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C. H. Waddington taught and did research at the Department of Genetics in the University of Edinburgh. He died in 1975.

The invitation to take part in this symposium came at a time which was rather awkward for me. I had for a year or two been thinking that it might be useful to write a book about Whitehead and the relevance of his thought to some of our present controversies, particularly in relation to biology, and the ‘anti-science’ movement. I had in fact decided to do so, when I had cleared off my plate a number of things which were already on it. But I had not fully thought out just what I would have to say, and I confess that I still have not yet done so. So my paper now must have a rather interim, half-prepared character; it will be another year or so before I can hope to have properly sorted out whatever I may find I have to contribute. I shall therefore present here only a rather expanded version of the notes I used when I gave the talk in the Villa Serbelloni, rather than a definitive essay.

The points I want to make come under four headings:

I. Whitehead and Reductionism

The controversy between reductionism and anti-reductionism (which in my young days in the ‘thirties we used to refer to as between material materialism and organicism) is usually stated in something like the following terms. We (and science in general) start by accepting the real existence of certain scientific objects -- atoms, electrons, gravitation, light, etc. The question at issue is whether we can account for everything -- e.g., all biological processes, including behaviour (and some people would include, others exclude, mind and/or conscious self-awareness) -- in terms of those entities, as reductionists and mechanists claimed, or do we have to invoke something else, which might be organizing relations’ or ‘system properties,’ as anti-reductionists and organicists argued.

Whitehead stated that we start somewhere else; not with objects, but with ‘events’ which are four-dimensional happenings, i.e., processes. All knowledge, and all talk, is derived from experiences of events. Scientific objects -- atoms, etc -- are not basic, but are derivative, intellectual constructs invented to assist us to understand events.

This view removes the whole heat from the controversy. Reductionism simply does what it says it is going to do, namely it reduces, from the experienced event to an intellectually constructed object, which is useful in making sense out of the particular aspect of the event we are interested in at the time. If we get interested in some other aspect, e.g., if we change from considering the blood circulation of an animal to its nest-building, we have a perfect right to invent new appropriate objects. But, in the interests of consistency, we shall only invent new objects when we cannot escape from doing so; usually, it is sufficient slightly to modify the description of our previous objects, e.g., when we modify the definition of the atom to accommodate it to new observations about radioactivity or atom-smashing, or new types of chemical combination. The point is, the definition which is given of a scientific object at any given point in history is not inviolable, so that the only change possible would be to add something (‘organizing relations’) to it; what happens is that the definition itself is changed.

II. Whitehead and the Complexity of Events

For Whitehead real existents were events. Each event has a definite character, but this results from the ‘concrescence’ of an infinite number of objects (which are essentially relations with other events, ‘prehensions’) into a unity. In doing science we have, on the one hand, to try to formulate simple objects which express the most important causal relations between events, but at the same time we have to ensure that these objects include (as sub-objects) as many as possible of all those involved in the event. The thrust of Whitehead’s thought is not to simplify unduly; every time you ‘reduce’ you leave something out, and scientific ideas are richer and nearer to nature the less that has had to be omitted in order to reach them.

I applied these ideas in embryology as follows. When I began working, the standard concepts of experimental embryology were such things as ‘potencies.’ A potency to develop into neural tissue was a simple concept, but it was in fact totally vacuous since it could not be analyzed into anything else. Reinforced by Whiteheadian principles, I was not afraid to substitute for this the concept that development depended on the activities of very large numbers of genes. It had to be supposed that these activities were brought together to result in some relatively unified type of action, e.g., to form a definitive nerve cell, rather than a definite muscle cell. This ‘concrescence-like’ process would have to involve a great many control circuits, cybernetic-type interactions and so on. Further, this unity would itself be a process. That implies that the unifying action is not a homeostasis, i.e., a set of interactions which ensure that a certain state of the system is stable; instead it is a homeothesis, which brings it about that a certain process of change is stable. When the developing system is disturbed it returns not to the state it was at when the disturbance occurred, but to some later part of the stabilized pathway of change. The stabilized pathway of change is named a ‘chreod,’ and the whole system of chreods in a complex developing system such as an egg gives rise to an ‘epigenetic landscape.’

Note that this is quite a different conception from that which a few geneticists were beginning, at that time or shortly thereafter, to formulate from a reductionist point of view. They asked the question, What controls the activity of a single gene, turning it on or off? We are by now beginning to get quite good answers to this question as regards bacteria, and are even approaching it for higher organisms. But it is not actually the crucial question, which is, What controls the activity of the complex interacting set of genes, which produces a nerve cell or a muscle cell? We know that in general this control of complex development processes takes place earlier than the control of single genes, but I doubt whether we know any more about it now than we did when I first formulated it, around 1940.

If one approaches the problems of evolution with a similar readiness to accept that the process may essentially involve very numerous components, one again comes out with a set of questions which are characteristically Whiteheadian rather than present-day orthodox. For instance, one admits that in much of evolution (probably all above the bacteria), evolutionary changes involve enormous numbers of genes, rather than a selection of one or two particular genes (although that occurs in a few instances, possibly, for instance, in industrial melanism). Of course this is a point which Dobzhansky and Sewall Wright have emphasized, both from the practical and theoretical points of view. It reduces to very small proportions, almost negligible, in fact, the importance of the element of chance mutation, on which R. A. Fisher on the one hand and Jacques Monod on the other have reared such super-structures of rather emotional philosophizing.

Moreover, from the Whiteheadian point of view one has to recognize that the evolving events -- actual animals and plants as we meet them in real life -- are influenced by environmental factors as well as genetic. Further, all living things above a very low level of evolution play some role, active or passive, in deciding what environmental influences will act selectively on their populations. All this produces a much more interactive theory of evolution than the conventional ‘chance and necessity.’ The organism draws its genes from an enormously variegated gene pool; it develops under the influence of them and also under those of a probably pretty heterogeneous environment; and, at any given stage of its life, the way its genes and its previous environment have acted up to that point may have considerable effect on the nature of the environment to which it will next be subjected -- if the animal does not like it here it may migrate someplace else, and so on. We are dealing in fact with a Whiteheadian type of interacting network, rather than a straightforward linear sequence of cause and effect of the classical materialist kind.

III. Whitehead and the Nature of Organizing Relations

Absolutely central to Whitehead’s thought is the idea that a unified event, which has a definite characteristic identity or, otherwise expressed, is an organized unit, is built up by the bringing together in some way of its interactions with other entities in the world (‘the concrescence of prehensions’). How is this done? Since Whitehead wrote in the ‘twenties, the standard scientific ideas about the nature of effective interactions between entities have undergone a number of changes. I think they are just about now beginning to catch up with the first phase of Whitehead’s thought on the subject, that is, his thought up to and including Science and the Modern World. They have not yet caught up with his thinking in Process and Reality. I think science will proceed in that general direction, but I am not quite convinced that it will come to exactly the same conclusions as Whitehead does -- partly because I find it very difficult to make up my mind what those conclusions are. However, the first part of the story is considerably simpler.

The ‘classical’, idea of effective interactions was that of simple material causality, with one or two causes producing one or two effects in a simple linear manner. The next stage was to accept that in many entities we have to consider a large number of interacting components, and processes of cause-effect which are not simply linear, but may interest either by being linked into networks, or by various types of feed-back interaction, positive or negative and so on. These are the ideas which were first brought forward in biology by thinkers such as Needham and Woodger (with myself acquiescing on the side-lines) under the name ‘Organizing Relations,’ and by Bertalanffy, who conducted a vigorous propaganda campaign on their behalf, under the name of ‘Systems Theory, and finally by Norbert Wiener, with equal fervour, as ‘Cybernetics.’ These all essentially involved interaction -- though not simple linear interactions -- between material things.

