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Aristotle’s memorable sentence¹ seems as true today as when it was written. Far from settling among themselves on a metaphysical description of the world of experience, philosophers do not even agree on how Aristotle himself conceived ‘substance’. At any rate it will be argued here that Whitehead radically misunderstood Aristotle’s concept. This misconception, which has ever since flourished unquestioned among Whiteheadian philosophers, proved a powerful factor, I think, in Whitehead’s ultimate adoption of an atomic or epochal theory of becoming.

Whitehead’s interpretation of Aristotelian ‘substance’ figures in a classic exchange between Leonard J. Eslick and Charles Hartshorne in the late Fifties. In his paper Eslick asserted: "I think it can be shown that Whitehead’s equation of Aristotelian primary substance with Descartes’ definition rests upon a gross misunderstanding. It is, furthermore, a travesty to depict Aristotle’s substance as static and inert, hermetically sealed off from the causal efficacy of other entities and devoid of any internal becoming" (SCCW 504). Recognizing that Whitehead’s exegesis of Aristotle is not of primary importance in evaluating Whitehead’s own metaphysics, Eslick did not bother in that essay to show what he had said could be shown, and went on to other issues. Hartshorne’s, however, took the time to respond with some vigor that no such misinterpretation of Aristotle on Whitehead’s part was evident.

Hartshorne’s instinct that this point is worth arguing was sound. I suspect that Whitehead’s interpretation of ‘substance’ in Aristotle had a stronger influence on the formation of his own metaphysics than is generally supposed. It was one of several factors which coalesced to convince Whitehead that no metaphysics of essentially self-identical and enduring fundamental entities is viahle.² It encouraged him to develop a counter-theory of epochal, successive units of becoming. This alternative, for better or for worse, draws a radically different picture of the human person, for instance, than does that of Aristotle. Man himself is at stake in what one takes the fundamental constituents of being to be.

Whitehead evidently read Aristotle (or perhaps W. D. Ross’s book about Aristotle) with the specter of modern materialistic mechanism haunting his mind, and thought he recognized in Aristotle’s ‘substance’ its remote but unmistakable ancestor. And if, as seems natural, Whitehead took Aristotle’s philosophy as paradigmatic of any substance-type philosophy, his turn to another alternative is not surprising.

Whitehead’s understanding (or, as I shall argue, misunderstanding) of Aristotle’s concept of ‘substance’ has continued to flourish, entrenched and unquestioned, among subsequent Whiteheadian philosophers. It is taken for granted, so that the word ‘substance’ is used as a term of opprobrium. But whether this dogmatic antisubstance bias of modern process philosophy is well-founded or, rather, stems largely from an ill-examined myth, depends on the accuracy of Whitehead’s interpretation of Aristotle’s concept of substance.

Here, then, is what I propose to do. I shall argue that Whitehead did in fact badly misinterpret Aristotle’s concept of substance, as Eslick claimed, and I shall suggest that, far from amounting to an inconsequential error in historical exegesis, this misconception was a strong influence in turning Whitehead’s metaphysics in the direction of an epochal theory of becoming. I shall maintain that Aristotle’s theory conceives substances as dynamic and interrelated, contrary to what Whitehead supposed, but I shall not claim that, had Whitehead realized this, he would have been satisfied with Aristotle’s conception. I shall only ask that we accept Aristotle at his own word and not transform his theory into a caricature he demonstrably never intended. I shall also suggest that a recovery of the real Aristotelian view casts doubt on the currently accepted repudiation of the very possibility of any sort of substance metaphysics.

1. Whitehead’s Conception of ‘Substance’ in Aristotle

We begin with Whitehead rather than with Aristotle, for Whitehead’s assessment of Aristotle flows out of Whitehead’s own philosophic concerns. We also take special note of what Whitehead was concerned to avoid. Bergson’s observation still holds: "Is it not obvious that the first step the philosopher takes, when his thought is still faltering and there is nothing definite in his doctrine, is to reject certain things definitively? Later he will be able to make changes in what he affirms; he will vary only slightly what he denies" (CM 110). Appropriately, Eslick writes: "It is likely the polemic against substance was originally motivated by Whitehead’s reaction against mechanistic materialism, in which substances are inert, vacuous pieces of matter or stuff" (SCCW 504).

Whitehead’s polemic against materialistic mechanism is too well known to require much elaboration here. The ‘matter’ of such a mechanism was, by its nature, static, passive, and incapable of supporting internal relationships to other bits of matter. This incapacity of relationship had its counterpart, Whitehead thought, in Descartes’ definition of substance, and that in turn was a direct consequence of Aristotle’s notion. In a key passage Whitehead writes:

Whitehead’s assertion that Descartes’ definition of substance is a true derivative from Aristotle’s was based, claimed Eslick, on a "gross misunderstanding" of Aristotle. Hartshorne promptly countered this claim by providing the following formal derivation of Descartes definition from Aristotle’s:

Thus, argues Hartshorne, denying Descartes’ definition of substance logically entails denying Aristotle’s, so that affirming Aristotle’s entails affirming Descartes’. Aristotelian substances, therefore, are in principle mutually independent, hence intrinsically unrelated to one another. It would follow that Descartes, in defining a substance as needing nothing else in order to exist (Principles of Philosophy, I, 51) only spelled out what was already implicit in Aristotle’s definition. This apparent incapacity of Aristotelian substances to enter into intrinsic relations with one another seems to have struck Whitehead as distinctive of matter or stuff, hence to lend itself readily to the viewpoint of materialistic mechanism.

Whitehead also saw ethical significance, says Hartshorne, in therejection of substance. For if each person is self-sufficient to himself and intrinsically independent of all others, have we not a prescription for selfishness and self-centeredness? As Hartshorne put it:

In addition to this apparent intrinsic separateness of Aristotelian substances, Whitehead was bothered by what he took to be their static nature. He conceived Aristotle’s ‘substances’ as stolidly, changelessly, enduring through time (whatever that could mean!), while yet acquiring or losing various accidental qualities. This is the impression he got from Aristotle’s Categories -- or perhaps, instead, from W. D. Boss’s Aristotle.³ For Aristotle says it is distinctive of a substance that it remains numerically one and the same while nevertheless taking on varying, even contrary qualities (Categories, Ch. 5).

This suggested to Whitehead a notion of "undifferentiated endurance" (a favorite phrase) almost indistinguishable from that of passive matter or "stuff." The tenacity with which the latter concept held the minds of philosophers for centuries was due, Whitehead thought, to (1) the influence of Aristotelian subject-predicate logic, and (2) a careless misconstrual of what is given in sense experience -- an instance of misplaced concreteness, as we see in the following passages:⁴

As for Aristotle’s logic, its dominance over several centuries "imposed on metaphysical thought the categories naturally derivative from its phraseology" (PR 30/ 45). Its pattern of attributing varying qualitative predicates to stable, self- contained subjects was mistakenly taken for a metaphysical description of the structure of the real. "The evil produced by the Aristotelian primary substance is exactly this habit of metaphysical emphasis upon the ‘subject-predicate’ form of proposition" (ibid.).

Furthermore, the notion of the purely numerical identity of an unchanging subject of change seems vague or even incoherent. How can something endure changelessly, and in what would its supposed self-identity consist? "Numerical identity," writes Hartshorne, has no strict meaning, once accidental qualities are admitted such that they can alter, but the thing remain that very thing" (SCCW 515).

In sum, Whitehead interprets Aristotle’s substances (1) as self-contained, self-sufficient units of actuality, lacking the possibility of internal relationships to one another, and (2) as entities whose individual histories consist in acquiring or losing various accidental characteristics, while they, the subjects of these accidental changes, remain themselves unchanged. This interpretation arises essentially from (1) Aristotle’s definition that a substance is never "present in" another substance, and (2) Aristotle’s doctrine of the relation of substance to accident: that it is characteristic of substance that it itself remains numerically one and the same while nevertheless taking on various accidental qualities.

2. Whitehead’s Conception a Misconception

Preliminary word-problem -- Before taking a closer look at the evidence for Aristotle’s own conception of ‘substance’, it is necessary to ask whether that is even the most appropriate English word. Aristotle’s actual word is ousia (accented on the second syllable), etymologically a derivative of the Greek word "to be" (einai). In a long and careful analysis of what ousia would mean to the Greek ear, Joseph Owens sets down the following characteristics of any near-equivalent in English:

Owens concludes that the English word ‘entity’ comes closest to satisfying these requirements, especially if written with an uppercase ‘E’ whenever it is being used to translate Aristotle’s term, ousia.

Beyond argument, however, ‘substance’ is exactly the wrong term to use, and that for several reasons:

(1) Etymologically it does all the wrong things. For it has nothing to do with the verb "to be," and derives rather from the Latin, ‘substantia’, denoting something "standing under" another, although, as we shall see, this is in a crucial sense not what Aristotle meant by ousia! ‘Substantia’, as the Latin rendition of the Greek term, was chiefly popularized by Boethius in his Latin translation of the logical works of Aristotle, in which the primary meaning of the term is the subject of predication. In his theological works, on the other hand, Boethius was careful to use ‘essentia’ to translate the same term. It was, however, by his logical works that Aristotle first became widely known to the Western world, so that the Boethian logical term, ‘substantia’, stuck (DBAM 68).

(2) Historically it conjures up exactly the wrong ideas -- or at the very least loads the dice against an impartial examination of Aristotle’s real meaning. It is especially misleading to anyone acquainted with the history of Western philosophy, as Owens points out: "Because of Locke’s influence, substance in English philosophical usage strongly suggests what its etymology designates. It conjures up the notion of something ‘standing under’ something else. The background is the view of accidents ridiculed by Malebranche. Such a perspective inevitably falsifies the Aristotelian ousia, and ends up by reifying the accidents as in Locke" (DBAM 69).

I shall, therefore, hereafter adopt Owens’ recommendation and usually write ‘Entity’ (with an upper-case ‘E’) to denote Aristotle’s term ousia, rather than continue to use the unfortunate term ‘substance’. Let us then examine Aristotle’s own explanations of what he means by ‘Entity’.

This is the first of the key Aristotelian definitions which bothered Whitehead, and which he and Hartshorne think leads straight to Descartes’ definition of substance as "needing nothing else in order to exist." It seemed to Whitehead to insulate Aristotelian Entities from one another, so as to prevent any kind of inherence of one in another. Aristotle goes on to add: "It is a common characteristic of all Entity that it is never present in a subject" (3a6f). Do not such statements vindicate Whitehead’s conception of the apartheid of individual Entities in Aristotle?

No, they don’t. To see this, one must first examine what sort of work the Categories is, and what Aristotle’s intention was in writing it.

The Categories is the first of Aristotle’s ordered set of treatises on the foundations of logic. In this first book he inquires into the significance of the terms (or, as Ross suggests, ‘linguistic facts’ [AR 26]), in which propositions are couched. In the subsequent book, On Interpretation, he inquires into the relationship between multiple terms in the form of propositions. Aristotle is in effect asking, in the Categories, what different sorts of entities are named by the different terms in propositions. He refers back to this initial treatise when, in Book Delta (V) of the Metaphysics, he writes: "The kinds of essential being are precisely those that are indicated by the figures of predication [i.e., the categories]; for the senses of ‘being’ are just as many as these figures" (1017a23-25).

In the Categories, then, Aristotle is not yet concerned to work out a metaphysics; he simply wants, as a necessary preliminary clarification, to distinguish among the many different senses in which something can be said to ‘be’. He notices that at least the following sorts of entities or kinds of being can be distinguished: Entity, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, and affection (Ch. 4). And among these diverse kinds of being Aristotle notices a fundamental distinction logically dividing them into two distinct classes. One class has only a single member: Entity. It alone, of all the kinds of being, enjoys a sort of logical autonomy, whereby it can be said to ‘be’ in its own right, whereas all the other kinds of being have an intrinsic dependence on Entity for their own being. ‘White’ or ‘tall’ do not exist in their own right (except as pure abstractions, and even then, as abstractions in someone’s mind): they have to belong to Entities, such as a man or a tree, for instance, if they are to be at all. But ‘man’ and tree’, as kinds of being, are not thought of as needing to inhere in some other kind of entity.

Aristotle works out in precise, technical terms the relationships I have just roughly sketched, and does it in terms of two careful definitions which he has already provided in Chapter 2. These exact definitions are essential for understanding what Aristotle later says about Entity. (He is, after all, writing a careful, technical essay.) He says:

These statements define what Aristotle had in mind when he later asserted that "entity, in the truest and primary and most definite sense of the word, is that which is neither predicable of a subject nor present in a subject" (Ch. 5).When, therefore, we predicate ‘man’ of Socrates, man is entity not in the primary but only in the secondary sense; it is a universal, a class. It denotes the essential nature common to Socrates and all other men. Only entity in this secondary sense is predicated, and then only of ‘Entity’ in the primary sense (never vice-versa). Roughly: classes are predicated, people aren’t.

On the accidental level, however, to say that Socrates is shrewd or homely, is not to attribute to him extrinsic qualities which cling to him in about the same way as his cloak. It is to say something about Socrates himself. In saying, therefore, that ‘Entity’ is never present in another as a in a subject, Aristotle is not at all concerned to deny that (or even to ask whether) actual primary Entities relate efficaciously to one another. In the Categories he is simply not concerned to do that kind of metaphysics. He is asking, rather, how the terms of proposition denote different kinds of being, and he points out that, alone among other kinds of entities, primary Entity is conceivable, and can be discussed, without its having to be thought of as essentially inhering in some other kind or category of entity. Colors and shapes and relations, on the other hand, are kinds of being which of their very nature must be thought of an inhering in primary Entities, if they are to be thought of as being at all. True, primary Entities do require the other kinds of entities -- a man, for instance, must have some shape, yet not with that same relation of inherence. Shape is clearly in the man in a way in which it would be absurd to say that the man is in his shape.

One must conclude, therefore, that Aristotle’s stipulation that one Entity is never "in another" provides no warrant for the supposition of radical, mutual exclusiveness which Whitehead read into it. And indeed there is plenty of evidence to show that Aristotle himself never supposed that primary Entities could not be related to one another. For instance, in Physics, Bk. III, Ch. 2, he says:

And a few lines farther down, in reply to an objection he has posed to himself, Aristotle responds: "It is not absurd that the actualization of one thing should be in another. Teaching is the activity of a person who can teach, yet the operation is performed [on] some patient -- it is not cut adrift from a subject, but is of A on B" (202b6-8).

This is Aristotle’s way of saying that the ‘agent’ is in the ‘patient’; that the Entity effecting change in another is, precisely in that respect, in the other. The resulting activity in the affected Entity is the actualization of both Entities together.

In the face of such passages one can suppose either that Aristotle was inconsistent in wedding his notion of primary Entity with other aspects of his system, or that interpreting Aristotle’s concept of Entity in a Lockean manner is, as Eslick suggested, a "gross misunderstanding." All the evidence points toward the latter view.

Or does it? What about Hartshorne’s precise logical derivation, quoted above, of how Descartes concept of ‘substance’ is entailed by Aristotle’s definition of Entity as "never in another"? The derivation, in fact, fails! Instead of attending to Aristotle’s own careful preliminary definition of what he means by " (present) in another," Harts-home allowed this notion of "presence in" to float ambiguously, unexamined, until it became implicitly transformed into a notion of sheer logical inclusion. But that is demonstrably not what Aristotle had in mind when he used the phrase.

There is a special irony in Hartshorne’s providing this derivation. For not only was Aristotle highly sensitive to the perils of determining the real by means of the logical -- this was, after all, his chief criticism of Plato’s theory of the Forms ⁶ -- but Whitehead himself tirelessly attacked the tendency to mistake logical relationships for the structure of the real, an ultimate case of what he called ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’. Yet in proposing this derivation Hartshorne succumbs exactly to this fallacy, since he thereby deals with the metaphysical relationship between actual Entities as if it were simply that of logical inclusion.

Entity and qualities: "undifferentiated endurance." -- The other key aspect of Aristotle’s definition of ‘Entity’ which bothered Whitehead is the relation Aristotle proposes between Entity and qualities, between ‘substance’ and accidents. Aristotle says:

We saw in Section 1 that, given the background of later Western philosophic thought, this definition provoked Whitehead to attribute the notion of "undifferentiated endurance" to Entity itself, conceived as a substrate of diverse accidental qualities which come and go. It is, he writes, "the notion of continuous stuff with permanent attributes, enduring without differentiation, and retaining its self-identity through any stretch of time. . . . The stuff undergoes change in respect to accidental qualities and relations; but it is numerically self-identical in its character of one actual entity throughout its accidental adventures" (PR 78/120). This notion, Whitehead thought, has wrecked the various systems of pluralistic realism and also formed the basis of scientific materialism.

Whitehead’s clearly Lockean concept of ‘substance’ in Aristotle, besides supposing the mutual isolation of Entities one from another, seems to include at least the following characteristics:

(1) Substance is conceived as intrinsically unchanged, or unchanging, even amid its acquiring or losing accidental qualities.

(2) Substance is therefore rightly thought of as both static and passive, hence as lending itself immediately to the notion of an inert stuff or matter.

(3) Similarly, substance enjoys a kind of independence of existence from its accidental qualities; it becomes a kind of "thing" even apart from those qualities. And in a somewhat different way, qualities must enjoy a kind of ontological autonomy of their own.

I submit that attributing the above characteristics to Aristotle’s notion of Entity is a mistake on every count! For Aristotle says that it is a distinctive mark of Entity that, while remaining numerically one and the same, it is nevertheless capable of admitting contrary qualities. If we read on in that same Chapter (5) of the Categories, we find him indicating the manner in which this comes about, thereby clarifying his whole concept of "alteration" ("accidental" change, in which an Entity remains itself while undergoing change of qualities). This clarification arises in the context of an objection which Aristotle poses to himself. Propositions -- which are not Entities in the primary sense -- appear also to satisfy the characteristic, supposedly peculiar to Entities, of admitting contrary qualities, since the proposition that someone is sitting passes from true to false when the person stands up. But there is a key difference, says Aristotle, between the proposed counter-example and what he has said of Entities. The difference is that the proposition changes its truth-value because of a change in something else, something other than itself -- namely, the person who stood up. But it is different with Entities:

It is by themselves changing that Entities admit contrary qualities. It is thus that that which was hot becomes cold, for it has entered into a different state. Similarly that which was white becomes black, and that which was bad good, by a process of change; and in the same way in all other cases it is by changing that Entities are capable of admitting contrary qualities.... It is the peculiar mark of Entity that it should be capable of admitting contrary qualities; for it is by itself changing [ ] that it does so. (4a30-4b3.0; emphasis added)

There is, therefore, no "undifferentiated endurance" for the Aristotelian Entity! There is, on the contrary, intrinsic development, change, becoming. It is the Entity (the man or woman, for instance) which does the changing in passing from thin to fat or pale to tan. The reason, says Aristotle, why it is legitimate to predicate contrary predicates of the same Entity at different times is precisely because the Entity itself has changed: George himself, or Martha herself, has become tan, so that as a result ‘tan’ is truly predicated when it would have been false before.

To identify Aristotelian Entity, then, with "undifferentiated endurance" (characteristic (1) above), is, contrary to the received Whiteheadian tradition, simply anti-Aristotelian. It deserves the "pincushion" comparison used by Eslick (SCCW 506). For on that view Entity never intrinsically becomes in any way; it only extrinsically acquires or loses qualities, as one might acquire or lose books. But in that case it is clear that characteristics (2) and (3) would also follow. For by (1), Entity has no alternative to being static and passive (2) and there must therefore be a kind of independence of existence of Entity on the one hand, and of accidental qualities on the other. For if contrary qualities do not affect Entity, and if they can successively be "admitted" by Entity, it seems clear that Entity and qualities all get along quite well by themselves (3).

It would be possible to construct a litany of other Aristotelian texts which indicate that for Aristotle, Entity is dynamic and changing, rather than passive and static. Recall only that natural things, especially animals, are examples par excellence of Aristotelian Entities. Yet they not only change, they even move themselves to their own activities. In Aristotle’s view, the self-same squirrel, by its feeding activities, moves itself to its own growth while nevertheless remaining a single, enduring Entity. Leclerc writes: "The Aristotelian doctrine is that the physical existent, by virtue of its inherent activity, is necessarily involved in internal change, while . . . the denial of internal change in matter is the one feature of the modern conception of matter which has persisted until this century" (NPE 257f.).

Whitehead might also have found a clue to this in Ross’s Aristotle, with which we are certain that he was acquainted. In his chapter on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Ross explains:

"The substance is the whole thing," and its qualities are not something outside it but rather a part of itself -- that is exactly the point which Whitehead missed.

3. Conclusion

Insofar as Whitehead interpreted Aristotle’s theory of Entity as if it were practically indistinguishable from a Lockean or even a Cartesian notion of substance, he was simply and radically mistaken. Descartes’ definition of eremitical substances is not a "true derivative" of Aristotle’s statement that an Entity is never "present in another." And the (perhaps) Lockean notion of an anonymous stuff enduring without internal change beneath a transition of superficial qualities has nothing to do with Aristotle’s concept of Entity.

Whitehead’s withering attack on the Lockean type of substance-philosophy proves nothing, therefore, against the Aristotelian concept of Entity. Furthermore, of itself it furnishes no antecedent evidence whatever against the viability of at least some form of metaphysical system which would postulate a world of interrelated, dynamic Entities which endure in time as essentially self-identical individuals, which move themselves to their own activities, and which, precisely by themselves changing, change their accidental qualities over time.

References

AR -- W. D. Ross, Aristotle (New York: 1960).

BWA -- Richard McKeon (ed.), The Basic Works of Aristotle, trans. W. D. Ross (New York: 1941).

CAT -- J. L. Ackrill (trans.), Aristotle’s Categories and De Interpretatione (Oxford: 1963).

CM -- Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (Totowa, New Jersey: 1965).

DBAM -- Joseph Owens, C.Ss.R., The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics (Toronto: 1951).

MET -- Richard Hope (trans.), Aristotle: Metaphysics (Ann Arbor: 1952).

NPE -- Ivor Leclerc, The Nature of Physical Existence (London & New York: 1972).

RFP -- Charles Hartshorne, "Recollections of Famous Philosophers -- and Other Important Persons," Southern Journal of Philosophy, 8 (Spring, 1970), 67-82.

SCCW -- Leonard J. Eslick, "Substance, Change, and Causality in Whitehead," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 18 (June, 1958), 503-13; and Charles Hartshorne, "Whitehead on Process: A Reply to Professor Eslick," ibid., 514-20.

WTCS -- Ivor Leclerc, "Whitehead’s Transformation of the Notion of Substance," Philosophical Quarterly, 3 (July, 1953), 225-43.

Notes

I Metaphysics, Zeta, Ch. 1, 1028b2-4.

2 The other principal factors, as far as I can judge, are Zeno’s arguments (PR 68-70/106-08), and the tendency in modern science to view nature in terms of quanta (SMW, Ch. 8). If, as I think can he argued, neither of these considerations is a cogent argument against the Possibility of any sort of metaphysics of Entity, then the question of the validity of Whitehead’s rejection of Aristotle’s notion of substance takes on special importance. It may he the last substantial foundation, so to speak, of the modern anti-substance bias.

3Eslick points out that at the crucial passage in Process and Reality in which Whitehead says Descartes’ concept of substance is a true derivative from Aristotle’s, Whitehead refers the reader not to Aristotle’s Categories but to W. D. Ross’s book about Aristotle (SCCW 504). Partly for that reason I have in this essay used Ross’s own translations of Aristotle (in BWA).

4 PR 77f./ 119f. Leclerc points out (WTCS 225) that the notion of substance which Whitehead was most concerned to attack was that of Locke. It is also clear that Whitehead saw in Aristotle’s notion the clear forerunner of that of Locke, as well as that of Descartes. Leclerc in effect grants as much in his subsequent explanation (WTCS 225f. and n. 6).

5Categories, Ch. 2 (1a17-23). Confusion readily arises from this passage inasmuch as Aristotle here intermixes a linguistic relation (‘predicable of" a subject) with an ontological relation ("present in" a subject).

6 This relation to Plato was called to my attention by Professor Richard J. Blackwell of Saint Louis University, to whom I am also indebted for other suggestions concerning an earlier version of this essay.

Whitehead’s fall into metaphysics, it has been observed, began with his biting into the apple of induction (2). Has even this turned mealy and sour in his mouth, as Professor Gutting implies? Illuminating as Gutting’s criticisms are, I do not think they quite succeed in making the case he supposes.

The key to Whitehead’s understanding of the problem of induction and of its solution lies in his recognition of our direct experience of causal efficacy, that vector aspect of experience by which the immediate past is felt as imposing limitations on the present, and the present felt as making a difference to the future. In overlooking this dimension of immediate experience Hume rendered inductive inferences radically unsupportable. At the same time he reduced causality to a purely inferential, and in fact groundless, relation posited between observed events or their appearances. Whitehead, who is not given to exaggeration, asserted: it is impossible to overemphasize the point that the key to the process of induction, as used either in science or in our ordinary life, is to be found in the right understanding of the immediate occasion of knowledge in its full concreteness" (SMW 64). It should be noted that this right understanding of the vector characteristic of immediate experience is asserted to be "the key to the process of induction," not a solvent for the practical problems of inductive inference.

Professor Gutting does a real service in underlining the distinction between the metaphysical and the epistemological aspects of the inductive problem. Why then does he proceed to write off the importance of the metaphysical problem, as at the beginning of his second section where he explicitly equates the problem of induction with the epistemological problem? This move, however, enables him to state that acceptance of a theory of genuinely productive causality is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for a solution to the problem of induction. But clearly that is true only of the epistemological problem. One may grant Gutting’s point with regard to the epistemological problem without in the least admitting that causality is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for the metaphysical problem of induction.

Now the whole efficacy of our practical solutions to the epistemological problem rests ultimately on there being a valid metaphysical ground underlying them, namely, a describable causal efficacy given within experience. It is true that metaphysics cannot inform me whether you have laced my bread with arsenic, but it can provide rational grounds for thinking that if you haven’t, then I can expect from the bread the usual nourishment and the usual fattening carbohydrates. It may be a perplexing legal problem to discover who is the rightful heir of an estate, but the whole importance of the investigation rests on the existence of an underlying inheritance law which will make a real difference indeed to the legally declared heir.

By shifting the entire discussion to the likelihood of determining when "other things are equal," Gutting has neglected Bertrand Russell’s admonition to keep our eye on the interesting doubt about induction. In seeking our justification for thinking the sun will rise tomorrow, Russell suggests that a reply might first be given in terms of the laws of motion of rotating bodies, such as the Earth. Then he goes on to say: "Of course it might be doubted whether we are quite certain that there is nothing outside to interfere [Gutting’s "other things equal"], but this is not the interesting doubt. The interesting doubt is as to whether the laws of motion will remain in operation until tomorrow" (1:61).

Granted that it may be difficult, perhaps impossible, to ascertain that "other things are equal," the more fundamental question still remains: supposing that other things are equal, what justifies our expectation even then that the future event will turn out like the past? It is only by tacitly supposing that there is a positive answer to this latter question that it makes any sense to attempt to answer the former. Hume himself grants this in his Enquiry when, speaking of the present fact and that which is inferred from it, he says: "Were there nothing to bind them together, the inference would be entirely precarious" (Sect. IV, Part I). Why inquire whether there is arsenic on our bread if even without it we can have no legitimate expectations about what the bread will do for us? In fact, unless we face Russell’s interesting doubt then we cannot reasonably entertain any expectations about the effect of arsenic itself.

Whitehead’s technical solution of the metaphysical problem of induction amounts to a careful description in terms of his categorical scheme of that vector characteristic of lived experience alluded to earlier. We find that in our experience there are no radical discontinuities This experiential fact constitutes a necessary, though not a sufficient, condition for the availability of a solution to the epistemological problem. Every solution to the epistemological problem implies the continuity of the future with the present and the past. Whitehead’s theory of internal relatedness through causal prehensions makes speculative sense out of this continuity.

Finally, is it true, as Gutting contends, that there can exist metaphysical justifications of induction which are independent of any doctrine of causality or of internal relations? I suggest that any such supposed justifications (for instance, those Gutting cites of Keynes or of D. C. Williams) are effective only within a quantified, static view of temporal process, in which future events are taken as already in some sense defined, like marbles in a bag. Given certain suppositions about the randomness of our sampling, we may formulate statistical expectations about the color of the marbles still remaining in the bag. But future events are not defined like so many already-given marbles. The future grows creatively and continuously out of the present, and if it does not grow under causal constraints already operative and in principle discernible within the present, then our expectations about the character of the future are as groundless as Hume said they were.

References

1. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 1959.

2. Gregory Vlastos, "Whitehead, Critic of Abstractions," The Monist, 39 (1929), 170-203.

Rejoinder, by Gary Gutting

Let me begin by summarizing what seems to be a fairly wide area of agreement between Professor Felt and me. We seem to agree that the problem of induction is a problem of justifying inferences from what has happened in the past to what will happen in the future. As such, induction is a problem about what we can justifiably claim to know; this is why I term it an essentially epistemological problem. Of course what we can justifiably claim to know about the world will depend on what the world is like; therefore, I agree that the problem of induction has metaphysical aspects. Accordingly, I am willing to accept Felt’s suggestion that the metaphysical and the epistemological aspects of the problem of induction can be conveniently separated to give us two sub-problems: (1) How do we know that there are regularities in nature that persist through time (metaphysical aspect)? (2) Given a particular present event, how do we know which regularities are relevant to the prediction of its effects (epistemological aspect)? Felt admits that a doctrine of causal efficacy or internal relations is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a solution to (2). In turn, I admit that such a doctrine is sufficient (but not necessary) for solving (1). Actually I make this admission only on the condition that the relevant metaphysical theory itself be established in some satisfactory way that does not itself presuppose the legitimacy of inductive inference. In particular, I think Whitehead’s hypothetico-deductive version of metaphysical method makes him very liable to the charge of circularity in his attempt to justify induction.

However, I disagree with two of Felt’s basic claims: (a) the claim that (2) is an "uninteresting" problem; (b) the claim that a theory of causal efficacy via internal relations is a necessary condition for a solution of (1).

With regard to (a): The only ways a problem can be uninteresting is for the issue it raises to be of no significance or for its solution to be trivially simple. Since (2) is crucial for the justification of inductive inference, it cannot be called uninteresting as long as we regard the problem of induction as interesting. Indeed, it seems that Whiteheadians should find (2) particularly significant, since they so greatly emphasize the concrete particulars of a situation as opposed to abstractions from the situation. To minimize the significance of (2) is precisely to ignore the fact that the concrete locus of the problem of induction is the particular inductive inferences made by individuals. (I owe this comment to my colleague, Neil Delaney.) And if Professor Felt could show that the solution to (2) is trivially simple, I am sure he would have done so in his reply.

With regard to (b): Felt argues that any proposed justification of induction which did not employ a theory of causal efficacy or internal relations would fail because it could not take account of the fact that the future involves genuine novelty and hence cannot be presently defined as something already given. I agree that a satisfactory justification of induction must take account of the presently indeterminate, genuinely novel character of the future. But I do not see that he has shown that the sampling methods of probability theory (supplemented by minimal metaphysical assumptions about, say, random samples) are not capable of taking account of this aspect of the future. Surely, it is not true as Felt suggests that the use of sampling techniques must presuppose that future samples are already given in a completely determined way. For example, sampling techniques can be used to predict the probable behavior of children as yet unborn. In fact, even in the case of drawings of already-existing marbles from a bag, the real subject of the probabilistic inference is not the marbles in se but the as yet nonexistent and indeterminate drawings of marbles. The possibility of radically different behavior due to completely novel characters or circumstances is taken into account by the very fact that any predictions about the future are regarded as at best probable.

To summarize my position: Its most central claim is that (2) as well as (1) is an essential element of the problem of induction. Once this is granted, I claim (and Felt seems to agree) that metaphysical theories of causal efficacy and internal relations are neither necessary nor sufficient for a solution of the problem. Finally, the only relevance to the problem of induction that I see for metaphysical theories of causal efficacy and internal relations is that they may provide one way of finding a sufficient condition for the solution of sub-problem (1).

One of the most crucial issues underlying much of contemporary philosophy is the relation of philosophy and science. Phenomenologists and ordinary language philosophers come down hard on the side of there being a radical difference between these two modes of knowing while pragmatically inspired philosophers stress their continuity. The extremes of the spectrum axe probably marked by those who totally reserve the term "knowledge" for philosophical claims while relegating science to the realm of the conventional and the fictional, and those who run philosophy out of court while proclaiming that science is the measure of all things. Between these two extremes there are almost as many positions on this issue as there are philosophers who seriously reflect on it.

One of the most important gambits in this range is the Kantian and post-Kantian "appearance and reality" dichotomy. Herein, scientific claims are construed as merely phenomenal while those of speculative philosophy, if there are to be any, will be noumenal in nature. Inasmuch as Bergson sometimes talks this way, he is usually assimilated into this "appearance and reality" tradition. It is this assimilation against which I shall argue in this paper. Although Bergson does call scientific knowledge "relative" and philosophical knowledge "absolute," it will be my contention that it is fundamentally wrong to interpret this distinction in the Kantian spirit. When such is done not only is Bergson’s historical position radically misrepresented, but a position philosophically different from the Kantian is suppressed from the range of possible alternatives.

The locus classicus for the Kantian interpretation of Bergson’s position is the introductory paragraph of his Introduction to Metaphysics:

Throughout the course of this paper I shall argue that the proper interpretation of "relative" as it is used in this text bears not on the subjective notion of an object’s relation to a knower but on the objective factor of the object’s own relations. In other words, it is not Bergson’s point that science is relative rather than objective, but that it has to do with relations rather than essences.

The paper as divided into four parts. In the first I shall examine Bergson s specific attempt to disassociate himself from the Kantian tradition. In parts two and three I shall examine his particular analyses of the scientific and the philosophical ways of knowing respectively and in the fourth part his reintegration of them in a somewhat unified picture. In the conclusion I shall briefly sketch what I think are the major difficulties with his whole program.

