lower forms of animal life, we have no ground for con- jecturing living personality. But in the case of the higher animals there is central direction, which suggests that in their case each animal body harbours a living person, or living persons. Our own self-consciousness is direct. awareness of ourselves as such persons.*” There are limits to such unified control, which indicate disso- ciation of personality, multiple personalities in successive alternations, and even multiple personalities in joint pos- session. This last case belongs to the pathology of reli- gion, and in primitive times has been interpreted as demoniac possession. Thus, though life in its essence is the gain of intensity through freedom, yet it can also submit to canalization and so gain the massiveness of order. But it is not necessary merely to presuppose the drastic case of personal order. We may conjecture, though without much evidence, that even in the lowest form of life the entirely living nexus is canalized into some faint form of mutual conformity. Such conformity amounts to social order depending on hybrid prehensions of originalities in the mental poles of the antecedent members of the nexus. The survival power, arising from adaptation and regeneration, is thus explained. Thus life is a passage from physical order to pure mental origi- nality, and from pure mental originality to canalized mental originality. It must also be noted that the pure mental originality works by the canalization of relevance arising from the primordial nature of God. Thus an originality in the temporal world is conditioned, though not determined, by an initial subjective aim supplied by the ground of all order and of all originality.
Finally, we have to consider the type of structural
society which gives rise to the traditional body-mind
problem. For example, human mentality is partly the
outcome of the human body, partly the single directive
a This account of a living personality requires completion by refer- aa its objectification in the consequent nature of God. Cf. Part V,
The Order of Nature 165
agency of the body, partly a system of cogitations which
have a certain irrelevance to the physical relationships
of the body. The Cartesian philosophy is based upon
the seeming fact—the plain fact—of one body and one
mind, which are two substances in casual association.
For the philosophy of organism the problem is trans-
formed.
Each actuality is essentially bipolar, physical and mental, and the physical inheritance is essentially accom- panied by a conceptual reaction partly conformed to, and partly introductory of, a relevant novel contrast, but always introducing emphasis, valuation, and pur- pose. The integration of the physical and mental side into a unity of experience is a self-formation which is a process of concrescence, and which by the principle of objective immortality characterizes the creativity which transcends it. So though mentality is non-spatial, men- tality is always a reaction from, and integration with, physical experience which is spatial. It is obvious that we must not demand another mentality presiding over these other actualities (a kind of Uncle Sam, over and above all the U. S. citizens). All the life in the body is the life of the individual cells. There are thus millions upon millions of centres of life in each animal body. So what needs to be explained is not dissociation of person- ality but unifying control, by reason of which we not only have unified behaviour, which can be observed by others, but also consciousness of a unified experience.
A good many actions do not seem to be due to the
unifying control, e.g., with proper stimulants a heart
can be made to go on beating after it has been taken out
of the body. There are centres of reaction and control
which cannot be identified with the centre of experience.
This is still more so with insects. For example, worms
and jellyfish seem to be merely harmonized cells, very
little centralized; when cut in two, their parts go on
performing their functions independently. Through a
series of animals we can trace a progressive rise into a
166 PROGESSIAND) REALITY.
centrality of control. Insects have some central control;
even in man, many of the body’s actions are done with
some independence, but with an organ of central control
of very high-grade character in the brain.
The state of things, according to the philosophy of organism, is very different from the Scholastic view of St. Thomas Aquinas, of the mind as informing the body. The living body is a co-ordination of high-grade actual occasions; but in a living body of a low type the occa- sions are much nearer to a democracy. In a living body of a high type there are grades of occasions so coordi- nated by their paths of inheritance through the body, that a peculiar richness of inheritance is enjoyed by vari- ous occasions in some parts of the body. Finally, the brain is coordinated so that a peculiar richness of inherit- ance is enjoyed now by this and now by that part; and thus there is produced the presiding personality at that moment in the body. Owing to the delicate organization of the body, there is a returned influence, an inheritance of character derived from the presiding occasion and modifying the subsequent occasions through the rest of the body.
We must remember the extreme generality of the notion of an enduring object—a genetic character inher- ited through a historic route of actual occasions. Some kinds of enduring objects form material bodies, others do not. But just as the difference between living and non-living occasions is not sharp, but more or less, so the distinction between an enduring object which is an atomic material body and one which is not, is again more or less. Thus the question as to whether to call an endur- ing object a transition of matter or of character is very much a verbal question as to where you draw the line between the various properties (cf. the way in which the distinction between matter and radiant energy has now vanished).
Thus in an animal body the presiding occasion, if there be one, is the final node, or intersection, of a complex
Reesor Der of Nature 167
structure of many enduring objects. Such a structure pervades the human body. The harmonized relations of the parts of the body constitute this wealth of inherit- ance into a harmony of contrasts, issuing into intensity of experience. The inhibitions of opposites have been adjusted into the contrasts of opposites. The human mind is thus conscious of its body inheritance. There is also an enduring object formed by the inheritance from presiding occasion to presiding occasion. This endurance of the mind is only one more example of the general principle on which the body is constructed. This route of presiding occasions probably wanders from part to part of the brain, dissociated from the physical material atoms. But central personal dominance is only partial, and in pathological cases is apt to vanish.
