacy as interpreted by symbolic reference. For example, we say that ‘we see the stone’ where stone is an interpretation of stone-image: also we say that ‘we see the stone-image with our eyes’; this is an interpretation arising from the complex integration of (i) the causal efficacy of the antecedent eye in the vision, (ii) the presentational immediacy of the stone-image, (iii) the presentational immediacy of the eye-strain. When we say that ‘we see the stone with our eyes,’ the interpretations of these two examples are combined.

SECTION III

The discussion of the problem, constituted by the connection between causation and perception, has been conducted by the various schools of thought derived from Hume and Kant under the misapprehension generated by an inversion of the true constitution of experience. The inversion was explicit in the writings of Hume and of Kant: for both of them presentational immediacy was the primary fact of perception, and any apprehension of causation was, somehow or other, to be elicited from this primary fact. This view of the relation between causation and perception, as items in experience, was not original to these great philosophers. It is to be found presupposed in Locke and Descartes; and they derived it from mediaeval predecessors. But the modern critical movement in philosophy arose when Hume and Kant emphasized the fundamental, inescapable, importance which this doctrine possesses for any philosophy admitting its truth. The philosophy of organism does not admit its truth, and thus rejects the touchstone which is the neolithic weapon of ‘critical’ philosophy. It must be remembered that clearness in consciousness is no evidencep. 264 for primitiveness in the genetic process: the opposite doctrine is more nearly true.

Owing to its long dominance, it has been usual to assume as an obvious fact the primacy of presentational immediacy. We open our eyes and our other senseorgans; we then survey the contemporary world decorated with sights, and sounds, and tastes; and then, by the sole aid of this information about the contemporary world, thus decorated, we draw what conclusions we can as to the actual world. No philosopher really holds that this is the sole source of information: Hume and his followers appeal vaguely to ‘memory’ and to ‘practice,’ in order to supplement their direct information; and Kant wrote other ‘Critiques’ in order to supplement his Critique of Pure Reason. But the general procedure of modern philosophical ‘criticism’ is to tie down opponents strictly to the front door of presentational immediacy as the sole source of information, while one’s own philosophy makes its escape by a back door veiled under the ordinary usages of language.

If this ‘Humian’ doctrine be true, certain conclusions as to ‘behavior’ ought to follow—conclusions which, in the most striking way, are not verified. It is almost indecent to draw the attention of philosophers to the minor transactions of daily life, away from the classic sources of philosophic knowledge; but, after all, it is the empiricists who began this appeal to Caesar.

According to Hume, our behaviour presupposing causation is due to the repetition of associated presentational experiences. Thus the vivid presentment of the antecedent percepts should vividly generate the behaviour, in action or thought, towards the associated consequent. The clear, distinct, overwhelming perception of the one is the overwhelming reason for the subjective transition to the other. For behaviour, interpretable as implying causation, is on this theory the subjective response to presentational immediacy. According to Hume this subjective response is the beginning and the end of all thatp. 265 there is to be said about causation. In Hume’s theory the response is response to presentational immediacy, and to nothing else. Also the situation elicited in response is nothing but an immediate presentation, or the memory of one. Let us apply this explanation to reflex action: In the dark, the electric light is suddenly turned on and the man’s eyes blink. There is a simple physiological explanation of this trifling incident.

But this physiological explanation is couched wholly in terms of causal efficacy: it is the conjectural record of the travel of a spasm of excitement along nerves to some nodal centre, and of the return spasm of contraction back to the eyelids. The correct technical phraseology would not alter the fact that the explanation does not involve any appeal to presentational immediacy either for actual occasions resident in the nerves, or for the man. At the most there is a tacit supposition as to what a physiologist, who in fact was not there, might have seen if he had been there, and if he could have vivisected the man without affecting these occurrences, and if he could have observed with a microscope which also in fact was absent. Thus the physiological explanation remains, from the point of view of Hume’s philosophy, a tissue of irrelevancies. It presupposes a side of the universe about which, on Hume’s theory, we must remain in blank ignorance.

Let us now dismiss physiology and turn to the private experience of the blinking man. The sequence of percepts, in the mode of presentational immediacy, are flash of light, feeling of eye-closure, instant of darkness. The three are practically simultaneous; though the flash maintains its priority over the other two, and these two latter percepts are indistinguishable as to priority. According to the philosophy of organism, the man also experiences another percept in the mode of causal efficacy. He feels that the experiences of the eye in the matter of the flash are causal of the blink. The man himself will have no doubt of it. In fact, it is the feelingp. 266 of causality which enables the man to distinguish the priority of the flash; and the inversion of the argument, whereby the temporal sequence ‘flash to blink’ is made the premise for the ‘causality’ belief, has its origin in pure theory. The man will explain his experience by saying, ‘The flash made me blink’; and if his statement be doubted, he will reply, ‘I know it, because I felt it.’