I. Bergson on Kant

Far from claiming to be Kantian, Bergson at least claims to be diametrically opposed to the necessary relegation of human knowledge (either scientific or philosophical) to the sphere of the merely phenomenal. He is specifically concerned to disassociate himself from that dimension of Kantianism whereby there is no possibility of knowing the real structures of existing things, but only objects constituted by their relations to us. This radical restriction of all knowledge, Bergson contends, follows from an essentially fallacious presentation of certain philosophical problems. In an effort to restore knowledge to the sphere of the absolute, he gives three distinct (though related) refutations of Kantian relativism.

The first of these concerns the questions of the antinomies. According to Bergson. the unchecked speculations of the human mind, an essentially practical instrument, inevitably lead to philosophical problems which are and will remain insoluble because they are presented backwards. Kant rightly saw the problems to be insoluble; but precisely because he did not appreciate the error in their presentation, he arrived at the conclusion that all knowledge was relative and that the absolute was impossible of attainment. The Kantian arguments for the rejection of any absolute knowledge can be seen to dissolve, however, once the true cause of the antinomies is uncovered. This being accomplished, Bergson feels, it will be possible to recover human knowledge from the depths of relativism. The key is to appreciate the fact that the antinomies are not necessary but of man’s making: "They did not come from the things themselves but from an automatic transfer to speculation of habits contracted in action, and what a careless attitude of the intellect had done, an effort on the part of the intellect could undo; this for the human mind would be a liberation" (CM 71).

Bergson, however, obviously feels that the relativistic attitude toward knowledge is not so easily dispelled as this selection from Creative Mind might lead one to believe. He realized that although one of its proximate origins may lie in the antinomies, its roots in the Kantian philosophy go much deeper than this. In Creative Evolution he gives a more thorough analysis of the historical factors leading to Kantian relativism and the misunderstandings they involve.

He feels that the relativism of knowledge was implicitly contained in a confusion in scientific theory from the time of Galileo: "The idea of a science and of an experience entirely relative to the human understanding was therefore implicitly contained in the conception of a science, one and integral composed of laws: Kant only brought it to light" (CE 251). There are two factors involved in this conception: science is supposed to be uniquely one, and made up entirely of laws. Granting this description it can be argued that since a law is a relation, and a relation is essentially a comparison, it has objective reality only for an intelligence that represents to itself several terms at the same time. Hence, an experience made of laws, that is, of terms related to other terms, is an experience made of comparisons, which before we receive it. has already had to pass through an atmosphere of intellectuality (CE 2 1).

Bergson argues, however, that there is operative here a fundamental confusion between the generality of laws and that of genera. Though intelligence may be necessary to condition terms by relation to each other, we may conceive that in certain cases the terms themselves may exist independently. This being granted, there is a possibility of absolute knowledge:

In this paragraph he argues for the absolute character of both philosophical and scientific knowledge. One-half of our knowledge, the philosophical, can bear upon the absolute because it is not concerned with laws but with real genera. Even the other half, the scientific, is not completely relative because there is one aspect of reality which is geometrical and is the foundation for our mathematical laws. There are two distinct orders in reality and their confusion lies behind modern relativism.

This question of order brings Bergson to the third source of Kantian relativism, again founded on a misunderstanding. He maintains that the whole object of the Critique of Pure Reason is to explain how a particular order is superimposed on supposedly incoherent materials. Kant’s solution is that the mind imposes its form on the sensible manifold with the consequence that the order we find in things is the order which we ourselves put in them. This explanation has two results, both of which involve a "degradation" of human knowledge. Science would be legitimate but relative to our faculty of knowing, and metaphysics would be impossible since there would be no knowledge outside of science. Both conclusions subject the human mind to an unwarranted limitation. Bergson’s radical objection to this whole series of moves is that it rests on a positive idea of absolute disorder, an idea which he claims to be nonexistent. "Absolute disorder" is a mere expression by which one designates an oscillation of the mind between two different orders, in which case it is absurd to suppose that disorder logically and chronologically precedes order. The merit of Kantianism, for Bergson, has been to develop this natural illusion In all its consequences and to present it in systematic form. But it does rest on the illusion, and "once we dispel the illusion we immediately restore to the human mind, through science and through metaphysics, a knowledge of the absolute" (CM 65).

The Kantian analysis, however, is not without its value. It has an important negative role, inasmuch as it shows the direction which philosophy and science must follow if they are to avoid relativity. Kant prepared the way for a new philosophy which might have established itself on the grounds of a higher effort of intuition. Consciousness, by two darts of opposite direction, might be able to grasp from within and no longer perceive merely from without the two forms of reality, matter and mind. This twofold effort could enable us as far as possible to grasp the absolute. Moreover, "in the course of this operation, we should see intellect spring up of itself, cut itself out of the whole of mind, and intellectual knowledge would then appear as it is, limited but not relative" (CE 389). Hence, the Kantian analysis has a double negative yield. First, it points out the direction any scientific knowledge bearing upon the absolute would have to take. More importantly, however, it indicates the kind of knowing power necessary to make absolute metaphysical knowledge a possibility. Bergson considers this latter negative influence the greatest service Kant rendered to speculative philosophy: "He definitely established that if metaphysics is possible, it can be so only through an effort of intuition" (CM 140).

Such is Bergson’s analysis of Kantian relativism. A complete relativism of either mode of knowing, scientific or philosophical, he considers not only to be an unwarranted restriction of the human mind but also to be contrary to our fundamental experience. We know reality, not perfectly, not exhaustively, but reality nonetheless. Whatever partial knowledge we do have in either mode does have absolute value, does touch some real aspect of the world; for in the absolute we live and move and have our being. The knowledge we possess of it is incomplete, no doubt, but neither external nor relative: "it is reality itself, in the profoundest meaning of the word, that we reach by the combined and progressive development of science and philosophy" (CE 218).

Bergson, then, explicitly claims to be profoundly un-Kantian However, it is one thing for him to say this and quite another to give a philosophical account of its possibility. In the next section of this paper each of the two modes of knowing will be treated positively in order to indicate their particular objective referents and the claim concerning their absolute value. While he does maintain that both science and philosophy bear upon absolute reality, Bergson would be the first to uphold the fact that they are radically different ways of knowing radically different aspects of reality. Science and philosophy differ, then, both in object and in method. The object and method of science are inert matter and intellectual analysis, while those of philosophy are real duration and intuition. The two different ways of knowing bear upon two different aspects of the absolute. This will be brought out more dearly as we examine in a more positive and specific manner, first science, and then philosophy.

II. Scientific Knowledge

Science is essentially a function of the human intellect. i.e. discursive reason, and the intellect is essentially an instrument of action. Bergson maintains that the defining function of our intellect, as the evolution of life has fashioned it, is to be a light for our conduct, to make ready for our action on things. Its role is to foresee in a given situation the events favorable or unfavorable, which may follow thereupon. Thus, it instinctively selects in a given situation whatever is like something already known, and in applying the principle that "like produces like," tries to get some prevision of future states. This pragmatic nature of the intellect tells us something about the objects with which it deals. The essential function of intelligence is therefore to see the way out of a difficulty in any circumstances whatever, to find out what is most suitable, what answers best the questions asked. Hence, "it bears essentially on the relations between a given situation and the means of utilizing it. . . . Where activity is directed toward manufacture, there knowledge necessarily bears on relations" (CE 166). Intellectual knowledge, then, is essentially rational. It is that way of knowing a thing which proceeds "by going all around it," by relating it to other known reference points, rather than by "entering into it" (CM 159). And scientific knowledge is a function of this intellect. Science carries this faculty to its highest possible degree of exactitude and precision, but it does not alter its essential character (CE 34). Science, then, will be a relational analysis of reality.

Since it is the function of the intellect, and accordingly science, to grasp relations, the obvious point to be examined is the nature of these relations. Here Bergson issues an initial caution. The shift from a consideration of science as essentially relational to a consideration of science as merely relative is easily made once we start considering the intellect as a speculative faculty. We would then be tempted to take the general categories of the understanding for something absolute and inexplicable whose function would be some sort of unification (CE 167). In this context knowledge would become relative. If the intellect proceeds as it does simply because of a drive for unification, then the whole of our knowledge would seem to be relative to certain requirements of the mind that might have been entirely different from what they are. Then the claim would be made -- for an intellect differently shaped, knowledge would have been different. Thus, intellect being no longer dependent on anything, everything becomes dependent on it; and so, having placed the understanding too high, we end by putting too low the knowledge it gives us. On Bergson’s account, then, knowledge becomes relative as soon as the intellect is made a kind of absolute (CE 168).

This relativistic conclusion can be avoided, he maintains, if we retain a proper view of intellect, i.e., as a tool for action rather than of pure speculation. If the intellectual form of man has been gradually modeled on the reciprocal actions and reactions of certain bodies and their material environment, if it is a mechanism of adjustment, how could it not reveal to us something of the very structure of these bodies? If we refer to this active pragmatic role of the intellect in the world, a role which does issue in success inasmuch as it does enable us to handle the real, it seems to follow that the relations the intellect deals with are real aspects of the world. Bergson will admit that a mind born to speculate or to dream might deform or transform the real or perhaps even create it. But, "an intellect bent upon the act to be performed and the reaction to follow, feeling its object so as to get its mobile impression at every instant, is an intellect that touches something of the absolute" (CE xxi). There seems to be a sort of communion of intellect and reality evidenced by the fact of fruitful action. The objects of the intellect -- these relations -- must be aspects of reality because in dealing with them the intellect meets with success.

Even more so than in individual actions is this evidenced by the great success of science, which is but intellect in macrocosmic proportions. The operations by which science isolates and explains a system cannot be altogether artificial. If it had no objective foundation, we could not explain why it is dearly indicated in some cases and impossible in others (CE 13). These do seem to be the facts of experience -- the experience of successful action. They indicate that although science is relational, it is not relative. Bergson realizes, however, that this is hardly an explanation, but rather a fact of experience that calls for an explanation. It remains for him to outline the ontological structures that make possible the absolute value of such relational analysis.

Having put aside relativism, Bergson is now faced with the task of providing some sort of ontological guarantee of the correspondence of the structures of the intellect and at least some aspect of reality. He finds this guarantee in the dynamics of evolution:

Hence, between the logical structures of mind and the structures of matter there exists a harmony, proceeding not from any imposition of divine authority, but from the working out of the evolutionary process itself. The correspondence of the intellect and material reality does not have to be mysterious; it is due to their simultaneous genesis.

Bergson never tires of insisting that man is not something outside the stream of evolution but is himself a product of it, with the result that theory of knowledge and theory of life are inseparable. The one analysis of evolution will illumine both. It is, then, with a certain confidence that he attempts the rather prodigious task of explaining the simultaneous engendering of intelligence and material bodies: ~we are now, then, to attempt the genesis of intellect at the same time as the genesis of material bodies -- two enterprises that are evidently correlative if it be true that the main lines of our intellect mark out the general form of our action on matter, and that the detail of matter is ruled by the requirements of our action" (CE 2040. Thus, intellectuality and materiality have been constituted, in detail, by reciprocal adaption; both are derived from a wider and higher form of existence. Bergson imaginatively replaces them in this context in order to "explain" their genesis.

On the basis of empirical analyses Bergson maintains that in the cosmological order there are two main currents, the organic and the inorganic, and that in the gnoseological order there are also two clearly defined powers, instinct (intuition being instinct become conscious) and intelligence (CE 203). Each of these dualisms (organic-inorganic, instinct-intelligence) derived from a more fundamental source; in the first case, the primordial flux, and in the second case, consciousness (CE 204). Ultimately, as soon as we abandon the prejudice that man is exempted from the implications of evolution, the flux and consciousness become identified as the one fundamental source of all reality. From this primal force, then, the same process has cut out both matter and intellect simultaneously, thus accounting for their evident agreement and defining their particular characteristics.

At the origin and heart of reality, then, is a creative impulse, and materiality is but an interruption of this movement. Matter is not another positive force, but the result of the "retardation" and consequent "extension" of the original impetus (CE 262). He says:

Hence, the same movement by which the vital force materializes itself, i.e., breaks itself up into objects excluding one another, brings the mind to form itself into intellect, i.e., into distinct concepts excluding one another. And the more matter is spatialized, the more consciousness is intellectualized. Moreover, this distention of the creative impulse involves a natural mathematical ordering of the extension, to which there corresponds the natural geometrization of the mind. Herein lies the ground of the absolute value of scientific analysis. There is a mathematical order in reality, a real spatialization, corresponding to the mathematical relations our intellect sets up. There is a correspondence because both factors have been simultaneously generated by "distention," and confirmed by interaction. It is this which is the ontological foundation of science’s success: "Its success would be inexplicable, if the movement which constitutes materiality were not the same movement which, prolonged by us to its end. that is to say, to homogeneous space, results in making us count, measure. follow in their respective variations terms that are functions one of another" (CE 239). The intellect naturally tends toward space and mathematics, intellectuality and materiality being of the same nature and having been produced in the same way. This retardation of the creative forte, then, has a spatializing or mathematical effect on part of reality, and consequently on part of the mind. The absolute value and the success of a science of mathematical form is understandable inasmuch as matter already possesses everything necessary to adapt itself to our formulae (CE 240).

But has Bergson really proved too much? If reality has an inherent mathematical structure, and mans intellect is naturally geometrical, should not science be a complete and exhaustive account of reality? In accounting for the absolute character of scientific knowledge, hasn’t be eliminated the need for any other kind of explanation? Nothing could be further from Bergson’s mind. Two very important factors in his thought militate against drawing such a conclusion: first, the degree of correspondence he admits between the intellect and materiality; and secondly, the fact that it is only materiality that the intellect has reference to.

In the first place, he maintains that there is a certain correspondence between the intellect and inert matter, but not a congruity. Material reality does not go quite as far in this direction of isolation and geometrization as the intellect would have it go. Matter has a tendency to constitute isolated systems that can be treated geometrically, but it is only a tendency. Matter does not go to the end, and the isolation is never complete. If science does go to the end and isolate completely, it is for the convenience of study (CE 13). Intellect is very much in tune with matter, and this is why Bergson will even say that the physics and metaphysics of inert matter are very near each other. They are very near but they are not identical. Science, aspiring to the mathematical form, over-accentuates the spatiality of matter; its formulae are too precise and constantly in need of remaking. It is not the case of there being a definite system of mathematical laws at the base of nature, but rather the fact that mathematics represents simply the side to which matter inclines (CE 240). There seems to be some surd element (surd as far as science is concerned) even in material reality that makes it fall short of the absolute isolation and geometrization of the intellect and of science. This surd, of course, is the residual influence of the ever-present creative force whose retardation is matter.

This brings me to the second, and most important, restriction of science mentioned above. Science bears on reality itself; it has absolute value, but only with reference to the domain of inert matter. With regard to the fundamental principle in reality, the original creative force, science can have at best a completely relative value. It can and does treat this area of movement and life, but it necessarily treats it as if it were inert. In this instance, "the knowledge we arrive at becomes altogether relative to our faculty of action; it is no more than a symbolic verity" (CE 214). Hence, the intellect, and accordingly science, can never attain any knowledge of the life force as it is in itself. It can never have any absolute knowledge of the positive, creative current in reality. This latter is strictly the sphere of intuition and philosophy.

III. Philosophical Knowledge

Bergson insists that philosophy is not just generalized science. There were and are those who would maintain that the effort of the philosopher should be to embrace in one great synthesis the results of the particular sciences. His task would be to take possession of existing science and bring it to increasing degrees of generality, and to proceed from condensation to condensation, to what has been called the unification of knowledge (CM 122). This conception of philosophy Bergson feels to be injurious both to science and to philosophy. In the first place, this view of philosophy, proposed in the name of science and out of respect for science, is really quite insulting to the latter:

The philosopher is, in effect, saying that the scientist is sort of an under laborer who can’t see even the more general scientific implications of what he’s doing, and must wait for the philosopher to generalize his results. Bergson feels that this whole outlook depreciates science. The scientist is certainly able to forge ahead and generalize his results; he has no need for the philosopher in this properly scientific task.

Secondly such a conception is degrading to philosophy. It should be clear, Bergson argues, that the reason why the scientist stops at a certain point along the road of generalization and synthesis is because beyond that point objective evidence and sure reasoning do not permit us to advance. Hence, in claiming to go farther in the same direction, the philosopher automatically implies that he is making arbitrary generalizations that go beyond the scope of the evidence: "To make of philosophy an ensemble of generalities which goes beyond scientific generalization, is to insist that the philosopher be content with the plausible" (CM 123). But Bergson maintains that such is hardly the lot of philosophy. It is not to be relegated to the merely plausible over-extension of the evidence, for philosophy is not a synthesis of particular sciences but a unique way of knowing reality.

It will be recalled that Bergson has maintained that reality itself is not simple, but is made up of two opposing currents, one being Just the negation or condensation of the other. Moreover, it is only with regard to the negative current, the sphere of inert matter, that science has any absolute value. When extended and applied to the positive principle of reality, science has only relative value inasmuch as it cannot absolutely lay hold of the real, but must "run around it" with its various symbolic interpretations. This positive aspect of reality -- duration, life, spirit, the creative impetus itself -- which is outside the grasp of science, is the real objective of philosophy. Just as science is at home in the sphere of inert matter, so philosophy is at home in the sphere of life. Each inquiry pertains to a different aspect of reality.

Moreover, not only does philosophy have its own distinct object, but obviously will demand a distinct method consonant with it. For as we saw earlier, the intellect is attuned to inert matter; and in the face of any instance of the creative aspect of the real, it can but "run around it" without ever grasping its reality. The method of philosophy, then, must be something different from this intellectual analysis; it must be a way of knowing that enables us to sympathize with the real, to be transported into it and coincide with it, instead of going all around it with our conceptual frameworks (CM 161). This Bergson calls intuition. And he concludes: "to metaphysics, then, we assign a limited object, principally spirit, and a special method, mainly intuition" (CM 37).

But what guarantee have we that this type of knowledge, this intuition, is possible? Putting aside the question of an intuition of things external for a moment, Bergson assures us that we have one fundamental intuition which is both clear and certain -- the intuition of our own internal duration. It is in terms of this primary instance, in fact, that intuition is defined: intuition is the direct vision of the mind by the mind -- nothing intervening, no refraction through the prism; it signifies first of all consciousness, but immediate consciousness, a vision that is scarcely distinguishable from the object seen, a knowledge which is contact and even coincidence" (CM 32). This claim of assurance with regard to the possibility of intuition, however, seems to greatly restrict the scope of philosophy. In view of this fundamental meaning of intuition, philosophy should be and is primarily defined as a "science of the mind" (CM 79). But philosophy so defined seems to be locked within the confines of human subjectivity, and hence unable to shed any light on the structure of reality in general. There doesn’t seem to be any ground for the extension of this absolute knowledge of the positive current in reality beyond the sphere of our own internal duration.

But again Bergson reminds us of evolution. We are not isolated from this cosmic process but are an element in it, and our internal duration is but an instance of that creative current that is running through all reality. Hence, since our duration is in communion with the positive current in all reality, our intuition is not so circumscribed as originally thought:

This is the ontological structure that makes possible the absolute value of philosophical knowledge. On this basis it is possible to make the inference: "Such is my inner life and such also is life in general" (CE 281). Through intuition we can come into contact with and enter into that aspect of reality that is beyond the scope of science, the creative impulse itself in all its manifestations.

While this framework does claim to render possible the absolute value of a philosophical knowledge of external reality, it might be objected that it goes too far. If we are able to attain this intuition of our own duration, and this puts us in immediate contact with the durational current that is running through all reality, why isn’t our philosophy complete? It would seem that such an intuitional philosophy would completely mirror the positive aspect of reality. But again Bergson has a ready answer. He concedes that if this intuitional state could be sustained, we could attain this complete and exhaustive philosophy: intuition, if it could be prolonged beyond a few instants, would not only make the philosopher agree with his own thought, but also all philosophers with each other. . . . The object of philosophy would be reached if this intuition could be sustained and generalized" (CE 260f).

Unfortunately, however, such a sustained intuition does not seem to be possible. Man is not the vital current itself, hut this current already loaded down with matter. All that seems within his power is the attainment of a few "fleeting intuitions, which light up their object only at distant intervals" (CE 292). The good part of his philosophy is still made up of dialectic, which has both advantages and disadvantages. It does enable intuition to break itself up into concepts and so be communicated to other men, but it also introduces a certain arbitrary note into philosophical knowledge. But such is man’s lot -- his philosophy (to use Bergson’s image) is like a tornado that touches solid ground only at distant intervals. Its life blood is intuition, but it is an intuition which is infrequently achieved and almost impossible to sustain. Hence, we can not expect of philosophy an exhaustive knowledge of reality of even absolute certitude: "In the realm of experience, on the contrary, with incomplete solutions and provisional conclusions it will achieve an increasing probability which can ultimately become the equivalent of certitude" (CM 45f). Such, then, is the object, method and limit of philosophical knowledge.

IV. Interrelationship of Science and Philosophy

To the degree that we have treated these two modes of knowing, science and philosophy, in isolation from one another, we have been untrue to the Bergsonian spirit. Neither operates in a vacuum but in the context of the other. Having seen the characteristics of each, we must now indicate their interrelationships and interdependences in order to appreciate his integral view of human knowing.

In the first place, philosophy does have a certain dependence upon science. In addition to the liberating view Bergson takes of technology, which would be an extrinsic contribution, science does play a role intrinsic to the working out of philosophy itself. The philosopher does not work in a void; even a cursory glance at the history of philosophy would point out that the masters of modern philosophy have been men who had assimilated all the material of the sciences of their time. Moreover, Bergson insists that the partial eclipse of metaphysics since the last half century has been caused more than anything else by the extraordinary difficulty the philosopher experiences today in making contact with a science already much too scattered (CM 200). In this spirit Bergson insists that "Metaphysics can not get along without the other sciences" (CM 168).

Nowhere is this dependence closer than in areas such as psychology and biology. Even the direct contact of the self with the self, the primary instance of intuition must be preceded by a great number of psychological analyses. The point is made even more forcefully with regard to evolution. If Spencer had begun by putting to himself the question of the hereditability of acquired characteristics, his evolutionism would, no doubt, have taken an altogether different form (CE 87). In this regard Bergson counsels the philosopher: "Nowhere is it clearer that philosophers cannot today content themselves with vague generalities, but must follow the scientists in experimental detail and discuss the results with them" (CE 87). And this points up one area wherein the philosopher would do well to emulate the scientist. In sharp contrast to philosophical theories, the scientific explanation gives evidence of a great deal of control and precision on the part of the scientist. This precision in fitting the explanation to the evidence should be carried over into philosophy: "The only explanation we should accept as satisfactory is one which fits tightly to its object with no space between them, no crevice in which any other explanation might equally well be lodged; one which fits the object only and to which alone the object lends itself" (CM 11). Then philosophy could progress.

Even more so, however, is science impregnated with metaphysical intuition. While science does tend to mold reality in fixed and static frameworks, the history of this very science itself is a series of creative advances forward, and these are the workings of intuition. Bergson’s favorite example of this is the ; introduction of the calculus: "It is my belief, in fact, that the idea of differential, or rather, fluxion, was suggested to science by a vision of this kind; metaphysical in its origins, it became scientific as it grew more rigorous, that is, expressible in static terms" (CM 33). It was an instance of creative intuition that suggested this substitution of a mathematics of becoming for the mathematics of the ready-made. It is true, Bergson admits, that it has been able to realize its marvelous applications only through the invention of certain symbols, and that, if the intuition we have just mentioned is at the origin of the invention, it is the symbol alone that intervenes in the application (CM 190f). But this is the way intuition operates in science: it effects certain creative break-throughs but then is immediately covered over by the static or symbolic translation of them. It is present, but it is "stopped up." Occasionally it breaks through, and then science takes another stride forward to its next stop.

Bergson concludes, then, that science and philosophy need an intuition. A truly intuitive philosophy would realize the union so greatly desired of mathematics and science:

In such an interaction, all our knowledge, both scientific and metaphysical, would be heightened; and the extent of our absolute knowledge greatly increased. Both aspects of reality would be within our grasp by the combined and progressive development of science and philosophy. Both ways of knowing commune in experience, which, together, they explain.

Conclusion

We have seen that Bergson not only maintains an irreducible dualism of the ways of knowing but also the absolute character of both. Both science and philosophy proceed by different methods and bear upon different aspects of the real; through the combined efforts of both we can grasp to some degree the material and immaterial dimensions of reality. Thus, in Bergson we have a position with regard to the relation of philosophy and science which is somewhere toward the middle of the spectrum sketched at the beginning of this paper. There remains, of course, the philosophically important question of its viability.

It seems to me that the Bergsonian position is radically vulnerable to several interrelated criticisms that have their origin in the work of C. S. Peirce and which have become almost contemporary commonplaces. On the most general level the target would be his designation of intuition as the primary source of philosophical understanding. In a set of papers belatedly gaining recognition as philosophical classics, Peirce submitted the concept of intuition to a sustained critique.¹ His contention was threefold. First, even if we have intuitions we have no intuitive power of distinguishing an intuition from another cognition, thus nullifying their alleged role in grounding knowledge. Secondly, in fact we don’t have intuitions. And thirdly, neither scientific nor philosophical knowledge depends on our having them.

Toward establishing the first point Peirce puts forward a whole battery of arguments of differing texture. If we did have such a power of intuitively distinguishing our intuitions from other cognitions, surely there would be reasonable agreement among men as to which cognitions are intuitive; but, of course, history attests to the contrary. Moreover, the general psychological fact of perceptual supplementation renders it impossible in concrete to distinguish sharply between what we have seen and what we have inferred. From these and other considerations it seems to follow that even if we have intuitions, we have no power of intuitively distinguishing them from our other cognitions. On the second point Peirce argues in the Kantian spirit that all knowledge is interpretation, or, that there is no premise that is not itself a conclusion. In answer to the infinite regress objection that there must be a first, Peirce maintains that knowing is a process, processes are continuous, and continuous series do not have first members. To establish his third point Peirce invokes the pragmatic shift of concern from origins to consequences and argues that knowledge is justified not because it has an absolute foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy though not all at once.

Specifically, Peirce goes after the positing of an intuitive knowledge of the self. Here he attacks not only the strong claim of an intuition of the self but even the more mitigated claim of an introspective knowledge thereof. His argument is that the positing of such an intuition or introspection is unnecessary because all the facts of self-knowledge can be explained given only known faculties operating under conditions known to exist.

He argues that the knowledge of the self arises only in and by means of social interaction; specifically, as an hypothesis to account for ignorance and error. As the child becomes aware of ignorance it is necessary to suppose a self in which this ignorance can inhere, and the dawning of error can be explained only by supposing a self which is fallible. On this account self-knowledge is always in fact inferential, but the inferences have become so habitual to us that it has the appearance of an immediate intuition. He goes on further to argue against an introspective knowledge of the self. Introspection is actually a weaker claim than intuition since it involves not a total lack of mediation but simply a direct knowledge of the internal world not derived from external observation. But Peirce argues that since knowledge involves classification, and classification the possibility of significant identification and reidentification, and such identification is possible only with regard to publicly accessible objects, it follows that our classificatory predicates apply primarily to external objects and only in a derived or parasitic sense to internal objects. Our knowledge of ourselves is, then, not introspective but dependent on external observation

Now the obvious Bergsonian objection to this whole line of reasoning is that Peirce’s arguments are telling only against the claim to have an intuitive knowledge which is at the same time conceptual. But Bergson’s point, it will be argued, is that there is genuinely non-conceptual knowledge. i.e., knowledge by acquaintance. This objection, while in a sense appropriate, brings to the fore many of the difficulties Peirce is worried about. To the degree that Bergson comes down hard on the non-conceptual character of intuition, to that degree intuition seems to lack the determinateness needed to enable it to function epistemically in grounding or falsifying metaphysical claims or at least as revealing the appropriateness or inappropriateness of certain metaphors. On the other hand, to the degree that the intuition is determinate enough to function metaphysically in this fashion, it would seem to have to be conceptual and thus subject to the above critique.

Moreover, these criticisms of Peirce are of more than simply historical interest -- they have become the truisms of contemporary philosophy. In contemporary terms, Bergson’s general adherence to intuition would be seen as a paradigm case of "the myth of the given" and his specific intuition of the self as committing him to either pre-linguistic knowledge or the possibility of a private language. This, of course, is not to say that Bergson is wrong, but it is to say that this whole cluster of problems surrounding Bergson’s doctrine of intuition will have to be cleared up for his position to earn a contemporary hearing.

References

CE -- Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Mitchell. New York: Modern Library, 1944.

CM -- Henri Bergson, Creative Mind, trans. Andison. New York: Philosophical Library, 1946.

N o t e s

1The papers referred to are "Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man" and "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities" in volume five of C. S. Peirce: Collected Papers, edited by C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, l931-35.)

In an article which appeared some time ago Frank M. Doan sought to determine the precise nature of Whitehead’s revised metaphysical language and to appraise its effectiveness both as a mode of explanation and as a vehicle of philosophic imagination. Included in that discussion was a presentation in four steps of Whitehead’s method of deriving the technical vocabulary of his system. (2:605-22) But the article lacked any specification of the distinct criteria which guided Whitehead in the derivation of that terminology. I propose in this article to supply that lack by exhibiting that there are at least six such criteria which can be inferred from those passages in his writings where he reflects upon his choice of key terms. I shall also discuss the rationale for the criteria and comment on the importance of taking them into account when evaluating Whitehead’s way of using language for metaphysical purposes.

The criteria can be listed as follows:

1. The terms chosen ought to have associations with the language used by philosophers in the past.

2. It is desirable that the meanings given to the terms for philosophical purposes should have some justification in the etymologies of the terms.

3. The terms should have about them the suggestiveness of familiar facts or concrete exemplifications in experience.

4. The terms ought to be sufficiently general or inclusive in their ordinary meanings to admit of the further extensions of meaning required for their use in the scheme.

5. The terms ought to be devoid, so far as is possible, of misleading associations or implications.

6. Where a term is inadequate when taken by itself, but it is still desirable to make use of it, it must be complemented with approximately equivalent terms which can help to make up its deficiency.

I

Criterion one: the need for associations with the language of past philosophers. In a book written after Process and Reality Whitehead shows himself to be well aware of the familiar charge that he is guilty of arbitrarily inventing new words or capriciously "redesigning" old words to suit his purposes, without due regard for the proprieties of linguistic usage. One of his responses to this charge is to note that his "nomenclature has been made to conform to the condition that, as a theory develops, its technical phraseology should grow out of the usage of the great masters who laid its foundations." (AI 30l)¹ This amounts to a statement of the first criterion that I have listed.

Whitehead’s way of utilizing this first criterion can be illustrated by reference to the terms ‘prehension’ and ‘actua1 entity’. He selects ‘prehension’ as a derivative of the word apprehension."² on the model of two terms given prominence by Leibniz: ‘perception’ and ‘apperception’. By use of these terms Leibniz sought to give expression to the view, quite congenial to Whitehead’s way of thinking, that every real thing in the universe has an experiential character involving a mental aspect (‘perception’), and that human self-consciousness (‘apperception’) is but one manifestation of this pervasive mental aspect. But the trouble with Leibniz’s terms is that they both suggest consciousness (by association with their meanings in ordinary discourse) and, more fundamentally, that they are entangled with Leibniz’s doctrine of representative perception, which Whitehead is anxious to reject. By its reminiscent affinity with Leibniz’s terms, ‘prehension’ can convey something of the spirit and intent of the Leibnizian metaphysics, some features of which Whitehead took to be illuminating and important. But its difference from those terms guards it against suggesting the errors of the earlier thinker. Thus the meaning of the technical term ‘prehension’ is partly fixed by comparison and contrast with the meaning of similar terms used in a past philosophical system. (Al 300)

The term ‘actual entity’ is used by Whitehead to designate the irreducible units of reality in his metaphysical pluralism. This term, although in a sense artificial, is one possible translation into English of Descartes’ phrase res vera. Whitehead wants to make central in his own system the idea of that fullness of existence with respect to which everything else is a derivative or an abstraction (cf. the ‘ontological principle’). And he finds this idea implicit in Descartes use of the two terms res vera and ‘substance’ in the Meditations. The term ‘substance’ carries with it too much of the substance-attribute metaphysics to be useful for the organic philosophy. But res vera can serve as a substitute and, translated as ‘actual entity’, can grasp the germ of truth in Descartes’ doctrine of substance. So again, Whitehead seeks by his selection of terms to maintain a sense of continuity with his philosophic predecessors, but also to suggest important ways in which his outlook differs from theirs. (PR viii-ix, 108, 116)³

But why is the maintenance of this sense of continuity important for him? One answer is that he wants his metaphysical idiom to evoke the dialogue of philosophy with its past, to serve as a constant reminder that current philosophy is indebted to and builds upon the work of those who have gone before. Another answer is that he is simply considering the nature of his audience. Most of those who will be inquiring into his thought will be trained philosophers, familiar with the history and literature of their discipline. And if he is going to communicate effectively to them the novel insights and perspectives of his system, he must do so in terms that will strike a responsive chord. But if this is his concern, why not just use the phraseology fashionable in the philosophy of his own day? Why resort to a "redesigned" idiom at all?

Whitehead’s response to this question is twofold. First, the current stock of terms is too restrictive. It can embody only a very "small selection from the total vocabulary of the philosophic tradition." (AI 301) If he were to employ only those terms presently in vogue, he reasons that he would cut himself off from the much wider universe of discourse afforded by the voluminous literature of philosophy’s past with its rich diversity of modes of expression. He wants to achieve the virtue of effective communication to his fellow philosophers while at the same time avoiding the vice of that narrow and ephemeral quality which often attaches to systems couched exclusively in the jargon of their time. He wants also to make quite explicit by his careful selection of terms the many useful analogies to his way of thinking which he finds in the tradition taken as a whole.