A new step was taken with the introduction of ‘Information Theory.’ It became common to come across sentences such as the following (taken more or less by chance from the manuscript of a book entitled, Information, Explanation and Meaning, sent to me in advance of publication by its author E. H. Nutton). "The most general model of a natural process on which scientific explanation may be based is no longer the movement of a particle under the action of a force, but the storage (or organization) and the transmission of information within a system." ‘Information’ is, of course, not a material entity. This is the essential change made from the classical notion of effective interactions or the systems theory development of it.

However, Information Theory was developed by Shannon and Weaver, originally in relation to the transmission of messages along communication channels, such as the telephone wire. It is mainly a theory of inactive specificity, which does nothing and brings nothing about. This is a profound limitation on its powers of implication or explanation. It is, therefore, rapidly being displaced from the centre of scientific thought by theories which are concerned with active rather than inactive specificity. These are theories of Instructions (Automata Theory) or Programming. These have been, of course, specially developed in relation to computers, but they deal with interactions in terms of something which resembles information in that it is not material, but differs from it in that it does not merely describe a state, as does information, but both describes a process and, further, instructs that this process should be done. It is in terms of vectors, not of scalars.

For vectors were the basis of Whitehead’s idea of prehensions, as was pointed out particularly by Victor Lowe in his essay on "The Development of Whitehead’s Philosophy" (Schilpp, PA., ed., The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, 1941, 1951). Whitehead always thought of interactions as (a) involving something much more general than the physical forces contemplated in classical dynamics, involving in fact specificities akin to those contemplated in Information Theory, but (b) always as active ingredients of processes. That makes them very similar to the basic components of recent ideas about Automata Theory and Programming.

Whitehead had to go one degree further. He was concerned with the organization of specific character; every event reacts with every other, but not with all aspects of every other. We have one of those systems of circular causation which are characteristic of the whole Whiteheadian way of thought about organic unity. Event A requires its specific character of A-ness only by means of its interactions with all the other events P,Q,R,S,T, etc. But it interacts only with certain aspects of event P, and which those aspects will be depends on the character of A. Thus the character of A both depends on, and decides, the nature of its interactions with P,Q, and the rest. (Note the parallel with the system of ideas about evolution in which I suggest that the character of a living organism is determined by the particular natural selection it is subjected to, and that the natural selection it is subjected to is dependent on what its character leads it to select out of the range of environments available to it.)

Whitehead came to express this notion by saying that the prehension of one event A for another event B was according to the ‘Subjective Aim’ of A, and instead of ‘prehensions’ he began using the word ‘feelings.’ These are obviously very dangerous terms, and a great deal of thought and discussion is necessary to discover just what Whitehead meant by them. Certainly he intended to convey that the character of A, which was decisive in specifying the nature of its interactions with B, was a dynamic character which had some affinity with an intention or an objective, or instruction, rather than a mere static characteristic, such as a chemical composition is usually considered to be. How far he was justified in introducing clear references to human personality, by using words such as ‘subjective’ or ‘feeling,’ is difficult to decide. I am fairly certain he did not intend a simple pan-psychism in which every entity -- every stick and stone--is supposed to have a ‘stream of consciousness’ in any way comparable to our own consciousness. Perhaps he would have ruffled fewer people’s feelings if he had used, like the topologist Rene Thom, a less obviously loaded term, such as ‘the logos’ of an entity, which Thom defines as a figure which describes the totality of the regulatory mechanisms of a system.

I do not want to pursue the discussion of this matter in this section, the main emphasis of which has been to point out that Whitehead already in the ‘twenties was thinking in terms very close to those of the Automata Theorists and Programmers of the present day. I should, however, also remark that the more subtle developments of Whitehead’s thought seem to have been the inspiration for one of the most thorough and impressive discussions of the evolution of human mentality and language in its relation to cognate activities in earlier evolutionary forms, namely Suzanne Langer’s impressive work, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, of which two volumes have so far appeared and a third is promised soon. Thorpe stated that he personally had found Whitehead’s thought of little help in relation to his own work on animal behaviour which was largely concerned with birdsong, but I think Suzanne Langer has shown that it may indeed be illuminating to think of problems of animal communication and eventually human language in terms of instructions, subjective aims or feelings, rather than in terms of information and description of states of affairs.

IV. Whiteheadian Science and the Present Anti-Science Movement

This is the aspect of Whitehead’s relevance to the thinking of the present day that I do not feel ready yet to go into very deeply.

In cannot be denied that at the present day there is a widely disseminated feeling, which affects many people quite deeply, that it is an inescapable consequence of the essential nature of science that it devalues, dehumanizes, impoverishes the relation between man and nature; anyone who regards nature scientifically must find himself alienated and estranged from it. Exponents of this view are Marcuse, Gillespie, Roszak and many others.

Whitehead was the Knight in Shining Armour (some people seem to think him only the White Knight) who rode out to do battle against any and every form of what he called the Bifurcation of Nature -- whether it was the Cartesian Dualism or the alienation which the sensitive soul feels when it learns that water may be represented as H₂O. As we have seen knowing which occasions, and when in the development of that line of creatures, makes all the difference. We can never know just how ‘the giraffe got his long neck,’ but like everything else in evolution it is the result of subjectivity and purpose. Now, all the effective components in this picture---the instructional interactions and the events with a specific character, into which they are drawn together -- have the character of intentions, so we are already, in our basic view of science, in a world in which conceptions of Value are at least not foreign and maybe are inescapable. If we approach science from the Whiteheadian point of view, the fortress which the anti-scientists will have to attack is not what they think it is, and may be capable of mounting a rather devastating counter-attack.

Richard Overman spent four years in the general practice of medicine before returning to school to study philosophy and religion. He is now chairman of the Faculty in Religion at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington.

"He doesn’t know what he’s talking about!" Isn’t this what we all feel like blurting out occasionally? Especially when we find someone else’s language failing to express what we know! Still, in our better moments we refrain from such outbursts, because in our depths we know that, in the part of our lives concerned with language, hardly anything is more difficult than being sure what we mean. We know that when we are speaking seriously, we are trying to let something up into awareness -- the ‘what’ which is the true subject matter of our speaking -- and we are trying to become well-enough acquainted with it so we can deliver it in words. But there’s many a slip ‘twixt the ‘what’ and the lip! Indeed, unless we already know that ‘something’ quite well, our speaking may deliver something else by mistake. Anyone who tries to explain a minority viewpoint knows that his listeners may suspect him of just such an error, and he will know that a certain lightheartedness is necessary when hearing his words treated as a ‘Cloud of Unknowing’ or a huge trash heap! By ‘lightheartedness’ I am not speaking of childish frivolity in constructing one’s speech, or of shallow willingness to retrench. I mean the ability to be quite serious in trying to plumb the depths, to ‘draw up Leviathan’ into words, while at the same time being amused when one’s linguistic ‘fishline’ keeps pulling up minnows, blowfishes, and an occasional old tire. I mean the ability to be quite responsible for what one says, while at the same time knowing that his accuser is correct in exclaiming, "He doesn’t know what he’s talking about!"

Therefore, one must answer on two levels when he is asked, "Have I understood what you mean?" The easy level concerns whether the listener has grasped the conscious intention of the speaker, and most arguments in the worlds of politics, science, and theology remain at this level. But the more important, and much more difficult, answer concerns whether either person, listener or speaker, has fished up that deep ‘something’ or ‘what’ which may be pressing for expression then, meaning to be said. Sometimes it appears that we will go to almost any lengths to avoid looking deeper for that ‘something’ just beyond the edges of clear consciousness! But if there is anything to St. Paul’s notion that mysteries are cleared up in heaven, I am sure the first words of Plato upon entering those portals were the same as those of Lamarck, Darwin, and Einstein: "Aha! So that’s what I was talking about!"

