If this ‘Humian’ doctrine be true, certain conclusions as to ‘behavior’ ought to follow—conclusions which, in the most striking way, are not verified. It is almost in- decent to draw the attention of philosophers to the minor transactions of daily life, away from the classic sources of philosophic knowledge; but, after all, it is the empiri- cists who began this appeal to Caesar.
According to Hume, our behaviour presupposing cau- sation is due to the repetition of associated presentational experiences. Thus the vivid presentment of the ante- cedent percepts should vividly generate the behaviour, in action or thought, towards the associated consequent. The clear, distinct, overwhelming perception of the one is the overwhelming reason for the subjective transition to the other. For behaviour, interpretable as implying causation, is on this theory the subjective response to presentational immediacy. According to Hume this sub- jective response is the beginning and the end of all that
Symbolic Reference 265
there is to be said about causation. In Hume’s theory
the response is response to presentational immediacy,
and to nothing else. Also the situation elicited in
response is nothing but an immediate presentation, or
the memory of one. Let us apply this explanation to
reflex action: In the dark, the electric light is suddenly
turned on and the man’s eyes blink. There is a simple
physiological explanation of this trifling incident.
But this physiological explanation is couched wholly in terms of causal efficacy: it is the conjectural record of the travel of a spasm of excitement along nerves to some nodal centre, and of the return spasm of contrac- tion back to the eyelids. The correct technical phrase- ology would not alter the fact that the explanation does not involve any appeal to presentational immediacy either for actual occasions resident in the nerves, or for the man. At the most there is a tacit supposition as to what a physiologist, who in fact was not there, might have seen if he had been there, and if he could have vivisected the man without affecting these occurrences, and if he could have observed with a microscope which also in fact was absent. Thus the physiological ex- planation remains, from the point of view of Hume’s philosophy, a tissue of irrelevancies. It presupposes a side of the universe about which, on Hume’s theory, we must remain in blank ignorance.
Let us now dismiss physiology and turn to the private experience of the blinking man. The sequence of per- cepts, in the mode of presentational immediacy, are flash of light, feeling of eye-closure, instant of darkness. The three are practically simultaneous; though the flash maintains its priority over the other two, and these two latter percepts are indistinguishable as to priority. Ac- cording to the philosophy of organism, the man also experiences another percept in the mode of causal effi- cacy. He feels that the experiences of the eye in the matter of the flash are causal of the blink. The man himself will have no doubt of it. In fact, it is the feeling
266 Process and Reality
of causality which enables the man to distinguish the priority of the flash; and the inversion of the argument, whereby the temporal sequence ‘flash to blink’ is made the premise for the ‘causality’ belief, has its origin in pure theory. The man will explain his experience by saying, ‘The flash made me blink’; and if his state- ment be doubted, he will reply, ‘I know it, because I felt it.’
The philosophy of organism accepts the man’s state-
ment, that the flash made him blink. But Hume inter-
venes with another explanation. He first poimts out
that in the mode of presentational immediacy there is
no percept of the flash making the man blink. In this
mode there are merely the two percepts—the flash and
the blink—combining the two latter of the three per-
cepts under the one term ‘blink. Hume refuses to
admit the man’s protestation, that the compulsion to
blink is just what he did feel. The refusal is based on
the dogma, that all percepts are in the mode of presen-
tational immediacy—a dogma not to be upset by a mere
appeal to direct experience. Besides Hume has another
interpretation of the man’s experience: what the man
really felt was his habit of blinking after flashes. The
word ‘association’ explains it all, according to Hume.
But how can a ‘habit’ be felt, when a ‘cause’ cannot be
felt? Is there any presentational immediacy in the feel-
ing of a ‘habit’? Hume by a sleight of hand confuses a
‘habit of feeling blinks after flashes’ with a ‘feeling of
the habit of feeling blinks after flashes.’
We have here a perfect example of the practice of ap- plying the test of presentational immediacy to procure the critical rejection of some doctrines, and of allowing other doctrines to slip out by a back door, so as to evade the test. The notion of causation arose because mankind lives amid experiences in the mode of causal efficacity.
We will keep to the appeal to ordinary experience, and
Symbolic Reference 267
consider another situation, which Hume’s philosophy is ill equipped to explain. The ‘causal feeling’ according to that doctrine arises from the long association of well- marked presentations of sensa, one precedent to the other. It would seem therefore that inhibitions of sensa, given in presentational immediacy, should be accom- panied by a corresponding absence of ‘causal feeling’; for the explanation of how there is ‘causal feeling’ presup- poses the well-marked familiar sensa, in presentational immediacy. Unfortunately the contrary is the case. An inhibition of familiar sensa is very apt to leave usa prey to vague terrors respecting a circumambient world of causal operations. In the dark there are vague presences, doubt- fully feared; in the silence, the irresistible causal efficacy of nature presses itself upon us; in the vagueness of the low hum of insects in an August woodland, the inflow into ourselves of feelings from enveloping nature overwhelms us; in the dim consciousness of half-sleep, the presenta- tions of sense fade away, and we are left with the vague feeling of influences from vague things around us. It is quite untrue that the feelings of various types of influ- ences are dependent upon the familiarity of well-marked sensa in immediate presentment. Every way of omitting the sensa still leaves us a prey to vague feelings of influ- ence. Such feelings, divorced from immediate sensa, are pleasant, or unpleasant, according to mood; but they are always vague as to spatial and temporal definition, though their explicit dominance in experience may be heightened in the absence of sensa.