Second, he is convinced that every selection of terms is dictated by certain root philosophic assumptions and is intimately bound up with the outlook growing out of those assumptions. To be content with the stock of terms fashionable among philosophers of his time would have been to acquiesce more or less uncritically in the fundamental features of their viewpoint. But he desires to avoid precisely that; he seeks to offer a distinctively different philosophical perspective. Therefore, he feels constrained to clothe his system in a vocabulary deliberately tailored to his own assumptions and outlook. But in order to achieve this, he need not deny himself the semantic resources available in the philosophical literature as such. He need only be selective, drawing upon the portions of that literature which have affinities with his approach and which can yield a phraseology suited to its expression.

But just how successfully can Whitehead communicate with terms chosen in this manner? Clearly, there are some sorts of people with whom he will have little or no success. For example, he will not succeed with those not well versed in the history of philosophy, since the allusions he intends to generate with his terms will be lost on such persons. Nor is he likely to succeed with philosophers who think it essential that philosophy make a clean break with its past, because the technique of alluding to the language of traditional philosophy is specifically meant to imply a continuity with the past and a basic sympathy with its concerns.

Again, he will not communicate effectively with those who are convinced that philosophical discourse ought to be of the sort readily translatable into an ideal logical language or with those who conceive of technical philosophical terms as ones pared down to exact and unequivocal meanings with no hint of metaphorical variability. For although he strives to use his terms with systematic consistency, it can be seen from this first criterion and others yet to be discussed that Whitehead does not want his terms to be so precisely defined as to be deprived of a certain suggestive vitality. The idea apparently is that the terms shall not merely stand for concepts but also evoke a consciousness. The meanings they (or ones similar to them) had in the discourse of earlier philosophers are intended to haunt and permeate the meanings they have in the contexts and usage of Whitehead’s system. The result is a new nexus of meaning but with a ferment of old associations. A tension is set up between similarities and dissimilarities of the new and old meanings, and the terms gain a metaphorical thrust.⁴

II

Criterion two: the rule that the philosophical use of a term have some justification in that term’s etymology or root meaning. By this second criterion Whitehead also seeks to give an allusive energy to his terms. The allusions this time turn upon the images and associations implicit in the etymologies of words. The criterion can be illustrated and discussed in connection with two Whiteheadian terms: ‘concrescence’ and ‘superject’, the first a dictionary word, the second a term of Whitehead’s own devising. He uses ‘concrescence’ to signify the process whereby many component prehensions are brought into the novel unity of a single throb of experience. It is the act of becoming which constitutes the being of the actual entity. The etymological meaning of the word, "a growing together," makes it especially apt for the expression of this idea. And he reasons that its suitability is even further enhanced by the fact that it shares a common root with the word "concrete." For in his philosophy individual concrescent acts are the final concrete realities of the world. Or as he states it, ‘concrescence’ is that "ultimate entry into the concrete, in abstraction from which there is mere non-entity." (PR 321; AI 303)

‘Superject’ is a coined term based on the word "subject." The etymological meaning of "subject" is "a laying or placing under," and that of ‘superject’ is similar: "a laying or placing over." Given this etymology, ‘superject’ can serve to suggest the element of self-transcendence in the notion of an actual entity, the fact that its component ‘feelings’ aim at the end of their unification as ‘feeler’. For Whitehead the ‘superjective’ sense of ‘feeler’ is not that of subjective entertainment of feelings but rather that of the actual entity as ‘objectified’, i.e., as efficacious for future concrescences. Self-transcendence in the entity, therefore, is the transcendence of its own subjective immediacy that is inevitably brought about by its drive to become a distinct unit of experience. There is, of course, no ‘substance’ as such in Whitehead’s metaphysics, no prior unchanging thing undergoing various adventures of attribution. He does make frequent use of the term ‘subject’, but he asks that it be regarded as shorthand for the coordinate term ‘subject-superject’, this latter term serving as a constant reminder that "an actual entity feels as it does feel in order to be the actual entity which it is." (PR 339)

The question is bound to arise at this point: why did Whitehead feel the need to devise an artificial term like ‘superject’? Such a question would need to be answered for each case of Whitehead’s resorting to an odd term. But let us see what kind of explanation could be offered for the choice of ‘superject’, and how the two criteria we have so far discussed could be said to enter into that choice. It might be objected that Whitehead could have gotten his meaning across just as well with some term from ordinary language such as ‘feeler’, in which case he would not have needed to invent the term ‘superject’. Why, then, did he invent it?

We can only speculate about what Whitehead’s answer to this question might have been, but these responses come to mind. (i) The alternate term mentioned lacks the suggestion of self-transcendence carried by the prefix ‘super’, showing the importance of the etymological criterion. (ii) The alternate term cannot be as readily associated, for purposes of comparison and contrast with the term ‘substance’ in the traditional language of philosophy. (iii) The coordinate term ‘subject-superject’ can serve as a more obvious foil to the traditional ‘substance-attributes’ than ‘feelings-feeler’ could. It should be apparent that the second and third of these responses is intimately connected with the first criterion. (iv) ‘Superject’ does not confuse the issue by suggesting conscious entertainment of feelings in the way that ‘feeler’ might. Implicit here is criterion number five, to be discussed later. (v) Were a term like ‘subject-feeler’ to be used, it would not express with the same symmetry the inseparability of feelings and the feeler in the concept of an actual entity.

Considerations like these are admittedly subtle, and any one of them taken by itself would perhaps not be justification for the coining of a new term. But together they do help to make a case for the devising of a new term to do a job that no single existing term can do quite as well. The subtlety of the considerations emphasizes the delicate care given by Whitehead to the development of his technical vocabulary, a care made appropriate by the elusive and initially strange character of concepts like ‘superject’. What cannot be simply and directly stated can at least be adumbrated, and the etymological element is made an important tool in the adumbrative art.

III

Criterion three: the importance of obtaining terms which can suggest familiar facts or common exemplifications in experience. When Whitehead talks about finding terms in accordance with this criterion (PR 49), he has in mind, more often than not, the facts and experiences associated with human self-awareness. He does not associate concretion with the seemingly dead and inert "material objects" of sense observation. For in his philosophy, as is well known, inertness is an illusion, and the static data of sense are high-level abstractions. This puts his conception of fact and concretion very close to that of the phenomenologists and at a rather far remove from that of the behaviorists. The alpha and omega of the organic philosophy could be said to be contained in the following passage, in which Whitehead directs our attention to the pivotal importance of the experience of our derivation from the immediate past of a quarter of a second ago.

It is obvious that the articulation of such concepts will require a vocabulary drawn, in large measure, from the stock of terms in ordinary language which grow out of self-awareness.

But Whitehead’s penchant for a phenomenological vocabulary must be coupled with his drive toward a thoroughgoing realism, which sees no abrupt breach between the kind of fact reflected upon in the passage just quoted and the sort of fact which lies at the heart of reality. His drive toward realism would collapse into absurdity if one were to insist upon taking the phenomenological terms literally. He means for them to function as metaphors. He gives a prominent place to phenomenological terms because he is convinced that the best model, analogy, or clue that we have available (though not the only one) for conceiving of a world of ubiquitous process is the experience of ceaseless flux that we find within ourselves, a flux that is not merely haphazard but takes on a variety of forms and orientations, each associated in some way with the others while still achieving its own uniqueness as a specific occasion of experience.

Whitehead thinks that there is evidence from modern physics and biology to support such a view of the world, but our perceptual experience impels us to picture it differently, as static configurations sharply separated from one another. To employ the phenomenological metaphors as he does is to force us to relate things not usually related -- facts of consciousness, on the one hand, and facts of nature far below the level of conscious life and even below the level of life itself, on the other -- and through this relationship to sense features common to both kinds of fact. His metaphors are thus intended to perform the task of all powerful metaphors, creating novel insights and realizations through the imaginative juxtaposition of seemingly disparate facts. A semantic "interaction" (to use Max Black’s term) is created which brings hitherto unrecognized patterns and relationships into view. (1:218-35)⁵

Now that something of the meaning Whitehead packs into the phrases "familiar facts" and "common exemplifications in experience" has been clarified,⁶ this third criterion can be further explicated by a consideration of two terms in his philosophical lexicon which illustrate its application particularly well: ‘appetition’ and ‘satisfaction’. Appetition’ is the drive in the actual entity towards a form for its own definiteness.⁷ It is the element of unrest whereby the concrescing entity evaluates its immediate physical feelings from the standpoint of some conceptually entertained goal or ideal and then thrusts to realize that ideal by becoming what it has envisioned. ‘Appetition’ is thus the bridge from the facts of the present to the possibilities of the future; it is that agency or purpose which brings novelty into the world.

‘Conceptual prehension’ is an equivalent term for ‘appetition’, but Whitehead points out that it suffers from the defect of being too neutral and abstract a term, too devoid of any suggestiveness of concrete experience. ‘Appetition’, on the other hand, brings readily to mind such common, experienced urges as hunger or thirst (unrest directed towards the goal of satiety or quenching), and it can rather easily be extended in its meaning to encompass any kind of yearning after satisfaction. The usefulness of the term as a designation for a generic trait of every event is further heightened by the fact that examples of ‘appetition’ are not restricted simply to human experience but are to be found in every order of organic existence. (PR 47-49) ⁸

‘Satisfaction’, as the end aimed at by ‘appetition’, also suggests a very concrete and familiar kind of experience. We yearn for something (e.g.. the quenching of our thirst) and, having attained it, we are satisfied. The moment of satisfaction brings about the cessation of that particular yearning; it has been consolidated into a climactic experience. Involved in such satisfaction is not only the culmination of a particular kind of feeling or complex of feelings but also the exclusion from interest of other kinds of feelings. For were all yearnings to be given the same interest at the same time, there would be no satisfaction. We would remain forever in a state of longing and unrest, without purpose or direction, without integration or fulfillment. Finally, we can look back upon experiences which have been brought to fruition in satisfaction and have the memory of them serve as motives to new experiences.

The ‘satisfaction’ of the actual entity in Whitehead’s scheme means something very much like this commonplace experience. With its ‘satisfaction’ the entity is "closed up," or brought to the final phase of its career as a distinct act of concrescence. And the emotional complex constituting the subjective form culminating in the ‘satisfaction’ of the entity includes both negative and positive prehensions, i.e., data excluded from interest as well as data selected for inclusion in the felt content of the entity. Moreover, the actual entity, having reached its ‘satisfaction’, passes over into the role of a datum to be prehended by successive actual entities. Thus with ‘satisfaction’ as with ‘appetition’, Whitehead finds illuminating metaphors in the familiar facts of conscious experience.

But again, it must be stressed that these terms, and others like them, are intended by Whitehead to be taken as "metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap." (PR 6) It is tempting for the uncritical reader to take them too literally and assume that Whitehead is advocating some brand of "panpsychism" or "idealism." But what he is actually trying to do is find words and phrases which can penetrate into what is universal in concrete fact" (SMW 122), i.e., which can suggest categories adequate to the analysis of reality, on all its levels and in all its manifestations, as process finding pattern.

Such metaphors are troublesome and vexing in philosophy because they are so imprecise and can so easily mislead, despite all careful efforts to contain their meaning. They mislead either because we come to take them too literally, forgetting in time their original metaphorical character, or because they tend to suggest different kinds of association than those intended by the metaphysician. But perhaps the most exasperating feature of good metaphors is that they do not admit of easy translation. And as a consequence, no checks can be devised for determining their precise boundaries of meaning or for rigorously assessing their descriptive adequacy. As Whitehead himself admits on more than one occasion, we must rely, in the final analysis, on our intuitions. But philosophers typically are not satisfied with broad imaginative visions; they want to pin things down more precisely. Whitehead’s philosophy, however, is a sustained argument for the impossibility of complete precision when dealing with the generic features of existence and their highly complex inter-relationships.

IV

Criterion four: the requirement that the terms be sufficiently general or inclusive in their ordinary meanings to admit of the further extensions of meaning required for their employment in the scheme. Whitehead holds the task of the metaphysician to be that of achieving "descriptive generalization." But he complains that words in their ordinary narrow meanings are ill-suited to express in explicit form these larger generalities the metaphysician aspires to capture in words. Accordingly, he is forced to redesign language, stretching certain of its words and phrases "towards a generality foreign to their ordinary usage. (PR 16, 6) This necessity brings us to the fourth criterion governing White-head’s choice of terms. Since words are going to have to be stretched in this way, it is desirable to pick ones which are sufficiently general or inclusive in their ordinary meanings to admit of the further extensions of meaning required for their utilization in the scheme.

This criterion can be aptly illustrated by an important term in the Whiteheadian philosophy: ‘feeling’.⁹ In English the word "feeling" admits of an extremely wide range of possible meanings and applications. Our language permits us, for example, to attribute the property of "feeling" to lower as well as to higher forms of life. We can speak of an ameba "feeling" the prod from which it recoils under the microscope; we can talk about a flower’s "feeling" the heat of the sun; or we can infer from the wagging of our dog’s tail that be "feels" glad to see us.

As applied strictly to human experiences, the senses of the word "feeling" can run the gamut from tactile sensation, through blind emotion, to the highest capabilities of human consciousness. We can "feel" happy or sad, angry or tranquil; we can have the "feeling" that something is right or wrong, beautiful or ugly; we can "feel" a desire or an obligation to do something; we can experience a "feeling" of attraction or repulsion; we can "feel" that a proposition is true or false; we can develop a "feel" for art or for working with machines; we can speak admiringly of a poet’s or a prophet’s depth of "feeling."¹⁰

There is even a sense in which "feeling" can be an objective quality of things, and not simply a subjective state. We can talk about the "feel" of a piece of cloth or discuss the "feel" of a room. This fact lends itself nicely to that combination of subjective immediacy and objective immortality Whitehead builds into his concept of the actual entity.

A problem with Whitehead’s generic employment of the word "feeling," however, is that it must be taken to apply, not just to macroscopic and organic entities such as plants, animals, and men, but to the rudimentary constituents of every type of reality. What possible justification is there for such a radical extension of the meaning of a word, even granting its wide variety of uses in ordinary English?

Whitehead’s answer to this question is to insist that there are no inert ‘vacuous actualities’ which are related merely in external ways from outside themselves. What togetherness there is in the world is an ‘experiential togetherness’ in which the antecedent actual occasion objectified in the past is externally related to the present concrescence (i.e., it does not require the present occasion for its explication or its reality), and in which the subsequent or present occasion is internally related to the past one (i.e., it does require the past occasion for its explication or reality, since that past occasion is prehended as its datum in its physical pole).

Since actual occasions are units of prehension (the positive species of which are ‘feelings’), there is no togetherness anywhere in the world which can be accounted for apart from reference to ‘feelings’. This is the basic ground of the shift Whitehead tries to bring about by his metaphysical system from classical materialism, as exemplified in Newtonian ‘matter’ and Cartesian ‘extended substance’, toward organicism. (PR 254, 288-289, 471)

‘Feeling’ is thus a particularly powerful and important metaphor for Whitehead. Its systematic use in his metaphysics is a way of setting forth the interdependence of internal and external relations and breaking down the dualisms created by classical materialism, a way of stressing the interconnectedness and mutual responsiveness of all things, as they achieve transitory definiteness and then perish in the ever-flowing stream of time.

But there is a limit to how far and in what direction a word can be extended for special purposes and still remain intelligible, and we might consider whether Whitehead has exceeded this limit in his metaphysical employment of the word "feeling." The limit would seem to be that point where the extended meaning of a term no longer has any recognizable affinity with its ordinary meaning, or where the extended meaning clashes with, rather than builds upon, the ordinary meaning.

What affinities are there, then, between the ordinary and the extended meanings of "feeling"? Both uses of the term imply the following: (i) A dynamic process, rather than a static state. (ii) An assimilation from within, rather than a mere superimposition from without. (iii) A mode of apprehension more rudimentary and vague than conscious reflection, and also far more pervasive. (iv) An incorporation of features of the common environment into a unique perspective.¹¹ (v) A blending of physical and mental aspects.¹² If the connotations of the word "feeling" can be said to run somewhat along these lines, then there is a sense in which the term can admit of a much wider denotation than that ordinarily associated with it, given a certain perspective on the universe. If the universe does have the dynamic and pluralistic character Whitehead attributes to it, then traits similar to those present in feeling do perhaps pervade it at all of its levels.¹³ This is not a suggestion to be brushed off lightly.

But having said this, a clash in meaning is still undeniable, and there remains a disturbing opaqueness in the term as Whitehead applies it. It is difficult to conceive of the rudimentary constituents of entities like tables and stones as having "feelings," even in a metaphorical sense. Whitehead would have offended our sense of linguistic propriety far less had the word ‘feeling’ been left out of his technical vocabulary, and had he relied instead on some more neutral term like ‘prehension’ (which is roughly equivalent in meaning to ‘feeling’).

However, it is all-important to him that philosophical abstractions be rooted firmly in the concrete, that the terms of his system sustain a dialectic in which the particular is given significance by reference to general concepts, and the general is given substance by the particular exemplifying it. For this reason he will often choose two words, one of which is unusual and rather abstract (e.g., ‘prehension’), thus avoiding the misleading connotations of more conventional terms, and the other suggestive and concrete (e.g., ‘feeling’), thus making its appeal to direct experience. The logic of the situation is apparently that the suggestive metaphors are supposed to contribute an essential dimension of meaning to the more neutral terms, while the more neutral terms, in their turn, are intended to channel and control the suggestiveness of the metaphors. There is some real question as to how effective this technique really is, particularly in the case of terms like ‘feeling’, ‘appetition’, and ‘satisfaction’. For these terms strongly suggest some kind of pathetic fallacy, even though Whitehead struggles manfully to avoid this connotation.

Even so, one might venture to suggest that such terms are chosen by Whitehead partly for their shock value. Precisely because of the clash in meaning that it generates, ‘feeling’ jars our sensibilities and captures our attention in a way that ‘prehension’ cannot. It has an emotional impact which stimulates us to reflect upon its implications with the kind of intensity and curiosity required if we are to be brought to the point of questioning those assumptions about generic features which Whitehead thinks we have not bothered to justify by fresh appeals to concrete experience. There is a sense, then, in which the elusiveness of the term is quite deliberate. It is meant to point us beyond conventional concepts and usage to something which cannot be so much clearly expressed as dimly intimated.

V

Criterion five: the desirability of the terms’ being devoid, so far as is possible, of misleading associations or implications. Despite the emphasis in the preceding four criteria upon the importance of metaphysical terms having an undercurrent of allusive energy, the suggestiveness of a given word can sometimes be a problem. It is apt to suggest more than the philosopher wants it to, creating misconceptions about the proper range of its meaning within his system of thought. For example, one might mistakenly attribute self-consciousness to actual entities, since the language Whitehead uses to describe them contains so many terms grounded in human self-awareness. This problem can be controlled up to a certain point by stipulations within the system about the boundaries of a term’s meaning, but sometimes a word which is desirable on other grounds must be rejected because its suggestive aura is more confusing than clarifying. This gives rise to this fifth criterion, which can best be elucidated by considering briefly a term Whitehead rejects through its application.¹⁴

The term ‘universal’ has had a long philosophical history. Why, then, did Whitehead reject this term and choose ‘eternal object’ as a name for the pure predicable or potential required for his generic description of the world? The answer is that he judged the conventional word to be too grossly misleading in its associations and implications.

One reason he came to this conclusion is that the term ‘universal’ immediately invites a sharp contrast with ‘particular’, whereas in his philosophy there is a deliberate softening of such a contrast. Since there is an interpenetration of actual entities, one as objectified entering into the experience of another, the susceptibility of repeated exemplification traditionally reserved for the ‘universal’ is also a property of the Whiteheadian ‘particular’. And since each ‘eternal object’ is precisely what it is, admitting of no reduction or transformation to something else, Whitehead’s ‘universals’ have a kind of particularity.

Closely connected with this first objection to the term ‘universal’ is a second one. Whitehead feels compelled to reject the traditional distinction between ‘universal’ and ‘particular’ because he is convinced that such a distinction creates insurmountable problems for epistemology. The traditional view holds that no ‘particular’ can be involved with or be related to another, except in the sense that two or more ‘particulars’ can exemplify the same pattern of ‘universals’. But if this is the case, the order and interconnectedness of the world that presents itself to our consciousness must be more apparent than real. Moreover, since the traditional view teaches that we can never lay hold of any particular thing, but can only know those ‘universals’ which describe it (a view Whitehead takes to be implicit in Locke’s doctrine of ‘ideas’ and Hume’s doctrine of ‘impressions’), there is an almost irresistible tendency toward the skeptical conclusion that, in the final analysis, we know only our own ideas and not the world as such. At the very best the traditional understanding of the distinction between ‘universal’ and ‘particular’ produces an intolerable breach between man’s "inner" noetic experience and the world "out there." (PR 69-80, 226)

Since the term ‘universal’ and its correlate term ‘particular’ are so deeply enmeshed in such confusions and errors of thinking, Whitehead rejects ‘universal’ as a designation for the pure potentials of his scheme, preferring the noncommital phrase ‘eternal object’ instead. What he loses in richness of association and immediate clarity he gains in the avoidance of misleading associations and implications.

VI

Criterion six: the necessity of compensating for the deficiencies of certain desired terms by complementing them with approximately equivalent terms which can help make up their deficiencies. Toward the end of our discussion of the fourth criterion mention was made of the tension Whitehead considered it important to maintain between unfamiliar, more neutral terms and suggestive metaphors. This mention was actually a foreshadowing of this sixth criterion. Where a term is inadequate when taken by itself (for example, it may be either too neutral or too misleading in its suggestiveness), but it is still desirable to make use of it, it must be complemented with approximately equivalent terms which can help to make up its deficiency. Another way of stating the criterion would be to note that since few (if any) of the terms under consideration will exemplify all of the preceding five criteria with equal adequacy, it may be necessary to compensate for those respects in which they fall short by supplementing them with terms whose strengths, as judged in light of the criteria, are their weaknesses, and vice versa. We are thus brought to the necessity, or at least desirability, of what Whitehead calls "an apparent redundancy of terms." (AI 304)

Terms already mentioned which illustrate this principle are ‘subject’ and ‘superject’; ‘feeling’ and ‘prehension’; ‘appetition’ and ‘conceptual prehension’; ‘concrescence’ and ‘actual entity’; ‘pure potential’ and ‘eternal object’. Instead of inquiring in further detail into how this sixth criterion is operative in Whitehead’s selection of these sets of equivalents, we shall turn to another set, examining the criterion with respect to it.

The set of equivalents is as follows; ‘ingression’. ‘inclusion’, ‘realization’, and ‘functioning’.¹⁵ Each of these terms is used by Whitehead at one time or another to designate the involvement of eternal objects in actual entities. The term which he clearly prefers is ‘ingression’, and at least three reasons might be offered for the preference. (i) ‘Ingression’ is a term rarely used in English, and its very rarity or oddity serves sharply to remind us that it is a technical term within the system. Since it has something of the abstract neutrality we have already talked about, it does not as readily invite misconstructions as more familiar words might, and its meaning can be more easily controlled by the stipulations of the system. By contrast, a term like ‘participation’ must be rejected, since it is too intimately associated with the Platonic theory of forms, with its implication of the superiority of static forms to dynamic events. (ii) ‘Ingression’ can be understood as a convenient shorthand for the phrase "is an ingredient within." This point is in a sense an etymological one, since ‘ingression’ and "ingredient" have the same root meaning. (iii) There is a metaphorical quality in the word "ingression" contained in its meaning of "a coming or entering into." Used in the context of Whitehead’s system, ‘ingression’ suggests familiar experiences of the "entry" of ideality into actuality, of the capturing of felt possibilities in contemporary matter-of-fact. For example, a man contemplates a past experience and seeks to recapture the satisfaction of that experience in the present moment, or an architect designs a structure in order to give concrete expression to his artistic vision. In both cases there has been an ‘ingression’ of ideality (past or future) into the present. These three reasons for preferring the term ‘ingression’ follow closely criteria five, two, and three, in turn.

Unfortunately, the metaphorical suggestiveness of ‘ingression’ can rather easily get out of hand. Whitehead therefore resorts to approximately equivalent terms to guard against the misleading implications of his preferred term. ‘Ingression’ could be taken to mean that eternal objects subsist in absolute independence of actualities and descend of their own accord from some antecedent realm into the concrescing occasion.¹⁶ But such an interpretation would do justice neither to Whitehead’s notion of an actual entity (no entities can be spoken of apart from eternal objects taken as their forms of definiteness), nor to his idea of an eternal object (there can be no complete abstraction of eternal objects from actualities; they can be abstracted from this or that actuality but not from all actualities).

‘Inclusion’ is a term very similar in meaning to the phrase "is an ingredient within," which is part of the meaning Whitehead wants to convey by his term ‘ingression’. It also does not mislead thought in the way described in the previous paragraph. But its greater familiarity deprives it of the technical ring of ‘ingression’, and its static connotation leaves something to be desired, since it is through dynamic prehensions that eternal objects are involved in actual entities.

‘Realization’ has the dynamic quality, and it suggests that the dynamism belongs where it should belong, to the actual occasion, whereas ‘ingression’ might cause the dynamism to be mistakenly applied to the eternal objects themselves. But on the debit side, ‘realization’ could be taken to imply that eternal objects are merely unrealized abstract possibilities having no transcendent status, while Whitehead insists that there is one sense in which eternal objects are immanent and another sense in which they are transcendent. Thus ‘realization’ might mislead thought in precisely the opposite direction from the misconception that could be created by ‘ingression’. Whitehead’s intended meaning is somewhere between the suggestive overtones of these two terms.

Finally, ‘functioning’ has the virtue of suggesting that the eternal object plays a distinctive role or has a peculiar ‘function’ in the context of the actual entity. This is true to Whitehead’s understanding of novelty, as brought about by the unique subjectivity of the occasion. No two occasions ‘feel’ the eternal objects in precisely the same way. But ‘functioning’ would be misleading if it were taken to mean that the eternal object is a ‘function of’ the actual entity, in the logical or mathematical sense of ‘function of’. For this would suggest that, with changes in the actual entity, there are corresponding changes in the eternal object. But actual entities do not change; they are units of change. And eternal objects in Whitehead’s scheme are invariable; they are just what they are and can be nothing else.

The need for this apparent redundancy of mutually corrective terms shows that, for Whitehead, words must be experimented with, their meanings, suggestions, and associations tested and retested in a variety of contexts and uses before the workable ones can be separated out from those which must finally be rejected. And even when the process of selection has been completed, there usually has been no exactly "right" word to be found, either in the existing language or by coinage. And in a real sense, the process of selection is never really finished, because "each phraseology leads to a crop of misunderstandings." (AI 226) This means that there must be a continuing openness to the clarification that terms not yet tried or thought of can introduce into the discussion.¹⁷

VII

Some implications of the criteria. If one were to apply the traditional tests of the adequacy of formal criteria to the six principles of selection we have been discussing -- i.e., are they necessary and sufficient; are they consistent; are they specific enough to place the selection of certain terms and the rejection of others beyond the pale of serious debate -- it would not be difficult to show that Whitehead’s principles fall short. But to view them as formal principles would be to miss the point. Whitehead saw them merely as useful rules of thumb. Their value is not so much the aid they can give to a new crop of enterprising metaphysicians bent upon their own program of "redesigning language." Rather, it is the insight they afford into the thinking processes of Whitehead as he went about developing what surely must be recognized as one of the great synthetic and imaginative achievements of this century.

What, then, are some of the implications of these criteria for an understanding of Whitehead? To begin with, awareness of the criteria can help to give content to his repeated claim that "philosophy is akin to poetry." (MT. vii, 237) For as we have seen, he was guided in the selection of his key terms not so much by considerations of literal exactitude as by a concern for the imaginative force and metaphorical impact the terms could have for the reader. The techniques whereby the poet seeks to kindle insight and awaken understanding -- reliance on the suggestive power of certain words, creation of new complexes of meaning by surprising juxtapositions and uses of terms, highlighting the universal meaning in the concrete experience, finding fit images and apt metaphors, evoking the memories and associations that lurk below the threshold of consciousness -- are also techniques of indispensable importance for the metaphysician.

A second implication has to do with the kind of interpretative spirit in which Whitehead apparently hoped the language of his metaphysics would be approached. It is a spirit able to wend its way between the extremes of romanticism. on the one hand, and literalism, on the other. As Victor Lowe has pointed out, a fundamental difference between Whitehead and Henri Bergson is that, while Bergson had recourse to poetic images because he despaired of dealing with metaphysical issues theoretically, Whitehead sought a blending of theoretical explanation and poetic insight. (3:259-60) Or as Whitehead himself expresses it, "the purpose of philosophy is to rationalize mysticism: not by explaining it away, but by the introduction of novel verbal characterizations, rationally coordinated." (MT 237) Thus, one must be careful not so to emphasize the poetic side of Whitehead that he loses sight of his drive toward theoretical rigor. While he did not judge the attainment of scientific refinement to be possible in a system preoccupied with the totality of experience in its many dimensions, he still aspired to as high a degree of descriptive precision as possible, given the nature of his subject matter.

But this precision, again, is not that of literal exactitude, and the reader must be careful to make due allowance for the poetic quality of Whitehead’s language and not to interpret him too literalistically. The "mystical" undercurrent remains, and it occupies an important place in his system. He has sought to do justice. not merely to those surface features of our experience of which we are well aware, but also to the elusive and yet pervasive traits (e.g., the immanence of the past in the present) which he takes to be of crucial import for philosophical understanding. But so vaguely do we apprehend these traits of our experience, that ordinary diction cannot suffice to bring them into view. The art of the poet must be called into play to make vivid our intuitions of such traits and their relationships, and it follows that a poetic sensitivity will be required for interpretation of the language used for this evocation. To interpret Whitehead’s language literalistically would be to fail to appreciate the need for this kind of sensitivity. The danger of such literalism has been alluded to already in discussing terms like ‘appetition’, ‘satisfaction’, and ‘feeling’. I do not pretend here to have settled the question of how literally or how poetically Whitehead’s language should be interpreted in particular cases. I simply want to emphasize the interpenetration of the theoretical and poetic modes in his metaphysical discourse, an interpenetration that is brought out particularly well, in my judgment, by the criteria which have provided the topic for this study. The full complexity of the hermeneutical problem raised by this interpenetration has not always been recognized.

A third implication has to do with the problem of translatability. In an article on "Metaphysics and Language," John Herman Randall, Jr., has made this statement:

I am entirely sympathetic with the need to distinguish artificial from real discriminations and well aware of the seductive tendency of language, artfully employed, to blur the distinction. Still, I am uncomfortable with the notion that all real distinctions admit of expression in any philosophical language. At least, I am uncomfortable if this be taken to mean that a discrimination expressed in Whiteheadian quasi-poetic diction could just as easily be rendered into nontechnical prose.

If this were true, it would invite a manneristic construction of Whitehead’s use of metaphor and allusion, i.e., that he has stated in a merely "pretty" way what could as well have been said without poetic ornament. But this is precisely what I doubt. The success of really effective metaphors is in inverse relation to their translatability. They cannot be dispensed with because they are bound inextricably with the concepts they express. Many of Whitehead’s metaphors are, I believe, successful in just this sense. Given the painstaking care he has lavished on his choice and use of these terms, and given his quite self-conscious recognition that poetic stratagems often work to communicate meanings that cannot be as precisely expressed in any other way, it should come as no surprise that many sentences in his scheme do not admit of ready translation into sentences in ordinary discourse. This does not mean that the sentences have no meaning; it simply means that it is inappropriate to apply to them tests of literal meaning.¹⁸

REFERENCES

1. Black, Max. "Metaphor." Philosophy Looks at the Arts. Edited by Joseph Margolis. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962.

2. Doan, Frank M. "On the Construction of Whitehead’s Metaphysical Language. The Review of Metaphysics, 13 (June, 1960).

3. Lowe, Victor. Understanding Whitehead. Baltimore The Johns Hopkins Press, 1966.

4. Randall, J. H., Jr. "Metaphysics and Language." The Review of Metaphysics, 20 (June, 1967).

NOTES:

1. Whitehead is also concerned that his terms have associations with scientific and literary language, and particularly that they be responsive to the insights of the great poets. But he holds it to be absolutely essential that the language of a particular discipline, like philosophy, be richly rooted in the expressive categories of its creative geniuses.

2. Single quotes will be used for technical terms, whether in Whitehead’s or some other philosophers thought. Double quotes are reserved for ordinary language terms outside any technical context.

3. Another interesting example of Whitehead’s use of this first criterion is to be found in PR 50, 70, where the term in question is ‘envisagement’.

4. If this analysis is correct, this first criterion imparts to Whitehead’s terms the flavor of "diaphoric metaphors" functioning as "symbols of ancestral vitality," as these terms are employed by Philip Wheelwright in his Metaphor and Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), Chaps. IV and V. and esp. pp. 94, 105.

5. Cf. also this passage from Wheelwright’s Metaphor and Reality, explaining the author’s notion of "diaphoric" metaphor: "As in nature new qualities may be engendered by the coming together of elements in new ways, so in poetry new suggestions of meaning can be engendered by the juxtaposition of previously unjoined words and images. Such diaphoric synthesis is indispensable as a factor in poetry." (p. 86)

6. He means more by these phrases than the facts and experiences of self-awareness that I have discussed. I have simply tried to stress the predominance of the phenomenological model in his conception of fact and concretion.

7. This term was used with a similar meaning by Leibniz. showing again how the first criterion influenced Whitehead’s selection of terms.

8. See also FR 32. The generality or inclusiveness of the term ‘appetition’ also satisfies criterion four, to be discussed presently.

9. Whitehead’s selection of the term ‘feeling’ also exemplifies the first criterion. He attributes to Bradley and James, for example, a use of the term much like his own. It is also worth noting that criterion number three is implicit in Whitehead’s selection of this term. For not only does it suggest concrete exemplification in an obvious sense; it also suggests a blending of visceral and conceptual elements analogous to the mental and physical poles of an actual entity, taken as a unification of ‘feelings’. Cf. the locution, "I feel sick in my stomach."

