Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures, 1929) — Alfred North Whitehead

1° Cf. Treatise, Bk. III, Sects. V and VI. 16 Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Logic, Intro. I.

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of ‘intuition,’ and thence with its necessary involution in consciousness. This suppressed premise is ‘Intuitions are never blind.’

In one important respect Hume’s philosophical con- ceptions show a marked superiority over those of Locke. In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the emphasis is laid upon the morphological structure of ‘human understanding.’ The logical relationships of various sorts of ‘ideas’ are examined. Now, whether in physics, biology, or elsewhere, morphology, in the sense of the analysis of logical relationships, constitutes the first stage of knowledge. It is the basis of the new ‘mathematical’ method which Descartes introduced. Morphology deals in analytical propositions, as they are termed by Kant. For example, Locke writes: “The common names of substances, as well as other general terms, stand for sorts: which *’ is nothing else but the being made signs of such complex ideas, wherein several particular substances do or might agree, by virtue of which they are capable of being comprehended in one common conception, and be signified by one name.” And again: “Our abstract ideas are to us the measures of species.” And again: “Nor let any one say, that the power of propagation in animals by the mixture of male and female, and in plants by seeds, keeps the supposed real species distinct and entire.’ ** In technical language, Locke had no use for genetic evolution.

On the other hand, Hume’s train of thought unwit- tingly emphasizes ‘process.’ His very scepticism is noth- ing but the discovery that there is something in the world which cannot be expressed in analytic propositions. Hume discovered that “We murder to dissect.” He did not say this, because he belonged to the mid-eighteenth century; and so left the remark to Wordsworth. But, in

+7 Italics mine. 1° TIT, VI, 1, 22, 23.

Locke and Hume 213

effect, Hume discovered that an actual entity is at once
a process, and is atomic; so that in no sense is it the sum
of its parts. Hume proclaimed the bankruptcy of
morphology.

Hume’s account of the process discoverable in ‘the soul’ is as follows: first, impressions of sensation, of unknown origin; then, ideas of such impressions, ‘derived from’ the impressions; then, impressions of reflection ‘derived from’ the antecedent ideas; and then, ideas of impressions of reflection. Somewhere in this process, there is to be found repetition of impressions, and thence by ‘habit’—by which we may suppose that a particular mode of ‘derivation’ is meant—by habit, a repetition of the correlate ideas; and thence expectancy of the repeti- tion of the correlate impressions. This expectancy would be an ‘impression of reflection.’ It is difficult to under- stand why Hume exempts ‘habit’ from the same criticism as that applied to the notion of ‘cause.’ We have no ‘impression’ of ‘habit,’ just as we have no ‘impression’ of ‘cause.’ Cause, repetition, habit are all in the same boat.

Somewhat inconsistently, Hume never allows impres- sions of sensation to be derived from the correlate ideas; though, as the difference between them only consists in ‘force and vivacity,’ the reason for this refusal cannot be founded in his philosophy. The truth is that Hume retained an obstinate belief in an external world which his principles forbade him to confess in his philosophical constructions. He reserved that belief for his daily life, and for his historical and sociological writings, and for his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

The merit of Hume’s account is that the process
described is within ‘the soul.’ In the philosophy of
organism ‘the soul’ as it appears in Hume, and ‘the mind’
as it appears in Locke and Hume, are replaced by the
phrases ‘the actual entity,’ and ‘the actual occasion,’
these phrases being synonymous.

Two defects, found equally in Locke and in Hume, are, first, the confusion between a Lockian ‘idea’ and

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consciousness of such an idea; and, secondly, the assigned relations between ‘ideas’ of sensation and ‘ideas’ of reflec- tions. In Hume’s language, this latter point is con- cerned with the relations between ‘impressions of sensa- tion’ and ‘impressions of reflection. Hume and Locke, with the overintellectualist bias prevalent among phi- losophers, assume that emotional feelings are necessarily derivative from sensations. This is conspicuously not the case; the correlation between such feelings and sen- sations is on the whole a secondary effect. Emotions conspicuously brush aside sensations and fasten upon the ‘particular’ objects to which—in Locke’s phrase—certain ‘ideas’ are ‘determined.’ The confinement of our pre- hension of other actual entities to the mediation of pri- vate sensations is pure myth. The converse doctrine is nearer the truth: the more primitive mode of objectifica- tion is via emotional tone, and only in exceptional organ- isms does objectification, via sensation, supervene with any effectiveness. In their doctrine on this point, Locke and Hume were probably only repeating the mediaeval tradition, and they have passed on the tradition to their successors. None the less, the doctrine is founded upon no necessity of thought, and lacks empirical confirma- tion. If we consider the matter physiologically, the emotional tone depends mainly on the condition of the viscera which are peculiarly ineffective in generating sen- sations. Thus the whole notion of prehension should be inverted. We prehend other actual entities more primitively by direct mediation of emotional tone, and only secondarily and waveringly by direct mediation of sense. The two modes fuse with important effects upon our perceptive knowledge. This topic must be reserved (cf. Parts III and IV) for further discussion; but it is fundamental in the philosophy of organism. One diffi- culty in appealing to modern psychology, for the purpose of a preliminary survey of the nature of experience, is that so much of that science is based upon the presuppo- sition of the sensationalist mythology. Thus the sim-

Locke and Hume 215

pler, more naive surveys of Locke and Hume are philo- sophically the more useful.

