The best rendering of integral experience, expressing its general form divested of irrelevant details, is often to be found in the utterances of religious aspiration. One of the reasons of the thinness of so much modern metaphysics is its neglect of this wealth of expression of ultimate feeling. Accordingly we find in the first two lines of a famous hymn a full expression of the union of the two notions in one integral experience:
Abide with me; Fast falls the eventide.
Here the first line expresses the permanences, ‘abide,’ ‘me’ and the ‘Being’ addressed; and the second line sets these permanences amid the inescapable flux. Here at length we find formulated the complete problem of meta- physics. Those philosophers who start with the first line have given us the metaphysics of ‘substance’; and those who start with the second line have developed the meta- physics of ‘flux.’ But, in truth, the two lines cannot be torn apart in this way; and we find that a wavering balance between the two is a characteristic of the greater number of philosophers. Plato found his permanences in a static, spiritual heaven, and his flux in the entangle- ment of his forms amid the fluent imperfections of the physical world. Here I draw attention to the word ‘imperfection.’ In any assertion as to Plato I speak under correction; but I believe that Plato’s authority can be claimed for the doctrine that the things that flow are imperfect in the sense of ‘limited’ and of ‘definitely exclusive of much that they might be and are not.’ The lines quoted from the hymn are an almost perfect expres-
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sion of the direct intuition from which the main position of the Platonic philosophy is derived. Aristotle corrected his Platonism into a somewhat difference balance. He was the apostle of ‘substance and attribute,’ and of the classificatory logic which this notion suggests. But, on the other side, he makes a masterly analysis of the notion of ‘generation.’ Aristotle in his own person expressed a useful protest against the Platonic tendency to sepa- rate a static spiritual world from a fluent world of super- ficial experience. The later Platonic schools stressed this tendency: just as the mediaeval Aristotelian thought allowed the static notions of Aristotle’s logic to formulate some of the main metaphysical problems in terms which have lasted till today.
On the whole, the history of philosophy supports Bergson’s charge that the human intellect ‘spatializes the universe’; that is to say, that it tends to ignore the flu- ency, and to analyse the world in terms of static cate- gories. Indeed Bergson went further and conceived this tendency as an inherent necessity of the intellect. I do not believe this accusation; but I do hold that ‘spatiali- zation’ is the shortest route to a clear-cut philosophy expressed in reasonably familiar language. Descartes gave an almost perfect example of such a system of thought. The difficulties of Cartesianism with its three clear-cut substances, and with its ‘duration’ and ‘meas- ured time’ well in the background, illustrate the result of the subordination of fluency. This subordination is to be found in the unanalysed longing of the hymn, in Plato’s vision of heavenly perfection, in Aristotle’s logi- cal concepts, and in Descartes’ mathematical mentality. Newton, that Napoleon of the world of thought, brusquely ordered fluency back into the world, regi- mented into his ‘absolute mathematical time, flowing equably without regard to anything external.’ He also gave it a mathematical uniform in the shape of his The- ory of Fluxions.
At this point the group of seventeenth- and eighteenth-
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century philosophers practically made a discovery, which, although it lies on the surface of their writings, they only half-realized. The discovery is that there are two kinds of fluency. One kind is the concrescence which, in Locke’s language, is ‘the real internal constitution of a particular existent.’ The other kind is the transition from particular existent to particular existent. This transition, again in Locke’s language, is the ‘perpetually perishing’ which is one aspect of the notion of time; and in another aspect the transition is the origination of the present in conformity with the ‘power’ of the past.
The phrase ‘the real internal constitution of a partic- ular existent,’ the description of the human understand- ing as a process of reflection upon data, the phrase ‘per- petually perishing,’ and the word ‘power’ together with its elucidation are all to be found in Locke’s Essay. Yet owing to the limited scope of his investigation Locke did not generalize or put his scattered ideas together. This implicit notion of the two kinds of flux finds further unconscious illustration in Hume. It is all but explicit in Kant, though—as I think—misdescribed. Finally, it is lost in the evolutionary monism of Hegel and of his derivative schools. With all his inconsistencies, Locke is the philosopher to whom it is most useful to recur, when we desire to make explicit the discovery of the two kinds of fluency, required for the description of the fluent world. One kind is the fluency inherent in the constitu- tion of the particular existent. This kind I have called ‘concrescence.’ The other kind is the fluency whereby the perishing of the process, on the completion of the particular existent, constitutes that existent as an origi- nal element in the constitutions of other particular exist- ents elicited by repetitions of process. This kind I have called ‘transition.’ Concrescence moves towards its final cause, which is its subjective aim; transition is the vehicle of the efficient cause, which is the immortal past.
The discussion of how the actual particular occasions become original elements for a new creation is termed
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the theory of objectification. The objectified particular occasions together have the unity of a datum for the creative concrescence. But in acquiring this measure of connection, their inherent presuppositions of each other eliminate certain elements in their constitutions, and elicit into relevance other elements. Thus objectifi- cation 1s an operation of mutually adjusted abstraction, or elimination, whereby the many occasions of the actual world become one complex datum. This fact of the elim- ination by reason of synthesis is sometimes termed the perspective of the actual world from the standpoint of that concrescence. Each actual occasion defines its own actual world from which it originates. No two occasions can have identical actual worlds.