10. This list is similar to Whitehead’s detailing of the various species of ‘subjective form’ (the "how" of an entity’s ‘feeling’) "emotions, valuations, purposes, adversions, aversions, consciousness, etc." (PR 35)

11. This feeling that I have now is unique in that it is my feeling and no one else’s; it is infused with the nuances of my mood and outlook at this particular moment; it occurs within the context of my unique personal past, with its accompanying memories.

12 See n. 9 above. In Whitehead’s metaphysics, the ‘physical’ is that part of the concrescence which is taken from the past; the ‘mental’ is that part which pretends possibilities for the future. Thus efficient and final causation are combined in the experience of the entity.

13. It ought perhaps to he noted that, even though ‘feeling’ is all-pervasive for Whitehead, this does not mean that there is no room in his system for the contrastive term "unfeeling." (If the contrastive term could not be used, a serious question would be raised about the meaningfulness of his use of ‘feeling’.) All past occasions, i.e., those which have achieved ‘objective immortality’, are unfeeling. They can be ‘felt’ but can no longer ‘feel’.

14. For other illustrations of this fifth criterion see PR 51-52, 69-70, where Whitehead discusses his rejection of the terms ‘person’, ‘form’, ‘idea’, and ‘essence’, on account of their seriously misleading suggestions.

15. For a detailed citation of places in his writings where Whitehead uses these terms see ‘William Christian, An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics (New Haven Yale University Press, 1959), pp. 208-209, 184-185, 189.

16. I am indebted to Christian for this point. See the pages of his book cited in the previous note. I do not quite agree with him, however, when he complains of the "dynamic connotation" of ‘ingression’ and contends that the term is merely "a name for a relationship, not for an action." (pp. 185, 288) Whitehead probably would not have chosen a term like ‘ingression’ had he not intended it to have a certain dynamic quality, and the prehension of eternal objects by concrescing entities is clearly to be understood as a dynamic process. The dynamism is entirely in the actual entities, however, as Christian points out, and not in the eternal objects themselves.

17. An interesting example of Whitehead’s persistent openness to new terms is his consideration of the Quaker word "concern" in AI 226, 232.

18. Max Black makes the point that, while attempted translation of effective metaphors tray be extremely useful for opening up some of their cognitive content, it cannot do Justice to all of that content. "It fails to be a translation because it fails to give the insight that the metaphor did." See 1:234. An excellent recent study seeks to exhibit in detail the unavoidability of metaphors in conceptual discovery and in the development of new perspectives on problems. Set Donald Schon, The Displacement of Concepts (London: Tavistock Publications, 1963). It is of course also true, as both Black and Schon note, that metaphors are dangerous, especially in philosophy. But they are most dangerous when unconsciously entertained and confused with literal truth. At least Whitehead has had the good sense to give deliberate recognition to the pivotal role of metaphors in his thinking. While translatability as a teat of the reality of expressed discriminations has its limitations, when applied to Whitehead’s metaphysical language, there is a test which he repeatedly invites us to apply. Does the discrimination ring true in our experience, once given formulation in the language of the scheme? Does it help to make self-evident what before we only vaguely discerned? For a discussion of this point see Victor Lowe, 3: 285-86.

The concept of God provided in the writings of Charles Hartshorne is one of the most influential and widely discussed notions in contemporary philosophy of religion and theology. Not only is Hartshorne’s God significantly different from the traditional concept of God, but Hartshorne also provides a revised version of the ontological argument to prove this God’s existence.

In this paper I shall (1) briefly set forth this argument; (2) show that the argument, if it is valid, is valid only for a Hartshornean God; (3) argue that, since Hartshorne’s God does require that at least something (anything will do) contingent exists, the "new" ontological argument fails even for Hartshorne’s God, because it is logically possible that there should be nothing at all, total non-being.

I shall not spend much space setting forth the argument, as it is already well known. The clearest statement of it is, I think, found in a recent issue of The Review of Metaphysics. (4:291.94. For Hartshorne’s first symbolic statement of the argument see 10:51.) There Hartshorne sets the argument up as a tetralemma and proceeds to attempt to show the falsity of all but one of the lemmas. In a succeeding article (15:297-307) R. L. Purtill examines the argument and puts it into the symbolism of modal logic. As set up by Purtill, the tetralemma is as follows:

T2 and T3 are eliminated by the contention that the contingent mode of existence is a defect and, thus, could not apply to the concept of a perfect being. T4 is ruled out by the contention that God is at least possible -- he is not impossible, the concept of God is not meaninglessness or contradictory.

It is important, before giving the argument further consideration, to consider briefly the "logical types" objection. As we shall see, though Hartshorne’s view of God meets that objection, it also opens the door for another objection, which is even more serious.

The doctrine of logical types holds that predicates are of a different logical type than existence. If this is true, then how can perfection be both a predicate and include necessary existence? As Hartshorne says, "on the removal of this difficulty depends the fate of the argument." (10:63) This is the difficulty which is considered to have done away with the traditional argument. The trouble, though, says Hartshorne, is not in the argument but in the God it is arguing for.

To solve the problem, two things are required: (1) on the lowest logical level there must be a form of God as concrete, actual. This concrete state of God must be extrinsic to perfection as a predicate and yet be the concrete and contingent exemplification of perfection. (2) There must also be another form which is necessary to perfection, and, thus, intrinsic to it. It is, thus, like the predicate itself, abstract. (10:63)

If such a view of God can be found, and if we can find in our everyday experience a basis for the distinction being made, then the logical types objection will be met, because the distinction will then fall between two aspects or kinds of existence, not between property and existence in general or as such." Such a view, Hartshorne holds, is provided by his di-polar God. (10:63)

This is the view that God has two aspects: an abstract, necessary aspect, which is his essence, and a concrete, relative aspect, which changes in each moment and includes his accidents. in each moment God is his concrete aspect. But each moment is always characterized by his essence. This essence is perfection: perfect knowledge, perfect love, necessary existence. That God will always exist, know all there is to know, and love all there is to love, is necessary. God’s concrete reality, the actual states of his existence, includes just what he loves now, just what he knows now. This is contingent, relative.

All we need do here is point out that requirement (1) is met by the concrete and relative aspect of God and (2) is met by the abstract and changeless aspect. In other words, reference is made to the distinction between the concrete states of God and the abstract changeless nature which is inevitably exemplified in each of those states.

The basis in ordinary experience is relatively easy to find. As a human being, I shall probably exist tomorrow. If I do, I shall inevitably exist displaying all those abstract traits by virtue of which I am a human being. However, whether I exist tomorrow with a broken leg is much more specific and concrete and not at all essential to my existing as a human king. My existing as a human being tomorrow does not entail that I shall exist having a broken leg tomorrow. All my existing as a human being entails is that I exist in some concrete state or other displaying those abstract properties by virtue of which I am a human being, plus whatever other contingent properties that state includes. (10:63) Furthermore, there is even another distinction to be made. For a particular human being to exist is much more specific and concrete than simply for human beings to exist. "There are thus at least three levels of existence: the occurrence of certain actual states of individuals; the existence of certain individuals; the existence of certain kinds of individuals or of certain class properties." (10:63-64)

Thus, on this analysis, the conception of necessary existence need not deny the distinction between the concrete and abstract. What is being argued for is nor the necessity of some particular instance or state, but only the necessity of an (any) instance or state.

In this connection, Hartshorne does point out that in terms of ordinary cases there are two forms of contingency involved: (1) whether there is any concrete state of the abstract property at all; (2) whether, if there is, it is A, B, C,. . . N. In the case of Perfection, only (2) applies. Statement (1) is a matter of necessity. Perfection must be instanced in some concretum. Statement (2) is a matter of contingency. In just what concretum Perfection is instanced is a matter of indifference. (10:64) The existence of no particular state of perfection is implied by the ontological argument, only the existence of some state.

Thus, the claim is not that Perfection necessarily entails some particular concrete state. It is only that Perfection entails some concrete state. Since God in his abstract absoluteness is Perfection, to argue that Perfection must somehow be instanced (have a concrete state) is to argue that there must be some concrete state which is God-now.

Since such a view cannot possibly be defended on the classical view (which holds that God is in all ways absolute and has no relative states), Hartshorne is actually maintaining that the case for God’s necessary existence is made by holding that God is in some ways contingent! So, he claims, though the logical types objection is very powerful (and is devastating for classical theism), it is met by his di-polar concept of God.

Evaluation

Clearly Hartshorne has successfully avoided the fallacy of logical types. By explicating his "double aspect" view of God, Hartshorne has shown that he is not deriving the existence of any particular concrete being from a concept. Rather he is deriving the existence of some instance of Perfection. To say "God necessarily exists" is to say "Perfection is necessarily instanced." But, since Perfection is modally coincident, no particular set of circumstances is implied by its being instanced. It matters not what the universe contains, Perfection is still instanced. The existence of God requires only some concretum, no particular one.

Now the point I wish to raise is this: to exist other than abstractly (and abstract "existence" is not sufficient for the God of religion) an essence must be instanced in some concretum. Hartshorne himself admits this. But he claims that any concretum will suffice to instance God’s essence, Perfection. However, the point to see is that Hartshorne’s God does require at least something other than his own essence. Anything will do, but there must be something. If there were no concretum at all, Perfection could not be instanced; God could not exist. Hartshorne admits this:

Thus, we see that the ontological argument proves the existence of God if and only if there is some actual, concrete state (any one will do) in which Perfection may be instanced. The ontological argument does not prove that there is any actual state. Hartshorne is quite clear about that. What is being proved is not a God who creates ex nihilo. Hartshorne’s God creates on the human analogy; he shapes that which is already given. In fact, it is only on this ground that Hartshorne says we can say literally of God that he creates. We, as humans, know the literal meaning of "create"; we take it to mean the shaping of some already given material. However, creatio ex nihilo is totally beyond our conception of creating, says Hartshorne. Hence, to say literally and meaningfully that God creates, we must exclude the notion of creatio ex nihilo.

This does not mean that some universe antedates God -- "Everything that influences God has already been influenced by him" (8:30) -- but that God and some universe have always existed: "God exists" is logically equivalent to "Some universe exists." It thus becomes needful that Hartshorne show that "some universe exists" is necessarily true, for if the truth of that statement is contingent, then "God exists" is also only contingently true. The claim I am making is this: granted that Hartshorne has shown that the existence of any universe necessarily implies the existence of God, if the existence of any universe at all is contingent (i.e., if there might have been no universe at all), then the existence of God is, likewise, ultimately contingent.

Now, Hartshorne recognizes the distinction between conditional and absolute necessity.

This quote from Hartshorne does show that he recognizes the distinction between absolute and conditional necessity. But it also indicates that Hartshorne does not (at least here) want to recognize that p can stand for the universe as a whole, not just some particular concrete state of the universe. Certainly, if we grant that p can stand for particular states only, then God exists, because not-p then stands simply for the non-existence of that particular state; and, on Harts-home’s view of God as modally coincident, no particular state is required for God’s existence. However, if we let p stand for the existence of the universe (this one and all others) as a whole, for all concreta, then the disjunction "p or not-p" becomes crucial for Hartshorne. For on this interpretation it does matter which of the disjuncts is true: p logically implies "God exists." Not-p logically implies "God does not exist." Hence it is not enough for Hartshorne to state "p or not p" implies "God exists," for this is dearly false where p stands for the universe as a whole. Hartshorne must argue, in this case, that p is true; and p is not a tautology. As Hartshorne himself says: "If an individual X could exist only thanks to the existence of certain other individuals, then unless these exist necessarily, X cannot be necessary. (10:75)

The burden of proof is on Hartshorne. To prove the necessary existence of God he must show that at least some universe necessarily exists. Hartshorne does in fact offer arguments for this. However, if those arguments can be refuted, it will be shown that Hartshorne has not proven God’s necessary existence. The refutation of Hartshorne’s arguments will not, of course, suffice to show that God does not necessarily exist -- but only that Hartshorne has failed to prove his case. That, I take it, would be sufficient to show that Hartshorne has not (yet) succeeded. However, the case against Hartshorne would be made even stronger if it could be shown not only that Hartshorne does not prove that some universe is necessary, but that he cannot prove it. In other words, if it can be shown that it is contingent that anything at all exists, then not only will the particular effort Hartshorne has made be refuted, but any further attempts would be ruled out a priori.

Inevitably, the modal question of "logical" and "real" possibility will arise. That is, when we claim, contra Hartshorne, that it is contingent that there be any concrete state at all, that it is possible for there to be no concrete states whatsoever, do we mean "real" or "logical" possibility? There is dispute over whether everything that is logically possible is "really" possible. Hume’s claim that logical and real possibility are distinguished only by a habit of the mind (we are not in the habit of seeing billiard balls vanish when struck by other billiard balls, so we do not think that is a "real" possibility) is not universally accepted. Hartshorne himself denies this. (6:601) However, we need not here concern ourselves with this distinction because logical possibility is all we need to establish.

Hartshorne argues that his God is logically necessary. He uses logical implication in his argument. We have shown that this is so if and only if it is also logically necessary that at least some concretum exists. Hence, if we can show that it is not logically necessary that at least some concretum exists we will have shown that Hartshorne’s God is not logically necessary. We shall take our definition of logical possibility from Hartshorne himself: "A described state of affairs is ‘logically possible’ if the description ‘makes sense’ and involves no contradictions" (6 :593) What Hartshorne means by "makes sense" is never clearly spelled out in his arguments. However, he seems to mean that such non’ contradictory statements as "there is a blurx and a glop" are not logically possible because they are pure nonsense. As we shall see, Hartshorne wants to argue that total non-being falls into this category. It is, he says, mere verbiage. We shall argue (1) that Hartshorne does not show that this is so and (2) that, as a matter of fact, it is not so.

As to Hartshorne’s second criterion for logical possibility, there is clearly nothing contradictory in the notion of all contingent beings ceasing to be. We shall spell this out further below. Meanwhile, when we speak of "possibility" in connection with the question of whether it is possible for there to be nothing at all, we mean "logical possibility."

In this regard, we shall proceed now to explicate Hartshorne’s arguments for the necessary existence of some universe and to show why the arguments are not successful. Then we shall further argue that it is in fact contingent that there be any concrete state at all rather than no concrete states at all. It will then be clear that it is impossible to argue validly for the necessary existence of the neoclassical God.

I find in Hartshorne’s writings six separate arguments for the necessity of there being at least some concretum, for the impossibility of there being no concretum at all, total nothingness.

I shall consider each argument in turn and show that each is insufficient to establish what Hartshorne needs.

(1) The first argument is couched in the following statement by Hartshorne:

This is probably Hartshorne’s strongest argument and it is the one to which, in the final analysis, he usually appeals. The argument briefly stated is: the real is that which can be known by at least some mind. Total nothingness, which would, by definition, entail the non-existence of everything (including minds), is, thus, not a possibility. The fallacy here seems apparent. Hartshorne has won the game by definition. He defines the real in terms of the knowable. (There is, of course, philosophical precedent for such; cf. Plato.)

Hartshorne’s reply would probably be that since, by definition, God is the perfect knower, and that means there is nothing he cannot know, then either total non-being is impossible or the notion of a perfect knower is nonsensical. (Hartshorne considers the second disjunct positivism.) However, I think a more careful scrutiny of the situation will reveal a bit more than is prima facie apparent. Hartshorne remarks many times that positive states of affairs are the only meaningful ones (see below). Can we not define the perfect knower as the one who can know any positive state? That would mean there is only one state that could not be known by the perfect knower -- total nothingness. Hartshorne would reply, presumably, that this is not perfect knowledge. Perfect knowledge, he would claim, means knowledge of all possible states -- thus a completely negative state is not a possible state.

It is important to remember here that we need not argue that total nothingness is a possible state, only that Hartshorne has not shown that it is not a possible state. Now, I see no more difficulty in defining the perfect knower as one who can know all positive possible states but not the one totally negative possible state, than many theologians and philosophers would find with Hartshorne’s defining perfect knowledge such that it excludes knowledge of what will happen in the future. As Hartshorne says: "It is the only way to combine with’ out contradiction, the assertions: God knows all the truth, and, not all truths are necessary." (8:117-18. Cf. also 8:8. Cf. also 5:11.) Many traditionalists would claim that if God can know only the past and present but not the future (save in terms of possibilities -- not in terms of what will actually happen), then God does not have perfect knowledge. That is, they would accuse Hartshorne of denying that there can be perfect knowledge,

Hartshorne replies that if one demands that perfect knowledge include knowledge of exactly what the future will hold then he is denying the distinctive reality of freedom. In other words, if God knows exactly what the future will contain then the future is already exactly determined. Human freedom is on such a view, non-existent.

Thus, in order to make a place for freedom in the universe, Hartshorne denies that perfect knowledge must include knowledge of the future. One could always say to Hartshorne at this point that what he is really doing is denying that there can be perfect knowledge. One could say that he has simply redefined "perfect knowledge" in such a way as to make room in his system for both perfect knowledge and freedom.

The move I am attempting to make against Hartshorne here is precisely the same kind of move that he makes against traditionalism. I am claiming that perfect knowledge is a meaningful concept but that it need not include anything more than knowledge of all positive states, the ability to know all positive states when they occur, not the knowledge that they will occur just as they do before they occur. Thus, I want to maintain that total non-being cannot be ruled out as a possibility that perfect knowledge need not include ability to know all possible states but only all possible positive states. Hartshorne may claim that I have, thus, really denied that perfect knowledge is possible (since I am claiming that there is one possible state which it cannot include) and have taken a positivist position. But, for him to do so would be for him to take a position similar to that of the man described above who would claim that Hartshorne has really denied the possibility of perfect knowledge because Hartshorne says perfect knowledge does not include knowledge of the future.

What I am saying is this: if Hartshorne can redefine the notion of perfect knowledge in order to retain both that notion and another notion, freedom, then I can also redefine perfect knowledge to keep both it and a notion I claim is meaningful, the possibility that there might have been (and might yet be) nothing at all. If Hartshorne, from his point of view, wishes to call me a positivist then, from another point of view of perfect knowledge, he is himself open to the same charge. My own thoughts on the matter are that neither of us is a positivist. We are both trying to make rational space for everything that is real. Hartshorne, I think, is correct in saying that freedom and perfect knowledge, which includes knowledge of the future, are incompatible. He is also right in maintaining that freedom is real and that, therefore, perfect knowledge cannot (regardless of Thomist claims) include knowledge of the future. Likewise, I am correct in maintaining that the possibility of total non-being and perfect knowledge which includes all possible states, both positive and negative, are incompatible. I am furthermore correct in saying, then (after Hartshorne), that perfect knowledge need not include knowledge of all possible states but only knowledge of all possible positive states.

There is more yet to be said about this first argument of Hartshorne’s. Even if we did accept his dictum that the unknowable is the impossible, the question of the meaning of "knowable" would still have to be answered. Does "knowable" mean "directly knowable" or only "conceivable?"

If Hartshorne means directly knowable then he has ruled out many states which many people believe to have existed. Most people would hold that there once was (or at least could have been) a time when there were no minds, no knowers. Such a time would have been the universe before evolution of consciousness. Such a state, by definition, is not directly knowable. Hartshorne may reply that God would have known it. But that begs the question. He may also reply that, since panpsychism is the proper view of reality, a universe devoid of minds is the same as absolute nothingness. However, few philosophers are panpsychists; and if the ontological argument presupposes the validity of that view, then things are certainly much more complicated than they at first appeared. A case for panpsychism would have, in that case, to be made first.

The reason most persons would agree that a universe devoid of knowers is a possible state is because, although such a universe could never be known directly, it is conceivable; we can even meaningfully describe what would have to occur for such a universe to become actual; all minds would have to cease to be. Likewise, though total nothingness or no world at all is not a state which is directly knowable, it is conceivable; we can meaningfully describe the conditions requisite for its actualization: all particular beings would have to cease to be. Just as there is no contradiction involved in speaking of the absence of all minds (unless one is a panpsychist), because minds are contingent, there is no contradiction involved in speaking of the absence of all particular beings, because all particular beings are contingent.

Hartshorne may reply that I am merely denying that the notion of a necessary being is meaningful. I am doing that only in a limited sense. I am admitting that if it is necessary that there be any concrete states then it is necessary that God exists. This is all Hartshorne himself claims. What I am denying is that it is necessary that there be any concrete states -- at all! I am admitting all the necessity that Hartshorne’s ontological argument implies. The necessity I am denying is not that argued for by the ontological argument but, rather, that which must first be argued for to make the argument ultimately valid. The conclusion of the ontological argument is that if there are any concrete states whatever, then Perfection is actualized, God exists. I am contending that the antecedent of that hypothetical has not been shown to be necessarily true.

(2) Hartshorne’s second argument is stated as follows: "‘Nothing exists’ excludes everything positive and so must be false." (10:86) To call this an "argument" is probably a mistake because it is actually a denial. Hartshorne is maintaining that a statement cannot be true unless it describes a positive state. But there is only one totally negative state, viz., the absence of everything. Hence, Hartshorne is here simply stipulating that "nothing exists" is necessarily false.

(3) Hartshorne’s third argument contradicts the other things he says. Hartshorne here wants to maintain that God is the source of being in things: "Divine power is adequate both to insure that there be a world and to possess whatever world there is." (11:183) This is clearly contrary to Hartshorne’s view that God does not create ex nihilo. Hartshorne’s God is a being. (Cf. 2:7. Cf. also 9:152.) It is true that it is a unique and all inclusive being, but not being-itself, not that by virtue of which things are rather than are not. The being of things, Hartshorne must. admit, is inexplicable. Process for him is ultimate. Process simply is. As Whitehead puts it:

I read all of Hartshorne (with the exception of the one statement quoted above) to be in accord with this statement from Whitehead. On Hartshorne’s view, God includes the world, knows it, shapes it through his influence. But He does not give the universe its being. If Hartshorne does want to maintain that God is the source of being then he is going to run into the traditional problem of creatio ex nihilo (which he explicitly rejects -- as we have seen).

However, even if Hartshorne did seriously want to hold that view he would be committing a petitio: God exists necessarily if at least some concretum exists necessarily, and some concretum exists necessarily because God’s power insures it.

(4) I call Hartshorne’s fourth argument a "psychological" one.

I think that most people would admit that they hope for or would be very pleased if there were such a "factor" in nature. But to say that no one really "doubts" the existence of such a factor is merely autobiographical. I myself hope for such a factor, but have many very uncomfortable doubts that there is one. Philosophically, one need only point to Sartre. That most men desire such a "factor" and that some men do not doubt it, I do not question. But on the basis of my own experience and, unless we wish to say they are either deluded or liars, the words of others, I must say that there are those who seriously doubt the existence of such a "factor" -- even though Hartshorne may not.

(5) Hartshorne’s fifth argument is as follows:

Now it is true, as Hartshorne has shown, that if it can be established that a thing has the necessary mode of being then that thing either exists or fails to exist from necessity. Furthermore, if the thing in question is not an absurdity, if it does not necessarily fail to exist, as, for example, a round square does, then it necessarily exists. However, the very point at issue is whether the universe does have the necessary mode of being. If it does, then, since there clearly is a universe, it necessarily exists. That it exists proves that it is possible, and if a necessary thing is possible then it necessarily exists. That is what Hartshorne’s argument is about. But, if it is contingent that there be any universe at all then the fact that there is a universe does not imply that there is necessarily a universe.

Hartshorne claims that the statement "some concretum necessarily exists" is not contradictory when taken to mean simply any concretum at all. That the statement is not contradictory, though, does not make it true unless it can first be shown that the existence of some universe is a question of necessity to begin with. Hartshorne’s reply to this may be that, if it is admitted that "some concretum necessarily exists" is not contradictory, then it is a question of necessity. He would say this on the ground that the reason we would not make the same statement about any particular being, e.g., elephants or unicorns, is precisely because it is contradictory to assert of any particular being that it has the necessary mode of existence. The reason for this would be that we can conceive any particular being without conceiving it to exist; we can conceive their absence from concreteness, their lack of being.

If this is Hartshorne’s reply, then I would point out that he has not shown that we cannot conceive all possible universes as lacking concreteness, that we cannot conceive that there might have been (and may yet be) no universe at all. Thus, if Hartshorne’s statement " ‘some concretum necessarily exists’ is not contradictory" means that we cannot conceive that there might have been nothing at all, then he will have to argue that this is so. It has not been shown that it is any more necessary that there be any concretum at all than it is that there be any particular concretum. Hence, if it is contradictory, then, to assert of any particular concretum that it necessarily exists, it would seem to be likewise contradictory (until proven otherwise) to assert of all concreta that at least some of them must exist. The only necessity Hartshorne has shown with regard to ontological status is the conditional necessary status of God -- if some concretum exists, then God must exist.

(6) The sixth argument against the possibility of total non-being is the claim that negation always refers to "othering." (Cf. 10:282) The clearest explication of this argument is actually provided by William Reese in an article in the Hartshorne Festschrift. (16:311-23)

Reese’s claim in that article is that at no time whatsoever do we make reference to non-being as such. It is true, he says, that we make negative statements, but all of them can be handled on the model of "othering." Our denials, he says, are two in kind: denial in the predicate and denial in the subject. Denial in the predicate means simply that the predicate in question fails to apply to the subject in question, for example, "Socrates is not ill." However, the "not" here does not refer to non-being but refers to some other positive state which Socrates has. Thus, "Socrates is not ill" means "Socrates is well." The illness is replaced by something other. All cases of denial in the predicate may be handled in this fashion, Reese claims.

Denial in this subject, for example, "Socrates does not exist," is not so easily handled, but, says Reese, clear analysis can do the job. A denial in the subject means that one has a "mental construct" which has no counterpart in the outer world; one has an idea of Socrates but fails to be able to match it with anything "outside." The reference, thus, is not to non-being but to the fact that Socrates has only mental existence. He is "in the mind" but not in the world. Reese admits that he is assuming that all references are at least to mental constructs. However, he says, non-being refers to no mental construct at all.

The claim that can be made on the basis of this is that we never refer to non-being in any of our negative judgments and, thus, we never refer to it at all. Thus, to speak of non-being is to speak of that which has no meaning to us.

However, although in the analysis of predicate denial ("Socrates is not ill" equals "Socrates is well") that which it denies (illness) is replaced by something else (health), Reese’s argument can be refuted by pointing out that in "Socrates does not exist" Socrates’ physical existence is not replaced by something else. Reese says "Socrates exists" really means "Socrates has both physical and mental existence." The denial of physical existence, therefore, is not to replace it with something (as health replaces sickness in "Socrates is not sick"), but to deny it altogether. Is this not a reference to non-being?

The preceding discussion shows, I think, that Hartshorne has no convincing arguments for the necessary existence of at least some universe. This, in connection with our earlier analysis, shows that Hartshorne has not proven the necessary existence of God, but only the conditional necessity of God. This, I take it, is sufficient to reveal a basic inadequacy in Hartshorne’s efforts. However, as previously stated, the case can be made much stronger if it can be shown not only that Hartshorne has failed to prove the necessity of some universe, but that such necessity cannot be proved, because as a matter of fact it is contingent that there be any universe at all, it is logically possible for there to be no concretum. We shall now attempt to show that this is the case.

The first argument for the possibility that there might have been nothing at all is the sense of wonder and awe which strikes reflective persons when they consider the bare fact that there is a universe. This sense of amazement can be illustrated by quoting numerous philosophers from varying philosophical positions. A few examples should suffice here.

J. J. C. Smart states:

Julian Huxley speaks of "the basic and universal mystery -- the mystery of existence in general. . . . Why does the world exist?" (13:107-08)

Norman Malcolm reports that

Of course, for Heidegger . . . "Why are there essents, why is there anything at all, rather than nothing? Obviously this is the first of all questions, though not in a chronological sense." (12:1)

We could continue; the list could be much longer. The point is this: it is the case that many (most? all?) people are struck with wonder and amazement that there is any concretum at all, that there is any universe at all (not just this universe rather than another one). Now, let us ask about wonder and amazement. Are we ever struck with wonder and awe by things that are necessary? It is hardly amazing that triangles all have three sides, that bachelors are unmarried, that "all men are mortal and Socrates is a man" entails "Socrates is mortal." Necessities are things which are expected, predictable. The radical contingencies are what inspire a sense of awe and wonder: the fact that I exist at all, and the further fact that I am who I am; a "miraculous" recovery by someone who was given no chance to live; a sudden break in a stormy sky where the sun bursts through.

The point I am trying to make is this: on the basis of a prima facie examination of human experience, it would seem that there is a basic sense of wonder with regard to there being anything at all. This, in turn, would seem to indicate that it is not a necessity that there is a world at all, because human beings do not wonder at necessities; they wonder at the existence of the unexpected, the contingent. Now, I am not claiming that this alone establishes the contingency of existence. That would be premature. I am claiming, however, that a prima facie examination of a basic human experience at least seems to indicate such contingency.

The second point against Hartshorne’s claim that at least some universe necessarily exists is the fact that we can conceive that there might have been (and yet may be) nothing at all. If we admit that the conceivable is the logically possible (and, again, logical, not causal or scientific, or "real" possibility is all one needs to argue for here), then it follows from our ability to conceive that nothing at all may have existed, that it is not necessary that there be any universe at all. We cannot conceive a four sided triangle, a married bachelor, or an extentionless physical object (or a universe without God, if we understand Hartshorne correctly and grant that "perfection," in the way he has defined it, is meaningful), because a triangle necessarily has three sides, bachelors are necessarily unmarried, physical objects are necessarily extended, (and the existence of any universe necessarily entails the existence of God). Hence, if it were true that some world necessarily exists, we would not be able to conceive that there may well have been (and yet may be) no world at all.

Now I take it that Hartshorne would grant the truth of the hypothetical that "if it can be conceived that no universe may exist then it is not necessary that any universe exists." However, he would argue that it cannot be so conceived. The crux of the matter is whether it can be so conceived.

Now, if by "conceived" one means "imaged" then we must grant that total nothingness is not conceivable. Even to image total blackness (or whiteness) is still to image something. However, there is no need to identify conceiving with imaging. One cannot image a thousand-sided figure either. But the existence of such a figure is conceivable. One cannot image his own non-existence. But it hardly follows from that that one’s own non-existence is inconceivable to him. One need only state, in a non-contradictory and meaningful manner, the conditions requisite for producing such an occurrence to show that it is a possible occurrence.

It is easy enough to list the conditions requisite for a thousand-sided figure (but impossible to do so for a four-sided triangle) or for one’s own non-existence. Likewise, it is easy enough to list the conditions requisite for total nothingness: each thing which now exists would cease to exist and no thing would be replaced by anything else. Since everything that now exists is contingent (although God is contingent only on there being at least something), then each existing thing can be conceived not to exist. Likewise, there is no necessity in our replacing each thing with something else.

This can, perhaps, be made clearer by referring to what we know of familiar objects, for example, trees. We know all trees are contingent. Hence, we can conceive that each tree might cease to be and be replaced by nothing else. In the same manner, we know all beings to be contingent (except God, in his special sense) and, hence, we can conceive that each being might cease to be and be replaced by nothing else. If this is absurd, if the notion of absolute nothingness is mere verbiage, because it does not "make sense," then the notion of there being no trees is likewise absurd -- but clearly it is not.

Again, perhaps this is not sufficient. One may reply that the analogy between there being no trees and no concreta at all does not hold because in the case of the trees there would always be some "cause" by virtue of which the trees would disappear; there would be a blight or a scourge, they would wither and die, etc. On the other hand, there could be no cause by virtue of which all beings (or events) could cease to be, for if a being were the last being (or an event the last event) then either (1) it would have to be part of that being’s intrinsic nature to be the last being or (2) something else would have to destroy it, cause it to cease to be.

But, (1), we can form no consistent idea of a being (or event) whose intrinsic nature it is to be the last; and (2) if something else destroyed the being, then that something else would itself, still exist. Hence there would still be something; the event would not be the last.

Let us grant this disanalogy. However, if it can be shown that we can and do conceive of trees (or whatever) simply vanishing "into thin air" with no "cause" then it will be shown that a being or event could be the last by simply vanishing, with no "cause" "making" it do so. Two examples will suffice to illustrate this.

(1) Almost all so-called "magic tricks" are based on the assumption that we can conceive of things simply vanishing. When the magician pulls a rabbit out of an "empty" hat, we, of course, think there is some "trick" to it; the rabbit was somehow concealed in the hat beforehand. Likewise, when an egg is wrapped in a handkerchief and then has disappeared when the handkerchief is removed, we think the magician has it up his sleeve. However, and this is precisely the point, the whole "magic" or "mystery" of the show is predicated on the fact that we can conceive that the rabbit might just have appeared out of nothing and that the egg might just have vanished into nothing -- with no "cause," except the waving of a "magic" wand. The whole fun of it is just the lingering doubt in the back of our minds that perhaps the rabbit did just "appear" and the egg did just "vanish." Were it not for our ability to conceive this, magic acts would never have made a dime. And, if we can conceive an egg’s just vanishing, with no "cause," we can conceive that the same thing might occur with all contingent beings.

(2) The ability to conceive "causeless" (or spontaneous) creation is part and parcel of one of the two leading scientific cosmologies of the day, the "steady state theory.

Herman Bondi states:

Clearly, if we can conceive things simply coming to be out of nothing, for no "cause" or "reason," we can likewise conceive their vanishing into nothing for no cause or reason. Again, this is not to argue that things do happen in this way hut only that it is conceivable, logically possible -- it is not contradictory and it is not nonsense or mere verbiage. If it were no one would ever attend a magic show and the "steady state" theory would never have been conceived.

Hence, it is conceivable that everything may cease to be for no "cause" or "reason" It could just occur. Hence, it follows that it is not necessary that there be any universe at all. It then follows from this that it is not ultimately necessary that God should exist. For, as we have already shown, God necessarily exists if and only if at least some universe necessarily exists. Hence, Hartshorne not only has not proved God’s necessary existence, he cannot.

Further, if "necessary existence" must be part of the divine essence, and Hartshorne says it must, then Hartshorne’s concept of God cannot be an adequate concept of God.