May I draw two ‘morals’ from this story? The first is short, concerning the way we should read the essays in this volume. Our whole civilization seems to act as though restoring things to their ‘natural’ state would mean making them dead, and this crisis in our world has a lot to do with our ancestors’ enjoyment in dealing with easy, clear, conscious meanings and their dislike in looking for that deeper ‘something.’ So, if we want to help cure our sick world we had better remember that the real subject matter of this hook is not likely to emerge unless each of us looks through the conscious language of the essays, asking, "Now what is it that he doesn’t know he is saying?"

The second ‘moral’ is longer, and I will dwell on it in the rest of this paper. But briefly, it is this: ‘orthodox’ scientific uneasiness about the role of purpose or final causation in planetary evolution has its grounds partly in the fact that over the centuries most people who have tried to describe the role of purpose on Earth haven’t known ‘what’ they were talking about. They have known that somehow or other everything depends on purposes somewhere, in something or other -- or in something and another -- but they have hardly ever had a very clear grasp of just where the purposes are, in what things, and how much. So sometimes they have rendered to God the purposes that really were Caesar’s, and sometimes they have credited crowds of Caesar’s liver cells with a unified conscious vision of the future which only Caesar’s soul could have enjoyed. The result, as we all know, has been the gradual eliminating of the notion of purpose from scientific thought. And not merely from scientific thought, for it has been suppressed in theological thought as well! I don’t know which is more perplexing, to be told by a ‘Fundamentalist’ in theology that all the purposes of the universe are hoarded everlastingly in heaven by God, or to be told by a ‘Fundamentalist’ in science that there just aren’t any purposes. Either way, my own purposes here on Earth (which are more obvious to me than either God or evolution!) seem to be neatly explained away. The two ‘Fundamentalists’ seem to agree in giving me a perplexing bit of advice: "Why worry? You’re really dead!"

But all this perplexity is unnecessary -- the fact that a lot of people haven’t known ‘what’ they were talking about for centuries is important, but it is not grounds for assuming they were talking of nothing! On the contrary, the very persistence of language about purpose indicates that people are trying to speak of something -- the question is, what? At this point, Whitehead’s analysis is particularly helpful, for he helps us understand where the purposes of the world are, in what kinds of things, and how they are related to the intricate patterns of physical causation we may discover through scientific research. In other words, he can help people who experience purposes to know much more closely ‘what’ they are talking about, so that the whole discussion of purposes in our world can move on beyond the typical confusion of the last few centuries. Perhaps, if we are granted time, some more purified currents of thought may emerge to support life instead of death!

‘Life’ and ‘Purpose’ in Evolution¹

Most of our trouble in discussing ‘life’ and ‘purpose’ comes from assuming that the subjects which are ‘alive’ and enjoy ‘purposes’ are the things which appear before our eyes, enduring through time. But Whitehead directs our attention away from such enduring things to the individual ‘occasions of experience,’ momentary events whose subjective aims determine their becoming. In thinking of the world we rarely consider the purposes of these basic entities; instead, we tend to be conscious of and think almost entirely of collections of entities, arranged in complex spatial and temporal patterns. Whitehead calls any such group of occasions with some sort of connectedness a nexus,’ and a nexus which shows some trait shared by each member in dependence on the others he calls a ‘society’ (PR 30, 50f.). The common trait is called the ‘defining characteristic’ of the society. For example, what we usually call ‘an electron’ really is a society of occasions, each of which is a distinct subjective process of becoming, flickeringly brief in duration; each inherits some characteristic forms (which we call ‘electronic’) from a predecessor and mediates them to a successor. Taken together, any such nexus of occasions composing a society stretching through time is an enduring object’ (PR 51f.); so a ‘molecule’ also is an enduring object -- but it is composed of more-complex ‘molecular’ occasions in a temporally-ordered society which also contains sub-societies of atoms. Ordinary objects of our experience, such as rocks and tables, are composed of many strands of enduring objects; and the story of planetary evolution focuses on the careers of incredibly complex organisms which may be analyzed into societies with sub-societies of many kinds. But even the most complex order of life can be analyzed ultimately into the relationships among short-lived occasions with subjective aims. The reasons for things, Whitehead insists, always lie in actual entities (PR 28); and since all these are invisible to our eyes, it is no wonder that we often speak confusedly!

Nearly everyone agrees that a moment of ‘human’ experience is richer, more intense, more laden with intrinsic value than a moment of ‘electronic’ experience. Also we believe that this complex human experience has evolved gradually from some such simpler kinds of entities. But how? Here is one great ‘problem’ faced by nature, which has its solution in the events which Dobzhansky and Thorpe call ‘evolutionary emergences.’ But for Whitehead, nature’s ‘problem’ can be solved only if two mutually-dependent kinds of emergences are occurring: (a) more complex societies of occasions must emerge if there is to be (b) the emergence of higher-grade individual occasions which then are the final loci of actuality and value. As Birch suggests (above, p. 15), this view of ‘emergence’ does not in Whitehead’s view allow us to suggest that new explanatory categories (such as ‘subjectivity’ or mentality’) emerge partway along the evolutionary way; but Dobzhansky’s belief that evolution is "emergence of new patterns" (above p. 21) certainly can be accepted as a statement about new kinds of societies of societies, and new grades of actual entities within these societies.

Yet ‘emergence’ alone is not enough. No matter how complex the actual entities in a society, the society only ‘counts’ in evolution if it has a method of surviving. Whitehead saw two ways in which nature has solved this ‘problem’ of ‘survival’:

1. Material bodies, such as rocks and stars, are composed of societies which persist because their occasions are dominated by massive, average feelings of their environments. In turn, this reflects the fact that the subjective aims of such entities are confined ordinarily very closely to what Whitehead calls ‘physical purposes’ (PR 280, 406 ff.) -- that is, aims merely to repeat in themselves and pass on the physical characteristics of their immediate surroundings. Mentality in these entities is real, but it operates at a trivial level, serving only to eliminate any novel possibilities which may have entered into their predecessors and to suppress any fresh novelty within themselves beyond that which may account for the vibratory phenomena of these basic societies. Such societies are what we call ‘inorganic,’ and we correctly recognize them as being dominated by the patterns of physical feeling which stimulate our sense organs and scientific instruments.

Now, it is basic to Whitehead’s vision that each occasion is first a subject whose process of becoming is absolutely private; only afterwards is it an object which can have an effect on subsequent subjects. I stress: nothing is simultaneously a subject for itself and an object for other subjects. Because the subjective immediacy of every occasion is quite private, there is no way for scientific research to peer in and ‘verify’ the reality of subjectivity in the world. (Anyone who says, "Show me a subject with purposes and then I’ll believe in it!" is only muddled -- what he means is, "The only kind of ‘subject’ I’m willing to believe in is one which really is an ‘object.’" And one of the clearest examples of ‘not knowing what we’re talking about’ is to say that ‘subjects’ are ‘objects’!) Nevertheless, no real problems are posed to the quest for scientific understanding by the fact that we cannot get ‘inside’ the subjectivity of an occasion in a rock or a star with our research instruments. This is because the subjective aim of such an occasion is so nearly limited to repeating the physical patterns which we can detect; in other words, if we pay attention only to the physical characteristics of these enduring objects, we are not missing anything very significant. Only when we are considering much more complex occasions, e.g., moments of human experience, are there significant aspects of aim and mentality which elude our instruments (see below).

