current physical notions, conceived ‘sensible objects’ to be the material bodies to which the science of dynamics applies. He was then left with the antithesis between ‘sensible objects’ and empty space. Newton, indeed, as a private opinion, conjectured that there is a material medium pervading space. But he also held that there might not be such amedium. For him the notion ‘empty space’—that is, mere spatiality—had sense, conceived as an independent actual existence ‘from infinity to infinity.’ In this he differed from Descartes. Modern physics sides with Descartes. It has introduced the notion of the ‘physical field” Also the latest speculations tend to remove the sharp distinction between the ‘occupied’ por- tions of the field and the ‘unoccupied’ portion. Further, in these lectures (cf. Ch. III of Part II), a distinction is introduced, not explicitly in the mind either of the ‘vul- gar’ or of Newton. This distinction is that between (i) an actual entity, (ii) an enduring object, (iii) a corpuscular society, (iv) a non-corpuscular society, (v) a non-social nexus. A non-social nexus is what answers to the notion of ‘chaos.’ The extensive continuum is that general rela- tional element in experience whereby the actual entities experienced, and that unit experience itself, are united in the solidarity of one common world. The actual entities atomize it, and thereby make real what was antecedently merely potential. The atomization of the extensive con- tinuum is also its temporalization; that is to say, it is the process of the becoming of actuality into what in itself is merely potential. The systematic scheme, in its com- pleteness embracing the actual past and the potential future, is prehended in the positive experience of each actual entity. In this sense, it is Kant’s ‘form of intuition’; but it is derived from the actual world qua datum, and thus is not ‘pure’ in Kant’s sense of that term. It is not productive of the ordered world, but derivative from it. The prehension of this scheme is one more example that actual fact includes in its own constitution
The Extensive Continuum 113
real potentiality which is referent beyond itself. The former example is ‘appetition.’
Newton in his description of space and time has con- fused what is ‘real’ potentiality with what is actual fact. He has thereby been led to diverge from the judgment of ‘the vulgar’ who ‘conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation they bear to sensible objects.’ The philosophy of organism starts by agreeing with ‘the vulgar’ except that the term ‘sensible object’ is replaced by ‘actual entity’; so as to free our notions from participation in an epistomological theory as to sense-perception. When we further consider how to adjust Newton’s other descriptions to the organic theory, the surprising fact emerges that we must identify the atomized quantum of extension correlative to an actual entity, with Newton’s absolute place and absolute dura- tion. Newton’s proof that motion does not apply to abso- lute place, which in its nature is immovable, also holds. Thus an actual entity never moves: it is where it is and what it is. In order to emphasize this characteristic by a phrase connecting the notion of ‘actual entity’ more closely with our ordinary habits of thought, I will also use the term ‘actual occasion’ in the place of the term ‘actual entity.’ Thus the actual world is built up of actual occasions; and by the ontological principle whatever things there are in any sense of ‘existence,’ are de- rived by abstraction from actual occasions. I shall use the term ‘event’ in the more general sense of a nexus of actual occasions, inter-related in some deter- minate fashion in one extensive quantum. An actual occasion is the limiting type of an event with only one member.
It is quite obvious that meanings have to be found for
the notions of ‘motion’ and of ‘moving bodies.’ For the
present, this enquiry must be postponed to a later chapter
114 Process and Reality
(cf. Part IV and also Ch. III of this Part). It is sufficient to say that a molecule in the sense of a moving body, with a history of local change, is not an actual occasion; it must therefore be some kind of nexus of actual occasions. In this sense it is an event, but not an actual occasion. The fundamental meaning of the notion of ‘change’ is ‘the difference between actual occasions comprised in some determinate event.’
A further elucidation of the status of the extensive con- tinuum in the organic philosophy is obtained by com- parison with Descartes’ doctrine of material bodies. It is at once evident that the organic theory is much closer to Descartes’ views than to Newton’s. On this topic Spinoza is practically a logical systematization of Descartes, purging him of inconsistencies. But this attainment of logical coherence is obtained by empha- sizing just those elements in Descartes which the philoso- phy of organism rejects. In this respect, Spinoza per- forms the same office for Descartes that Hume does for Locke. The philosophy of organism may be conceived as a recurrence to Descartes and to Locke, in respect to just those elements in their philosophies which are usually rejected by reason of their inconsistency with the ele- ments which their successors developed. Thus the phi- losophy of organism is pluralistic in contrast with Spinoza’s monism; and is a doctrine of experience pre- hending actualities, in contrast with Hume’s sensa- tionalist phenomenalism.
First let us recur to Descartes at the stage of thought
antecedent to his disastrous classification of substances
into two species, bodily substance and mental substance.
At the beginning of Meditation J, he writes:
“For example, there is the fact that I am here, seated by the fire, attired in a dressing gown, having this paper in. my hands and other similar matters. And how could I deny that these hands and this body are mine, were it not perhaps that I compare myself to certain persons, devoid of sense. . . . But they are mad, and I should not
The Extensive Continuum 115
be any less insane were I to follow examples so extravagant.