References

1. Bondi, Herman. The Universe at Large. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1960.

2. Hartshorne, Charles. A Natural Theology for Our Time. LaSalle, Illinois: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1967.

3. Hartshome, Charles. Mans Vision of God and the Logic of Theism. New York: Harper and Row, 1941. Reprinted by Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Press, 1964.

4. Hartshome, Charles. "Necessity." The Review of Metaphysics, 21 (December, 1967).

5. Hartshorne, Charles, and Reese, William L. Philosophers Speak of God. Chicago: Univsity of Chicago Press. 1953.

6. Hartshome, Charles. "Real Possibility." The Journal of Philosophy, 60 (October 10, 1963).

7. Hartshorne, Charles. Reality as Social Process. Glencue, Illinois The Free Press, 1953.

8. Hartshorne, Charles. The Divine Relativity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948.

9. Hartshorne, Charles. "The God of Religion and the God of Philosophy." Talk of God. Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, II. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969.

10. Hartshorne, Charles. The Logic of Perfection and Other Essays in NeoClassical Metaphysics. LaSalle, Illinois: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1962.

11. Hartshorne, Charles. "Tillich’s Doctrine of God." The Theology of Paul Tillich. Edited by Charles W. Kegley and Rckert W. Bretall. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1961.

12. Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Ralph Manheim. Garden City, New York: Doubleday 6’ Company, Inc. Anchor -Books, 1961.

13. Huxley, Julian. Essays of a Humanist. New York: Harper and Row, 1964.

14. Malcolm, Norman. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. London: Oxford University Press, 1958.

15. Purtill, R. L. "Ontological Modalities." The Review of Metaphysics, 21 (December, 1967).

16. Reese, William L. "Non-Being and Negative Reference." Process and Divinity. Edited by William L. Reese and Eugene Freeman. LaSalle, Illinois: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1964.

17. Smart, J. J. C. "The Existence of God." New Essays in Philosophical Theology. Edited by Antony Flew and Alasdair Maclntyre. London: SCM Press, 1955.

Notes:

1. Cf. also, William Rowe, "The Cosmological Argument and the Principle of Sufficient Reason," Man and World. 2 (1968), p. 28V "The difficulty with the view that the Principle [of Sufficient Reason] . . . is necessary is that we do seem able to conceive of things existing, or even of things coming into existence, without having to conceive of those things as having an explanation or cause. Unlike the proposition ‘Some red things are not colored,’ it does seem conceptually possible that something should exist and yet have no cause or explanation of its existence. As Hume remarks, "The separation, therefore, of the idea of a cause from that of a beginning of existence is plainly possible for the imagination, and consequently the actual separation of those objects is so far possible that it implies no contradiction nor absurdity, . . .’ Indeed, not only does the denial of the Principle seem to be possible, philosophers have held that the denial of the Principle is true. [For example, John Laird states:] ‘Many philosophers have maintained that it is not true that everything that exists, or even that everything that has a beginning, has a cause, that is to say, is an effect. The world, they say, contains ‘spontaneous,’ free, or uncaused and unoriginated events. In any case they assert very Positively that there is no way of proving that such uncaused events do not occur.’ " The quote from Hume is from his Treatise. Book I, pt. III section 3. The quote from Laird is from his Theism and Cosmology (New York: Philosophical Library, 1942), p. 95.

Whiteheadian ontology and epistemology illuminate many areas of debate. One such area concerns critical evaluation of literature, particularly when the standards involved have differing philosophical implications. The three critics R. P. Blackmur, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Cleanth Brooks, although varying in the explicitness with which they affirm the criteria and their philosophical bases, all make value judgments that have such implications. This paper will show how three quite different criteria can be reconciled within the framework of Whitehead’s thought.

In the discussion that follows, one work by each writer is assumed to embody his respective position: Blackmur’s Form and Value in Modern Poetry (FVMP), Sartre’s Literary and Philosophical Essays (LPE), Brooks’s The Well-Wrought Urn (WWU), and Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas (AI). Our present concern with the systematic relationship of ideas rather than history or biography warrants such restriction, to set aside the question, "Did he always think thus?"

The three critics all base their evaluations upon criteria of truth. They have in common the formal criterion that literature is good insofar as it is true to reality; they differ in their specifications as to what that reality is. In fact, the three aspects of reality emphasized by Blackmur, Brooks, and Sartre, respectively, may be distinguished in terms of the three basic phases of an actual occasion as analyzed by Whitehead.

Blackmur judges the poetry of Hardy, of Wallace Stevens, of Yeats, of D. H. Lawrence, according to the following implied premise: Good poetry provides an objectification of material (i.e., preconscious experience: the impact of things upon a person, in which the person is passive) within a framework of ideas, the consequent -- not prior -- emotion resulting from apprehension of the material rather than of the ideas.¹

The verdicts differ. Having identified Hardy’s pervasive ideas as "obsessions that have to do mainly with love, time, memory, death, and nature, and have to do mainly with the disloyalty, implacability, or mechanical fatality of these" (FVMP 4), Blackmur judges Hardy’s poems unfavorably: the ideas are separable because too rigid; the emotion precedes rather than follows the material. Thus Hardy "evidently preferred to assault his material with an emotion, preferably violent, and an idea, preferably distraught, in either hand" (FVMP 13). This separability is a fault not only because it violates the aesthetic principle of unity, held in some form by any theory of beauty. More particularly, separability of idea and emotion means the poems fail to objectify their material. The essay "Examples of Wallace Stevens" argues at length that the agent by which Stevens informs material is not strictly an idea, but the form of idea itself -- rhetoric, and then delivers a positive verdict: his poetry meets the criterion. The essays on Yeats differ in leaving the specific verdict to the discretion of the reader; they are intended (especially the first) to answer only the preliminary question as to what constitute Yeats’s pervading ideas. The context within which the reader is to make his judgment, however, is the same. The essay on D. H. Lawrence investigates the opposite flaw to rigidity of ideas -- the almost complete absence of form. Thus there is reference to "Lawrence’s increasing disregard of the control of rationally conceived form and his incipient indifference, in the very last poems, to the denotative functions of language" (FVMP 264). The concept of form is expanded, as it is with Stevens, to include more than idea. But the effect of Lawrence’s error is the same as that of Hardy’s, loss of objectivity. The loss comes from the same failure, although by a different excess, to maintain the proper relationship between idea, emotion, and material.

Blackmur’s criterion is the objectification of the preconscious impact of things upon a person. I equate the preconscious impact with the givenness of the initial datum. For Blackmur, the personal should be shunned in favor of the objective. Thus in Hardy’s best poetry, "all that was personal -- the private drive, the private grief -- is cut away and the impersonal is left bare, an old monument, mutilated or weathered as you like to call it, of that fact which the personal only hides" (FVMP 30). "The true piety here exemplified consists in the celebration of things for their own sake and not for the sake of the act of feeling" (FVMP 12). Whitehead says that "two conditions must be fulfilled in order that an entity may function as an object in a process of experiencing: (1) the entity must be antecedent, and (2) the entity must be experienced in virtue of its antecedence: it must be given" (Al 229). This is an insistence upon the independence of the object from the individuality, one might say from the distinctive personality, of the occasion whose object it is. The initial phase of the occasion is preeminently the phase of the object. In Whitehead’s terms, Blackmur’s "objectification" would be retention within consciousness, which arises as a consequence of higher phases of feeling. Blackmur is concerned with the "poet’s version of the actual" (FVMP 11), which in Whitehead’s terms is the conformation of appearance to reality.

It should be noted that Whitehead is not using "reality" as applicable to the whole of the occasion, but only to the initial phase. The objectivity of this initial phase, as it is effective within the occasion, is the physical pole of the occasion; whereas "‘appearance’ is the effect of the activity of the mental pole" (AI 270). This division into mental and physical poles is reproduced in Blackmur’s dichotomy between the ideas which grasp material and the material which is grasped. Blackmur wants ideas to include rather than to exclude material. Hardy’s work thus suffers because his "idea-patterns... were held rather as rigid frames to limit experience so far as possible, and to substitute for what they could not enclose" (FVMP 3). In contrast, "It is the certification of craft [the poetic use of ideas] that what it handles it makes actual: objective, authoritative, anonymous" (FVMP 11). Such activity -- Blackmur’s interaction of idea-patterns with objective experience -- occurs for Whitehead in the intermediate phases, in which "the initial objective content is still there. But it is overlaid by, and intermixed with, the novel hybrid prehensions derived from integration with the conceptual ferment" (AI 270). Blackmur’s concern is that the overlay be as transparent as possible, for "the celebration [of things, of material] becomes poetic when the things are so put together as to declare their own significance, when they can be taken to mean just what they are -- when the form, the meter, the various devices of poetry merely provide the motion of the meaning" (FVMP 12). Blackmur calls this transparency, which occurs in successful poetry, making actual or making objective (FVMP 11, quoted above). Whitehead would see it as the retention of what was objective to start with, as a conformation of appearance to reality.

Blackmur is concerned with fidelity to the past, to what has been given. Brooks, however, is not concerned with fidelity to any content, but with the establishment of an experience that shall be structurally faithful (see WWU 177) to the complexity which is generically characteristic of reality. "The truth which the poet utters can be approached only in terms of paradox" (WWU 3); "the common goodness which the poems share will have to be stated . . . in terms of structure" (WWU 177). In The Well-Wrought Urn, he tests this criterion by applying it to works acknowledged to be good: good poetry communicates or induces an experience that reflects the structural complexity of reality by presenting elements (emotional and/or ideational) that are in conflict with one another, and are unified by the state of tension (unique for each poem) which enables all to be affirmed and none to be denied.

Various poetic works are analyzed to show that they are in some way or other paradoxical, and that the paradoxes are central to "the total experience that is the poem." Thus, Donne’s "The Canonization" paradoxically unites the secular and the sacred, profane love and holy love; it "welds together the discordant and the contradictory" (WWU 17). In "The Naked Babe and the Cloak of Manliness," Brooks discusses how two recurrent images define the poetic texture of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. One is apparently paradoxical, the other is genuinely paradoxical. "Certainly, the final and climactic appearance of the babe symbol merges all the contradictory elements of the symbol" (WWU 45). Since seriously meant paradox defines good poetry, it is no accident that "the babe turns out to be, as a matter of fact, perhaps the most powerful symbol in the tragedy" (WWU 37). Together, in conjunction, the two images are paradoxical and "furnish Shakespeare with his most subtle and ironically telling instruments" (WWU 47).

"Corinna’s Going a-Maying" is shown to contain elements drawn from two conflicting views, the pagan hedonist and the Christian. Discussion of the last stanza, however, using such terms as "reconcilement of the conflicting claims," "viable relation," and particularly "resolution" (WWU 66) suggests that the paradox of the double attitude is to be abandoned. But Brooks denies that this is his intention by referring the reader to the poem itself for detailed understanding of the resolution (WWU 67). It is worthy of note that the reader is not referred to the last stanza alone, in which the "resolution" takes place, but rather to the entire poem. The reason is not, I take it, that the facts must be known if one is to understand the author’s choice between alternatives, but rather that the resolution is in fact the retention of both the conflicting aspects,² and therefore exemplifies the truly paradoxical quality Brooks is seeking to establish as the generic characteristic of poetry faithful to reality.

This preservation of elements in conflict is identified by Whitehead as a primary characteristic of beauty: "its use [is] to preserve the massive qualitative variety of Reality from simplification by negative prehensions" (AI 335). But the point at issue is not the teleology of the structure, especially since Whitehead here makes fidelity to reality subordinate to the production of certain feeling-states; but whether such structure is particularly faithful to the nature of the intermediate phase of an occasion. Whitehead’s description of the intermediate phase can be paralleled with quotations from Brooks. In the following pairs of quotations, note the similarities between the roles of concept and intellect, the role of the past, the processes of integration-reintegration and mutual modification, and the resulting definition of an experience. On the roles of concept and intellect:

Brooks quotes Coleridge, with emphatic approval:

On the role of the past (the quotations from Whitehead are consecutive):

The processes of integration-reintegration and of mutual modification:

The resulting definition of an experience:

The intermediate phase is preeminently the phase of prehending. It is in this phase that the structural complexity of the immediate occasion is constituted. The preceding description may seem to emphasize integration rather more than Brooks does, But, just as Brooks’s criterion necessitates some unity,³ so the multiplicity of prehensions that constitute an occasion are minimally unified in that they do in fact constitute one occasion. "Throughout the universe there reigns the union of opposites which is the ground of dualism" (AI 345). As Brooks says, "Indeed, almost any insight important enough to warrant a great poem apparently has to be stated in such terms," that is, "by means of paradox" (WWU 16).

Whitehead is describing the generic properties of all actual occasions; Brooks, on the other hand, is setting forth a criterion that will distinguish between good poetry and bad poetry. There is an apparent contradiction here, which was absent in Blackmur’s case. Blackmur’s criterion required the preservation of the characteristics of one phase of an occasion within the following phase. Brooks, however, is using a characteristic of all occasions to distinguish some as better than others. The distinction depends, of course, on degree. Brooks is asking for the strongest instances of structural complexity, which will clearly introduce it into the conscious mind; not, perhaps, as an object of contemplation, but as an effective agent within the experience, whose stresses are definitely felt. "The poem, if it be a true poem, is a simulacrum of reality -- in this sense, at least, it is an ‘imitation’ -- by being an experience rather than any mere statement about experience or any mere abstraction from experience" (WWU 194).

The third critic whose poetic criterion fits Whitehead’s ontology so neatly is Sartre. In Literary and Philosophical Essays Sartre evaluates novels by François Mauriac, Albert Camus, Jean Giraudoux, and William Faulkner. Sartre’s premise: A good novel induces in the reader a sense of the free, creative, and temporally extending nature of the self.

Mauriac’s La Fin de la Nuit is judged bad because its heroine is not free. "Because Therese’s freedom has been doled out with a dropper, it no more resembles real freedom than her mind resembles a real mind" (LPE 18). She is not free partly because of the author’s omniscience: "The reader of a novel does not want to be God. In order for my duration to the transfused into the veins of Therese and Marie Desqueyroux, I must, at least once, be unaware of their fate and impatient to know it" (LPE 19).

Sartre sees Camus’ philosophy of the absurd as a philosophy of fragmentation, calling it "the analytic assumption that any reality is reducible to a sum total of elements . . ." (LPE 37). He therefore praises Camus’ appropriately fragmentary style (short sentences, use of the present perfect tense, and elimination of words signifying causal relationship or temporally extended duration). But he judges the novel negatively at the end of the essay because the apparently disconnected and random events of the book are in fact coherent: they, not free selves, are the mechanical causes which effect the book’s conclusion. It is an "orderly work, composed about the absurd and against the absurd" (LPE 41). This mechanical efficacy denies freedom, although the novel successfully uses an objective point of view (not, of course, an omniscient point of view) to make the reader infer a self behind the evidence. "The character of the protagonist thus retains a real opacity even to the absurd-conscious observer. . . . He is there before us, he exists, and we can neither understand him nor quite judge him. In a word, he is alive, and all that can justify him to us is his fictional destiny" (LPE 32).

The essay "Jean Giraudoux and the Philosophy of Aristotle" attacks Choix des Elues because it "has banished every possible element of surprise or bewilderment, including evolution, development, disorder and novelty" (LPE 50). It presents people as things. Faulkner’s Sartoris is similarly judged: "What do we see? Only gestures, no more than we could see from the outside" (LPE 74). The fault is not the external vision per se, but that there is no self behind the gestures to be inferred; the only inner essence Faulkner manages to suggest "is a thing, a spirit-thing, an opaque, solidified spirit behind consciousness" (LPE 77). The Sound and the Fury is similarly criticized because it denies to its characters an open future. The success possible to Faulkner’s "extraordinary art" is that, in describing "our suffocation and a world dying of old age" (LPE 87) he communicates his own existential attitude toward it: the self the reader may apprehend is Faulkner, freely choosing to be a determinist.

The terms on which Sartre places the greatest emphasis are freedom and the individual time.⁴ The first of these terms would seem to suggest an equivalence between the reality Sartre seeks in poetry and the supplemental phases of the actual occasion, which include for Whitehead both the actively creative phase (see AI quoted above) and the region of the occasion’s. "Our claim for freedom is rooted in our relationship to our contemporary environment" (AI 251). If freedom lies in contemporaneity, it should be sought neither in the first phase, which looks to the past, nor in the final phase, which looks to the future. "The mutual independence of contemporary occasions lies strictly within the sphere of their teleological self-creation. . . . The immediate activity of self-creation is separate and private, so far as contemporaries are concerned" (AI 252). The "immediate activity" is the primary characteristic of the intermediate phase of the occasion; and teleology too inheres in the intermediate phase: "the occasion arises as an effect facing its past and ends as a cause facing its future. In between there lies the teleology of the Universe" (AI 249). Furthermore, Whitehead finds the focus of an occasion’s selfhood within the intermediate rather than the final phase: "Thus a subject’s own constitution involves that its own activity in self-formation passes into its activity of other-formation" (AI 248).

But Sartre is not concerned with the self-creativity of occasions: he is concerned with the self-creativity of persons. "Do you want your characters to live? See to it that they are free" (LPE 7). He refers constantly to the time of the individual person, and is concerned with the intimate relationship between freedom and duration.⁵ There is no time within an actual occasion: time for Whitehead lies between occasions, not within them. Therefore, if Sartre’s criterion can be understood with reference to some aspect of Whitehead’s ontology, it must be with reference to an aspect of the occasion that involves it beyond itself.

Among the phases of an occasion, choice is clearly limited to the initial and the final. The first is obviously inappropriate, because the initial phase is preeminently determined, not free; passive, not creative. This immanence of the past in the present is "according to the mode of efficient causality" (AI 254).

Whitehead must, of course, indicate how distinction is to be made between persons and things, for although he has denied a radical dualism, there are obvious empirical differences. The whole of Sartre’s argument rests on this distinction between persons and things. (Note the contrast, cited above, which Sartre makes between the selves Faulkner does not create and the things he does create.) Whitehead makes the distinction in terms that involve the relationship of the present to the future, as he distinguishes two kinds of societies of occasions.

This is an expression of what Whitehead calls the "Doctrine of Conformation of Feeling" (AI 235) as it may be elaborated when the string of occasions considered is a personally ordered society. It is Whitehead’s explanation of the unity and continuity that each man intuits as characteristic of himself. The unity and continuity are not the distinctively creative aspect of a single occasion; they are rather the impetus of a significantly creative occasion toward the future. They depend, of course, upon the creativity supremely manifest within the intermediate phases. But they are not characteristics of an occasion’s selfhood. Unity and continuity of purpose are rather the distinctive characteristics of a personal self; they are the occasion’s creativity in the mode of anticipation of the future. This is the final phase. White-head’s chapter on ‘The Grouping of Occasions" in which he is specifically concerned with the characteristics of humanity, concludes: "the very essence of life . . . is conformation of purpose." "Purpose is the word for which Sartre would substitute "freedom and duration." The reality to which Sartre would have novels be true⁶ is therefore the final phase of an actual occasion in its role of anticipation towards a relevant future.

Discussion of Sartre has entailed an attention to time that was unnecessary with respect to Blackmur and Brooks. It may need to be explicitly recognized that none of the three critics is thinking in terms of aesthetic experiences of the temporal magnitude -- a tenth of a second -- that Whitehead estimates for a human occasion. Criticisms against the identifications we have made between the three criteria and the three phases of an occasion, based on such temporal considerations, would take us too far afield, but two observations might be in order. First, the appropriateness of Whitehead to Blackmur’s criterion is even stronger if one understands the former to assert that even occasions in the distant past may be prehended directly, particularly occasions in one’s own personal society. Second, it seems to me that Brooks tends to think of poems as essentially nondevelopmental. The most obvious expression of this attitude is his frequent reference to the reading of a poem as an experience.

The criteria of truth used by these three critics are clearly not incompatible. Application of their criteria to the same work might, however, produce conflicting judgments. They may easily be reconciled with each other, if negative judgments are abandoned, and only positive judgments are retained. But the critics do make negative judgments. Sartre is the most emphatic in his rejection of works that do not satisfy his criterion of literary (novelistic) worth. However, what Sartre really rejects is not works that do not give any feeling of new selfhood, but works that pervert the notion of selfhood. Blackmur’s negative valuations, on the other hand, are rejections of failures to reobjectify rather than of poems that reobjectify falsely. If the three criteria are really compatible, an explanation of such negative judgments is needed. One could be constructed by means of a theory of literary genres.

If each of the criteria clearly applied to different genres, then a literary typology with ontological roots would be implicit in what has been said already. This is almost the case; Blackmur and Sartre apply their criteria to different genres in the conventional sense (poetry and fiction). Blackmur’s emphasis upon the initial phase of an actual occasion and Sartre’s emphasis upon the final phase are reflected in their criticisms’ respective emphasis upon re-objectification, and upon personal freedom (or, the openness of the future). One would therefore expect most difficulty in applying Blackmur’s and Sartre’s criteria to the same work. The blurring of the typological outlines occurs when one examines Brooks. Brooks’s criterion, fidelity to the intermediate phase of an actual occasion, lies between the other two both ontologically and in the possibilities of practical use.

References

FVMP -- R. P. Blackmur, Form and Value in Modern Poetry. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1957.

WWU -- Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn. New York: Cornwall, 1947.

LPE -- Jean-Paul Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. Annette Michelson. New York: Criterion, 1955.

Notes

1 The vocabulary is Blackmur’s (material, idea, emotion); the parenthetical definition of material, crucial to the argument of this paper, is mine. Its justification lies in such statements of Blackmur’s as those we quote.

2 "Any statement which we attempt to abstract from the whole context as the meaning’ of the poem is seen to be qualified and modified by the context of the poem taken as a whole" (WWU 174). The same point is made when Pope’s "The Rape of the Lock" is shown to embody a "total situation," not choosing between convention and economic or biological necessity, but recognizing both the seriousness and the triviality of the rape. "It is, finally, the delicate balance and reconciliation of a host of partial interpretations and attitudes" (WWU 94).

3 In L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, "Milton could not afford to exploit mere contrast. If he had, the two halves would have been driven poles apart. They would have ceased to be twin halves of one poem, for the sense of unity in variety would have been lost" (WWU 75).

4 The title of Sartre’s first essay is "Francois Mariac and Freedom." To explain the negative judgment of La Fin de la Nuit, Sate says, "We must go back to the question of freedom (LPE 9). "The book has disappointed me. Not for a moment was I taken in, never did I forget my time" (LPE 8; italics his). The connection between freedom and time (and between them and selfhood or personal identity) appears clearly in Sartre’s insistence that the good novel present a self shaping an open future, not a puppet ruled by the past whose end is contained in his beginning: "But in order for the duration of my impatience and ignorance to be caught and then moulded and finally presented to me as the flesh of these creatures of invention, the novelist must know how to draw it into the trap, how to hollow out in his book, by means of signs at his disposal, a time resembling my own, one in which the future does not exist. If I suspect that the hero’s future actions are determined in advance . . . my own time ebbs back into me; there remains only myself" (LPE 7).

5 Sartre finds in the "irreversibility of time" the unconditioned quality of freedom; the past and the future are radically different. "M. Camus calls The Stranger a ‘novel.’ The novel, however, requires continuous duration, development and the manifest presence of the irreversibility of time. I would hesitate somewhat to use the term ‘novel’ for this succession of inert present moments which allow us to see, from underneath, the mechanical economy of something deliberately staged" (LPE 41).

6 The equation of "un-novelistic" with "untrue" is but one of many indications that "novelistic" and "true" -- to the nature of selfhood as Sartre understands it -- are synonymous. "Why have Faulkner and so many other writers chosen this particular absurdity which is so unnovelistic and so untrue?" (LPE 87).

Sherburne:

Those who have followed our debate concerning Sherburne: "Whitehead without God" [PS 1/2 (Summer, 1971), 91-113] and "Regional Inclusion and the Extensive Continuum" [PS 2/4 (Winter, 1972), 277-95] will recall our differences concerning regional inclusion. Whitehead does not develop such a theory, but our problem is whether such a theory would be compatible with his basic principles as Cobb claims. Here my efforts to adumbrate a "Whiteheadian Psychological Physiology" are quite pertinent. I originally wrote this article (1:401.07) as the opening shot in my war against the concept of regional inclusion. One of Cobb’s arguments is that regional inclusion is a fruitful concept for gaining understanding of the relationship between the regnant society of personally ordered occasions that answers to the concept of a "soul" in the Whiteheadian philosophy and the other occasions in the brain which support that regnant society. Since I believe that regional inclusion is an incoherent concept, I there provided a model for understanding the relationship in question without making any appeal to regional inclusion.

Cobb:

Whitehead speaks of the personally ordered society of dominant human occasions (Sherburne’s regnant society) as a "thread of happenings wandering in ‘empty’ space amid the interstices of the brain" (PR 516). This clearly does not entail regional inclusion; so I am not claiming his support for my doctrine of the relation of the "soul" to the "body." My claim is that this relation could be understood better if reconceived in terms of regional inclusion. Since Sherburne has proposed a theory interpreting and defending Whitehead’s position as part of our debate, my claim may be furthered by responding to it. First, I would like to express my gratitude for his clarifying interpretation of the passage in PR 161 to which I have paid too little attention.

The main point of Sherburne’s theory is that a nonsocial nexus exists in the interstices of the brain such that its members are severally attuned to stimuli from different parts of the body. The personally ordered society that is the soul is not a set of distinct entities. It is rather defined by a decisive inheritance by one or another of the members of the otherwise nonsocial nexus from some antecedent member, a member which may or may not have had a similar relation to the body. Thus in one moment the soul would be constituted by the present reception of stimuli from the ear drums, while inheriting from a past occasion that was stimulated from the big toe.

I grant that this is a possible interpretation of certain texts in Whitehead. Although I doubt that it was his intention, it is as close or closer to his intention than my theory. Hence I do not want to dispute the matter textually. My thesis is rather that it is not a plausible view of physiological psychology. Consider its implications. (1) No one human experience can be affected directly by a multiplicity of sources of sensations, such as seeing, hearing, and tasting, as well as feeling what is occurring in the big toe. All such contributions of the body must be successive. A man might remember what he saw a moment earlier while hearing a portion of a syllable, but he could not simultaneously see the man speaking and hear what he says. (2) Since the members of the nonsocial nexus cannot all be contiguous, and since Sherburne stresses the necessity of contiguity for inheritance, definite patterns of succession must exist such that, for example, between a moment of seeing and a moment of hearing one might have to have a moment of awareness of his big toe. (3) Conscious seeing, for example, can occur only intermittently, since most of the time the ego must be elsewhere than in the seeing occasions. (4) Since seeing, etc., are in fact physiologically very complex processes, even the above is oversimple. Probably we must be held to see different parts of the visual field successively, perhaps one color at a time.

I know of no evidence supporting this theory, and certainly it sharply conflicts with my experience of seeming to see, hear, taste, and feel my big toe all at once. Indeed, this theory of experience is so eccentric that I hesitate to attribute it to Sherburne. I am helped in avoiding this attribution by his subsequent indication that the personally ordered regnant society he is tracing "answers to the notion of the conscious ego while the supporting nonsocial nexus answers to the dimly conscious regions of the ‘depth’ dimension of the psyche" (1:406). Sherburne’s point is then that conscious attention focuses on different aspects of experience successively.

This doctrine also is questionable if pressed as far as Sherburne’s theory would require, but it is far more defensible than the other. Let us assume, for the sake of discussion, that it is correct. There is then an important shift that moves Sherburne closer to my own position, closer than he intends. Although he begins by associating the soul with the regnant society, he ends by identifying the psyche with the whole nonsocial nexus. The regnant society is one part of this nexus, but my experience in any moment includes both the clear conscious experience of the regnant society and the dimly conscious experiences of the other members of the nexus. In that case, either my experience does not have (at any moment) the unity of an actual entity (i.e., it is then in fact and finally many discrete experiences and not an experience at all), or my experience is an actual occasion including, or contributed to by, both the ego and the other occasions of the nexus. The first alternative must be rejected, for Whitehead holds that all real togetherness is derived from the indefinable togetherness that is found in a single experience (PR 288). If the apparent togetherness in experience of both clear and dim consciousness, or of hearing and seeing, is declared unreal, as in this alternative, then no basis remains for any doctrine of togetherness whatever.

The second alternative requires a doctrine of regional inclusion. If my experience subsumes, or directly inherits from, a multiplicity of members of a nonsocial nexus, then it must be contiguous (on Sherburne’s view) to all of them. It cannot be contiguous to all of them unless its region includes other regions.

One other point in Sherburne’s article needs to be challenged as misleading. Sherburne correctly quotes a passage from Whitehead in which he argues that life is not to be explained in terms of the relations between successive members of an enduring entity. That relation is one of repetition and reenactment, whereas the characteristic of life is novelty.

However, Sherburne follows this quote with the following statement which is at least implicitly critical of the doctrine of the human soul that I developed in A Christian Natural Theology. "This objection has force . . . against any simple-minded attempt to identify as the living soul the regnant, personally ordered society which we uncritically have been calling the analogue of the soul. Such an enduring entity, with its binding of any individual entity to the line of its ancestry, is, taken by itself, as irrelevant an answer to the problem of life, which is a bid for freedom, as is the doctrine of substance" (1:403). Sherburne proceeds to the discussion of the nexus of living occasions that provides the context of the soul and with which in the end he seems to identify the soul. (Or does Sherburne ontologically distinguish between soul and psyche?)

I have no desire to quarrel with the discussion of the nonsocial nexus in the interstices of the brain. But Sherburne poses a question which Whitehead answers in another and a clearer way. The reason we cannot explain life in terms of enduring entities is that in ordinary enduring entities the physical feeling of each member is reenacted in its successors.

The lines quoted by Sherburne are taken from a discussion of the life of a cell. Whitehead denies that this life can be illuminated by thinking of the cell as having a soul. However, a few pages later Whitehead starts a new section with the sentence: "The complexity of nature is inexhaustible" (PR 163). Here he begins his discussion of what in Adventures of Ideas he called the soul, what he here calls a living person." The living person is also an "enduring entity" but it differs from the enduring entities of which he was speaking before in a crucial respect. Those, which he usually calls enduring objects, establish their identity through time by endless repetition, i.e., by physical feelings of physical feelings of physical feelings, ad infinitum. Life or novelty can play at best a trivial role there. But where life is highly developed a new mode of relationships among living occasions is possible. Living persons establish their identity, or, perhaps better, continuity, by hybrid feelings of hybrid feelings of hybrid feelings. Hybrid feelings are feelings of the conceptual feelings of antecedent occasions, and it is there that novelty lies. "By this transmission the mental originality of the living occasions receives a character and depth" (PR 163). It is both "canalized" and "intensified."

My point here is not that Sherburne is strictly incorrect in anything that he says. My point is only that by failing to mention the way in which Whitehead solves the problem Sherburne poses, Sherburne gives the impression that much more hinges on his mode of dealing with it than is in fact the case.

Sherburne:

Cobb’s fundamental objection is that my account makes ordinary human experience unintelligible. He argues that my account implies that our human experience cannot be affected by a multiplicity of sources of sensation all at once, with the result that if my account were correct we ought to have for one moment a visual, and nothing but a visual experience, succeeded the next moment by an auditory, and nothing but an auditory experience, etc. Our experience is not like this, he correctly points out, and so he condemns my account. In a moment I shall defend my account from this charge, but let me first point out that Cobb’s theory of regional inclusion leads to a position that is equally as absurd as the conclusions with which he attempts to saddle my presentation. Then I shall argue that I can get out from under my "absurdities" a lot better than he can get out from under his. But I want to emphasize before launching into these topics that I consider these comments exploratory and provisional -- we are entering an area where a great deal more work needs to be done.

Here, now, is the problem for Cobb. If the route of "soul" occasions is composed of "macro" occasions that regionally include the totality of occasions that make up the brain, then the regnant, "soul" occasions should be perfectly receptive of all the experiences recorded by the brain. But our experience no more answers to this model than it answers to Cobb’s interpretation of my model. Consider first the way we experience, forget, and recall again. Last week a prospective graduate student called to inquire about our philosophy program. Now I want to write him a note. But I have forgotten where I put the scrap of paper with his name on it. I think and think in an attempt to recall. I fail. But suddenly I remember I gave it to the departmental secretary. Now in some sense I knew this all along, i.e., in the sense that the information was coded as a memory trace in my brain. I could not "put my finger on" the information momentarily but after a while "it came to me." This kind of experience would not be what Cobb’s model would lead us to expect at all, for if the fully conscious, regnant occasions totally encompassed the region of the brain, inheriting from every part, how could the content of some of the brain occasions have remained hidden from me? Consider another example. A football player gives his shoulder a hard twist but hardly notices it in the heat of the game. When the game is over he becomes aware of the pain, and aware also that it was in some sense hurting during the game, though he hardly noticed it. Cobb’s model is ill equipped to explain this sort of experience. Consider again my own experience right now in my library study. I have suddenly focused on the hum of the air-conditioning unit. The hum has been there all afternoon but I have not been aware of it until now, as I searched for another example to make my point. Given Cobb’s model I would assume the hum ought to have been bearing in on me constantly. (But now I find I have made my point too well -- I cannot get my mind off the hum and back completely on my writing; my attention fluctuates on and off the hum in just the successive way that fits Cobb’s interpretation of my model!)