The high-grade organisms we study in biological evolution contain many subordinate enduring objects; molecules and cells, for example, comprise the environment for atoms and electrons in our bodies. Since every occasion somehow is influenced by its environment, a sodium atom within a living body is different from one outside it, say, in a salt mine. Yet the atom in the living body is just as ‘law-abiding,’ just as dominated by ‘physical purposes, as one we might study outside the body in a crystal. Sodium atoms are just as much ‘conformists’ inside the body as outside it, but the pattern of physical feeling to which they conform is different in the body. So, if we are able to discover statistical laws describing the average behavior of such tiny enduring objects in salt mines, we should expect to find analogous laws which describe the slightly-different behavior of their ‘cousins’ in livers and brains. Also, in speaking of the differences, we can avoid cumbersome notions such as ‘emergent properties of sodium’ merely by recalling that the occasions of sodium which conform to one pattern of physical feeling in a salt mine are not the same occasions which later (after the salt has been eaten) conform to a somewhat different pattern of physical feeling in a human brain.

2. The second way for societies of occasions to survive is by changing their defining characteristics, done by admitting novelty in the form of conceptual feeling. As Whitehead puts it, the world advances into novelty along a road paved with ‘propositions’ (PR 284). This advance occurs wherever the mentality of an occasion entertains a possibility of that occasion’s becoming something more than it would become by merely conforming to past matter-of-fact. The decision to synthesize some novelty with inherited physical feeling is directed by subjective aim. For this to succeed, of course, the ‘something more’ must be a quality of newness which can be introduced without destroying the already-existing characteristics of the society. Also, in low-grade living societies this purposive adaptation occurs quite without any consciousness; all that is required is that an occasion be able to incorporate some alternative for itself beyond what is supplied by physical feelings of its past. But it is this subjective aim to incorporate novelty which lies behind all purposive adaptation to the environment.

Societies in which this method of ‘survival’ is important are what Whitehead calls ‘living societies’ (PR 156). In this sense, then, ‘life’ is the escape from physical routine. But why has such an important factor in evolution always eluded the grasp of those most anxious to demonstrate its reality? Here we can recall that all subjectivity is private. But we can point also to Whitehead’s judgment that ‘life’ is a characteristic of ‘empty space’ (PR 161). Of course he does not mean to discover life we must take a voyage in a rocket ship! Rather, he uses the term ‘empty space’ to designate a state of affairs which we do recognize most easily in the apparent void beyond Earth’s atmosphere, but which occurs also within animal organisms. We have seen that inorganic societies, such as rock molecules, endure through time by repeating endlessly their patterns of physical feeling, and that it is just this endurance through time of a definite pattern of physical feeling which ‘catches our eye.’ Thus interstellar ‘empty space’ is ‘empty’ for us because it is deficient in such enduring objects. Now, the occasions which cause us to call a society ‘living’ are characterized by a certain freedom from domination by the physical past, and just to the extent that they are characterized by novelty they too become unlikely candidates to ‘register’ on our sense organs. From the perspective of those sense organs, then, these occasions occur in the ‘empty space’ of cells. A scientist studying a living cell can hope to detect its atoms and molecules, which are strands of physical inheritance, but the ‘life’ of the cell will elude his gaze. He can only infer the presence of occasions which account for ‘life’ by noticing the slight but definite ways they modify the typical patterns of physical feeling displayed by the enduring objects which he can perceive. For example, we may infer the presence of living societies in cells when we find that certain chemical reactions occur there but not elsewhere.

This account of ‘life’ as a characteristic of cells means that in the human organism there are billions of centers of life, not one. Since we cannot identify ‘life’ with ‘self,’ how then should we speak of that center of bodily experience which we call the ‘soul’ or ‘personality’? For Whitehead, the ‘soul’ is composed of a series of ‘presiding’ or ‘dominant’ occasions in our bodies; he supposes that these ‘dominant occasions’ occur in or about the brain so as to receive from the brain a peculiarly-focussed ‘report’ of bodily experience, not available to any other occasion. But the human ‘soul’ is only the most complex example of what Whitehead calls a ‘living nexus,’ and we should note two general characteristics of all such nexus.² First, the continued existence of any ‘living nexus’ seems to depend upon the support of inorganic societies; this helps us understand why living organisms require food and why a ‘soul’ is always somehow embodied.³ Second, each occasion in a ‘living nexus’ introduces some novelty through its mental pole. Now, Whitehead supposed that even in the lowest forms of life the mentality in any ‘living nexus’ is "canalized into some faint form of mutual conformity" (PR 164), allowing for the emergence of a society whose defining characteristic is mental. Such a society is composed of occasions each of which is able to sum up the mental experience of its predecessors in such a way that any novelty which enters into a new occasion builds upon that which was experienced by earlier occasions. Higher animals all seem to contain at least one such society, called a ‘living person,’ present in the body in addition to the cells and molecules of the central nervous system, even though dependent upon them. The human ‘living person’ or ‘soul’ is what I call ‘myself,’ as known to introspection.

The overall picture, then, is one of ‘life’ on Earth as a movement from mere physical order to mental novelty, and from mental novelty to coordinated inheritance of mental novelty. It is of some interest that Whitehead’s use of the word ‘life’ changed in a way reflecting his interest in this same movement: his earlier discussion of ‘life’ in Process and Reality (PR 156 ff.) stressed the emergence of novelty (so that he spoke of individual ‘living occasions’ as the loci of this emergence in the ‘living societies’), but his later discussion in Adventures of Ideas (AI 266 ff.) focussed more on the coordination of novelty (so that he used the word ‘life’ only to designate a characteristic of a ‘living society’ enduring through time). Either way, we can trace the ‘upward thrust’ of evolution to final causation in nature -- the subjective aims of actual occasions.

The Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics

Arguments about the inheritance of acquired characteristics -- what I shall call here ‘Lamarckian inheritance,’ with due apology to Lamarck! -- commonly prove fruitless because someone proposes, in effect, that we try to consider the life of an animal as though it were one of Whitehead’s occasions, with a single subjective aim determining the whole course of its life. A clear example of what happens if we don’t know what we are talking about! So here let us try to sort out carefully the several grades of actual occasions discussed by Whitehead, and the several kinds of aggregations of occasions which seem to occur in nature. There are four discernible grades of actual occasions, listed here in order of increasing complexity (PR 269).

1. There are the very primitive occasions, as in the ‘empty space’ beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

2. There are the occasions in inorganic enduring objects, such as electrons and rock molecules.

3. There are the occasions in living enduring objects (‘living nexus’), enjoying a degree of conceptual novelty

4. There are the occasions in the life histories of ‘living persons’ with conscious knowledge.

Comparing these, we see tremendous differences in actual subjective attainment and complexity of mentality, differences sufficient to account for our conviction that ‘life’ really is very different from the inorganic realm. Between the world of rocks and a world of people, there has been a series of ‘emergences’ -- new forms of actuality have appeared. But, as noted above, we should not suppose that any new abstract categories of explanation have emerged! I stress this mainly because one old error in explaining the evolution of ‘mind’ seems quite persistent: the notion that ‘bodies’ evolved first through purely physical means, and then later ‘minds’ appeared, exhibiting mentality. This really is an effort to explain the vast gulf between inorganic and organic actuality by proposing that ‘subjectivity’ and ‘mentality’ emerged partway through Earth’s history. On the contrary, Whitehead insists that every occasion in this long history is, during its moment of becoming, a subject governed by subjective aim and characterized by both a physical and a mental pole of experience.

