Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

In another sense, a ‘nexus’ falls under the meaning of the term ‘contrast’; though we shall avoid this application of the term. What are ordinarily termed ‘relations’ are abstractions from contrasts. A relation can be found in many contrasts; and when it is so found, it is said to relate the things contrasted. The term ‘multiple contrast’ will be used when there are or may be more than two elements jointly contrasted, and it is desired to draw attention to that fact. A multiple contrast is analysable into component dual contrasts. But a multiple contrast is not a mere aggregation of dual contrasts. It is one contrast, over and above its component contrasts. This doctrine that a multiple contrast cannot be conceived as a mere disjunction of dual contrasts is the basis of the doctrine of emergent evolution. It is the doctrine of real unities being more than a mere collective disjunction of component elements. This doctrine has the same ground as the objection to the class-theory of particular substances. The doctrine is a commonplace of art.

Bradley’s discussions of relations are confused by hisp. 356 failure to distinguish between relations and contrasts. A relation is a genus of contrasts. He is then distressed— or would have been distressed if he had not been consoled by the notion of ‘mereness’ as in ‘mere appearance’ —to find that a relation will not do the work of a contrast. It fails to contrast. Thus Bradley’s argument proves that relations, among other things, are ‘mere’; that is to say, are indiscretions of the absolute, apings of reality without self-consistency.

SECTION Ix

One use of the term ‘contrast’ is to mean that particularity of conjoint unity which arises from the realized togetherness of eternal objects. But there is another, and more usual, sense of ‘particularity.’ This is the sense in which the term ‘particular’ is applied to an actual entity.

One actual entity has a status among other actual entities, not expressible wholly in terms of contrasts between eternal objects. For example, the complex nexus of ancient imperial Rome to European history is not wholly expressible in universals. It is not merely the contrast of a sort of city, imperial, Roman, ancient, with a sort of history of a sort of continent, sea-indented, river-diversified, with alpine divisions, begirt by larger continental masses and oceanic wastes, civilized, barbarized, christianized, commercialized, industrialized. The nexus in question does involve such a complex contrast of universals. But it involves more. For it is the nexus of that Rome with that Europe. We cannot be conscious of this nexus purely by the aid of conceptual feelings. This nexus is implicit, below consciousness, in our physical feelings. In part we are conscious of such physical feelings, and of that particularity of the nexus between particular actual entities. This consciousness takes the form of our consciousness of particular spatial and temporal relations between things directly perceived. But, as in the case of Rome and Europe, so far as conp. 351cerns the mass of our far-reaching knowledge, the particular nexus between the particular actualities in question are only indicated by constructive reference to the physical feelings of which we are conscious.

This peculiar particularity of the nexus between actual entities can be put in another way. Owing to the disastrous confusion, more especially by Hume, of conceptual feelings with perceptual feelings, the truism that we can only conceive in terms of universals has been stretched to mean that we can only feel in terms of universals. This is untrue. Our perceptual feelings feel particular existents; that is to say, a physical feeling, belonging to the percipient, feels the nexus between two other actualities, A and B. It feels feelings of A which feel B, and feels feelings of B which feel A. It integrates these feelings, so as to unify their identity of elements. These identical elements form the factor defining the nexus between A and B, a nexus also retaining the particular diversity of A and B in its uniting force.

Also the more complex multiple nexus between many actual entities in the actual world of a percipient is felt by that percipient. But this nexus, as thus felt, can be abstracted from that particular percipient. It is the same nexus for all percipients which include those actual entities in their actual worlds. The multiple nexus is how those actual entities are really together in all subsequent unifications of the universe, by reason of the objective immortality of their real mutual prehensions of each other.

We thus arrive at the notion of the actual world of any actual entity, as a nexus whose objectification constitutes the complete unity of objective datum for the physical feeling of that actual entity. This actual entity is the original percipient of that nexus. But any other actual entity which includes in its own actual world that original percipient, also includes that previous nexus as a portion of its own actual world. Thus each actual world is a nexus which in this sense is independent of its originalp. 352 percipient. It enjoys an objective immortality in the future beyond itself.

Every nexus is a component nexus, first accomplished in some later phase of concrescence of an actual entity, and ever afterwards having its status in actual worlds as an unalterable fact, dated and located among the actual entities connected in itself. If in a nexus there be a realized contrast of universals, this contrast is located in that actual entity to which it belongs as first originated in one of its integrative feelings. Thus every realized contrast has a location, which is particular with the particularity of actual entities. It is a particular complex matter of fact, realized; and, because of its reality, a standing condition in every subsequent actual world from which creative advance must originate.

It is this complete individual particularity of each actuality, and of each nexus, and of each realized contrast, which is the reason for the three categoreal conditions— of subjective unity, of objective identity, and of objective diversity. The word ‘event’ is used sometimes in the sense of a nexus of actual entities, and sometimes in the sense of a nexus as objectified by universals. In either sense, it is a definite fact with a date.

The initial data of a complex feeling, as mere data, are many; though as felt they are one in the objective unity of a pattern. Thus a nexus is a realized pattern of the initial data; though this pattern is merely relative to the feeling, expressive of those factors in the many data by reason of which they can acquire their unity in the feeling. This is the second use of the term nexus, mentioned above.

Thus, just as the ‘feeling as one’ cannot bear the abstraction from it of the subject, so the ‘data as one’ cannot bear the abstraction from it of every feeling which feels it as such. According to the ontological principle, the impartial nexus is an objective datum in the consequent nature of God; since it is somewhere and yet not by any necessity of its own nature implicated in thep. 353 feelings of any determined actual entity of the actual world. The nexus involves realization somewhere. This is the first use of the term nexus.