Later, in Part III, a ‘prehension’ will be analysed into ‘prehending subject,’ ‘object prehended,’ and ‘subjective form.’ The philosophy of organism follows Locke in admitting particular ‘exterior things’ into the category of ‘object prehended.’ It also follows Hume in his admission at the end of his Appendix to the Treatise: “Had I said that two ideas of the same object can only be different by their different feeling, I should have been nearer the truth.’ What Hume here calls ‘feeling’ is expanded in the philosophy of organism into the doctrine of ‘subjective form.’ But there is another ineradicable difference between some prehensions, namely, their diver- sity of prehending subjects, when the two prehensions are in that respect diverse. The subsequent uses of the term ‘feeling’ are in the sense of the ‘positive’ type of prehensions, and not in the sense in which Hume uses it in the above quotation.

The approximation of the philosophy of organism to Santayana’s doctrine of ‘animal faith’ is effected by this doctrine of objectification by the mediation of ‘feeling.’

Santayana would deny that ‘animal faith’ has in it any element of givenness. This denial is presumably made in deference to the sensationalist doctrine, that all knowl- edge of the external world arises by the mediation of private sensations. If we allow the term ‘animal faith’ to describe a kind of perception which has been neglected by the philosophic tradition, then practically the whole of Santayana’s discussion *° is in accord with the organic philosophy.

The divergence from, and the analogy to, Santayana’s
doctrine can be understood by quoting two sentences:
“T propose therefore to use the word existence . . . to
designate not data of intuition but facts or events
believed to occur in nature. These facts or events will
include, first, intuitions themselves, or instances of con-

7° Cf. his Scepticism and Animal Faith.

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sciousness, like pains and pleasures and all remembered
experiences and mental discourse; and second, physical
things and events, having a transcendent relation to the
data of intuition which, in belief, may be used as signs
forsthem; 7

It may be remarked in passing that this quotation illustrates Santayana’s admirable clarity of thought, a characteristic which he shares with the men of genius of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Now the exact point where Santayana differs from the organic philosophy in his implicit assumption that ‘intuitions themselves’ cannot be among the ‘data of intuition,’ that is to say, the data of other intuitions. This possibility is what Santayana denies and the organic philosophy asserts. In this respect Santayana is voicing the position which, implicitly or explicitly, pervades modern philos- ophy. He is only distinguished by his clarity of thought. If Santayana’s position be granted, there is a phenom- enal veil, a primitive credulity associated with action and valuation, and a mysterious symbolism from the veil to the realities behind the veil. The only difference between such philosophers lies in their reading of the symbolism, some read more and some less. There can be no decision between them, since there are no rational principles which penetrate from the veil to the dark background of reality.

The organic philosophy denies this doctrine because, first, it is contrary to naive experience; secondly, ‘mem- ory’ is a very special instance of an antecedent act of experience becoming a datum of intuition for another act of experience; thirdly, the rejected doctrine is derived from the misconception of Locke, already noted previ- ously (cf. Part II, Ch. I, Sect. VI), that logical sim- plicity can be identified with priority in the concrescent process. Locke, in his first two Books, attempts to build up experience from the basic elements of simple ‘ideas’ of sensation. These simple ideas are practically Santa- yana’s ‘intuitions of essences.’ Santayana explicitly

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repudiates the misconception, but in so doing he knocks
away one of the supports of his doctrine. A fourth
reason for the rejection of the doctrine is that the way
is thereby opened for a rational scheme of cosmology in
which a final reality is identified with acts of experience.

Chapter Vi

From Descartes to Kant

A comparison of different ways in which Descartes and Locke respectively conceived the scope of their inves- tigations at once discloses the very important shift which Locke introduced into the tradition of philosophic thought. Descartes asked the fundamental metaphysical question, What is it to be an actual entity? He found three kinds of actual entities, namely, cogitating minds, extended bodies, and God. His word for an actual entity was ‘substance.’ The fundamental proposition, whereby the analysis of actuality could be achieved, took the form of predicating a quality of the substance in question. A quality was either an accident or an essential attribute. In the Cartesian philosophy there was room for three distinct kinds of change: one was the change of accidents of an enduring substance; another was the origination of an individual substance; and the third was the cessa- tion of the existence of an enduring substance. Any individual belonging to either of the first two kinds of substances did not require any other individual of either of these kinds in order to exist. But it did require the concurrence of God. Thus the essential attributes of a mind were its dependence on God and its cogitations; and the essential attributes of a body were its dependence on God and its extension. Descartes does not apply the term ‘attribute’ to the ‘dependence on God’; but it is an essential element in his philosophy. It is quite obvious that the accidental relationships between diverse indi- vidual substances form a great difficulty for Descartes. If they are to be included in his scheme of the actual

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world, they must be qualities of a substance. Thus a relationship is the correlation of a pair of qualities one belonging exclusively to one individual, and the other exclusively to the other individual. The correlation itself must be referred to God as one of his accidental qualities. This is exactly Descartes’ procedure in his theory of representative ideas. In this theory, the perceived indi- vidual has one quality; the perceiving individual has another, quality which is the ‘idea’ representing this qual- ity; God is aware of the correlation; and the perceiver’s knowledge of God guarantees for him the veracity of his idea. It is unnecessary to criticize this very artificial account of what common sense believes to be our direct knowledge of other actual entities. But it is the only account consistent with the metaphysical materials pro- vided by Descartes, combined with his assumption of a multiplicity of actual entities. In this assumption of a multiplicity of actual entities the philosophy of organism follows Descartes. It is however obvious that there are only two ways out of Descartes’ difficulties; one way is to have recourse to some form of monism; the other way is to reconstruct Descartes’ metaphysical machinery.