In addition to four grades of actual occasions, Whitehead also distinguishes four kinds of aggregations of occasions on Earth:

Now, if we combine both modes of analysis, we have roughly five kinds of occurrences in nature, shading off into each other:

The higher organisms which most interest us thus can be analyzed into complexly-related levels of social order. Beginning with the lowest level, there are societies of electrons, and there are the occasions in cellular ‘empty space’ which account for the life of the body. Within the cells and in the body fluids there are societies of atoms and molecules; what we call ‘metabolism’ springs from the delicately-balanced forms of atomic and molecular order at this level. Then there are societies of cells in organs and tissues; some of these societies may be dispersed widely through the body, as in the case of blood cells. Finally, in some animals there is a society of ‘dominant occasions.

To clarify the problem of ‘Lamarckian inheritance,’ we need to ask just how influences may be transmitted among the levels of social order sketched above. The ‘traditional’ (and erroneous) proposal amounts to a claim that influences from either the dominant occasions or some cellular occasions are transmitted to the molecular occasions in sexual cells which are responsible for the succession of organisms between generations -- as though the giraffe’s aim to stretch his neck somehow could cause his DNA molecules to ‘stretch’ too! Now, anyone who claims that doesn’t know ‘what’ he is talking about! But by analyzing a few key notions we may be able to see what he is talking about. Let us take Lamarck’s notion of ‘adaptation to a need imposed by the environment’ and ask how the analysis of actual occasions may help us find its meaning. Whitehead notes that the upward thrust of evolution has produced animals increasingly able to adapt the environment to themselves (FR 4-5), and this suggests that ‘adaptation’ concerns not only an occasion’s mode of responding to a given world but also its mode of altering the world beyond itself. The first sense of ‘adaptation’ springs from subjective aims to increase the intensity of experience so that potentially-destructive feelings from the environment may be absorbed and integrated. (We gain a hint of this in our own experience whenever we are able to ‘contain’ a sharp insult without ‘blowing up.’) In this case, a ‘need imposed by the environment’ is any influence in the actual world of an occasion which threatens to disrupt its achievement. Applying this insight, we can see how to use the time-honored expression ‘natural selection’ in a more adequate way: evolution toward ‘adaptation’ with the environment involves the survival of societies whose occasions aim to incorporate in a richer experience influences which might otherwise be destructive of the society’s defining characteristics.

This reference to societies, and the above reference to ‘altering the world beyond itself,’ can be clarified by noting that the subjective aim of an occasion is never merely for some intensity of experience within itself. Always there is some aim for achievement in its ‘relevant future,’ i.e., in whatever occasions are significantly derived from it. This aim for achievement in another, later occasion(s) is the ground both of altruism and of our sense that the past pays a claim upon us. Therefore, a ‘need imposed by the environment’ will be experienced by an occasion not merely as a ‘threat’ to its own subjective fulfillment but also in terms of its capacity to disrupt the future which that occasion is able to affect by its aims. Probably one of the least complex ‘relevant futures’ is that for a single occasion in an electron; the aims of such an occasion may reach no further than its immediate successor; if so, no one need suppose that an electronic occasion ‘cares’ whether the electron survives as an enduring object. But occasions in higher-grade societies entertain aims for more inclusive futures. For example, the subjective aim of a single occasion within a complex DNA-molecule’s life history as an enduring object might include aims to perpetuate the existence of its own atomic and molecular sub-societies. Even so, a ‘need imposed by the environment’ will be experienced only as a threat to that (very limited!) future -- there is no reason to suppose that in its aim to ‘adapt’ to that ‘need’ the DNA-molecular-occasion is taking into account anything more complex. The amount of conceptual novelty it can introduce is tiny indeed, and the ‘cleverest’ DNA-molecular-occasion in the world is oblivious of the fact that its aims may have an effect on the welfare of the human ‘living person’ who happens to inhabit the same organism!

Let us now consider the subjective aims which may be typical of even more complex occasions. Just as we can speak of ‘electronic’ occasions composing an enduring electron, we can speak of ‘cellular’ occasions composing an enduring cell; and we note that a cell is a complex society of societies. Let us consider, say, a liver-cell-occasion. Such occasions might well entertain aims for the welfare of adjoining cells; but since the liver seems to be a ‘republic’ of cells, we would not expect to find in the liver any occasion which has aims for the future welfare of the entire organ, or for the body beyond the liver. More likely, we are dealing with aims which do not extend much beyond an urge to perpetuate the molecular sub-societies on which the life of the cell and its neighbors depend. At least, this conjecture is in line with our knowledge of the habits of liver cells; they show a remarkable plasticity of response to insult, but this has definite limits. For example, liver-cell-occasions seem unable to absorb into their experience the kind of threat posed by molecular carbon tetrachloride in their environment, and in the presence of carbon tetrachloride the order of the cells is disrupted -- which is very bad news for the human ‘living person’ up above! Likewise, we should not suppose that the liver cells aim to store glycogen in order to benefit the muscles; carbohydrate metabolism in the liver merely expresses the complex ways in which the many sub-societies in those cells are ‘pleased’ to enjoy themselves in their immediate environments. For most purposes, then, we are quite safe in regarding physiological processes as dominated by patterns of physical feeling, and in expecting that research will reveal the ‘machinery’ of living cells to be more complex than we have yet imagined.

At first glance, the previous sentence may seem to contradict our claim that purpose and novelty are basic to evolution. But this is not so. In the first place, every liver cell aims to ‘run its machinery’ the way it does. Second, most cellular activities are examples of long-standing evolutionary ‘success stories’; the novelty required for their appearance has long-since passed over into patterns of efficient causation, and any additional novelty would be principally disruptive. Third -- and most important for understanding the emergence of large-scale evolutionary change -- the amount of novelty introduced by a single cellular occasion is extremely small when compared with the power of its physical inheritance. But if we recall that each subjective occasion quickly becomes an object for its successor’s experience, we can see how a tiny increment of novelty in one occasion may be inherited physically by its successors without any requirement for repeated novelty of mental experience. Later occasions merely inherit these patterns from the past but do not introduce them; final causation quickly passes over into efficient causation, and the net result after millions of years is the unbelievably complicated patterns of efficient causation which we observe. The peach tree blindly produces its seeds, the ovum blindly divides when it is fertilized. Still, none of these patterns evolved through ‘blind mechanism’ -- in every case, they must be traced finally to the cumulative power of subjective aims. Even ‘chance,’ which has been recognized in this century as a very important factor in evolution, merely designates the way in which many patterns of physical causation arise from the uncoordinated aims of many occasions. The inheritance of acquired characteristics of feeling is fundamental to evolution.

In the last few paragraphs I have tried to show that there is ‘Lamarckian inheritance,’ if we see that the term applies to the transition from one occasion to a successor and not to the transition from one animal to another animal generation. Also I have suggested that the aims of low-grade occasions in cells do not ‘trickle up’ to include interest in higher-grade bodily occasions, even though the physical results of those aims may well affect the entire body. But can the aims of higher-grade bodily occasions ‘trickle down’ to the cellular and molecular level? It seems clear enough that my own human aims affect some occasions in my brain cells, and through them, occasions in my arm, as I sit here typing. My aim to strike an ‘e’ -- or even to type a complete word ‘the’ triggers a burst of physical responses in my brain cells, which in turn mediate these ‘amplified’ feelings to adjacent occasions in other brain cells and in neurons. Finally, the fingers move. If I am a skilled typist, the whole sequence of events ending up in the typed word may require introducing novelty only at the outset. But if I am just now learning to type, I am aware of aims to make many mid-course corrections’ in the movements of my fingers. The existing patterns of physical feeling in my brain cells have to be deflected repeatedly by fresh novelty -- now this way, now that way, in a tedious sequence of trial-and-error, before these tiny bodily societies learn the new patterns which enable them to respond to my aims to type. Without these repeated opportunities to gain ‘feedback’ by noting the actual way my fingers are moving, I would be helpless in my effort to discover just which patterns of physical feeling in my brain cells should be deflected by some fresh novelty. But once learned, these new patterns of brain-experience may produce muscular movements even without my consciously intending them -- perhaps the arching of my fingers as I drum them idly on my writing board is a reenacting of the skill first learned at my typewriter, or at the piano. In such ways, then, novelty in a high-grade occasion can ‘trickle down’ to influence lower-grade occasions. But there must be some ‘feedback system’ if high-grade novelty is to be effective in influencing the larger bodily pattern.