It seems to me that the only systematic concept that Cobb could fall back on in connection with these sorts of examples would be the concept of a negative prehension. He would have to argue that the regnant occasion directly inherits from all the regions of the brain in virtue of regionally including all the occasions of the brain, but negatively prehends some of these occasions while positively prehending others. This move might be plausible as an account of the example of the football player and his pain -- the concentration of aim upon the game generates negative prehensions of all factors not relevant to the winning of the game. But when we move to the example of not being able to remember where I put the scrap of paper, then I find that this suggestion has lost its plausibility. Here my every ounce of concentration is involved in trying to remember where I put it; every aim of the moment is directed toward drawing forth into consciousness what I know is buried in my brain somewhere and what I am confident I will uncover shortly. How I could be stymied in this way over little things from time to time baffles me if Cobb’s model be used to shape our understanding of psychological physiology. It is possible that a Freudian explanation in terms of unconscious aims and wishes might account for some instances of this type of temporary inability to remember, but there are so many ordinary, common, innocuous instances of this phenomenon that to account for them all in terms of negative prehensions generated by hidden aims strikes me as highly unsatisfactory. One wants further to ask of Cobb’s model how it would propose to make intelligible the notion of these unconscious aims which generate these slyly operative negative prehensions. As unconscious and hidden to the all-encompassing regional inclusiveness of Cobb’s regnant occasion, they themselves must be hidden by negative prehensions entertained by virtue of yet other hidden aims, etc., etc., ad infinitum. My conclusion from these considerations is that Cobb has problems of his own when he proposes to illuminate our understanding of psychological physiology by means of his model of a regionally inclusive regnant occasion. Having pointed this out, I turn now to my own model in an effort to show that it can be defended from the objections Cobb brings against it.

Let me point out first that the phenomena we have been discussing respond rather well to analysis in terms of the model presented in my original article (1:401-07). When we forget something and are trying to remember, the mind moves from topic to topic trying to find its way to its goal. It often finally arrives at its goal by a circuitous route involving a great deal of free association. In the face of this kind of evidence I feel my model is strong, stronger than Cobb’s, for the zigzagging route of the regnant society through the supporting nonsocial nexus diagrams just such a search, a search we often make but the need for which would be a mystery were we to take Cobb’s model of regional inclusion seriously. In situations where we focus on one particular facet of our environment to the exclusion of others, here again I feel on firm ground. The model of the route of regnant occasions inheriting steadily from the same segment of the supporting nonsocial nexus seems to answer to this experience and handles not only cases of intense concentration on sensory input, but also cases like that described by Russell, when he says he and a friend walked into Whitehead’s garden one day but found him concentrating so intently on a mathematical problem that he was oblivious to their presence; they circled around him once and left.

Now I turn to the specific objections against my model advanced by Cobb. In the first instance he claims that my model entails that no one human experience can be affected directly by a multiplicity of sources of sensations." This I deny. I think the reason for this objection is that Cobb has not kept in mind the distinction I have made between inheritance from a dominant past occasion and oblique inheritance from occasions in the past which are contiguous but "at a slant," so to speak (PPCT 328). I think this distinction gives me everything I need provided the following points are kept in mind. The nonsocial nexus is the terminus of inheritances which involve many complex integrations. Rather than thinking that there is one terminal entity in the nonsocial nexus directly connected to the big toe, another connected to the little toe, another connected to the ankle, and so on, my suggestion is that an entity which is part of the nonsocial nexus (which remember, would only be a very small section of the brain) is an entity which, by means of transmutations, has brought together a vast number of, for example, bodily feelings into a unity of bodily experience. Our normal, ordinary bodily experience is like that of, say, feeling tired, which we might describe as a general feeling of tension and strain broadly diffused throughout the whole body. Many, many, many routes of inheritance from all parts of the body contribute to this general feeling but in the brain these many feelings are integrated into one general experience focused in one strand of the nonsocial nexus. The regnant society of occasions may by and large inherit obliquely from this strand of the nonsocial nexus so that the feeling of being tired is carried along as a vague, undifferentiated background for that activity (which might be something like looking through a microscope) which is generating the dominant route of inheritance for the regnant society at that time. In this way human experience is quite normally affected directly and simultaneously by a multiplicity of sources of sensation. Perhaps a surprising find in the microscope can so focus our attention on what we see that our awareness of being tired vanishes for a spell, or perhaps the feeling of fatigue comes to dominate our experience so that we cannot "keep our mind on" the patterns before our eyes.

But now I want to challenge more directly Cobb’s reading of our experience. He advances as a criticism of my view the claim that given my model "no one human experience can be affected directly by a multiplicity of sources of sensation." We have seen that we can account for the type of situation where a general feeling tone persists in consciousness as a background for a focal point of attention. But how well, in fact, can we fully concentrate on multiple sources of sensation? Suppose you were sitting in a chair with earphones and were hearing a lecture on politics over the earphones at the same time that the printed pages of a novel were being reeled off on a screen before you. Could you both read the novel and follow the lecture simultaneously? Perhaps if both were going rather slowly you could hang on to the two. But you would hang on by making a whole series of flip-flops between sight and hearing. While you were concentrating on the screen your auditory mechanisms would sort of make a recording for you of a series of sounds and then you would switch your attention to those sounds and scoop them up before returning your attention to the screen. While at Oxford University, I took tutorials for two terms with a don who was notorious for reading his mail, writing letters or talking on the phone while his tutees were reading their essays. At the conclusion of an essay he would invariably provide a brilliant critique of everything that had been said. When queried once about this ability seemingly to concentrate on two things at once he implied that his "gift" was a combination of knowing the subject matter of the essays very well and being able to shift his attention between two matters very rapidly. All of this is a way of saying that Cobb’s objections may have more weight than he intended. In terms of our concentrated, conscious experience, it does seem to be the case that we have difficulty absorbing two sources of sensation concomitantly. Now Cobb might object that the earphone-screen example is not what he has in mind -- rather, he might say, he has in mind the sort of situation where we go to listen to a lecture but obviously watch the speaker while we listen to his words. Here, also, I suggest, we must consider our experience carefully. Normally in this sort of situation our visual impressions are much in the background of our attention. Should the speaker have unusual mannerisms, we refer to them as "distracting" or "disconcerting" -- they draw our conscious attention to our visual data to the detriment of our ability to follow the argument. Should people on the rostrum move about or do things while the speaker is holding forth, we find this distracting. My point in these examples has been that our normal experience is not as Cobb suggests, it is not the sort of thing wherein all sorts of sensations and awarenesses hold equal sway. Rather, it has the character of a focal point of attention (correlated with dominant inheritance on my model) washed over by various vaguely discriminated backgrounds (correlated with oblique inheritance on my model). In this regard it is instructive to consider certain of the recent "compositions" by men such as John Cage. The audience is bombarded by sound, lights and fragments of poetry and other readings. The intent seems to be to shake us out of our normal patterns of experience by doing away with the possibility of a mute of dominant inheritance. What results is either a blur of sensations or a constant, and very disconcerting, shifting of attention. Such a happening may have a certain charm to it, but it is certainly not anything like our normal mode of awareness. My response to Cobb’s first line of criticism, then, is that the presuppositions of his criticism entail a view of experience which is unreal, namely, that we have all kinds of focused, conscious experiences simultaneously. To the contrary, our normal experience has a focused center washed over by a series of vaguely discriminated backgrounds, any one of which can snap to the center of attention given appropriate stimuli, and I hold that it is my model of dominant and oblique inheritance and not his model of regionally inclusive inheritance which most adequately reflects this normal mode of awareness.

There are many different kinds of experiences we could appeal to and analyze in connection with this first line of criticism -- let me assume that I have made my position clear enough for the reader to go on and work out the kind of analysis I would provide in each of these cases. To summarize, Cobb is of the opinion that pointing out that he seems "to see, hear, taste, and feel my big toe all at once" refutes my position (and presumably he means see a mountain, hear music, taste ice cream and feel the toe, not see the toe, hear the toe, etc.). I do not think this is true at all, for if I am listening to a thrilling concert of Mozart’s music outdoors in Salzburg, I am only vaguely aware of the scenery, idly nibble on the ice cream cone, and totally "forget" for the moment the blister on my big toe. But enough of this point; the distinctions we have already made will help me deal more briefly with Cobb’s second main line of criticism.

This second line of attack centers on the demand for real togetherness within a single experience. The argument is that the "togetherness in experience of both clear and dim consciousness, or of hearing and seeing" requires a doctrine of regional inclusion. This I deny. At stake here is how one conceives the relationship between the "conscious" and the "unconscious." I used the language of "ego," "soul," and "‘depth’ dimension of the psyche" in my article and Cobb, in effect, has asked me to clarify what I mean by this language. I am happy to oblige.

I mean to assert that my conscious experience, the experience constitutive of me as a conscious ego, is the experience of the actual entities constitutive of the personally ordered regnant society which dominates my brain and my whole animal organism. As Whitehead clearly states, the question of the immortality of the soul is the question whether this regnant society can continue to persist without its supporting subordinate societies; for reasons such as this I have referred to this regnant society as being the analogue of the traditional concept of soul.

A problem is generated when I go on to suggest that "the supporting nonsocial nexus answers to the dimly conscious regions of the ‘depth’ dimension of the psyche Cobb notes that it is not clear whether I identify "soul" and "psyche." Assuming that I make the identification, he poses a dilemma; either my experience does not have the unity, the togetherness required by a single experience (and this because my experience includes both the clear, conscious experience of the regnant society and the dim experience of other members of the nonsocial nexus); or, my experience is that of a super entity which inherits from the ego and from the other occasions of the nonsocial nexus, and, since inheritance requires contiguity, this latter alternative presupposes acceptance of a doctrine of regional inclusion. In this dilemma Cobb attempts to make me accept either an incoherent concept of experience or his own doctrine of regional inclusion. I accept neither, and to break out of the dilemma I must clarify my meaning when I use the phrase "‘depth’ dimension of the psyche," and when I refer to these regions as "dimly conscious."

My view is that the unity of my conscious experience is the unity of experience in the occasions of the regnant society. About the other members of the nonsocial nexus I will make several points. First off, they have their own dynamic experience apart from that of the regnant society. In pathological cases this experience can burst into consciousness and there can be multiple centers of control competing for authority over the entire organism. The celebrated case reported in The Three Faces of Eve is a well documented case of what, in some degree or other, seems not to be terribly uncommon. In this instance three distinct regnant societies battled for control of the organism, each with its unity of experience. But even when there is not the extreme situation of multiple personalities, it seems as though "unconscious" drives and fears, appetitions and aversions, are present in occasions of the nonsocial nexus which are not incorporated into the regnant society. Whitehead notes that negative prehensions exclude their data from positive ingression into the subject occasion, but nevertheless leave the scar of this rejection on the rejecting entity. This seems to be an appropriate description of how these "dimly conscious" regions have an effect on the regnant society. They are "dimly conscious" in two senses: (1) as experiences, they do not normally rise to the stature of conscious centers competing for control of the organism, but they have appetitions and aversions in their own right so that it seems appropriate to label them "dimly conscious"; (2) they are perceived only dimly by the members of the regnant society, i.e., the regnant society has these particular occasions as dim, vaguely felt, negative "scars" on the data of what is clearly perceived in full consciousness. I submit that this seems to be an accurate picture of what psychoanalysis finds "inside" a man. There is warfare, with hidden troops, whose existence is hardly even suspected. Experiences from early youth, say, get shunted off into a byway of the brain and fester as uneasy memory traces, exerting only a negative prehensive effect on the regnant society. This negative pressure creates tensions without positive content in conscious experience. Therapy consists in using associational techniques to lead the conscious ego into those parts of the brain where the data of the renegade traces can be consciously encountered in positive prehensions. What were, in effect, many experiences can in this way become united in conscious experience in such a way as to eliminate tension, and the neuroses which this tension may create. I will put Cobb back on the defensive by saying that I fail to see how the model of an all-encompassing, regionally inclusive experience is compatible with the hiddenness of competing drives, aspirations and fears which psychoanalysis reveals in the "‘depth’ dimension of the psyche," by which term I mean something broader than the unified experience of the analogue to the "soul," namely, the restless depths of the complex societies which support the regnant nexus and which have a "life" of their own, which is in some instances incorporated into, melded into the conscious experience of the occasions in the regnant society, and sometimes is not.

It may be the case that bringing in terms like "soul" and "psyche" confuse more than they help, but I am willing to run the risk to try to bring Whitehead’s abstract terminology into contact with more ordinary ways of speaking. But Cobb is quite right in pushing me to clarify my analogies and I hope I have satisfied him.

The word "I" is ambiguous, but it has been my purpose to try to clarify the concept. I am a total organism made up of many societies of societies. If my arm is cut off, I lose a part of me, but I still exist, that is, my regnant society can still be supported by the organic structures which remain, though its character, aspirations, etc. may become deeply modified. But destroy my brain so that the regnant society can no longer be supported, and then you destroy the essential me. The experience of that regnant society is my experience and the frustration and triumphs of the societal parts of me (such as my big toe) are known to me through the unity of the experience of that central route of inheritance. This essential me is analogous to the director of the CIA in that it is at the apex of a great information gathering agency. The life of that agency is in a sense concentrated in that director, but there may well be subordinates down the line who are recalcitrant, who withhold information from the pipeline in an effort to influence agency policy, etc. I want to say that the human organism is like the agency in that there is both the unified togetherness of experience enjoyed by the director and fragmentary bits and pieces of structure which may be at odds with, out of tune with, the agency as a whole. In this analogy there is a sense in which there are many discrete experiences in the agency, but there is no experience which lacks the real togetherness of a single experience in virtue of lacking a subject for that experience. Cobb’s model is less atomistic -- he can have only a much less perfect analogy with a CIA-type agency because he wants his director to be an all-encompassing fellow whose experience involves overlap, in the sense of regional inclusion, with that of all the agents, i.e., he reads all the reports up and down the line!

These paragraphs have spoken to the problem of the togetherness of a single experience. But it does not follow that I am now thrown back on regional inclusion. The occasions in my regnant nexus inherit from their predecessors and inherit at any given moment obliquely from a variety of obliquely contiguous occasions. But they do not inherit from all of the members of the nonsocial nexus at all times, as Cobb implies they must. Rather, many parts of that nexus are unheard from in the experience of a given regnant occasion. That means that what is going on in some parts of the supporting nonsocial nexus is not known to the regnant occasion and this is what I mean by saying that the activities of those unprehended parts of the nonsocial nexus answer to the notion of the unconscious, or the depth dimension of the "psyche." Some aspects of this unconscious area are unconscious through lack of attention, and the regnant society may easily bring the experience of the occasions in that part of the nonsocial nexus within its purview. Other aspects of the unconscious may be areas of the nonsocial nexus where the regnant society fears to tread except in dreams through the mediation of a transforming symbolism. By permitting these sorts of distinctions I~ feel that my model for understanding psychological physiology from within a generally Whiteheadian context is superior to the one offered by Cobb.

Cobb:

Sherburne is performing a valuable service in his persistent effort to develop a physiological psychology that takes seriously Whitehead’s doctrine of the dominant occasion surrounded by a nonsocial nexus wandering among the interstices of the brain. However, he has not yet succeeded in persuading me that an adequate view can be developed along these lines, though his present argument marks a considerable advance over the earlier one.

One issue that lies between us is the relation of the dominant occasion to consciousness and to focal attention. Although Sherburne is not entirely consistent he seems to identify the experience of the dominant occasion as exclusively focused, conscious experience. Otherwise there would be no point to his criticism of my attack on him as presupposing "that we have all kinds of focused, conscious experiences simultaneously," since, of course I said nothing of the sort. Also, much of his phenomenological analysis assumes this. I, on the contrary, assume that focused, conscious experience is a very small, although very important, part of the total experience of the dominant occasion. At this point I believe that Whitehead agrees with me. For him "consciousness presupposes experience, and not experience consciousness. It is a special element in the subjective form of some feelings. Thus an actual entity may, or may not, be conscious of some part of its experience. Its experience is its complete formal constitution, including its consciousness, if any" (PR 83). It is my understanding that in principle, even the dominant’ occasion may have no consciousness whatever. Certainly its consciousness may be dim (PR 267). I am highly doubtful that any other occasions in the psychophysical organism enjoy consciousness. But however these more extreme statements may fare, I am sure that White-head means to say that the dominant occasion has nonconscious as well as conscious feelings.

For one thing, he explicitly asserts that all occasions include physical purposes (PR 421). And although consciousness can enter into their subjective forms where intellectual feelings are present, I do not believe that Whitehead meant to imply that they are all conscious in dominant occasions. "Consciousness only illuminates the more primitive types of prehension so far as these prehensions are still elements in the products of integration. Thus those elements of our experience which stand out clearly and distinctly in our consciousness are not its basic facts" (PR 245).

My own reflection on experience has led me to emphasize the primacy of the unconsciousness still more strongly. I assume that I prehend numerous occasions in my brain -- in Sherburne’s theory it would be occasions in the nonsocial nexus -- but I am conscious of none of them. What I am conscious of, of course, I receive in large part from them. But of those occasions themselves. I am blankly unconscious. When we follow Whitehead in thinking of prehensions of noncontiguous occasions -- mediated or not -- then the number of physical feelings of which I am blankly unconscious is staggering.

Whitehead, like Sherburne, does associate consciousness with attention. Consciousness is found chiefly in the subjective form of intellectual feelings, and "intellectual feelings, in their primary function, are concentration of attention involving increase of importance" (PR 416). My view is that conscious attention shades off by degrees into unconscious inattention, the latter constituting by far the larger part of the experience of the dominant occasion. Sherburne puts this well: "Our normal experience has a focused center washed over by a series of vaguely discriminated backgrounds, any one of which can snap to the center of attention given appropriate stimuli." I would want only to add that the backgrounds that are vaguely discriminated consciously have as their backgrounds others that are completely unconscious but which are also capable of so developing as to become conscious.

Sherburne thinks that the model of regional inclusion should imply that we are continuously conscious of everything that is occurring in the brain. My response is that the dominant occasion is continuously feeling all the occasions in the brain. None of these occasions is negatively prehended, since in Whitehead’s view "all actual entities in the actual world, relatively to a given actual entity as ‘subject,’ are necessarily ‘felt’ by the subject" (PR 66). However, of necessity most of the feelings of most of these occasions are negatively prehended. Most of what is felt is not consciously felt. Most, even of the conscious feeling, is vague.

Sherburne thinks I should have difficulty explaining forgetting. He seems to think the only obstacle to memory would be purposive. I by no means believe that conscious experience is so fully subject to purposive control. To a large extent consciousness is determined by the strength of the data. There is a tendency for what has been recently conscious to dominate present consciousness. What has long not been conscious -- has even been negatively prehended -- is not easily attended to and brought to consciousness. In my experience the very effort to remember a name can block me from doing so.

I am also persuaded by depth psychology to attribute to the psyche an active unconscious life. Whereas Whitehead recognizes that much experience is unconscious, he does not seem to have thought of this experience as involving the levels of symbolization of which depth psychology regards it as capable. Whitehead does not say much about our experience in dreams even though he does not intend to exclude it. I believe that dreams are experiences of the dominant occasion and that similar experience plays a subordinate role while we are awake, although generally excluded from consciousness by focused attention on the external world or events in the body. Whitehead does not help much directly in the unraveling of these mysteries of the human psyche, but that is not a serious objection. He does give us a way of thinking about the relation of the psyche to the body that provides a context for psychological work. Since for both Whitehead and depth psychology unconscious experience precedes and is more fundamental than conscious experience, a basic compatibility is available for fuller treatment. I have developed it somewhat in The Structure of Christian Existence.

In the foregoing I am using psyche and soul synonymously, as Whitehead did. As he says in Adventures of Ideas, "The Psyche is, of course, the Soul" (AI 354). Both are used by Whitehead to refer to what Sherburne calls the soul. I am glad to have Sherburne clarify his usage of the two terms, but I regard it as unfortunate that the English translation of the Greek word should be taken to have a different meaning. The distinction reflects what I take to be an inaccurate and waning view of depth psychology, namely one that hypostatizes the different elements in the psyche as separate entities. Whitehead did not do that, and unless it has more responsible support from the psychological community than I am aware, I think it a dangerous proposal from a philosopher.

I will now raise some fresh objections to Sherburne’s model, many of which, would apply also to the undeveloped suggestions of Whitehead. I am not sure that the notion of a memory trace is supported by contemporary physiological psychology, but I will take Sherburne’s account. Despite the close association of the soul with conscious attention, Sherburne must attribute to the soul a great deal of unconscious experience. For one thing, I assume that it is not conscious of where it is. At least I have never had even the dimmest inkling of being in one or another part of my brain. It is also unaware of its motion. It seems also to have considerable knowledge of the physiology of the brain to guide it as it races around looking for the right memory trace, since the likelihood of its finding such a trace by sheer chance is negligible. Yet this vast array of knowledge, requiring intellectual feelings, as to the location of all the memory traces is entirely unconscious. If Sherburne means to say that he is conscious of some of this I hope he will say so. He would be an excellent subject for experiments in physiological psychology.

Now although I am much more inclined than Sherburne to attribute unconscious experience to the dominant occasion, I hesitate to regard its unconscious as so well informed as this. There is also certain irony involved. Sherburne does not want to attribute to the unconscious of the dominant occasions the memory itself, but he must then attribute to it the memory of where the memory trace is to be found. Or else it must remember where to look for the memory of where the memory trace is to be found. Perhaps it would be better after all to locate the memory itself in the soul’s unconscious!

I assume that these memory traces may be spatially at some distance from each other, two or three inches, perhaps. In relation to the size of the dominant occasion that is a great distance. Presumably it must wander through the interstices of the brain, which would protract the journey. I assume further that the successive dominant occasions, in Sherburne’s view, must be contiguous to each other. If a dominant occasion has a spatial extent of one-sixteenth of an inch, a minimum of forty-eight occasions would be required to move from one memory-trace to another. Meanwhile, one would suppose that the forty-seven intervening occasions would be peculiarly influenced by the memory traces--or whatever -- along the sides of the interstices through which they traveled. The nonsocial nexus, of course will be required to go along.

It was my inability to take such a view seriously that drove me to a different model in the first place. I still find that view incredible. However, I do not mean to ridicule it or to pose the limits of my own credulity as a norm for truth. I want rather to know whether this really is the model Sherburne offers us, or whether I have misunderstood. If I have not misunderstood, it should be possible to predict from the model certain remarkable phenomena whose occurrence could be empirically demonstrated.

On Sherburne’s principles (1) in the foregoing example, if there are ten dominant occasions per second, it would take at least 4.8 seconds from one memory trace to the other with a predictable series of memories or other experiences occurring in between. (2) It would be possible to interdict the dominant occasion and its accompanying nexus surgically and to remove them from the brain without disturbing any of the brain cells.

My question to Sherburne is whether he accepts these testable implications of his theory, and if so whether he believes that any evidence exists in their favor. Apart from empirical checks, I would like to know what Sherburne supposes would happen to a brain from which the dominant occasion was thus removed. Would the result be a human vegetable? Or would the brain generate a new living nexus to take the place of the old? Would this be an entirely new person or somehow a continuation of the old one? Is it possible that meanwhile the removed nexus could be transplanted to another brain, so that "soul transplants" are at least a theoretical possibility?

I could continue to ask questions, but these are enough to indicate the difficulty I have with this model. I still hope that if we can clarify our two models sufficiently, we will find what empirical tests are possible.

References

PPCT -- Delwin Brown, Ralph E. James, Jr., and Gene Reeves, eds., Process Philosophy and Christian Thought. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971.

1. The special Whitehead issue of the Southern Journal of Philosophy. 7/4 (Winter, 1969-70), for Sherburne’s article on "Whitehead’s Psychological Physiology," 401-07.

Cobb: It is a pleasure to debate Professor Sherburne. Not only does he take clear positions and argue for them vigorously, but also the debate makes progress! Sherburne’s rejoinder [in PS 1, 2 (Summer, 1971), 101-13] is much more sharply focused than his original essay on "Whitehead Without God." (PPGT 305-28). It pushes more deeply into basic issues. And it calls for a more precise response, though in this exchange we will restrict ourselves to only one of the issues raised, that concerning regional inclusion and the extensive continuum.

Altering somewhat his sequence, I believe that I do no injustice to the structure of his general argument by summarizing it as follows:

1. Whitehead implies that God is the ground of the givenness of the past. This is a sufficiently important part of Whitehead’s reason for affirming God that its successful rejection is "one reason for exploring the possibility of a naturalistic reinterpretation of Whitehead’s basic categories" (PS 1:105; cf. 108f).

2. For God to function as the ground of the givenness of the past, he must either occupy a region coextensive with the regions occupied by his creatures or relate to them nonextensively. The first alternative must he rejected because there can be no regional inclusion. The second alternative must be rejected because only contiguous occasions can be prehended.

It is important for the reader to understand a rather odd feature of our debate. I am not arguing against Sherburne in favor of the view that God is needed as the ground of the givenness of the past and can fulfill this function. On the contrary, I am arguing in favor of Sherburne’s view that God is not and cannot be in Whitehead’s system the ground of the givenness of the past. Our disagreement is as to Whitehead’s intention. According to Sherburne the "most reasonable reading of Whitehead’s system" (PS 1:105) requires that God be the ground of the givenness of the past and Whitehead implies this doctrine. I deny that there is any ground for attributing this doctrine to Whitehead. The dispute is relevant to Sherburne’s basic project of an atheistic Whiteheadianism since, if this were an important reason for Whitehead’s theism, its refutation would cast doubt on that theism. Since I am convinced that it was no part at all of Whitehead’s reasons for affirming God, I do not see its refutation as a "reason for exploring" the atheistic alternative. Of course in our day, when "God" is so unpopular in philosophy, in the university culture, and even in theology, there are quite understandable reasons for trying to excise God from Whitehead’s system. But I think it worthwhile to insist that Sherburne’s basic argument thus far does not express them; otherwise, the reader might suppose Sherburne had displayed a very basic weakness in Whitehead’s case for theism that does not in fact exist.

Sherburne explicitly discusses regional inclusion and noncontiguous efficacy as adjuncts of his basic argument that God cannot be the ground of the givenness of the past. Since we are agreed that God is not the ground of the givenness of the past, one might suggest that no further discussion is appropriate. However, in fact Sherburne’s argument is much more fundamental. If God cannot be related to occasions either contiguously or noncontiguously, God cannot be related to occasions at all. This is the real thrust of Sherburne’s argument, and it counts against all Whiteheadian talk of God. For this reason it is eminently worth discussing.

I shall begin with the second point because that can be treated more briefly. Here too there is partial agreement between us, followed by important disagreement. We agree that the most promising way to show how God is related to the world would be by regional inclusion. We disagree in that whereas I leave open the possibility of exploring an alternative mode of relation, he wishes to foreclose this. In A Christian Natural Theology I pointed out that Whitehead allows for the prehensions of noncontiguous Occasions. This leaves open the undeveloped possibility of arguing that the relation of God to actual occasions may be of this sort.

Sherburne does not in this instance dispute my reading of the text He argues instead that Whitehead errs in allowing for such noncontiguous prehensions. He insists that Whitehead’s assertion of hybrid feelings of noncontiguous occasions assumes too sharp a distinction between the mental and the physical poles. If the mental pole cannot be sharply separated from the physical pole, Sherburne thinks, Whitehead must accept the same limits for hybrid feelings as for physical feelings. Since Whitehead follows science in disallowing physical feelings of noncontiguous entities, he should deny such hybrid feelings as well. Sherburne even claims that in this way he has "educed arguments that strongly suggest the desirability of limiting immediate objectification to contiguous occasions as a general metaphysical principle" (PS 1:113, italics mine).

It would indeed require that this be a general metaphysical principle in order to achieve Sherburne’s desired results of excluding the possibility that God and actual occasions have hybrid feelings of each other not dependent on contiguity. For if the argument appeals to contingent features of the interrelation of actual occasions in our cosmic epoch, it obviously cannot settle the relation of God and the world. Whitehead’s assertion that God exemplifies the categories is not an assertion that in his relation to actual occasions he is bound by all the limitations that govern the relations of actual occasions with each other. But I do not find that Sherburne even discusses the metaphysical or categoreal question. Hence I assume that he does not really mean anything as strong as this.

To show that Whitehead should, in consistency, deny all prehensions by actual occasions of noncontiguous ones would go some way to putting the burden of proof on the Whiteheadian who would claim contiguity unnecessary for God. This is the actual context of Sherburne’s argument. However, even here it basically begins at the opposite pole from Whitehead. Sherburne assumes that common sense or science overwhelmingly supports the view that there can be no "action at a distance" and hence thinks that the burden of proof rests on anyone who would assert this to be possible. He further seems to think that Whitehead denies physical feelings of noncontiguous entities. Hence he thinks Whitehead could only justify his belief that there are hybrid feelings of noncontiguous entities by showing some very fundamental difference between hybrid and physical feelings.

Whitehead held, on the other hand, that "the contrary opinion would seem more natural" from the point of view of his philosophy (PR 469). He then conceded,

Since he concedes only contingent "practical negligibility" with respect to physical feelings, he obviously does not have to show any profound difference of hybrid feelings from physical ones in order to hold that there may be less negligible hybrid feelings of noncontiguous occasions. Many Whiteheadians pass over this aspect of Whitehead’s thought with embarrassment. They seem to think that to agree with Whitehead here would either violate fundamental intuitions that are sacrosanct or be "unscientific." They are likely to agree with Sherburne because they want to. Wishful thinking of this sort is difficult to argue against, but it may be relevant to note briefly that the status of "action at a distance" is by no means so clear cut in contemporary philosophy of science as they seem to suppose.

"Action" in the sense required in this phrase has to do with causal efficacy, and few concepts are less clear in contemporary science than is cause. Among philosophers of science the Humeans are in the majority; the Humean doctrine by no means excludes noncontiguous causes. Bertrand Russell even argued on occasion that causes cannot be contiguous to their effects (2:389-91). More recently Arthur Pap has discussed the whole matter as an open question, although he favors the search for (nearly but not quite) contiguous causes (4:261, 269f).

The non-Humeans are at least equally undogmatic on this point. Mario Bunge asserts that the relation of causality to contiguity is one to be investigated empirically, not decided by fiat. He traces the history of physical theory on this point and indicates that the gradual victory of contiguity applies only to phenomena of a specifiable sort. It provides no grounds for metaphysical generalization (1:64).

Modern science in general has found that a priori views of what is possible, far from being helpful in its development, are handicaps. Whitehead is again and again careful to present categories that are open to highly varied empirical facts. There is no more reason to suppose that he is being weak-minded on this point than when he denies dimensionality as a necessary characteristic of the extensive continuum. If some development of quantum theory should lead to the positing of causal efficacy between noncontiguous quanta, we might be glad that Whitehead had not been so rigid as to affirm a metaphysical necessity of contiguity. Similarly, if evidence continues to favor the occurrence of parapsychological phenomena, and if no special medium of such communication can be found, we should be glad to have available a conceptuality in which these phenomena can be understood in continuity with the rest of our knowledge of the world. Whitehead’s openness on such questions may in the long run prove much wiser than the narrower views of many of his followers. At the very least, if we are to speak of God at all, we should be careful not to suppose that he is limited to the same modes of relation that contingently characterize us.

Although I am sure Whitehead left open the door to think of God’s relations with the world in such terms and although I see no reason to close it, I am myself more interested in exploring the consequences of holding that God is quite literally omnipresent. His interrelations with the world can be rendered more readily intelligible in this way. Sherburne and I agree that this implies that the regional standpoint of God includes the regional standpoints of the creatures. Sherburne believes that this idea of regional inclusion is excluded by Whitehead’s systematic position. I recognize that Whitehead does not have it in view, but I do not see that it is excluded.

With Sherburne’s discussion of the relation of regions and entities I find myself generally in agreement. I even agree with the conclusion he takes "from these various argument . . . that the unity of a subject involves irrevocably the extensive elements which identify the standpoint, or region, of an actual entity" (PS 1:104). To deny that would seem to suggest that the actual entity need not be extensive at all, or that it might float loose from its locus in time and space, or that it might expand or contract, and it has never occurred to me to affirm anything of that sort. But I am a little startled in reading on to find that "this conclusion does show that Whitehead’s categories exclude regional inclusion from his system, in principle."

I am puzzled by this last step for two reasons. First, I simply don’t see how the conclusion shows this. I cannot think how one would formalize a deduction of the latter sentence from the previous one without introducing a number of very questionable premises (This is a challenge!), and I have only a vague intuition as to how Sherburne’s mind connects the two. Second, he speaks here of Whitehead’s categories, whereas the previous discussion does not refer to them, and the notion of region does not appear in the categoreal scheme. Perhaps "categories" is used more loosely, but in that case, the "in principle" becomes even more suspect.

My perplexity leads me to try to understand the difference between us that leads Sherburne to find the irrevocable extensiveness of an actual entity sufficient reason to suppose that regional inclusion is impossible. This leads me to a close examination of some quite subtle disagreements with his language, disagreements that in another context I would pass over as trivial.

Sherburne twice (PS 1:102, 103) quotes against me Whitehead’s statement that "the subjective unity dominating the process forbids the division of the extensive quantum which originates with the primary phase of the subjective aim" (PR 434). This sentence is taken from a passage dealing with the relation of occasions to physical time. Whitehead’s point is that one cannot speak of a first part of an occasion as temporally preceding a second part. The becoming of the whole occasion presupposes its entire standpoint. I fully concur, but this is an entirely different issue, one on which I think that Sherburne and I are in agreement.

But Sherburne draws from this sentence the conclusion that "the extensive quantum, the region correlated with an entity [italics mine], actually originates with an entity" (PS 1:102; note that Whitehead’s sentence does not speak of regions). He thus gives the impression that regions come into being. That could be understood to mean that until the extensive quantum originated, i.e., prior to the actual entity’s becoming, there was no given region at all. Sherburne’s criticism of my view as presupposing a Newtonian preexistent space-time fits this interpretation of his view, because in this criticism he seems to assert that extensiveness applies only to the past and to the becoming occasions, that the extensive continuum is actually increased in extent by the concrescence of new occasions. If that were the case, then I would indeed have difficulty in speaking of regional inclusion, for it would be strange to think of a single region as being created out of nothing twice!

But whether or not this is Sherburne’s view, it is not Whitehead’s. Whitehead holds that "the extensive continuum . . . underlies the whole world, past, present, and future . . . The reality of the future is bound up with the reality of this continuum" (PR 103; my italics). The continuum is characterized most basically by extensive connection, and Whitehead defines regions as "the relata which are involved in the scheme of ‘extensive connection"’ (PR 449). Hence past, present, and future are all characterized by regions. Regions as such do not originate with the becoming of occasions.

