The answer of the philosophy of organism is that, in the sense in which Locke is here speaking, the exterior things of successive moments are not to be identified with each other. Each exterior thing is either one actual entity, or (more frequently) is a nexus of actual entities with immediacies mutually contemporary. For the sake of simplicity we will speak only of the simpler case where the ‘exterior thing’ means one actual entity at the moment in question. But what Locke is explicitly concerned with is the notion of the self-identity of the one enduring physical body which lasts for years, or for seconds, or for ages. He is considering the current philo- sophical notion of an individualized particular substance (in the Aristotelian sense) which undergoes adventures of change, retaining its substantial form amid transition or accidents. Throughout his Essay, he in effect retains this notion while rightly insisting on its vagueness and obscurity. The philosophy of organism agrees with Locke and Hume, that the non-individualized substantial form is nothing else than the collection of universals—or, more accurately, the one complex universal—common to the succession of ‘exterior things’ at successive moments respectively. In other words, an ‘exterior thing’ is either one ‘actual entity,’ or is a ‘society’ with a ‘defining charac- teristic.’ For the organic philosophy, these ‘exterior things’ (in the former sense) are the final concrete actu- alities. The individualized substance (of Locke) must be construed to be the historic route constituted by some society of fundamental ‘exterior things,’ stretching from the first ‘thing’ to the last ‘thing.’
83 Process and Reality
But Locke, throughout his Essay, rightly insists that the chief ingredient in the notion of ‘substance’ is the notion of ‘power.’ The philosophy of organism holds that in order to understand ‘power,’ we must have a correct notion of how each individual actual entity con- tributes to the datum from which its successors arise and to which they must conform. The reason why the doc- trine of power is peculiarly relevant to the enduring things, which the philosophy of Locke’s day conceived as individualized substances, is that any likeness between the successive occasions of an historic route procures a corresponding identity between their contributions to the datum of any subsequent actual entity; and it therefore secures a corresponding intensification in the imposition of conformity. The principle is the same as that which holds for the more sporadic occasions in empty space; but the uniformity along the historic route increases the degree of conformity which that route exacts from the future. In particular each historic route of like occa- sions tends to prolong itself, by reason of the weight of uniform inheritance derivable from its members. The philosophy of organism abolishes the detached mind. Mental activity is one of the modes of feeling belonging to all actual entities in some degree, but only amounting to conscious intellectuality in some actual entities. This higher grade of mental activity is the intellectual self- analysis of the entity in an earlier stage of incompletion, effected by intellectual feelings produced in a later stage of concrescence.**
The perceptive constitution of the actual entity pre-
sents the problem, How can the other actual entities,
each with its own formal existence, also enter objectively
into the perceptive constitution of the actual entity in
question? This is the problem of the solidarity of the
universe. The classical doctrines of universals and par-
ticulars, of subject and predicate, of individual sub-
stances not present in other individual substances, of
2° Ci. Part IIT, Che V.
Fact and Form 89
the externality of relations, alike render this problem incapable of solution. The answer given by the organic philosophy is the doctrine of prehensions, involved in con- crescent integrations, and terminating in a definite, com- plex unity of feeling. To be actual must mean that all actual things are alike objects, enjoying objective immor- tality in fashioning creative actions; and that all actual things are subjects, each prehending the universe from which it arises. The creative action is the universe always becoming one in a particular unity of self-experi- ence, and thereby adding to the multiplicity which is the universe as many. This insistent concrescence into unity is the outcome of the ultimate self-identity of each entity. No entity—be it ‘universal’ or ‘particular’—can play disjoined réles. Self-identity requires that every entity have one conjoined, self-consistent function, what- ever be the complexity of that function.
There is another side of Locke, which is his doctrine of ‘power.’ This doctrine is a better illustration of his ad- mirable adequacy than of his consistency; there is no escape from Hume’s demonstration that no such doctrine is compatible with a purely sensationalist philosophy. The establishment of such a philosophy, though deriva- tive from Locke, was not his explicit purpose. Every philosophical school in the course of its history requires two presiding philosophers. One of them under the in- fluence of the main doctrines of the school should survey experience with some adequacy, but inconsistently. The other philosopher should reduce the doctrines of the school to a rigid consistency; he will thereby effect a reductio ad absurdum. No school of thought has per- formed its full service to philosophy until these men have appeared. In this way the school of sensationalist empiricism derives its importance from Locke and Hume.