Can my aims ‘trickle down’ in this fashion so as to influence such occasions as those in my chromosomes? For example, if I come from a long line of brown-eyed people, can I aim to alter the DNA molecules in my reproductive cells so as to pass on to my son ‘genes for blue-eyedness’? Two facts stand in the way of supposing that such aims can be effective. First, there is no bodily ‘transmission line’ connecting my aims with my chromosomes in the way my central and peripheral nervous systems connect my aims with my muscles. Second, even if there were such a transmission route, my aims to have genes for blue-eyedness are bound to be ineffective because I have no way of getting ‘feedback’ from my chromosomes. In learning to type, successive occasions of my soul probably introduced novel ‘mid-course corrections’ thousands or millions of times; but the only way I can discover the typical condition of DNA in my spermatozoa is by having a child. In short, genetic change is random with regard to any aims of my soul which might ‘trickle down.’

Any ‘trickle-down’ theory assumes that novelty introduced in the mentality of an occasion produces its effects by triggering some pattern of efficient causation. According to Whitehead, however, there is another way in which the mentality of one occasion can produce effects beyond itself. He says that the mental pole of an occasion can take account of the mentality of other occasions spatially removed from it, even though physical effects must be mediated through spatially-contiguous occasions. Thus he proposes a ‘doctrine of immediate objectification’ (PR 469) for the mental poles of occasions, citing as evidence the occurrence of telepathy. In principle, then, it is possible that the mentality of a human personality might immediately affect various bodily sub-societies. Modern psychosomatic medicine has made some progress in analyzing along these lines; for example, it seems quite possible that the emotional tone of my soul may directly alter the patterns of physical feeling in my stomach.⁴ Still, we should not suppose too quickly that the aims of a human personality have any very effective direct influence on the molecules of body cells, other than those in the brain. First, any direct effect of my aims on cells remote from my soul will be garbled and intermixed with the indirect effects of the same aims as mediated by many routes of physical contact -- the situation is analogous to the problem of understanding a speaker in an echo chamber. Second, the mentality of occasions in my soul is quite unlikely to entertain the sort of simplified possibilities which really would need to be ‘dangled’ before cellular and molecular occasions; surely an aim ‘to have a blue-eyed son’ would overwhelm the tiny creatures in my chromosomes!

We can conclude, then, that ‘Lamarckian inheritance’ does occur as an expression of the ways in which feelings are transmitted from one occasion to the next. But it is quite limited in scope by the available routes of transmission in organisms. The proper interpretation of Lamarckian notions in genetics thus depends fully on knowing ‘what’ we are talking about: all new patterns of efficient causation in animal bodies can be traced to some occasions’ subjective aims. But knowing which occasions, and when in the development of that line of creatures, makes all the difference. We can never know just how ‘the giraffe got his long neck,’ but like everything else in evolution it is the result of subjectivity and purpose.

EXPLANATION OF SYMBOLS FOR WHITEHEAD’S WORKS

AI Adventures of Ideas. Macmillan, 1933.

FR The Function of Reason. Princeton University Press, 1929; Beacon, 1958.

PR Process and Reality. Macmillan, 1929.

NOTES

1 The following sections of this essay contain some ideas and several short quotations from my book Evolution and the Christian Doctrine of Creation (Westminster Press, 1967), Clv IV, "A Whiteheadian Interpretation of Evolutionary Theory."

2 ‘Nexus’ is the plural of ‘nexus.’

3 Whether human souls may be freed of their dependence on bodies is for Whitehead " -- another question" (Al 267).

4 Unfortunately, research has not yet attended carefully to the question of whether my soul may influence your stomach!

David Griffin teaches philosophy of religion at the School of Theology at Claremont and Claremont Graduate School and is Executive Director of the Center for Process Studies.

Many readers of this volume may find the Whiteheadian notions scattered throughout it helpfully suggestive, without being concerned with Whitehead’s methodological justification for his ideas, or with the more precise understanding of his philosophy that can only be attained by learning some of his technical vocabulary. However, other readers may have these concerns. The present essay is written for them.

Alfred North Whitehead believed that there should be positive mutual relationships between metaphysical philosophy and the special sciences. He further believed that his own philosophy, which he called the ‘philosophy of organism,’ was more compatible with modern science than previous philosophies, and provided a more adequate set of fundamental notions for interpreting each of the special sciences, as well as their interrelations. His own applications were limited primarily to "the most general notions of physics and biology" (PR vi).

In the first section of this paper, I will discuss Whitehead’s understanding of metaphysics and its relation to the special sciences. In the second part, I will sketch his procedure for drawing his fundamental categories from human experience and applying them to all of reality. [n the third part, I will focus upon some of the implications of his fundamental categories for understanding the objects of physics. In the fourth part, I will briefly point out how the previous ideas allow for a nonreductionistic biology which avoids dualism, including vitalism.

I. The Mutually-Beneficial Relations Between Metaphysics and the Special Sciences

Metaphysics is the endeavor to develop a set of fundamental categories in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted (PR 4). This means that it must develop a set of notions that will coordinate and thereby reconcile the more limited sets of ideas suggested by religion, ethics, and aesthetics, as well as the various special sciences (SMW ixf.; PR vi, 23). Furthermore, these special ideas must be made compatible with the ‘common sense’ or common experience of humanity as a whole. "those presumptions, which, in despite of criticism, we still employ for the regulation of our lives." These ultimate presuppositions of our ‘practice’ provide the final test (PR 19, 25, 229, 502).

The method of metaphysics is to begin with factors based upon one topic of human interest, such as physics or psychology, imaginatively to generalize those factors in such a way that they might apply to all fields of interest, and then to test these generalizations by trying to apply them to the facts in these other fields (PR 7f., 24f.). "In default of such extended application, a generalization started from physics, for example, remains merely an alternative expression of notions applicable to physics" (PR 8). Insofar as the application fails in other fields, the generalizations need to be reformed, and then tested again.

Because of its task, metaphysics must combine boldness and humility (PR 25). It must be bold by the very nature of its undertaking, to frame categories which all facts whatsoever must exemplify (PR 5, 67). And, if any progress is to be made, it must state its categorical scheme with precision and definiteness, in order that its implications can be clearly deduced and then confronted with the facts (PR x, 12, 13, 16). On the other hand, it must think of this categorical scheme as a working hypothesis and be humble before logic and the facts of experience (AI 286; PR 25). It is in terms of the second of these criteria that most philosophies exhibit misplaced boldness: "Failure to include some obvious elements of experience in the scope of the system is met by boldly denying the facts’ (PR 9). Of course, Whitehead knows that "the appeal to the facts is a difficult operation," since the facts as stated are always interpreted in terms of some set of general notions. The "received notions as to fact" are in doubt as well as the new theory (PR 13). Accordingly, what from one set of notions may appear to be facts of experience that must be included within any adequate philosophy may seem, from another metaphysical point of view, simply a false verbal interpretation of the real facts (PR 16-18). Nevertheless, Whitehead believes that there are real facts independent of human interpretation (PR 18f.), that some of these are reflected in the common presuppositions of civilized humanity, and that philosophy, while it can never hope to state the ultimate generalities with finality, can make progress in approximating them (PR x, 6, 11, 13, 19, 20f.).