Further, our experience of our various bodily parts
are primarily perceptions of them as reasons for ‘pro-
jected’ sensa: the hand is the reason for the projected
touch-sensum, the eye is the reason for the projected
sight-sensum. Our bodily experience is primarily an ex-
perience of the dependence of presentational immediacy
upon causal efficacy. Hume’s doctrine inverts this rela-
tionship by making causal efficacy, as an experience,
dependent upon presentational immediacy. ‘This doc-
268 Process and Reality
trine, whatever be its merits, is not based upon any appeal to experience.
Bodily experiences, in the mode of causal efficacy, are distinguished by their comparative accuracy of spatial definition. The causal influences from the body have lost the extreme vagueness of those which inflow from the external world. But, even for the body, causal efficacy is dogged with vagueness compared to presentational immediacy. These conclusions are confirmed if we descend to the scale of organic being. It does not seem to be the sense of causal awareness that the lower living things lack, so much as variety of sense-presentation, and then vivid distinctness of presentational immediacy. But animals, and even vegetables, in low forms of organism exhibit modes of behaviour directed towards self-preser- vation. There is every indication of a vague feeling of causal relationship with the external world, of some intensity, vaguely defined as to quality, and with some vague definition as to locality. A jellyfish advances and withdraws, and in so doing exhibits some perception of causal relationship with the world beyond itself; a plant grows downwards to the damp earth, and upwards to- wards the light. There is thus some direct reason for attributing dim, slow feelings of causal nexus, although we have no reason for any ascription of the definite per- cepts in the mode of presentational immediacy.
But the philosophy of organism attributes ‘feeling’ throughout the actual world. It bases this doctrine upon the directly observed fact that ‘feeling’ survives as a known element constitutive of the ‘formal’ existence of such actual entities as we can best observe. Also when we observe the causal nexus, devoid of interplay with sense-presentation, the influx of feeling with vague qual- itative and ‘vector’ definition, is what we find. The dominance of the scalar physical quantity, inertia, in the Newtonian physics obscured the recognition of the truth that all fundamental physical quantities are vector and not scalar.
Symbolic Reference 269
When we pass to inorganic actual occasions, we have lost the two higher originative phases in the ‘process,’ namely, the ‘supplemental’ phase, and the ‘mental’ phase. They are lost in the sense that, so far as our observations go, they are negligible. The influx of objec- tifications of the actualities of the world as organized vehicles of feeling is responded to by a mere subjective appropriation of such elements of feeling in their received relevance. The inorganic occasions are merely what the causal past allows them to be.
As we pass to the inorganic world, causation never for
a moment seems to lose its grip. What is lost is origi-
nativeness, and any evidence of immediate absorption in
the present. So far as we can see, inorganic entities are
vehicles for receiving, for storing in a napkin, and for
restoring without loss or gain.
In the actual world we discern four grades of actual occasions, grades which are not to be sharply distin- guished from each other. First, and lowest, there are the actual occasions in so-called ‘empty space’; secondly, there are the actual occasions which are moments in the life-histories of enduring non-living objects, such as elec- trons or other primitive organisms; thirdly, there are the actual occasions which are moments in the life-histories of enduring living objects; fourthly, there are the actual occasions which are moments in the life-histories of en- during objects with conscious knowledge.
We may imaginatively conjecture that the first grade
is to be identified with actual occasions for which ‘pre-
sented durations’ are negligible elements among their
data, negligible by reason of negligible presentational
immediacy. Thus no intelligible definition of rest and
motion is possible for historic routes including them,
because they correspond to no inherent spatiatization of
the actual world.
The second grade is to be identified with actual occa-
sions for which ‘presented durations’ are important ele-
ments in their data, but with a limitation only to be
270 Process and Reality
observed in the lower moments of human experience. In such occasions the data of felt sensa, derived from the more primitive data of causal efficacy, are projected onto the contemporary ‘presented locus’ without any clear illustration of special regions in that locus. The past has been lifted into the present, but the vague differenti- ations in the past have not been transformed into any precise differentiations within the present. The enhance- ment of precision has not arrived.
The third grade is to be identified with occasions in which presentational immediacy has assumed some en- hanced precision, so that ‘symbolic transference’ has lifted into importance precisely discriminated regions in the ‘presented duration.’ The delicate activities of self- preservation are now becoming possible by the transfer- ence of the vague message of the past onto the more precisely discriminated regions of the presented duration. Symbolic transference is dependent upon the flashes of conceptual originality constituting life.
The fourth grade is to be identified with the canalized importance of free conceptual functionings, whereby blind experience is analysed by comparison with the imagina- tive realization of mere potentiality. In this way, experi- ence receives a reorganization in the relative importance of its components by the joint operation of imaginative enjoyment and of judgment. The growth of reason is the increasing importance of critical judgment in the discipline of imaginative enjoyment.
One reason for the philosophical difficulties over
causation is that Hume, and subsequently Kant, con-
ceived the causal nexus as, in its primary character, de-
rived from the presupposed sequence of immediate pre-
sentations. But if we interrogate experience, the exact
converse is the case; the perceptive mode of immediate
presentation affords information about the percepta in
the more aboriginal mode of causal efficacy.
Symbolic Reference 271
Thus symbolic reference, though in complex human experience it works both ways, is chiefly to be thought of as the elucidation of percepta in the mode of causal effi- cacy by the fluctuating intervention of percepta in the mode of presentational immediacy.