‘Concrescence’ is the name for the process in which
the universe of many things acquires an individual unity
in a determinate relegation of each item of the ‘many’
to its subordination in the constitution of the novel
‘one.’
The most general term ‘thing’—or, equivalently, ‘entity’-—means nothing else than to be one of the ‘many’ which find their niches in each instance of concrescence. Each instance of concrescence is itself the novel indi- vidual ‘thing’ in question. There are not ‘the concres- cence’ and the ‘novel thing’: when we analyse the novel thing we find nothing but the concrescence. ‘Actuality’ means nothing else than this ultimate entry into the concrete, in abstraction from which there is mere non- entity. In other words, abstraction from the notion of ‘entry into the concrete’ is a_ self-contradictory notion, since it asks us to conceive a thing as not a thing.
An instance of concrescence is termed an ‘actual entity’
—or, equivalently, an ‘actual occasion.’ There is not
one completed set of things which are actual occasions.
For the fundamental inescapable fact is the creativity
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in virtue of which there can be no ‘many things’ which are not subordinated in a concrete unity. Thus a set of all actual occasions is by the nature of things a stand- point for another concrescence which elicits a concrete unity from those many actual occasions. Thus we can never survey the actual world except from the standpoint of an immediate concrescence which is falsifying the pre- supposed completion. The creativity in virtue of which any relative complete actual world is, by the nature of things, the datum for a new concrescence, is termed ‘transition.’ Thus, by reason of transition, ‘the actual world’ is always a relative term, and refers to that basis of presupposed actual occasions which is a datum for the novel concrescence.
An actual occasion is analysable. The analysis dis-
closes operations transforming entities which are indi-
vidually alien, into components of a complex which is
concretely one. The term ‘feeling’ will be used as the
generic description of such operations. We thus say that
an actual occasion is a concrescence effected by a process
of feelings.
A feeling can be considered in respect to (i) the actual occasions felt, (11) the eternal objects felt, (iii) the feel- ings felt, and (iv) its own subjective forms of intensity. In the process of concrescence the diverse feelings pass on to wider generalities of integral feeling.
Such a wider generality is a feeling of a complex of feelings, including their specific elements of identity and contrast. This process of the integration of feeling pro- ceeds until the concrete unity of feeling is obtained. In this concrete unity all indetermination as to the realiza- tion of possibilities has been eliminated. The many entities of the universe, including those originating in the concrescence itself, find their respective réles in this final unity. This final unity is termed the ‘satisfaction.’ The ‘satisfaction’ is the culmination of the concrescence into a completely determinate matter of fact. In any of its antecedent stages the concrescence exhibits sheer inde-
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termination as to the nexus between its many com- ponents.
An actual occasion is nothing but the unity to be ascribed to a particular instance of concrescence. This concrescence is thus nothing else than the ‘real internal constitution’ of the actual occasion in question. The analysis of the formal constitution of an actual entity has given three stages in the process of feeling: (i) the responsive phase, (ii) the supplemental stage, and (iii) the satisfaction.
The satisfaction is merely the culmination marking the evaporation of all indetermination; so that, in respect to all modes of feeling and to all entities in the universe, the satisfied actual entity embodies a determinate attitude of ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Thus the satisfaction is the attainment of the private ideal which is the final cause of the con- crescence. But the process itself lies in the two former phases. The first phase is the phase of pure reception of the actual world in its guise of objective datum for aesthetic synthesis. In this phase there is the mere recep- tion of the actual world as a multiplicity of private centres of feeling, implicated in a nexus of mutual pre- supposition. The feelings are felt as belonging to the external centres, and are not absorbed into the private immediacy. The second stage is governed by the private ideal, gradually shaped in the process itself; whereby the many feelings, derivatively felt as alien, are transformed into a unity of aesthetic appreciation immediately felt as private. This is the incoming of ‘appetition,’ which in its higher exemplifications we term ‘vision.’ In the language of physical science, the ‘scalar’ form overwhelms the original ‘vector’ form: the origins become subordinate to the individual experience. The vector form is not lost, but is submerged as the foundation of the scalar super- structure.
In this second stage the feelings assume an emotional
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character by reason of this influx of conceptual feelings. But the reason why the origins are not lost in the private emotion is that there is no element in the universe capable of pure privacy. If we could obtain a complete analysis of meaning, the notion of pure privacy would be seen to be self-contradictory. Emotional feeling is still subject to the third metaphysical principle, that. to be ‘something’ is ‘to have the potentiality for acquiring real unity with other entities.’ Hence, ‘to be a real com- ponent of an actual entity’ is in some way ‘to realize this potentiality.’ Thus ‘emotion’ is ‘emotional feeling’; and ‘what is felt’ is the presupposed vector situation. In physical science this principle takes the form which should never be lost sight of in fundamental speculation, that scalar quantities are constructs derivative from vector quantities. In more familiar language, this prin- ciple can be expressed by the statement that the notion of ‘passing on’ is more fundamental than that of a private individual fact. In the abstract language here adopted for metaphysical statement, ‘passing on’ becomes ‘crea- tivity,’ in the dictionary sense of the verb creare, ‘to bring forth, beget, produce.’ Thus, according to the third principle, no entity can be divorced from the notion of creativity. An entity is at least a particular form capable of infusing its own particularity into creativity. An actual entity, or a phase of an actual entity, is more than that; but, at least, it is that.