By reason of vagueness, many count as one, and are subject to indefinite possibilities of division into such multifold unities. When there is such vague prehension, the differences between the actual entities so prehended are faint chaotic factors in the environment, and have thereby been relegated to irrelevance. Thus vagueness is an essential condition for the narrowness which is one condition for depth of relevance. It enables a back- ground to contribute its relevant quota, and it enables a social group in the foreground to gain concentrated relevance for its community of character. The right chaos, and the right vagueness, are jointly required for any effective harmony. They produce the massive sim- plicity which has been expressed by the term ‘narrow- ness.’ Thus chaos is not to be identified with evil; for harmony requires the due coordination of chaos, vague- ness, narrowness, and width.
According to this account, the background in which the environment is set must be discriminated into two layers. There is first the relevant background, provid- ing a massive systematic uniformity. This background is the presupposed world to which all ordinary propo- sitions refer. Secondly, there is the more remote chaotic background which has merely an irrelevant triviality, so far as concerns direct objectification in the actual entity in question. This background represents those entities in the actual world with such perspective remoteness that there is even a chaos of diverse cosmic epochs. In the background there is triviality, vagueness, and mas- sive uniformity; in the foreground discrimination and
172 Process and Reality
contrasts, but always negative prehensions of irrelevant diversities.
Intensity is the reward of narrowness. The domina-
tion of the environment by a few social groups is the
factor producing both the vagueness of discrimination
between actual entities and the intensification of rele-
vance of common characteristics. These are the two
requisites for narrowness. The lower organisms have
low-grade types of narrowness; the higher organisms
have intensified contrasts in the higher categories. In
describing the capacities, realized or unrealized, of an
actual occasion, we have, with Locke, tacitly taken
human experience as an example upon which to found
the generalized description required for metaphysics.
But when we turn to the lower organisms we have first
to determine which among such capacities fade from
realization into irrelevance, that is to say, by comparison
with human experience which is our standard.
In any metaphysical scheme founded upon the Kan-
tian or Hegelian traditions, experience is the product
of operations which lie among the higher of the human
modes of functioning. For such schemes, ordered
experience is the result of schematization of modes
of thought, concerning causation, substance, quality,
quantity.
The process by which experiental unity is attained, is
thereby conceived in the guise of modes of thought. The
exception is to be found in Kant’s preliminary sections
on “Transcendental Aesthetic,’ by which he provides
space and time. But Kant, following Hume, assumes
the radical disconnection of impressions qua data; and
therefore conceives his transcendental aesthetic as to be
the mere description of a subjective process appropriat-
ing the data by orderliness of feeling.
The philosophy of organism aspires to construct a critique of pure feeling, in the philosophical position in
Organisms and Environment 173
which Kant put his Critique of Pure Reason. This
should also supersede the remaining Critiques required
in the Kantian philosophy. Thus in the organic philos-
ophy Kant’s ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’ becomes a dis-
torted fragment of what should have been his main topic.
The datum includes its own interconnections, and the
first stage of the process of feeling is the reception into
the responsive conformity of feeling whereby the datum,
which is mere potentiality, becomes the individualized
basis for a complex unity of realization.
This conception, as found in the philosophy of organ- ism, 1s practically identical with Locke’s ways of thought in the latter half of his Hssay. He speaks of the ideas in the perceived objects, and tacitly presupposes their identification with corresponding ideas in the perceiving mind. The ideas in the objects have been appropriated by the subjective functioning of the perceiving mind. This mode of phraseology can be construed as a casual carelessness of speech on the part of Locke, or a philo- sophic inconsistency. But apart from this inconsistency Locke’s philosophy falls to pieces; as in fact was its fate in the hands of Hume.
There is, however, a fundamental misconception to be found in Locke, and in prevalent doctrines of perception. It concerns the answer to the question, as to the descrip- tion of the primitive types of experience. Locke assumes that the utmost primitiveness is to be found in sense- perception. The seventeenth-century physics, with the complexities of primary and secondary qualities, should have warned philosophers that sense-perception was involved in complex modes of functioning. Primitive feeling is to be found at a lower level. The mistake was natural for mediaeval and Greek philosophers: for they had not modern physics before them as a plain warning. In sense-perception we have passed the Rubicon, divid- ing direct perception from the higher forms of mentality, which play with error and thus found intellectual empires.
174 Process and Reality
The more primitive types of experience are concerned
with sense-reception, and not with sense-perception.
This statement will require some prolonged explanation.
But the course of thought can be indicated by adopt-
ing Bergson’s admirable phraseology, sense-reception is
‘unspatialized,’ and sense-perception is ‘spatialized.’ In
sense-reception the sensa are the definiteness of emo-
tion: they are emotional forms transmitted from occa-
sion to occasion. Finally in some occasion of adequate
complexity, the category of transmutation endows them
with the new function of characterizing nexus.
In the first place, those eternal objects which will be classified under the name ‘sensa’ constitute the lowest category of eternal objects. Such eternal objects do not express a manner of relatedness between other eternal objects. They are not contrasts, or patterns. Sensa are necessary as components in any actual entity, relevant in the realization of the higher grades. But a sensum does not, for its own realization, require any eternal object of a lower grade, though it does involve the poten- tiality of pattern and does gain access of intensity from some realization of status in some realized pattern. Thus a sensum requires, as a rescue from its shallowness of zero width, some selective relevance of wider complex eternal objects which include it as a component; but it does not involve the relevance of any eternal objects which it presupposes. Thus, in one sense, a sensum is simple; for its realization does not involve the concur- rent realization of certain definite eternal objects, which are its definite simple components. But, in another sense, each sensum is complex; for it cannot be disso- ciated from its potentiality for ingression into any actual entity, and for its potentiality of contrasts and of pat- terned relationships with other eternal objects. Thus each sensum shares the characteristic common to all eternal objects, that it introduces the notion of the logi-
Organisms and Environment 175
cal variable, in both forms, the unselective ‘any’ and the selective ‘some.’