These regions, as segments of the continuum, are infinitely divisible. But the infinitely divisible continuum is atomized into definite extensive quanta which are the standpoints of particular occasions. These extensive quanta or standpoints do originate. They are, of course, also regions, having all the properties of regions as well as the distinctive property of atomic unification by the subjective unity of the occasions whose standpoints they are. Hence Whitehead writes, "In dividing the region we are ignoring the subjective unity which is inconsistent with such division. But the region is, after all, divisible, although in the generic growth it is undivided" (PR 435).

There is no disputing that regions as regions overlap and are divisible in all manner of ways. The question is only whether these relations can apply to those regions that function as standpoints of actual occasions. If this is forbidden, it is not by their character as regions; it must be by the character of the actual occasions whose subjective aims determine which regions will be standpoints. Neither Sherburne nor anyone else, so far as I know, has shown that the diversity of subjective aims requires externality of all standpoints.

Sherburne writes as if this distinguishing of regions from occasions led toward a Cartesian dualism. It does not. A Cartesian dualism would follow if it were held that some occasions had regional standpoints, and hence were extended, while others did not, Whitehead has not maintained anything of this sort, nor have I.

One final word. Sherburne tends, in his argument against regional inclusion, to quote passages in which Whitehead is making the point that when the region of an actual occasion is divided the subregions correspond to its physical feelings but that these physical feelings are not actual occasions capable of independent existence. These physical feelings exist only as parts of the total occasion, and the total occasion presupposes the entire extensive quantum that is its standpoint. I hope that it is understood that I not only subscribe to this Whiteheadian doctrine but insist upon its great importance. In the offending passage quoted by Sherburne from A Christian Natural Theology, I was stressing that the occasions whose standpoints occupied subregions were not parts of the occasions occupying the larger region. The occasions could not be discovered in the way Whitehead is rejecting, i.e., by identifying the subregion correlative with a particular physical feeling. On the contrary, the lesser occasions are contemporaries of the larger ones. They are not parts, and there is no causal relation between them. Again, I should stress that I do not attribute this doctrine to Whitehead. But I do not see that its possibility is excluded by basic aspects of his system.

Since the doctrine is not Whitehead’s, the reasons for exploring it must be shown. One reason, of course, is that (as Sherburne agrees) it could make more fully intelligible how God is related to the world. But there are other advantages. Ivor Leclerc (3) has recently shown that although Whitehead has- done more than other atomists in explaining the kind of unity possessed by compounds and organisms, he still fails to do justice to the distinctive characteristics that emerge and function at these supraparticle levels. I find his thesis generally persuasive, and I suggest that a doctrine of regional inclusion would handle the problem with less adjustment of Whitehead’s general philosophical position and greater adequacy to the needs of the sciences than Leclerc’s proposals.

Sherburne: This debate over my allegation that the concept "God" introduces an incoherent element into Whitehead’s metaphysics has developed to the point where my position can be stated, as noted by Cobb, in the form of a dilemma: God must be related to occasions either contiguously or noncontiguously, but both options fail, for the first horn presupposes the untenable concept of regional inclusion and the second presupposes an interpretation of hybrid physical feelings which I have argued is unjustified. The first horn is of primary interest in this debate, because Professor Cobb has shown a strong penchant for the notion of regional inclusion, a notion he acknowledges to be, at least explicitly, unrecognized by Whitehead, but which he, Cobb, finds (1) quite compatible with the Whiteheadian conceptuality and (2) of great philosophical usefulness. It is my conviction that the concept of regional inclusion is, in principle, incompatible with concepts at the heart of Whitehead’s metaphysics. I will move our debate forward by arguing that there are disagreements concerning the nature of the extensive continuum which underlie the different judgments Cobb and I make concerning the coherence of the notion of regional inclusion.

The new and significant claim which Cobb has introduced into the argument is the claim that regions do not come into being. I have argued that they do, since it is because an occasion’s region comes into being as an integral part of that occasion that the notion of regional inclusion is unintelligible. Prior to an actual entity’s becoming there is no given region, no actual region. Much is at stake here, for Cobb acknowledges that if I am correct then regional inclusion is an absurd concept. I will argue that Cobb has blurred the distinction between actual existence and existence as part of a scheme of potential relationships. This blurring of a key distinction results from the way he presents the concept of the extensive continuum -- he does not make clear the sense in which it "underlies the whole world, past, present, and future." It is my intent to clarify the concept of the extensive continuum with the aim of making it apparent that, in the sense relevant to our debate, regions do originate with the becoming of the actual entities of which they are an integral part.

Cobb writes:

Cobb gets in trouble here not so much because of what he has said as because of what he has left unsaid about potentiality and actuality in the context of his discussion. That Cobb is in trouble is apparent when we read on a few lines and find him saying of standpoints:

Cobb here says standpoints are regions, have all the properties of regions, and do originate. But in the passages above he has insisted that it is a property of regions that they do not originate. Cobb has contradicted himself. Something is wrong! His failure to take careful account of the actuality-potentiality distinction has revenged itself upon him!

The first point that must be insisted upon is that the extensive continuum is, in a sense to be specified, associated with potentiality.

Since Cobb has tied the notion of the future to that of the extensive continuum, let me put his quotation in context: "The reality of the future is bound up with the reality of this continuum. It is the reality of what is potential, in its character of a real component of what is actual" (PR 103; italics added), We need now a clearer grasp of the nature of this potentiality and if we really understand what Whitehead means in this last sentence, when he refers to the character of this potentiality as "a real component of what is actual," then we will understand the nature of the extensive continuum much more clearly.

The required understanding can be had if we unpack the following passage. "Extension is the most general scheme of real potentiality, providing the background for all other organic relations" (PR 105). The crux of the matter is this notion of "real potentiality." To understand this concept is to understand how the extensive continuum is a real component of what is actual, which in turn must be seen before Cobb’s confusion concerning whether or not regions originate can be cleared up.

"Real potentiality" is a concept best understood by contrast with the notion of "general potentiality." General potentiality is a phrase used by Whitehead to refer to "the bundle of possibilities, mutually consistent or alternative, provided by the multiplicity of eternal objects" (PR 102); general potentiality refers to the realm of eternal objects considered in itself apart from any limitations, other than logical limitations, that might be put upon the patterns within which eternal objects might ingress into the world. But there are, in fact, limitations other than those of logic put upon ingression into the world by eternal objects. The past, with all its commitments to one set of developments rather than another, limits the range of eternal objects that can ingress in any specific, concrete instance. For example, it is a general or pure possibility that I might win the 100-meter dash in the next Olympic Games, but this is not a real possibility given my creaky joints, advancing years, etc. "Real potentiality" refers to those possibilities for the ingression of eternal objects which still remain after one strikes from consideration the impossibilities which the conditions of a given, factual world eliminate from the horizon of any particular actual entity or set of actual entities arising out of that world.

In my example I have presented the notion of real potentiality in a negative way. I need now to provide another example which will put the notion in a positive modality, for it is in the positive modality that we encounter the extensive continuum. It is a fact that neither my wife nor I nor any of our relatives or close friends speaks Chinese. When we married and began to have our children, it was not a real possibility that our children would grow up speaking Chinese in the home -- even were the two of us to perish in a disaster, the pool of persons from whom guardians would be appointed were and are such that this is just not a real possibility. But now turn this example around and look at it positively. Our children were born enjoying certain real potentialities; i.e., they would grow up speaking English in the home, knowing about baseball and sailing, eating hot dogs and hamburgers, etc., because of the past of the world into which they were born. The nature and conditions of the world to which my wife and I belong specified certain real potentialities for all possible children we might have. Or put it this way, the world to which my wife and I belong is part of a society, and it is a characteristic of a society that as long as it endures it lays down conditions to which successor members of that society must conform. In my example the society involved is American society of the middle of the twentieth century, and that society lays down many different real possibilities for its members than does the society occupying mainland China in mid-twentieth century. Note carefully from this example that though the real possibility of our era and locale dictates that all possible children I might have would grow up speaking English and eating hot dogs, there is not, off in the shadowy future somewhere, a potential child of mine eating a potential hot dog. In talking about real potentialities we are talking about conditions that a present lays on any future which is to flow from it. If there were some conditions that a given present were to establish for its future, then Whitehead would be inclined to say that the reality of that future was bound up with the reality of that present just to the extent that certain structures were bound to unfold from that present, though there might very well be, of course, many particular aspects within these structures not yet determined.

Now we can push on to the notion of the extensive continuum. Whitehead’s trained mathematical intuition penetrates into the nature of things to grasp the defining characteristics of a vast society, wider than the electromagnetic society, wider than the societies which define the geometrical elements and the very concept of measurability itself. This widest of all discernible societies he terms the society of pure extension, and its defining characteristic is termed extensive connection (cf. PR 148). All actual occasions, even though they be also members of far more localized, specialized societies, must be members of this society, must obey the social conditions of inheritance which this society lays on all becoming. Therefore, this society, the extensive continuum, lays down, through the massive social inheritance of its myriad generations, the first, most general limitation upon general potentiality: the limitation that each generation of actual occasions, no matter what its more special characteristics of order, shall at least exhibit the general properties

This is the context within which one must understand the Whiteheadian assertion with which we opened this analysis: "Extension is the most general scheme of real potentiality, providing the background for all other organic relations" (PR 105).

We can now utilize this analysis to look more closely at Cobb’s claim that "regions as such do not originate with the becoming of occasions. In a sense his statement is correct, but my point will be to show that in another sense, and this the sense relevant to our debate over regional inclusion, it is incorrect. A rather neutral way of expressing the Whiteheadian position would be to say that the society of extensive connection, as realized up to now, so dominates the conditions of all future becoming that any actual occasion which might ever enjoy concrescence would have to be related to all other occasions extensively. Note first that to view this set of relations from the perspective of the future is to focus on regions as relata involved in a web of real potentiality. Seen from this perspective, as a schema of potential relatedness, the extensive continuum is, in some sense, infinite since all possible occasions must conform to its demands, so from this perspective it is odd to think of the extensive continuum as being increased in extent.

But note secondly that this real potentiality, like every real potentiality, is a function of a present that exists in the mode of actuality. There can be real potentialities only in as far as there are actual presents which lay down conditions to which the future must conform, Furthermore, a past has led up to any such present, and the weight of this whole tradition imposing itself on the future is a necessary condition of the very concept of a real potentiality. In this limited Whiteheadian context we can certainly accept Aristotle’s dictum that actuality precedes real potentiality (though it is also true that in some sense "general" potentiality precedes actuality for Whitehead). The meaning of these distinctions for my present dispute with Professor Cobb is simply this: the concept of regions as potentialities that cannot, qua potentialities, be said to originate with the becoming of occasions logically presupposes as its necessary condition the concept of regions as actualities, regions which, qua actualities, do originate with the becoming of occasions. And these necessarily presupposed actual regions have actually increased the extent of the extensive continuum, conceiving of that continuum now as the actual set of relationships among actual regions which generates the real potentiality relative to that actual world. Part of the confusion of Cobb’s position stems from the fact that the extensive continuum, conceived of as a set of relations underlying past, present, and future, is part actual and part potential -- actual in as far as it is constituted by actual entities enjoying actual relationships legislating what are real potentialities governing the relationships of future occasions; and merely potential in so far as these relationships are viewed as factors determining what forms of definiteness are, and are not, possible as factors in future fact.

As far as the regional inclusion hypothesis is concerned, let us recall that Cobb has (1) correctly noted that I hold that the extensive continuum is actually increased in extent by the concrescence of new occasions, and (2) admitted unequivocally that if this were true then he would "indeed have difficulty in speaking of regional inclusion, for it would be strange to think of a single region as being created out of nothing twice!" My argument has presented an analysis of the extensive continuum which clearly makes it true to say that the extensive continuum, as just that set of actual relations among actual occasions which makes the very conception of the continuum as real potentiality intelligible, is indeed actually increased in extent by the concrescence of new occasions. Cobb’s gambit in presenting his interpretation of the extensive continuum was to make it appear that the extensive continuum in the future has a kind of reality such that it makes no sense to speak of its regions originating with concrescence, This effect was obtained by quoting Whitehead (PR 103) to the effect that "the extensive continuum . . . underlies the whole world, past, present, and future. . . . The reality of the future is bound up with the reality of the continuum." This makes it plausible to say that since the future is real and since the continuum enjoys that same reality, it is therefore nonsense to speak of regions of the continuum originating with the becoming of occasions. But the bubble of plausibility is burst with the very next sentence in Whitehead’s text, which, unfortunately, was neglected by Cobb. It reads: "It is the reality of what is potential, in its character of a real component of what is actual. . . ." I submit that our analysis of real potentiality has revealed that there is no incompatibility at all in recognizing that "future regions" have the sort of potential reality which does "underlie" the future in the way that real potentiality does this, and at the same time recognizing that, as actual, regions do indeed most definitely originate with the becoming of occasions. As a potential scheme of relatedness, the extensive scheme specifies certain extensive conditions that the future must satisfy, and within these conditions there are many possible wax’s that regions could atomize this extensive continuum. But when that future becomes present, just one set of actual regions will atomize that continuum, and those actual regions will originate with the occasions of which they are the standpoints. The extensive continuum qua continuum underlies the past in the sense that although past regions are definite and atomic one can specify many alternate ways that regions might have atomized the continuum, though just that one set of regions did in fact so atomize it. It is clear that the scheme of potential relatedness which is the extensive continuum does not constitute a reality in any way ruling out subsequent "originating" of regions. Hence actual, given regions do originate as the extensive component of concrescing actual occasions, and it therefore follows that regional inclusion would involve a single actual region being created twice, a consequence which Cobb himself has recognized as a reductio ad absurdum of his position. For this reason I conclude that the notion of regional inclusion is incompatible, in principle, with concepts at the very heart of Whitehead’s systematic thought.

Cobb: Now it is highly probable that there are some state- ments of Whitehead’s that are incompatible with a doctrine he did not affirm or discuss. The debate between us is not over whether Whitehead ever asserted regional inclusion. We agree that he did not. It is not over whether there are statements in his writings that would require modification if regional inclusion is to be affirmed. There are such statements. In Sherburne’s words, the issue is whether "the notion of regional inclusion is incompatible, in principle, with concepts at the very heart of Whitehead’s systematic thought." Sherburne holds that it is and seeks to prove this by showing that regional inclusion is incompatible with Whitehead’s essential doctrine of the extensive continuum. I do not believe he has been successful.

Sherburne’s discussion of the extensive continuum is a genuinely helpful one. It further clarifies the issues between us as well as Whitehead’s difficult thought on this subject.

The focus of a debate is necessarily on differences. It is sometimes useful, however, to point out the common ground shared by the disputants. We agree that the distinction of actuality and potentiality is crucial for understanding the extensive continuum in its relation to past, present, and future. We agree that the continuum qua continuum is potentiality and not actuality. We agree that among the regions of the continuum qua continuum there occurs the relation of inclusion (PR 452). We agree that Whitehead did not affirm regional inclusion with respect to the standpoints of actual occasions. We agree that the extensive continuum qua continuum extends infinitely in all directions, including the future. We agree that the extensiveness which the future must have derives from the fact that it must have extensive relations to an extensive past and present, that is, that like all potentiality, the potentiality that is the extensive continuum derives from actuality.

Nevertheless, differences exist between us, which, though important, are not easy to state unambiguously. They have to do with the locus of the potentiality that is the extensive continuum. My view is that the dependence of the extensive continuum on the actual world is a function of the fact that if there were no actual occasions there would be nothing at all. There would be no potentiality of any kind. But there are actual occasions, and actual occasions are extensive. This extensiveness is more primitive than the distinction of space and time, but because actual occasions are necessarily sequential, it applies infinitely to past and future as well as to the present. The future continuum is there only because there is an actual world, but given the actual world, the future continuum is in the future and not in the actual world. It is that by virtue of which we can speak of future events or future cosmic epochs, not as located in the present but as genuinely future. All that is settled about them is settled by present actuality, but that "future" is a meaningful notion at all, that it has a certain reality for the present, is "bound up with the reality of the continuum.

The term region designates potential extensions past, present, and future. If there were no actuality at all, there would be no regions, but because there is actuality, there are also regions everywhere -- past, present, and future. There are regions as potential standpoints in the past even when that portion of the extensive continuum has been forever atomized in another way. And there are regions as potential standpoints for future actual occasions before those actual occasions originate.

No new regions come into being with the becoming of actual occasions. Some regions, as potentials, become also the standpoints of actual occasions. As regions they remain potentially divisible. As standpoints, by virtue of the subjective unity of their occasions, they are in fact undivided. If this is correct, there is no reason that two regions having the relationship of regional inclusion cannot both become the standpoints of actual occasions.

In Sherburne’s view, the locus of the potentiality that is the extensive continuum lies in the actuality of occasions. These occasions are such as to lay necessities upon whatever follows them, and this character of occasions, insofar as it determines that the future will be characterized by extensiveness, is the potentiality that is the extensive continuum. To say that this potentiality precedes new actualities is to say no more than that earlier occasions precede later ones.

The most important way Sherburne poses the issue in this paper is by his assimilation of the extensive continuum to real potentiality. Real potentiality is the past presenting itself as datum so as to limit the general potentiality of the universe in respect to each new concrescence. It is identical with the actual world of each new occasion. It pervades the future in just the way in which Sherburne understands the extensive continuum to pervade the future. If the extensive continuum is part of the real potentiality of the universe, such that Whitehead’s general account of real potentiality applies to it without qualification, then Sherburne is correct. The locus of "future regions" must then be in attained actuality.

I have tried to ponder the texts to which Sherburne calls our attention, together with others, with an open mind. One conclusion to which I have come is that Whitehead himself judged the question difficult. In Adventures of Ideas he comments more than once on Plato’s recognition of the peculiar obscurity of the notion of the receptacle, which is the equivalent in that book to the extensive continuum of Process and Reality.

Yet the notion of extensiveness in general is exceedingly important. The most basic fact about occasions is that they are extensive. The most inclusive society to which we belong is the society of pure extension. Whitehead hesitantly attributes metaphysical universality to extensiveness as such in its most abstract form. The continuum of this pure extensiveness is then unqualifiedly infinite. But Whitehead can also speak of tile extensive continuum as having more particular properties that limit it to our own cosmic epoch.

Extensive connection is a physical relationship (PR 449). The extensive continuum binds the physical world together (PR 147). Yet it relates an occasion to its contemporary world, which in Whitehead’s usual language cannot be physically felt. In these respects it seems quite real, almost to impose solidarity on the world. But the more usual emphasis is that it is "in itself merely the potentiality for division" (PR 104).

Extensiveness is discussed primarily in relation to two topics: mathematics and presentational immediacy. Presentational immediacy in turn has its importance both in the analysis of conscious experience and in the interpretation of strains. These topics are all united in the explanation of measurement.

If we ask what Whitehead seems to say as to the locus of the continuum, that is, whether it is somehow there before actual entities arise, the answer is that he does write in this way. Sherburne quotes him (PR 112) to the effect: "The actual entities atomize it, and thereby make real what was antecedently merely potential." Whitehead also writes: "With the becoming of any actual entity what was previously potential in the space-time continuum is now the primary real phase in something actual" (PR 104). He locates actual entities "in" the continuum as something given both in its past and future dimensions. A continuum has "unbounded dimensions," so that it cannot be regarded as ending or changing its character at the present.

But quotations like these, which could be multiplied, do not settle the issue in my favor. On the one hand, Whitehead envisioned a future of infinite extent reaching beyond our cosmic epoch and all now conceivable forms of order. On the other hand, Whitehead denied actuality to the future and insisted that all forms of potentiality are grounded in actuality. Where then is the future of the extensive continuum?

I noted that Sherburne’s major contribution to the discussion in this paper is his identification of the extensive continuum as part of real potentiality. Whitehead’s language definitely suggests this at times (cf. PR 123), and there is no question but that Whitehead’s explanation of the extensive continuum is closely bound up with his discussion of real potentiality. However, in his most careful formulations the two are distinguished, and I believe that there are reasons for distinguishing them.

The topic of extensiveness in general and the extensive continuum in particular is little discussed prior to the chapter with that title. That chapter begins with a discussion of "consciousness of the extensive relations of the world" given in presentational immediacy (PR 95). We then learn that the "account of ‘presentational immediacy’ presupposes two metaphysical assumptions." Of these the first is: "That the actual world, insofar as it is a community of entities which are settled, actual, and already become, conditions and limits the potentiality for creativeness beyond itself" (PR 101). This actual world is the real potentiality for becoming occasions. Real potentiality is relative to some actual entity, taken as a standpoint whereby the actual world is defined. . . . No two actual entities define the same actual world" (PR 102). "The second metaphysical assumption is that the real potentialities relative to all standpoints are coordinated as diverse determinations of one extensive continuum" (PR 103).

We may assume that this last sentence is very carefully formulated since Whitehead approached metaphysical statements with great caution. It certainly associates the extensive continuum with real potentiality very closely, but it will not do simply to call it a part of real potentiality. Real potentiality is relative to each standpoint. In the extensive continuum the real potentialities relative to all standpoints are coordinated. The extensive continuum is affirmed as the ground of the solidarity of all the relative real potentialities.

Now we must ask what is meant by "all standpoints." Are these all the standpoints of those occasions that compose the actual world of a concrescent occasion? If only they are indicated, then the coordination of the standpoints as diverse determinations of one extensive continuum might be felt with the feeling of the actual world. The continuum could be a part of the real potentiality. But that is not the case. The metaphysical assumption is introduced in order to explain the perception of the contemporary world in presentational immediacy. That world is perceived as an extensive continuum of "bare mathematical potentialities" (PR 97). It is this extensive continuum to which the second metaphysical assumption refers most directly. And this metaphysical continuum expresses the solidarity of the real potentialities of potential contemporary standpoints with each other and with the percipient occasion as well as with all those past occasions that constitute the actual world.

Does then "all standpoints" refer only to all past and contemporary standpoints? No, the two sentences that follow in immediate explanation of the metaphysical assumption preclude that limitation upon "all." They read: ‘This extensive continuum is one relational complex in which all potential objectifications find their niche. It underlies the whole world, past, present, and future" (PR 103).

We must not understand this to mean that there is some actual thing that is an extensive continuum that underlies the past, present and future. The phrase "the extensive continuum" may be unfortunate by its tendency to suggest reification. Whitehead’s point can be made, as Sherburne also shows, without use of the phrase. The second metaphysical assumption is that all the actual and possible standpoints of actual occasions are coordinated with each other in terms of a sell-consistent system of continuous extension. In presentational immediacy we have consciousness of these extensive relations in the world. We project these relations without bounds in all directions.

This does not mean that in addition to all the actual worlds and their actual coordinations with each other there is something else, i.e., an extensive continuum. The extensive continuum simply "expresses the solidarity of all possible standpoints throughout the whole process of the world" (PR 103). But that there is such a coordination or solidarity or relational complex among all standpoints and their actual worlds is a metaphysical assumption additional to the assumption that there is real potentiality relative to every concrescence. Extensive solidarity with other standpoints is not, like real potentiality, relative to some actual entity. Any world of settled entities imposes upon the creativeness beyond itself that it participate in coordinated extensive relations. Thus "It is not a fact prior to the world; it is the first determination of order -- that is, of real potentiality -- arising out of the general character of the world" (PR 103). As the first determination of real potentiality it is given with and by the actual world of each occasion, but in itself it arises out of the general character of the world rather than out of that particular actual world of which it is the first determination.

This distinction is important for our debate. What rises out of the relative real potentiality of a particular standpoint cannot be the basis of accurate perception of the contemporary world. Yet presentational immediacy does disclose the extensive relations of possible standpoints in that world. In this it does not err. This is possible only because the extensive relations arise out of the general character of the world. Their illustration by sensa, of course, arises out of the real potentiality that is the actual world relative to that percipient.

If the status of the extensive continuum is not that of real potentiality, what can it be? It is certainly some form of potentiality, and it is not pure or general potentiality, nor is it impure potentiality. I believe it is sui generis. It is "in itself merely the potentiality for division" (PR 104). That cannot be said of eternal objects, propositions, or the actual world.

Since Sherburne has appealed to the less rigorously systematic formulations of Adventures of Ideas, I will do so too. There Whitehead repeatedly lists the "seven main notions" attained by Plato and calls them "as important for us now as they were then at the dawn of the modern world" (AI 188). These are The Ideas (general potentiality or eternal objects), The Physical Elements (real potentiality or the actual world), The Psyche (the human soul), The Eros (the primordial nature of God), The Harmony (the consequent nature of God), The Mathematical Relations (also called that by Whitehead in Process and Reality), and the Receptacle (the extensive continuum). What is striking in his repeated discussions of these is that he does not correct Plato by reducing them to a smaller number of primitive notions. His task is to show their systematic interconnections, but in doing so the integrity of each is respected. To say that the kind of potentiality that is the receptacle is sui generis rather than an illustration of "real potentiality" fits, and is almost required by, these discussions in Adventures of Ideas.

My view of the possibility of regional inclusion of standpoints rests on the understanding that this potentiality for division precedes the actuality of division by actual entities. It is there because of the extensiveness of the actual world, but still it is there, and not simply in the actual world of an occasion or in that occasion itself. I do not profess that this is an altogether clear and distinct idea. But we are aided in grasping it by the fact that in presentational immediacy we perceive this potentiality clearly, independently of perception of the occasions that actually divide it. Thus we do have a basis for projecting that potentiality into the future as a continuing potentiality for division, despite the nonexistence of any future occasion, in much the same way that the potentiality is still perceived as pervading the past, despite the actual atomicity of the past world.

Sherburne chides me for vacillating on the question of whether regions, which are the parts of the continuum, originate. My intention is to say that they do not. Standpoints of actual occasions originate. He thinks I am inconsistent because I also say that standpoints are regions. Although I thought that my meaning was clear in the context, perhaps I could avoid ambiguity by stating that standpoints correspond to regions or even occupy regions. They have all the extensive relations that the corresponding regions have, but qua standpoints they have an actuality that regions as such do not.

Sherburne and I agree that future regions are merely potential. He grants also that regions so understood do not originate. But he states that in another sense regions do originate and that it is this sense that is relevant to our debate. This sense turns out to be the sense in which regions are "actualities" and "atomize the continuum." I am puzzled by this argument first because I do not believe that regions are ever actualities, or that they ever atomize the continuum. They are always potential and they are always divisible. The term actuality should be applied to actual entities. These do atomize the continuum. "Actuality" can derivatively be applied also to standpoints. If Sherburne means here by "regions as actualities" what I (and I believe Whitehead) call extensive quanta or standpoints, then, of course, I agree that these do originate with the becoming of occasions. I agree that regions as potentialities presuppose as their necessary condition (I would say ontologically or metaphysically rather than logically) actual occasions and their standpoints, although they presuppose no particular occasions or standpoints -- any will do. But I do not see how this in any way counts against my position.

Sherburne’s argument against me is based on using the term "extensive continuum" to refer to the nexus of occasions that constitutes the past. This nexus does increase in extent by the addition of new entities with new standpoints. To that of course I agree. But Sherburne himself acknowledges that this is not the continuum qua continuum. And his argument would count against me only if it were. He has adopted this second use of "the extensive continuum" to refer to what he himself knows not to be a continuum because of his interpretation of a passage on the society of pure extension. That passage is introduced by a reference to the extensive continuum (PR 147), and Sherburne has interpreted it to mean that the extensive continuum is that society. I hope he will not insist on this very confusing mistake.

We could avoid unnecessary confusion and mutual misunderstanding if we would agree to distinguish the extensive continuum and its regions, as merely potential, from societies, occasions, and standpoints, which are actual. That would not settle the real issue between us, which is the kind of potentiality that the continuum has and its locus. I have devoted most of my attention to this question. I suspect that the next step in our argument will lead us to a consideration of the status of the future, just as we were earlier led to discuss the status of the past.

Sherburne has quoted against me a sentence about the reality of the extensive continuum: "It is the reality of what is potential, in its character of a real component of what is actual" (PR 102). He has interpreted this to mean that the extensive continuum is part of the real potential for any actual entity and is located, therefore, in its actual world. I do not believe that was Whitehead’s meaning. To continue the quotation, "Such a real component must be interpreted in terms of the relatedness of prehensions. This task will be undertaken in Chapter V of Part IV" (PR 103-104). That chapter does not discuss real potentiality. Insofar as it treats the relatedness of prehensions, this has to do with strains which are closely associated with the perception of the con-temporary world in presentational immediacy. It explains that this mode "exhibits that complex of systematic mathematical relations which participate in all the nexuses of our cosmic epoch, in the widest meaning of that term" (PR 498). These mathematical relations are of course potential. They are also held to be real components of what is actual. But their locus is not limited to the actual world. Since they participate in all the nexuses of our cosmic epoch, the point is not to tie them down to the past but to show that they are real components of all nexuses including future ones. I do not say that this is the self-evident meaning of the sentence Sherburne quotes against me. But the meaning he finds in the sentence gets no support, so far as I can see, from the chapter to which Whitehead is at pains to refer us for elucidation. In the light of that chapter, the sentence should be interpreted to conform with Whitehead’s other careful formulations of the extensive continuum.

Sherburne: I believe I can make a very short but very telling response to Cobb’s most interesting remarks. Let us suppose that we accept Cobb’s thesis that the extensive continuum is a sui generis "form of potentiality." I do not accept the argument and could challenge it in detail, but let us accept it for the moment. Then, I submit, Cobb has proven too much for his own case! Remember that we are arguing about the viability of a certain way of conceiving the relationship between a particular actual entity, God, and other actual entities in the world. Cobb argues they are related via regional inclusion. But if regions are interpreted as Cobb now says he wants to interpret them, viz., as sui generis potentials which do not originate, then regions are not what is involved in relating God and other actual entities. Standpoints, as Cobb conceives them, are what are so involved, and hence Cobb must present and defend a theory of "standpoint inclusion." Let me elaborate and clarify. If we think of regions as just possible segments of this sui generis form of potentiality which is the extensive continuum, fine. Then what we need to distinguish from regions so conceived are standpoints, which are actualized segments of the continuum. Cobb makes this move. I spoke of "actual" regions as over against potential regions, meaning thereby the segment of the continuum (conceived of in terms of real potentiality) which is actualized by a concrescing occasion. It is only these "actual" regions which are relevant to the issue of how God is related to the world. Cobb’s claim is that the "actual" region occupied by God includes the "actual" region occupied by any given occasion. If Cobb wants to call what I have referred to as "actual" regions (actualized" regions might be better) standpoints, then Cobb’s doctrine with respect to Cod’s relationship to the world must be called the Doctrine of Standpoint Inclusion, because the Doctrine of Regional Inclusion is the claim that God’s actual (i.e., particular, definite) region includes the particular, definite region of each occasion. But recall that Cobb clearly, unequivocally states above that while regions do not originate, "standpoints of actual occasions originate." All my arguments having to do with "origination" now go through if directed to standpoints. In short, either Cobb conceives of actualized regions in such a way that my arguments apply to regions directly, or Cobb conceives of regions in such a way that regions have nothing to do with how God is related to occasions in the world and my arguments are then directed to the Doctrine of Standpoint Inclusion. Either way, the "inclusion" route of relating God to the world fails.

References

PPCT -- Delwin Brown, Ralph E. James, Jr., and Gene Reeves, eds. Process Philosophy and Christian Thought. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971.

1. Mario Bunge. Causality, The Place of the Causal Principle in Modern Science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959.

2. Herbert Feigl and May Brodback, eds. Readings in the Philosophy of Science. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1953, pp. 389-91.

3. Ivor Leclerc. "The Problem of the Physical Existent." International Philosophical Quarterly, 9 (March, 1969), 40-62.

4. Arthur Pap. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1962, pp. 261, 269-70.

One question central to current Whitehead studies concerns the nature of God: Is God a single actual entity in everlasting concrescence (the "entitative view"), or is God a society of successive actual entities (the "societal view")? This paper will examine the arguments on each side, indicate what the societal view implies about the nature of God, and suggest an additional argument for the societal view based on the idea of God’s freedom and faithfulness which this view implies.

I. Society or Entity -- The Arguments

What we ordinarily refer to as "things" or ‘beings" are, in Whitehead’s philosophy, societies of actual entities. Actual entities, variously called units of becoming or "drops of experience" (PR 27), are "the final real things of which the world is made up" (PR 28). A society is a grouping of actual entities whose members display some shared element of form derived in common from antecedent actual entities (PR 50f, 137). There are very different types of societies, as we should expect since the "things" we encounter are immensely different. A rock is an inorganic structured society -- it has components of varying complexity none of which are living. A plant is a living structured society; so also is a human organism. A plant and a man differ, however, in that the latter is a society dominated by a serially ordered society of living occasions within it. In Whiteheadian philosophy, that social society which more or less dominates the human body is called the "self" or "soul." It is also called a "living person," a "personally ordered society" and "an enduring society with personal order." The question is whether God, too, is a personally ordered Society.

It is clear that Whitehead did not hold to the societal view of God (PR 28, 47, 54, 137, 531), nor do some eminent Whiteheadians (cf. IWM; 1,2). Their arguments, and responses to their arguments, follow in Section A.

A1. The argument from temporal loss. One function of God is to preserve without loss the values accrued in the temporal world. But a characteristic of temporal succession, i.e., the progression from one actual entity to another, is the loss of value. Therefore, if there is succession in God the perfect preservation of value would also seem to be relinquished (cf. WTR 69).

The reply to this argument centers around the relation of succession to loss. It can be argued that the reasons for loss in the temporal process do not apply to God. Loss in the temporal process is due to the necessarily limited aims of each becoming occasion. The particularized subjective aim, the distinctive goal, of each actual occasion of necessity renders ineffectual elements of the past which are irrelevant to it. God’s aim, however, is all-inclusive; it seeks the maximum retention and enjoyment of all temporal achievements. Even if one might argue that loss could occur, given the all-inclusive nature of the divine aim there is no reason to suppose that loss would occur in the succession from one divine occasion to the next.