Locke introduces his doctrine of ‘power’ as follows (II, XXI, 1): “This idea how got—The mind being
90 Process and Reality
every day informed, by the senses, of the alteration of those simple ideas it observes in things without, and tak- ing notice how one comes to an end and ceases to be, and another begins to exist, which was not before; reflecting also on what passes within itself, and observing a con- stant change of its ideas, sometimes by the impression of outward objects on the senses, and sometimes by the determination of its own choice; and concluding, from what it has so constantly observed to have been, that the like changes will for the future be made in the same thing by like agents, and by the like ways; considers in one thing the possibility of having any of its simple ideas changed, and in another the possibility of making that change; and so comes by that idea which we call ‘power.’ Thus we say, fire has a power to melt gold; . . . and gold has a power to be melted: . . . In which and lke cases, the power we consider is in reference to the change of perceivable ideas: for we cannot observe any alteration to be made in, or operation upon, anything, but by the observable change of its sensible ideas; nor conceive any alteration to be made, but by conceiving a change of some of its ideas. . . . Power thus considered is two- fold; viz. as able to make, or able to receive, any change: the one may be called ‘active,’ and the other ‘passive,’ power. . . . I confess power includes in it some kind of relation,—a relation to action or change; as, indeed, which of our ideas, of what kind soever, when attentively con- sidered, does not. For our ideas of extension, duration and number, do they not all contain in them a secret relation of the parts? Figure and motion have some- thing relative in them much more visibly. And sensible qualities, as colours and smells, etc., what are they but the powers of different bodies in relation to our percep- tion! . . . Our idea therefore of power, I think, may well have a place amongst other simple ideas, and be considered as one of them, being one of those that make a principal ingredient in our complex ideas of substances, as we shall hereafter have occasion to observe.”
Fact and Form 91
In this important passage, Locke enunciates the main doctrines of the philosophy of organism, namely: the principle of relativity; the relational character of eternal objects, whereby they constitute the forms of the ob- jectifications of actual entities for each other; the com- posite character of an actual entity (i.e. a substance) ; the notion of ‘power’ as making a principal ingredient in that of actual entity (substance). In this latter notion, Locke adumbrates both the ontological principle, and also the principle that the ‘power’ of one actual entity on the other is simply how the former is objectified in the con- stitution of the other. Thus the problem of perception and the problem of power are one and the same, at least so far as perception is reduced to mere prehension of actual entities. Perception, in the sense of conscious- ness of such prehension, requires the additional factor of the conceptual prehension of eternal objects, and a process of integration of the two factors (cf. Part III).
Locke’s doctrine of ‘power’ is reproduced in the phil-
osophy of organism by the doctrine of the two types of
objectification, namely, (a) ‘causal objectification,’ and
(8) ‘presentational objectification.’
In ‘causal objectification’ what is felt subjectively by the objectified actual entity is transmitted objectively to the concrescent actualities which supersede it. In Locke’s phraseology the objectified actual entity is then exerting ‘power.’ In this type of objectification the eternal ob- jects, relational between object and subject, express the formal constitution of the objectified actual entity.
In ‘presentational objectification’ the relational eternal objects fall into two sets, one set contributed by the ‘extensive’ perspective of the perceived from the position of the perceiver, and the other set by the antecedent con- crescent phases of the perceiver. What is ordinarily termed ‘perception’ is consciousness of presentational objectification. But according to the philosophy of organism there can be consciousness of both types of objectification. There can be such consciousness of both
92 Process and Reality
types because, according to this philosophy, the know-
able is the complete nature of the knower, at least such
phases of it as are antecedent to that operation of
knowing.
Locke misses one essential doctrine, namely, that the doctrine of internal relations makes it impossible to attribute ‘change’ to any actual entity. Every actual entity is what it is, and is with its definite status in the universe, determined by its internal relations to other actual entities. ‘Change’ is the description of the adven- tures of eternal objects in the evolving universe of actual things.
The doctrine of internal relations introduces another consideration which cannot be overlooked without error. Locke considers the ‘real essence’ and the ‘nominal essence’ of things. But on the theory of the general rela- tivity of actual things between each other, and of the internality of these relations, there are two distinct no- tions hidden under the term ‘real essence,’ both of im- portance. Locke writes (III, III, 15): “Essence may be taken for the being of anything, whereby it is what it is. And thus the real internal (but generally in substances unknown) constitution of things, whereon their discover- able qualities depend, may be called their ‘essence.’ . . . It is true, there is ordinarily supposed a real constitution of the sorts of things: and it is past doubt there must be some real constitution, on which any collection of simple ideas co-existing must depend. But it being evident that things are ranked under names into sorts or species only as they agree to certain abstract ideas to which we have annexed these names, the essence of each genus or sort comes to be nothing but that abstract idea, which the general or ‘sortal’ (if I may have leave so to call it from ‘sort’ as I do ‘general’ from ‘genus’) name stands for. And thus we shall find to be that which the word ‘essence’ imparts in its familiar use. These two sorts of essences, I suppose, may not unfitly be termed, the one the ‘real,’ the other the ‘nominal’ essence.”