It is possible that this definition of ‘sensa’ excludes
some cases of contrast which are ordinarily termed
‘sensa’ and that it includes some emotional qualities
which are ordinarily excluded. Its convenience consists
in the fact that it is founded on a metaphysical principle,
and not on an empirical investigation of the physiology
of the human body.
Narrowness in the lowest category achieves such inten-
sity as belongs to such experience, but fails by reason
of deficiency of width. Contrast elicits depth, and only
shallow experience is possible when there is a lack of
patterned contrast. Hume notices the comparative fail-
ure of the higher faculty of imagination in respect to
mere sensa. He exaggerates this comparative failure into
a dogma of absolute inhibition to imagine a novel sen-
sum; whereas the evidence which he himself adduces,
of the imagination of a new shade of colour to fill a gap
in a graduated scale of shades, show that a contrast
between given shades can be imaginatively extended so
as to generate the imagination of the missing shade.
But Hume’s example also shows that imagination finds
its easiest freedom among the higher categories of eter-
nal objects.
A pattern is in a sense simple: a pattern is the ‘man- ner’ of a complex contrast abstracted from the specific eternal objects which constitute the ‘matter’ of the con- trast. But the pattern refers unselectively to any eter- nal objects with the potentiality of being elements in the ‘matter’ of some contrast in that ‘manner.’
A pattern and a sensum are thus both simple in the sense that neither involves other specified eternal objects in its own realization. The manner of a pattern is the individual essence of the pattern. But no individual essence is realizable apart from some of its potentialities of relationship, that is, apart from its relational essence. But a pattern lacks simplicity in another sense, in which
176 Process and Reality
a sensum retains simplicity. The realization of a pattern necessarily involves the concurrent realization of a group of eternal objects capable of contrast in that pattern. The realization of the pattern is through the realization of this contrast. The realization might have occurred by means of another contrast in the same pattern; but some complex contrast in that pattern is required. But the realization of a sensum in its ideal shallowness of intensity, with zero width, does not require any other eternal object, other than its intrinsic apparatus of indi- vidual and relational essence; it can remain just itself, with its unrealized potentialities for patterned contrasts. An actual entity with this absolute narrowness has an ideal faintness of satisfaction, differing from the ideal zero of chaos, but equally impossible. For realization means ingression in an actual entity, and this involves the synthesis of all ingredients with data derived from a complex universe. Realization is ideally distinguish- able from the ingression of contrasts, but not in fact.
The simplest grade of actual occasions must be con-
ceived as experiencing a few sensa, with the minimum
of patterned contrast. The sensa are then experienced
emotionally, and constitute the specific feelings whose
intensities sum up into the unity of satisfaction. In
such occasions the process is deficient in its highest
phases; the process is the slave to the datum. There is
the individualizing phase of conformal feeling, but the
originative phases of supplementary and conceptual
feelings, are negligible.
According to this account, the experience of the sim-
plest grade of actual entity is to be conceived as the
unoriginative response to the datum with its simple con-
tent of sensa. The datum is simple, because it presents
the objectified experiences of the past under the guise
of simplicity. Occasions A, B, and C enter into the
experience of occasion M as themselves experiencing
Organisms and Environment 177
sensa s, and s, unified by some faint contrast between 8, and s.. Occasion M responsively feels sensa s, and s2 as its own sensations. There is thus a transmission of sensation emotion from A, B, and C to M. If M had the wit of self-analysis, M would know that it felt its own sensa, by reason of a transfer from A, B, and C to itself. Thus the (unconscious) direct perception of A, B, and C is merely the causal efficacy of A, B, and C as elements in the constitution of M. Such direct per- ception will suffer from vagueness; for if A, B, and C tell the same tale with minor variation of intensity, the discrimination of A, and B, and C from each other will be irrelevant. There may thus remain a sense of the causal efficacy of actual presences, whose exact relation- ships in the external world are shrouded. Thus the experience of M is to be conceived as a quantitative emo- tion arising from the contribution of sensa from A, B, C and proportionately conformed to by M.
Generalizing from the language of physics, the experi- ence of M is an intensity arising out of specific sensa, directed from A, B, C. There is in fact a directed influx from A, B, C of quantitative feeling, arising from specific forms of feeling. The experience has a vector character, a common measure of intensity, and specific forms of feelings conveying that intensity. If we substitute the term ‘energy’ for the concept of a quantitative emotional intensity, and the term ‘form of energy’ for the concept of ‘specific form of feeling,’ and remember that in physics ‘vector’ means definite transmission from elsewhere, we see that this metaphysical description of the simplest elements in the constitution of actual entities agrees absolutely with the general principles according to which the notions of modern physics are framed. The ‘datum’ in metaphysics is the basis of the vector-theory in physics; the quantitative satisfaction in metaphysics is the basis of the scalar localization of energy in physics; the ‘sensa’ in metaphysics are the basis of the diversity of specific forms under which energy clothes itself. Sci-