Science, then, aids metaphysics in two ways: it provides a possible starting point for its imaginative generalizations, and it provides some of the facts against which these generalizations are to be tested and reformed.

Each of the special sciences deals with one type of facts, and as such it does not make statements about facts lying outside that type (PR 14). Nevertheless, these sciences have a tendency toward overstatement, to assume that the categories as they have formulated them in terms of their special interests are adequate for interpreting all facts (PR 8). Even apart from this dogmatism, a special science will be likely to state its basic principles in a manner that will prevent their coordination with the basic principles of the other sciences, and with the presuppositions of religion, ethics, and aesthetics, as well as with other inescapable presuppositions of human ‘practice.’ For example, the scientific principles formulated in the 17th century were primarily based upon the current physics, and were such as to be unsuited to biology, due to the total displacement of ‘final causation’ by mechanistic explanation (SMW 60, 150; PR 128f.). This sometimes led to reductionistic doctrines which violate our experience of freedom and responsibility, which is "too large to be put aside merely as misconstruction" (PR 74). It also has led to outright inconsistency: "A scientific realism, based on mechanism, is conjoined with an unwavering belief in the world of men and of the higher animals as being composed of self-determining organisms" (SMW 110). Hence, both logic and the facts of experience are violated.

Accordingly, "one aim of philosophy is to challenge the half-truths constituting the scientific first principles" (PR 15). On the principle that all general truths form a coherent system, metaphysics suggests how the general principles of a given science might be reformulated so as to be compatible with the even wider generalities of metaphysics, and hence not to be in conflict with the general principles of the other special areas of interest (PR 15). This suggestion might take the form, for example, of changing the denial that the entities of physics have any capacity for self-determination to the assertion that this capacity is ‘negligible.’ Since the difference between a ‘zero amount and a ‘negligible’ amount of some capacity is a difference in kind, this change would in principle allow the entities of physics to be interpreted in terms of the same categories used for interpreting entities in which the capacity for self-determination is not negligible.

Accordingly, Whitehead does not merely say that science should avoid becoming ‘scientism’ by recognizing that there are dimensions of reality to which its categories do not apply. He also says that these categories themselves should be reformulated. In asking whether there are aspects in nature that fail to receive expression in science, he says:

To anticipate the remainder of this paper: what Whitehead has in mind here is "the shift from materialism to organism, as the basic idea of physical science" (PR 471).

Furthermore, insofar as philosophy helps a science reformulate its basic ideas, it may help it see facts previously unnoticed. A new set of fundamental principles might provide the basis for deducing the existence of some previously unnoticed factors. This aids the interrogation of experience: "The observation acquires an enhanced penetration by reason of the expectation evoked by the conclusion of the argument" (PR 13).

These two ways in which metaphysical philosophy can influence science are summed up in a discussion of the relation between specialism and common sense. While it is the task of the special sciences to modify common sense, "philosophy is the welding of imagination and common sense into a restraint upon specialists, and also into an enlargement of their imaginations" (PR 26).

Before concluding this discussion of the mutually-helpful relationships Whitehead advocated between philosophy and the special sciences, the relevance of the distinction between ‘metaphysics’ and ‘cosmology’ should be mentioned. Although Process and Reality is subtitled "An Essay in Cosmology," it is really a combination of metaphysics and cosmology. Metaphysical principles about actuality are those which are without conceivable alternative, and hence apply in this and every possible world (PR 138f., 441). Cosmology is the attempt to describe the present order of the world in terms of principles which are special exemplifications of the most general, i.e., metaphysical, principles.

Accordingly, disagreements with Whitehead’s thought can occur on different levels, and some types of disagreement would be more serious than others. A disagreement with one of his basic metaphysical doctrines would probably entail disagreement with the whole philosophy. Disagreements with the principle of relativity (that it belongs to the nature of every being to be a potential ingredient in the becoming of actual entities), the principle of process (that how an actual entity becomes constitutes what it is), or the ontological principle (that only actual entities can exert influence) would be of this type. But disagreements with other statements made by Whitehead might be irrelevant in regard to the viability of the central metaphysical theses, since more than one description of the contingent aspects of the present universe would always be consistent with the metaphysical principles. When he discusses "the hierarchy of societies composing our present epoch," he says he is "deserting metaphysical generality" and only "considering the more special possibilities of explanation consistent with our general cosmological doctrine, but not necessitated by it" (PR 147). And he refers to these discussions as "conjectures." Hence, one could well disagree with some of Whitehead’s personal cosmological conjectures (and advancing scientific knowledge will surely necessitate this) without disagreeing with any of his fundamental principles.

II. Human Experience and Metaphysical Principles

The basic idea behind Whitehead’s entire enterprise is probably best expressed in this statement: "All occasions proclaim themselves as actualities within the flux of a solid world, demanding a unity of interpretation" (PR 22). This is the idea that rules out all dualisms within the actual world. It is self-evident to Whitehead that, if the perceived solidarity of the world -- the perceived fact that it all hangs together -- is to be made intelligible, there must be a set of interpretative principles in terms of which all actualities can be described. This is why it is necessary to develop a ‘one-substance cosmology,’ i.e., one in which there is only one type of actual entities (PR 29; cf. 28).

The fact that for Whitehead there is only one genus of actual entities means that he can in principle derive notions from any species of actual entities in order to interpret other species. Accordingly, if an electron and a human psyche are both considered examples of actualities, he could hope to use ideas derived from each one to interpret the other. And this is what he does (with the important qualification that psyches and electrons are both considered temporally-ordered societies of actual entities, a notion to be explained below).

If human experience is genuinely a part of nature, and if there be only one type of actual entity within nature (an idea whose truth-value must finally be verified heuristically), then, since it is that part of nature one knows most intimately, it provides the best starting point for finding principles that can be generalized to all actual entities. In fact, it provides the very standard of actuality (PR 219). This means that Whitehead believes that "Locke’s account of mental substance embodies, in a very special form, a more penetrating philosophic description than does Descartes’ account of corporeal substance" (PR 29). In this respect Whitehead is one with Leibniz. However, the description of physical things must also find its place, which it did in Leibniz’s Monadology only subordinately. "The philosophy of organism endeavors to hold the balance more evenly. But it does start with a generalization of Locke’s account of mental operations" (PR 29). Consistent with this starting point, Whitehead says: "The final facts are, all alike, actual entities; and these actual entities are drops of experience, complex and interdependent" (PR 28).

The fact that Whitehead understands human experience to consist in discrete ‘drops’ or ‘actual occasions’ of experience may be an example of the fact that Whitehead’s generalizations were developed from more than one starting point, in this case modern quantum theory as well as psychology. He says:

In spite of this reciprocal influence, however, it is clear that Whitehead’s fundamental categories are generalizations from human experience (PR 172). The purpose of this part of the paper is to describe the principles by which this generalization is carried out and justified.

The first thing to do, when turning from a description of the capacities of an occasion of human experience to that of the lower organisms, is "to determine which among such capacities fade from realization into irrelevance" (PR 172). The necessity for this determination is explained:

Whitehead agrees with the traditional principle that philosophical "generalization must be based upon the primary elements in actual experience as starting points" (PR 240). But which elements in experience are primary in the relevant sense? The answer to this requires a look at Whitehead’s critique of dominant epistemologies.