Organisms and Environment
So far the discussion has chiefly concentrated upon the discrimination of the modes of functioning which in germ, or in mere capacity, are represented in the constitution of each actual entity. The presumption that there is only one genus of actual entities constitutes an ideal of cosmological theory to which the philosophy of organism endeavours to conform. The description of the generic character of an actual entity should include God, as well as the lowliest actual occasion, though there is a specific difference between the nature of God and that of any occasion.
Also the differences between actual occasions, arising
from the characters of their data, and from the narrow-
ness and widths of their feelings, and from the compara-
tive importance of various stages, enable a classification
to be made whereby these occasions are gathered into
various types. From the metaphysical standpoint these
types are not to be sharply discriminated; as a matter
of empirical observation, the occasions do seem to fall
into fairly distinct classes.
The character of an actual entity is finally governed by its datum; whatever be the freedom of feeling arising in the concrescence, there can be no transgression of the limitations of capacity inherent in the datum. The datum both limits and supplies. It follows from this doctrine that the character of an organism depends on that of its environment. But the character of an envi- ronment is the sum of the characters of the various socie- ties of actual entities which jointly constitute that envi-
Organisms and Environment 169
ronment; although it is pure assumption that every environment is completely overrun by societies of entities. Spread through the environment there may be many entities which cannot be assigned to any society of entities. The societies in an environment will constitute its orderly element, and the non-social actual entities will constitute its element of chaos. There is no reason, so far as our knowledge is concerned, to conceive the actual world as purely orderly, or as purely chaotic.
Apart from the reiteration gained from its societies, an environment does not provide the massiveness of emphasis capable of dismissing its contrary elements into negative prehensions. Any ideal of depth of satisfac- tion, arising from the combination of narrowness and width, can only be achieved through adequate order. In proportion to the chaos there is triviality. There are different types of order; and it is not true that in pro- portion to the orderliness there is depth. There are various types of order, and some of them provide more trivial satisfaction than do others. Thus, if there is to be progress beyond limited ideals, the course of history by way of escape must venture along the borders of chaos in its substitution of higher for lower types of order.
The immanence of God gives reason for the belief that pure chaos is intrinsically impossible. At the other end of the scale, the immensity of the world negatives the belief that any state of order can be so established that beyond it there can be no progress. This belief in a final order, popular in religious and philosophic thought, seems to be due to the prevalent fallacy that all types of seriality necessarily involve terminal instances. It follows that Tennyson’s phrase,
... that far-off divine event To which the whole creation moves,
presents a fallacious conception of the universe. An actual entity must be classified in respect to its
170 Process and Reality
‘satisfaction,’ and this arises out of its datum by the operations constituting its ‘process.’ Satisfactions can be classified by reference to ‘triviality,’ ‘vagueness,’ ‘narrow- ness,’ ‘width.’ Triviality and vagueness are characteris- tics in the satisfaction which have their origins respec- tively in opposed characteristics in the datum. Triviality arises from lack of coordination in the factors of the datum, so that no feeling arising from one factor is reinforced by any feeling arising from another factor. In other words, the specific constitution of the actual entity in question is not such as to elicit depth of feeling from contrasts thus presented. Incompatibility has pre- dominated over contrast. Then the process can involve no coordinating intensification either from a reinforced narrowness, or from enhancement of relevance due to the higher contrasts derived from harmonized width. Triviality is due to the wrong sort of width; that is to say, it is due to width without any reinforced narrow- ness in its higher categories. Harmony is this combina- tion of width and narrowness. Some narrow concentra- tion on a limited set of effects is essential for depth; but the difference arises in the levels of the categories of contrast involved. A high category involves unplumbed potentiality for the realization of depth in its lower com- ponents. Thus ‘triviality’ arises from excess of incom- patible differentiation.
On the other hand, ‘vagueness’ is due to excess of identification. In the datum the objectifications of vari- ous actual entities are replicas with faint coordinations of perspective contrast. Under these conditions the con- trasts between the various objectifications are faint, and there is deficiency in supplementary feeling discriminat- ing the objects from each other. There can thus be inten- sive narrowness in the prehension of the whole nexus, by reason of the common character; combined with vague- ness, which is the irrelevance of the differences between the definite actual entities of the nexus. The objectified entities reinforce each other by their likeness. But there
ORGANISMS AND ENVIRONMENT i171
is lack of differentiation among the component objecti- fications owing to the deficiency in relevant contrasts.
In this way a group of actual entities contributes to
the satisfaction as one extensive whole. It is divisible,
but the actual divisions, and their sporadic differences
of character, have sunk into comparative irrelevance
beside the one character belonging to the whole and any
of its parts.