Now one may observe, by way of rejoinder, that the loss of "first-handedness" is not avoided on the societal view. Notice, for example, that the values I experienced first-handed a few moments ago -- say, the joy of believing I see my way through a problem -- are now possessed derivatively, second-handedly a few seconds later. If God is a society, this loss of the immediacy of each moment in its passing must also occur in him.

The reply is twofold. First, the "loss" in question is merely the replacement of one instance of the enjoyment of value with another a4 of enjoyment; it is not a loss of the value being enjoyed. If the value itself is diminished, that diminution is due to the limited aims of subsequent occasions, which we saw above does not apply to God. Secondly, even if the replacement of immediacy or the enjoyment of value is itself to be accounted a loss of value, still this kind of loss occurs no less in the entitative view than in the societal view. In the succession from a temporal occasion to the divine occasion, the metaphysical conditions are identical to those in the succession from one divine moment to another. If a genuine "loss" occurs in the latter instance of succession, it also occurs in the former. But even the entitative view cannot dispense with the former type of succession. Hence loss of first-handedness, if it is indeed a loss, is unavoidable whether God is an entity or a society of successive entities.

A2. The argument from the singular character of God’s primordial nature. God’s valuation of possibility, his primordial envisagement of the eternal objects, is a single, unchanging act. This singularity of the primordial nature of God is incompatible with the societal view, according to which God is a multiplicity. (This position is described but not espoused in CNT 191f.)

Whitehead’s statements about the singularity of the primordial nature, the advocate of the societal view may observe in response, can mean two different things. They may mean that the primordial envisagement is numerically One, and Whitehead no doubt thought this way since he did conceive of God as a single actual entity. But the essential meaning of such statements has to do with qualitative, not quantitative, singularity in God -- the oneness or consistency of God’s character, we may say. This meaning is preserved in the societal view since the structure of the primordial nature, its pattern of ordering, is in each successive divine occasion identical to the abstract pole of preceding occasions. In other words, the primordial nature is structurally self-identical but temporally disparate; it is numerically diverse, but always the same evaluation of possibility.

If one points out that, on the societal view, the primordial nature can no longer be temporally prior, the answer is that this is true and that, moreover, it must be true on any Whiteheadian view. Viewed as primordial, . . . [God] is not before all creation, but with all creation" (PR 521). The abstract nature of God is only logically, not chronologically, prior; it is the presupposition of the nature of God’s becoming (PR 54) and of the ordered relevance of possibility for the process of creation (PR 522).

A3. The argument from the unlimited nature of God’s subjective aim. God’s subjective aim is his ideal for temporal becoming. As such it is unlimited, that is,

In other words, the unlimited character of God’s subjective aim disallows the kind of satisfaction in God that the societal view would entail.

But this claim, the societal proponent could argue, misinterprets Whitehead. In the passages of Process and Reality generally appealed to, the terms "unlimited," "untrammeled" and "all-inclusive" refer to the primordial nature, not to God’s subjective aim (PR 521-24). The subjective aim, though "derived from" (PR 523f) the primordial nature, still differs from it. The "completeness of [God’s] primordial nature" gives rise to the "perfection of God’s subjective aim" (PR 524). While the primordial nature is indeed "untrammeled by reference to any particular course of things" (PR 522), the "perfection of God’s subjective aim" presupposes its being restricted. For the divine subjective aim is an aim for a particular state of affairs -- it "prehends every actuality for what it can be in such a perfected system" (PR 525). The object of the subjective aim is the specific actuality, not the abstract, "perfected system." The entitative view glosses a difference which the societal view may retain. God’s primordial nature is his abiding, abstract aim expressed in terms of his conceptual adjustment of pure possibility. God’s subjective aim is his primordial evaluation limited to, applied to, a specific state of affairs. God’s primordial vision can never be fully satisfied. His subjective aim can be. Since the satisfaction of an actual entity is the satisfaction of its subjective aim, it follows that God at least may be a society.

If the foregoing evaluation of the alternatives is correct, we are now able to conclude that God may be understood as a personally ordered society. Next, in Section B, we shall examine arguments that God must be a society.

B1. The argument from God’s effect upon the world. God, in Whitehead’s view, acts in two ways. First, God provides each temporal occasion with the initial aim for its becoming (PR 373f.) Secondly, God’s consequent vision of the world "passes back into the temporal world . . . as an immediate fact of relevant experience" (PR 532). Since God in these ways is efficacious, and because the process internal to an actual entity "has no efficacy for other occasions except indirectly through the satisfaction in which it eventuates" (CNT 188), John Cobb concludes that God must achieve satisfaction. Unless God then ceases to exist, which is incompatible with the Whiteheadian system, God must be viewed as a personally ordered society.

Now the assumption of this argument, as opponents note, is that objectification requires perishing. While it is clear throughout Process and Reality that this is ordinarily the case, it is not obviously so in the case of God. William Christian points out that in the categorical scheme, where Whitehead enunciates the metaphysical principles applying to all actual entities (including God), objectification and perishing are never associated (IWM 298; 2:8. 1:64f). And Lewis Ford contends that, in the case of God, they cannot be: Perishing is "a function of . . . the completion of concrescence, and it is the subjective aim which ultimately determines when and how an actual entity will find its completion (1:65). Since, according to Ford (see A3 above), God’s subjective aim is unlimited, God’s concrescence necessarily is never completed and thus God never perishes.

It was suggested above (in A3), however, that Ford neglects the distinction between God’s subjective aim and primordial nature. If that suggestion is correct, Ford’s denial of the linkage of objectification and perishing is at least neutralized. Perhaps associating the two categories even becomes metaphysically required: If the subjective aim is characterized by a different content vis-à-vis each given actual situation, and if, as Ford recognizes, the subjective aim determines the locus of the actual entity then the multiplicity of divine aims implies a multiplicity of divine occasions.

On behalf of the societal view, moreover, one may also derive some measure of support from Process and Reality for supposing perishing to be attributable to God. Whitehead does speak of God’s satisfaction (e.g., PR 48, 134f) and he does associate satisfaction with the termination of internal becoming (PR 71), with the "closing up" of the entity (PR 129), with the loss of the "actuality of the atomic entity" (PR 129), and, in Categorial Obligation II, with the "completed phase in the process" (PR 39). In addition, Whitehead apparently intends to use the term "actual entity" to refer both to temporal occasions and to God (PR 135), and Whitehead says that "actual entities perish" (PR 52).

B2. The argument from the world’s effect upon God. Whitehead denies that actual entities are separable from their "qualities" or "actions." An actual entity is what it does. There is not first a subject which then "takes on" and unifies its data. The actual entity is the prehending-concrescing process itself; it is the "transformation of incoherence into coherence" (PR 38). Whitehead therefore seems to define an actual entity as the unification of the data available to a given perspective into a single complex datum. The unification of differing data constitutes another actual entity so that, as Whitehead says, "no subject experiences twice" (PR 43). Now since Whitehead holds, as he must, that God prehends successively the successive finite perspectives of the temporal process, there must be more than one experience in the life of God. Thus each such unifying experience, being a transformation of the data available to that perspective from incoherence into coherence, would by definition specify a separate actual entity in the life of God.

William Christian, taking the entitative view, contends that God has a single, unceasing satisfaction, complete at any given time relative, however, to the given finite standpoint (IWM 294-300, 375). In affirming the completion of the divine satisfaction Christian is dearly following Whitehead. But since Christian apparently understands the satisfaction in an ultimate sense to be a satisfaction of God’s primordial aim, he must deny that God’s satisfaction is finalized.

Christian’s position presumably depends upon the identification of God’s primordial vision and subjective aim, an association criticized above. But it seems to me that the approach of Christian (and Ford), when strictly maintained, is also objectionable for another reason. If the satisfaction is in fact the satisfaction of the primordial vision, then Christian’s talk of a satisfaction "relative to any finite standpoint" would appear to be impossible. The primordial nature is God "abstracted from his commerce with particulars . . . God in abstraction . . . deficient in actuality" (PR 50). Thus God’s satisfaction, on this view, could only be relative to pure potentiality, entirely divorced from commerce with the finite particulars of the temporal process.

II. Systematic Implications of the Societal View

We have concluded that nothing prevents our conceiving of God as a personally ordered society (Section IA) and that affirming the interaction of God and the world requires the societal view (Section III). Now we must consider more systematically what the societal view implies about the nature of God. Specifically, we shall discuss (A) the relationship of God’s general purposes, or his "primordial vision," to his purposes vis-à-vis particular standpoints, or his "subjective aims" and (B) the nature and extent of God’s freedom.

A. The Purposes of God

God’s primordial nature is the unchanging, graded togetherness of the totality of the eternal objects. The "togetherness" of possibility in the primordial nature is basic, for in this way possibility is given ontological status (PR 73) and rendered accessible to actuality (PR 46, 48, 64, 73). But Whitehead holds that God not only envisions the eternal objects; the primordial nature is also a hierarchical evaluation of the possibilities. Thus, the primordial side of God is called a "valuation" (PR 46, 48. 373f, 377, 522, 532), a "gradation" (PR 46, 248, 315), an "ordering" (PR 46, 373. 522), a "comparison" (PR 46), a "differentiation" (PR 392), and "the ultimate, basic adjustment of the togetherness of eternal objects . . . in the form of aversions and adversions" (PR 48). As the evaluative adjustment of possibilities, the primordial nature is the partial explanation of "order" (PR 64, 373), "physical law’" (PR 434), the "urge towards the future" (PR 47), and "metaphysical stability" (PR 64). The ordering of possibility, we shall see, also constitutes God’s character; it is the embodiment of his own abstract value preferences -- God’s principles.

The primordial nature, we finally note, is referred to as being "unchanged" (PR 523), "eternal" (PR 524), "complete" (PR 70), and "permanent" (PR 529). This stability constitutes the stability of God’s own character. But it also raises a problem. It is not readily apparent how a completed, unchanging evaluation of possibility can be or even account for "an ideal peculiar to each particular actual entity" (PR 128) contingently rising in the temporal process. Indeed, talk of the relevance of possibility to actuality notwithstanding, Whitehead himself says the primordial nature is "untrammeled by reference to any particular course of things" (PR 522; cf. 160f). How can God’s unchanging gradation of possibility be relevant to the contingent particulars of the changing process?

This difficulty makes quite understandable William Christian’s attempt to modify Whitehead. Christian holds that "in the primordial nature of God. . . .eternal objects have togetherness but not gradations of importance" (IWM 275). An evaluative ordering is introduced into the eternal objects only with respect to particular concrescences.

Christian’s position does address itself to an ambiguity in Whitehead’s thinking. Even so, the clarification offered is not without difficulty. Unless God’s particular evaluations are purely capricious, there must be some criterion or abstract standard according to which relevant possibilities are ordered with respect to each particular actuality. God’s purpose for any concrete event, in other words, would appear to be derivative from some wholly general purpose. For Whitehead, of course, God’s ultimate aim is the pursuit of "beauty." Though neutral to actuality in the sense of being applicable to any state of affairs whatsoever, beauty is more fully manifest in some than in others. Those possibilities for a given actuality which will be most nearly beautiful are preferable to others. All that is required for such discriminations is a value criterion, in this case beauty, and a knowledge of all possibilities. Given these, an evaluation of eternal objects to their proximity to beauty is implicit, quite apart from any reference to actuality.

Although independent of temporal actuality, however, this ordering of possibility cannot fail to be relevant to that actuality. The primordial nature is the envisagement of all possibilities and, hence, of all possible combination of possibilities. It is therefore impossible that a complex of possibilities could become relevant to an emerging occasion for which God did not already have, with respect to those possibilities, a set of ordered preferences. God cannot know which possible combination of possibilities will be available for actualization; nevertheless, any that do become relevant to a particular actuality will have been eternally ordered in the primordial vision of all possibility.

The relationship of the abstract primordial purpose to the concrete subjective aims in each moment of God’s life may be clarified by an analogy. Suppose Ahmad of Afghanistan to be on a pilgrimage to Mecca. "To reach Mecca" is his general purpose, conceivable quite in abstraction from the particular circumstances contingently arising in his journey. Were Ahmad able to conceive all the varied circumstances possible he could "primordially" evaluate each possibility in relationship to the remainder, and no circumstance would arise to which some portion of his primordial valuation would not be relevant. His primordial nature, though abstract and unchanging, could not fail to be applicable to concrete, changing particulars. But the possibility of particular, and thus the appetition of it, is not identical to the concrete particular itself. So, for example, preferring the abstract possibility of "turning south at Damascus" while still one hundred miles away is not identical to choosing the concrete turn south when arriving at the crossroads in Damascus. Ahmad’s "subjective aim" for a real possibility ingredient in the context of a concrete situation is different than, though derived from, his primordial ordering of all abstract possibilities in terms of his ultimate pursuit of his goal, Mecca. Ahmad will have a different subjective aim at each successive intersection; yet each will be consistent with his one primordial purpose.

God’s primordial nature is the unchanging, graded togetherness of all abstract possibilities, i.e., eternal objects, without reference to actuality. God’s subjective aim for an emerging actual entity involves the ordered togetherness of only those possibilities relevant to that concrete occasion. Thus God’s "subjective aim [is] derived from the completeness of his primordial nature." The subjective aim is a propositional feeling, the logical subject being the actuality and the predicate being the ordered, real possibilities. The subjective aim is therefore a function of God conceived as a total actuality, including his consequent awareness of the actual world.

B. The Freedom of God

The societal view effects an even more radical change in the process conception of God’s freedom. To see this we may best begin by recalling Whitehead’s view of freedom. Each actual entity is confronted, not only by the data of the past, but also by a variety of possibilities for synthesizing that data. In so far as each synthesis is genuinely possible, the occasion is free to unify its data as it chooses. Still, this choice occurs in a relational context. The past is not neutral with respect to what becomes in the present -- in addition to determining the data given to the present, the past also "desires" or "prefers" a certain form or forms of synthesizing those data. The past is more than simply there; it is there persuasively. The preferred synthesis (or better, the synthesis-as-preferred-by-the-past), however, is itself but an element of the complex datum to which the becoming occasion must respond. Thus the past’s preference cannot explain or constitute the present’s response; it is one of the things the present must respond to. The response, the presently becoming occasion’s selection of one mode of synthesis rather than another, is in this sense ex nihilo -- it is not reducible to or explicable solely in terms of the data given by the past. And to this extent an actual entity is sui generis. -- what it is, finally, is a function of its own self- determination. Moreover, it is free -- it could have synthesized precisely the same data in a manner other than it did.

The foregoing account of the relation of the past to the present will appear quite unacceptable if judged from the standpoint of a Newtonian conception of causal relationships. But, similarly, a Newtonian scheme seems inadequate from the perspective of a "persuasive" interpretation of causal relationships and, one might suggest, from the standpoint of our lived experience. Whitehead sought a middle course between determinism and indeterminism, believing that the universe displayed too much order for the latter and too little for the former. Nor does it help much to understand the cosmic process as involving a mixture of purely determined and purely undetermined relationships, as the history of fruitless discussions on free will indicates. So long as the interaction of billiard balls or the movement of machine parts is assumed as the model of intelligibility, all talk of indeterminacy and freedom, and especially talk of the difference between the two, remains utterly question-begging.

Whitehead frankly seeks a new beginning, assuming (I) that, even as determinists have contended, a unitary account of causality ought, in view of the apparent unity of nature, to be given a try, and (2) that our account of causal relationships ought to begin with those we know best -- the only ones, in fact, that we know directly at all. Whitehead’s description, thus, begins with the model of personal decision-making. Consider, for example, Simpson at time T (i.e., the actual entity at T which is a member of that serially ordered society known as "Simpson") being confronted by his past actual world including Simpson at T^-T, ^T-2 , etc. That past world, and especially his own personal past, not only presents Simpson with certain data -- and this any realistic phenomenology of experience must recognize -- sets itself forth as desirous of certain conceptual syntheses of those data and their implied concrete expressions, e.g., honesty, respect for social order, obedience to duly established authority, etc. Simpson’s total environment, including his personal past, may therefore furnish a very strong lure for, say, Simpson’s paying his income tax. But the present decision is not thereby fixed Simpson’s past also provides and to some extent cherishes the alternative possibility of refusing to pay an oppressive, unjust Caesar. The struggle which ensues is scarcely amenable to the model of the clear, crisp movements of a balance scale responding automatically to the pressure of the heaviest weight, nor would we be tempted by such a model were its authoritative character not already assumed. The elements of choosing (i.e., the alternative possibilities and, in this case, the conflicting pressures regarding the actualization of those possibilities) are given, but the choosing is not; it is causa sui. Because his past is there persuasively, the present action is quite likely to be continuous with the dominant preferences of that past. But because the past is not there determinatively, the present action, finally, is explicable only in terms of itself. Therefore, Simpson at T is free to continue "his" prior value commitments, and he is free to alter them.

Assuming the unity of nature, Whitehead concludes that, though the variations are extraordinary, the foregoing account of causal relatedness must also he extended in some manner to the actual entities constituting subhuman and non-conscious levels of reality. Each actual occasion’s past lays claim upon it, luring it toward desired forms of synthesis. In practically all of nature, the abstract possibility of the present’s being urged toward novel modes of becoming is not actualized. So nature repeats itself. Yet, because each new occasion is not its past, its response cannot be reduced to the sum total of its antecedent influences. In that sense, nature is free.

God too is free, on either the societal or the entitative view. The freedom of an actual entity is manifest in its choice of a subjective aim, which then becomes the fixed principle to which the internal process of becoming resolves itself into greater and greater specificity. That freedom is in principle the same in God; the only variation being the fact that God’s subjective aim, whether one (the entitative view) or many (the societal view), is derivative from his primordial nature. God’s primordial evaluation is neither explicable in terms of, nor reducible to, anything other than the divine choice itself. On either view, then, God’s freedom lies in his primordial evaluation of possibility.

Beyond this point, however, the two views of God differ markedly -- both as to the extent and the consequence of the divine freedom. On the entitative view, God is free but once (even if, as we shall consider later, "once" is to be construed in some unique nontemporal sense). This single evaluative adjustment of possibility permanently fixes the character of God’s consequent commerce with the world. On the societal view, by contrast, God is repeatedly free. In each moment of his life God can choose to evaluate possibility in a manner differently than he does and differently than he did in previous moments. God can alter his own prior value commitments, i.e., his evaluative adjustments of possibility.

To clarify this claim let us recall that the primordial nature is logically, not chronologically, prior; it is, in each new moment of the divine life, the presupposition of the nature of God’s concrete action. Being a society, the effect of past occasions in his life upon the presently becoming one is, as is generally tnie in societies, a persuasive and not a coercive effect. Hence God can -- God is free to -- "primordially" evaluate possibility differently from one moment to the next. In other words, the abstract evaluation of possibility from which springs the divine synthesis in one moment of God’s life can be different in the next. To be sure, there are for God at each divine moment only a limited number of options. The limits placed upon God’s evaluation of possibility (we are not now speaking of actuality) are presumably those of metaphysical necessity. But within these limits, God may at any moment adopt a new scale of values. About what he deems to be desirable or valuable, God can "change his mind."

III. Freedom and God’s Faithfulness

I have thus far presented arguments for concluding that God is a society, and I have indicated how this view affects the process conception of the nature of God’s purpose and freedom. Now we shall relate this discussion to the religious experience of God’s faithfulness. An assumption which forms the background of this section of the paper should be acknowledged. If the societal view is at least as defensible, metaphysically, as its alternative, then the superior adequacy of the societal view for our religious experience should be counted as additional evidence in its favor.

The intuition of God’s faithfulness is a fundamental ingredient of the Western religious tradition. This notion involves more than God’s dependability, or even his beneficent dependability. The idea of faithfulness connotes the praiseworthiness of dependability. Thus, while we may be appreciative of those types of dependability which are a function of mechanical necessity, we do not regard them as being praiseworthy. We are pleased when the car starts on a cold morning, but we don’t praise cars or give them medals for service. The reason is that cars do not decide whether to be dependable. Praiseworthy dependability, or faithfulness, presupposes freedom. To say that God is faithful is to presuppose that God is free, that in a given circumstance God can do other than what he does.

There are some instances when we "praise" agents of mechanical necessity. For example, we commend the dog who performs his tricks as commanded. Such commendation, though, is not deserved by the dog; it is required for the continued success of the training. Similarly, if we do regard it appropriate to praise a freedomless God, that can only be because such praise is a requirement of God’s continued, mechanically distributed beneficence. This kind of "praise" is offered because it is required; it is no more deserved than is praise for a dependable automobile. In my view, "praise" of this sort is a perversion of the Western religious experience which, at a minimum, requires the encounter of free selves. If I am correct, philosophical theology must maintain the freedom of God in order to account for a fundamental element of our religious experience, the sense of God’s faithfulness.

Faithfulness, however, presupposes not only freedom; it also requires the repetition of freedom. Consider a mythological figure, Crysius, who in a last act of freedom irrevocably turns himself into a (freedomless) ray of sunlight in order to provide eternal warmth for his people. His freely-chosen beneficence should elicit and would merit the praise of his people. Moreover, as a ray warmth Crysius would continue to be beneficial, and succeeding generations of villagers would quite properly continue to he grateful for his beneficent action. But one can hardly say that the later generations are grateful to him for his faithfulness. Crysius continues to be beneficial to his people, and he, a ray of warmth, is dependable; but to say that he is faithful is no more appropriate than to say of the sun that it is faithful to the earth because it regularly warms our planet. The notion of faithfulness, thus, is tied to the idea of repeated freedom. (No doubt it may be extended metaphorically beyond this context, e.g., the poet could speak of the sun’s faithfulness to the earth, seeking, perhaps. to elicit in the hearer a heightened sense of the unmerited benefits of nature.) To speak of God’s faithfulness, then, would seem to require that we include in our concept of God the capacity to act freely repeatedly.

The entitative view of God disallows the kind of divine freedom that is presupposed by the religious intuition of God’s faithfulness. If God is a single actual entity, he has but one (numerically) subjective aim which is derivative from his single primordial evaluation of possibility. Perhaps God is free in his primordial decision, on this view, but even so he is no more faithful than is Crysius as a ray of light. In the entitative view, God is like a computer which mechanically works out its primordial programming vis-à-vis the data it receives from the becoming actual world.

It might seem possible to mitigate the computer image of God, implicit in the entitative view, by pointing to the unitary character of an actual entity. Whitehead tells us that an occasion must be viewed as a whole, as occurring all at once. And he suggests that analyses of concrescence must finally be viewed as abstractions of the intellect. Perhaps this means that, on the one hand, such analyses are "likely tales" appropriate only in the sense that if we understand the actual entity "as if" this analysis were true we should in some respects be looking at it most adequately, but that, on the other hand, the analysis should be qualified such that what is said of the "parts" it delineates should be applied to the whole. In this way it could be argued that the freedom of the primordial decision should be applied to God as a totality.

This line of reasoning, I think, is plausible; the inadequacy of language to give a logically neat account of the microcosmic process is perhaps what we should expect since our language is in a sense tied to, and thus derivative from, an experience of the macrocosmic process. Even so, it seems to me, the entitative view is not greatly aided. For it is possible to apply an "as if" analysis of the parts to the whole of an actual entity precisely because there is a whole actual entity. On the entitative view, however, God is never "whole" because he never experiences satisfaction. Thus the abstractions of genetic analysis, including talk of God’s free primordial decision, must ontologically stand on their own feet, unsupported by reference to a concrete, finished actuality.

I should now point out, however, that even if the entitative view can successfully maintain the freedom of God’s primordial evaluation, we still have no grounds for affirming God’s faithfulness. God now is a unique Crysius -- unique because the freedom of his past decision is somehow still present in the atemporal result of that decision. But if, as I have argued, faithfulness fundamentally pertains only to the repetition of free actions, a God who acts freely only once, whether or not that action is somehow eternally present, cannot be faithful.

Perhaps we should dispense with the notion of divine faithfulness. Perhaps -- but I see no reason for denying this or any basic ingredient of religious experience unless metaphysically we are forced to do so. And the societal view of God, it seems to me, can account for the religious intuition of God’s faithfulness. God is repeatedly free. At the inception of any moment in his life he can choose to order possibility differently than he does and differently than he did in past moments. (God is thus perhaps the closest approximation in process philosophy to Sartre’s "being-for-itself." God is radically free in the sense of being able to adopt alternative projects. Whitehead differs from Sartre, though, in acknowledging the persuasive power of the past -- the past influences, even if it does not determine, the present.) Moreover, God, in the societal view, is faithful. His faithfulness is the identical character of his manifold primordial aims. God, in each becoming moment, freely orders possibility as he did in previous moments. Although quantitatively the primordial aim is a multiplicity, qualitatively it is one. It is a unity in the sense that in each moment God manifests the same evaluation of possibility. It is primordial in so far as it is the presupposition of the nature of God’s becoming at each occasion of his life. And it is free since God could choose to order possibility differently in any given instance than he does.

Baldly put, God is faithful because he could, but does not, "sin" -- against his own previous primordial ideals. That God continues to relate himself to the world in a given way is a matter of grace, not of necessity.

References

CNT -- Cobb, John B., Jr. A Christian Natural Theology. Philadelphia-Westminster, 1965.

IWM -- Christian, William A. An Interpretation of Whiteheads Metaphysics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959.

WTR -- Johnson, A. H. Whitehead’s Theory of Reality. New York: Dover, 1962.

1. Lewis S. Ford, "Boethius and Whitehead on Time and Eternity," International Philosophical Quarterly. 8, 1 (March, 1968), 38-67.

2. Lewis S. Ford, "Whitehead’s Conception of Divine Spatiality," Southern Journal of Philosophy. 6, 2 (Spring, 1968), 1-13.

The author examines Whitehead’s view that scientific laws state principles which are immanent in nature but which evolve concurrently with novel changes in the entities actually constituting the universe..

According to Whitehead, scientific laws state principles which are immanent in nature but which evolve concurrently with novel changes in the entities actually constituting the universe.¹ This suggestive and almost entirely neglected thesis provides a lever for criticizing contemporary views concerning the scope and character of laws of nature. The received view among philosophers of science, whether they be of a regularity or necessity persuasion, is that a statement s is a law statement or nomological generalization if and only if it satisfies the following logically necessary specifications:

Whether any philosopher has ever held precisely this theory, I do not know. But certainly philosophers as diverse as Popper, Pap, Kneale, and Carnap have endorsed some form of crucial premises (1), (2), and (3).²

I contend that (2) and (3) cannot be defended against an epistemic construal of Whitehead’s position and therefore should be abandoned as necessary conditions of nomological generalizations. Some philosophers -- viz., those who accept either a weak (natural necessity) or a strong (logical necessity) version of lawful necessity -- have argued that (4b) directly supports (1) - (3) in a way (4a) logically cannot. But I intend my arguments to have an equal impact on the supporters of both (4a) and (4b). These arguments also show that Whitehead’s account raises afresh, somewhat surprisingly for those who regard him as Hume’s opposite on induction, some of the latter’s doubts concerning the justifiability of sweeping conclusions reached through scientific inference.

I

Whitehead’s theory directly challenges (2), a specification traditionally introduced in order to escape the problem of accidental universals. If nomological generalizations were restricted to specific finite space-time regions, the class denoted would be closed and the law statement could be expressed as a finite conjunction of singular statements. Since it is thought that counterfactual conditional statements cannot be adequately grounded by summative inductions and that laws must sustain counterfactuals, it is argued that no restricted universal qualifies as nomic. Regularity theorists generally argue that. the distinction between unrestricted universals of law and mere universals of fact is to be accounted for in terms of the epistemic and contextual support which unrestricted universals receive within a system of scientific theory. Necessity theorists maintain that a distinction must be drawn between necessary universals and mere universals of fact. But both parties agree that unrestricted universality is a logically necessary condition of laws.

Whitehead’s dissenting opinion is best understood as an extension of one dimension of Hume’s polemic against induction. Hume maintains that there is no adequate justification for inference from statements of the form

Whitehead takes the rather different view that while we are conditionally justified, for metaphysical reasons, in making these inferences (when confined to a particular space-time region where there is traceable continuity), we are not justified in construing the empirical generalization unrestrictedly. It may be true but not unrestricted in scope:

Whitehead is arguing, against (2), that laws should be construed as spatially or temporarily restricted and that they only support counterfactual conditionals whose conditions are within the scope of the law.³ Rational warrant, in the sense of epistemic worth, will thus diminishingly vary in accordance with the space-time region within which the law is assumed to hold. This is the epistemological side of Whitehead’s metaphysical speculation. It indicates that he is far more skeptical of scientists’ capacities to make accurate predictions beyond the relatively immediate future than is Hume, who had a strong faith in induction beyond the immediate environment but could not rationally justify it.

II

William Kneale is the only philosopher to my knowledge who has explicitly disagreed with Whitehead’s general thesis and has met it with an argument. Kneale objects that when special caution is employed by scientists concerning remote inferences beyond local conditions,

Kneale is contending that the concepts ordinarily used to describe universally connected features in nomological generalizations may differ radically from those which always could be mentioned and which would be contained in a complete formulation of the law. This is the received interpretation of causal laws. Donald Davidson has more rigorously developed the point -- though not specifically as an objection to Whitehead -- by drawing a distinction between a strong and a weak way of interpreting causal law statements which satisfy the Principle of Uniform Causation.⁵ On a strong interpretation, says Davidson. a causal law statement consists of those predicates X’ and ‘Y’ which are specifically used in singular statements to describe particular objects or events x and y which are instances of the general law. The singular statement "x caused y," in other words, entails a particular law incorporating the predicates actually used in describing x and y. On a weak interpretation, there might be some true descriptions of x and y such that the sentence derived by substituting these descriptions for ‘x’ and ‘y’ in the singular statement "x caused y" follows logically from a true nomological generalization. The second interpretation is weaker because no particular law using the predicates ‘X’ and ‘Y’ is directly entailed by ordinary singular causal statements and the latter can be defended without having to defend any particular law. Yet there is an unrestrictedly true law. This weak interpretation precisely expresses Kneale’s objection to Whitehead.

The argument, however, is question begging as an argument against Whitehead. Kneale presumes that there must be a specifiable, though overlooked or hidden, condition g. In the aforementioned passage, Whitehead refers to this as a "presupposition of the maintenance of the general order." This demand assumes that a full characterization of the antecedent will invariably reveal perfect uniformity, i.e., that if the law statement is true and fully described the same consequent will always result from the same antecedent. This assumption rests on the a priori same cause -- same effect" Uniformity Principle which Hume thought to have no rational warrant, but which he thought we believe nonetheless. Whitehead, in his distinctive way of extending Hume, is agreeing but is also adding a principle of novelty. We would expect this of a process and time-oriented philosophy such as Whitehead’s; and we would expect the reverse of a philosophy such as Kneale’s where laws are necessary principles and are stated in the timeless form "All a things are b."

The following schema is a simplification and reconstruction of Whitehead’s view that it is logically possible, and not known to be empirically impossible, that relevantly similar and fully described causal items may produce dissimilar effects in different cosmic epochs.⁶

Obviously it cannot be objected that (i), (ii), and (iii) are different, unrestrictedly true laws. If held to be omnitemporally unrestricted, they could not be omnitemporally true, for each falsifies the other. It also cannot be maintained that the conjunction of (i), (ii), and (iii) is logically impossible. This would not only render the presumably factual principle of uniformity logically necessary, it would also beg the question by simply denying the tenability of the claim that laws evolve and insisting on the notion of uniform causation. Whitehead is, of course, directly challenging this principle of uniformity. This will come as no surprise to those familiar with his theories of concrescence and novelty. But, again, it is somewhat surprising to find Whitehead in the position of being at once more skeptical than Hume about induction, while also being one of Hume’s most outspoken and non-skeptical critics.

III

Whitehead’s thesis that laws may be restricted in scope must be accepted, I think, unless it be held a conceptual truth that nomological generalizations express unrestrictedly exceptionless regularities. I cannot see that this is a conceptual truth, but even if it were so treated, Whitehead’s argument provides plausible grounds for revising the concept of a law of nature. The main import of this argument for contemporary philosophy of science is simply to show that the "omnitemporal and omnispatial" requirements of (2) and (3) are gratuitous and unjustified. If one follows Whitehead here, the most one can say about laws is that (A) no known data indicate that examined instances of contemporary laws constitute the complete class of instances, and that (B) we have reasonable grounds for holding laws to be unrestrictedly universal within a certain spatiotemporal scope (whereas we can, by experimentation, know that accidental universals are closed or subject to exceptions). The evidence for the knowledge claim in (A) coincides with the reasonable grounds of (B). Once again this epistemic approach to laws is largely, though not fully, shared by Whitehead and Hume. Whitehead thought, of course, that more could be said metaphysically. But it has not been my concern to explore his metaphysical views.

Notes

1 Whitehead usually states this view categorically rather than hypothetically. It is doubtful, however, whether his speculative system can sustain a categorical claim. Even if one grants the full complement of premises in his metaphysics of novelty, it follows only that laws may evolve -- not that they do evolve. Cf. AI 143-46; PR 139; FR 27-29; MT 211f; SMW 156. Some of Whitehead’s clearest, but least technical, statements are found in AI, chapters 7-8.

2 Cf. R. Carnap, Philosophical Foundations of Physics (Basic Books, 1966). pp. 209-14; W. Kneale, Probability and Introduction (Oxford, 1949), sections 13-19, and "Universality and Necessity," The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 12, 46 (1961), 89-102; A. Pap, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Free Press, 1962), pp. 292f; K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Harper and Row, 1959), Appendix X.

3 Whitehead also maintains that scientists do not find, even within the environment of our own cosmic epoch, laws which are exactly obeyed (AI 143-46; PR 140).

4 Kneale, Probability and Induction, p. 73.

5 Causal Relations," The Journal of Philosophy, 64 (1967), 691-703.

6 This schema indicates my disagreement with Gary Gutting’s recent interpretation of Whitehead in "Metaphysics and Induction," Process Studies, 1, 3 (Fall, 1971), 171-78, esp. 175-77.