“At the same time I must remember that I am a man, and that consequently I am in the habit of sleeping, and in my dreams representing to myself the same things or sometimes even less probable things, than do those who are insane in their waking moments. . . . At the same time we must at least confess that the things which are represented to us in sleep are like painted representations which can only have been formed as the counterparts of something real and true [ad similitudinem rerum verarum], and that in this way those general things at least, i.e. eyes, a head, hands, and a whole body, are not imaginary things, but things really existent. . . . And for the same reason, although these general things, to wit [a body],° eyes, a head, hands, and such like may be imaginary, we are bound at the same time to confess that there are at least some other objects yet more simple and more universal, which are real and true [vera esse]; and of these just in the same way as with certain real colours, all these images of things which dwell in our thoughts, whether true and real or false and fantastic, are formed.
“To such a class of things pertains corporeal nature in
general, and its extension, the figure of extended things,
their quantity or magnitude and number, as also the
place in which they are, the time which measures their
duration, andsoon... .”
In Meditation IT, after a slight recapitulation, he con- tinues, speaking of God: “Then without doubt I exist also if he deceives me, and let him deceive me as much as he will, he can never cause me to be nothing so long as I think that I am something. So that after having reflected well and carefully examined all things, we must come to the definite conclusion that this proposition: ‘I am, I exist,’ is necessarily true each time that I pronounce it, or that I mentally conceive it.”
® Haldane and Ross enclose in square brackets phrases appearing in the French version, and not in the Latin. I have compared with the Latin.
116 Process ‘and Reality
At the end of the quotation from Meditation I, Des- cartes uses the phrase res vera in the same sense as that in which I have used the term ‘actual. It means ‘existence’ in the fullest sense of that term, beyond which there is no other. Descartes, indeed, would ascribe to God ‘existence’ in a generically different sense. In the philosophy of organism, as here developed, God’s existence is not generically different from that of other actual entities, except that he is ‘primordial’ in a sense to be gradually explained.
Descartes does not explicitly frame the definition of actuality in terms of the ontological principle, as given in Section III of this chapter, that actual occasions form the ground from which all other types of existence are deriva- tive and abstracted; but he practically formulates an equivalent in subject-predicate phraseology, when he writes: “For this reason, when we perceive any attribute, we therefore conclude that some existing thing or sub- stance to which it may be attributed, is necessarily present.” * For Descartes the word ‘substance’ is the equivalent of my phrase ‘actual occasion.’ I refrain from the term ‘substance,’ for one reason because it suggests the subject-predicate notion; and for another reason because Descartes and Locke permit their substances to undergo adventures of changing qualifications, and thereby create difficulties.
In the quotation from the second Meditation: ‘ ‘I am, I exist,’ is necessarily true each time that I pronounce it, or that I mentally conceive it.” Descartes adopts the position that an act of experience is the primary type of actual occasion. But in his subsequent developments he assumes that his mental substances endure change. Here he goes beyond his argument. For each time he pro- nounces ‘I am, I exist,’ the actual occasion, which is the ego, is different; and the ‘he’ which is common to the two: egos is an eternal object or, alternatively, the nexus of successive occasions. Also in the quotation from the first.
* Principles of Philosophy, Part I, 52.
The Extensive Continuum 117
Meditation he begins by appealing to an act of experi- ence—‘I am here, seated by the fire... . .” He then asso- ciates this act of experience with his body—“these hands and body are mine.” He then finally appeals for some final notion of actual entities in the remarkable sentence: “And for the same reason, although these general things, to wit, a body, eyes, a head, hands, and such like, may be imaginary, we are bound at the same time to confess that there are at least some other objects yet more simple and more universal, which are real and true; and of these. . . all these images of things which dwell in our thoughts whether true and real or false and fantastic, are formed.”
Notice the peculiarly intimate association with imme. diate experience which Descartes claims for his body, an association beyond the mere sense-perception of the con- temporary world—‘“these hands and feet are mine.” In the philosophy of organism this immediate association is the recognition of them as distinguishable data whose formal constitutions are immediately felt in the origina- tion of experience. In this function the animal body does not differ in principle from the rest of the past actual world; but it does differ in an intimacy of association by reason of which its spatial and temporal connections obtain some definition in the experience of the subject. What is vague for the rest of the world has obtained some additional measure of distinctness for the bodily organs. But, in principle, it would be equally true to say, ‘The actual world is mine.’
Descartes also asserts that ‘objects yet more simple and more universal, which are real and true’ are what the “mages of things which well in our thoughts’ are formed of. This does not seem to accord with his theory of per- ception, of a later date, stated in his Principles, Part IV, 196, 197, 198. In the later theory the emphasis is on the judicium, in the sense of ‘inference,’ and not in the sense of inspectio of realitas objectiva. But it does accord with the organic theory, that the objectifications of other actual occasions form the given data from which an actual occa-