These epistemologies have held that the primary elements in experience are barren universals, and that all other elements must be classified as derivative. For purposes of criticism, Whitehead divides this view, normally called ‘sensationalism,’ into two parts, the ‘subjectivist principle’ and the sensationalist principle,’ corresponding respectively to the notions that the primary data of perception are universals, and that the reception of the primary data is barren.

Regarding the former, Whitehead says: "It is impossible to scrutinize too carefully the character to be assigned to the datum in the act of experience. The whole philosophical system depends on it" (PR 238). Now, the ‘subjectivist principle’ holds that "the datum in the act of experience can be adequately analyzed purely in terms of universals" (PR 239). Universals are qualities such as blueness and triangularity which can be exemplified in many instances. In other words, according to this dominant view, no actual things are directly experienced, and of course no causal efficacy of actual things is experienced. If one who holds the subjectivist principle posits the reality of a world of actual entities spatially and/or temporally beyond the present moment of experience, and the reality of causal interaction among these entities, one does so solely on the basis of inference, not direct knowledge. There is not even one instance of direct acquaintance with such other ‘actualities’ and their ‘causal efficacy’ that can be used as an analogical basis for grounding the use of these terms elsewhere (PR 77). Accordingly, on the basis of the empiricist doctrine (which Whitehead accepts) "that nothing is to be received into the philosophical scheme which is not discoverable as an element in subjective experience," the subjectivist principle entails that the notion of causal influence between actualities must be dismissed (PR 253).

In the light of the principles mentioned in Part 1, Whitehead has to believe that something is wrong with this analysis of the datum of experience. For the common sense of humanity is inflexibly objectivist. "We perceive other things which are in the world of actualities in the same sense as we are" (PR 240, cf. 78f., 83). And everyone in practice gives evidence of presupposing genuine causal influence between things. But if the subjectivist principle is consistently followed, it leads to the strange phenomenon of ‘empiricists’ explaining away the obvious facts of experience in obedience to an a priori doctrine (PR 220, 221).

Whitehead believes that the subjectivist principle is in turn rooted in the substance-quality dogma, i.e., the dogma that "the final metaphysical fact is always to be expressed as a quality inhering in a substance" (PR 239). This dogma, which makes the subject-predicate form of statement ultimate, implies that one ‘substance’ (i.e., actuality) is never ‘qualified’ by another one, but only by universal qualities, such as colors and shapes. This doctrine implies that actualities are essentially independent of each other. Accordingly, the most a ‘relationship’ can be is "the correlation of a pair of qualities one belonging exclusively to one individual, and the other exclusively to the other individual" (PR 219). In epistemology, this leads to the representative theory of perception, in which an experienced quality is said to ‘represent’ an exterior thing (PR 77f.). It cannot be admitted that the exterior thing is directly perceived, for that would mean that one actuality (the perceived thing) would be qualifying another one (the perceiver). It is this dogma, Whitehead believes, rather than an impartial analysis of immediate experience, which leads to the subjectivist principle. Hence, this principle must be rejected if we are to do justice to the perceived solidarity of the world, the basic character about reality to which a philosophy must be adequate.

Whitehead’s definition of the ‘sensationalist principle’ also focuses attention upon the question of the primary elements in experience. It is defined as the doctrine that "the primary activity in the act of experience is the bare subjective entertainment of the datum, devoid of any subjective form of reception" (PR 239). This implies that all emotional and purposive response must be considered derivative from the more primary conscious perception of those universals constituting the data of sense perception (PR 246). It is obviously essential to Whitehead’s program to reject this principle. For if he is to generalize the primary elements of human experience to all actualities, these primary elements cannot be factors, such as conscious sense experience, which rather obviously cannot be reasonably predicated of those actual entities at the base of the evolutionary process.

In explaining his rejection of the subjectivist and sensationalist principles, Whitehead distinguishes two modes of perception that are generally combined in human experience One mode is termed ‘perception in the mode of presentational immediacy,’ which involves as its most conspicuous aspect the perception of sense data as qualifying external regions. But (and this is Whitehead’s epistemological revolution) this mode is derivative from a more basic, temporally prior, mode, which he terms ‘perception in the mode of causal efficacy,’ or simply ‘prehension’ or ‘feeling.’ In this more fundamental mode, other actual entities are perceived, and the data are received not neutrally, but with emotional and purposive subjective forms of reception. Furthermore, the data themselves are prehended as emotional feelings. All of this is held to be involved in the primary phase of an act of human perception. Since these elements are prior to, rather than derivative from, what is normally referred to as ‘perception’ (i.e., presentational immediacy), it is not impossible in principle to attribute these elements to lower forms of actual entities. Since consciousness presupposes more basic forms of experience, rather than experience presupposing or being identical with consciousness (PR 83), it is possible to attribute experience to low-grade actual entities without supposing that they have conscious experience.

This revolutionary doctrine of what is really (temporally) prior in experience means that Whitehead believes that in most philosophy "experience has been explained in a thoroughly topsy-turvy fashion, the wrong end first" (PR 246). The essential fact that has been overlooked is that "clearness in consciousness is no evidence for primitiveness in the genetic process" (PR 263f.). Whitehead believes that "the opposite doctrine is more nearly true" (PR 264). He formulates this as a principle: "The late derivative elements are more clearly illuminated by consciousness than the primitive elements" (PR 246). Whitehead’s position is that consciousness can only illuminate those elements of experience which have been considerably simplified and integrated. Thus those elements of our experience which stand out clearly and distinctly in our consciousness are not its basic facts; they are the derivative modifications which arise in the process" (PR 243f.). Accordingly, the primary experience of receiving with emotional and purposive subjective form the causal influence of other actualities tends to be only dimly illuminated in consciousness precisely because it is primary. This is Whitehead’s basis for rejecting the Kantian ‘critical philosophy,’ which was based upon the inherited assumption that presentational immediacy was the primary fact of perception, so that the notion of causation (along with notions of value, emotion, and purpose) had to be derived from some source other than perception (PR 263).

Whitehead’s discussion of subhuman actual entities follows from the principles discussed above, viz., that there is only one genus of actual entities, that one’s present experience constitutes the standard for defining actuality, and that subhuman actualities can be conceived in terms of the primary elements in human experience. Accordingly, in reference to perception, Whitehead says:

And he believes this assignment to be harmonious with the observed facts:

To make explicit what is implicit above: Since there is only one type of actual entity, ontology and epistemology partially coincide. An act of human perception (in the primary mode) provides an example of causation which can be generalized to the relations between other actual entities. The percipient’s prehension of another actual entity is the perceived entity’s causal influence upon the percipient (PR 91, 361).

The fact that the prehension of other actualities is a prehension’ of them as other supplies the basis for one of Whitehead’s central concepts, that prehensions have a ‘vector’ character (PR 28). Using ‘feeling’ in place of ‘prehension,’ Whitehead says: "Feelings are ‘vectors’; for they feel what is there and transform it into what is here" (PR 133). This notion of the vector character of prehensions is basic to his attempt to describe the world as a multiplicity of actual things which are genuinely related. For the notion that prehensions are vectors is a rejection of the primary doctrine to which Whitehead is opposed, the doctrine of ‘simple location,’ which is the doctrine that an actual entity’s location can be described without reference to other actualities in other regions of space and time (SMW 72, 84). And, since Whitehead defines ‘matter’ as anything which has this property of simple location (SMW 72), his doctrine that all actual entities have prehensions that are vectors constitutes his rejection of a materialistic view of nature. It should be noted, too, that his doctrine of the vector character of prehensions is simply an ontological restatement of the epistemological rejection of subjectivism. The human perception of other actual entities is an example of the vector-character of prehensions by all actual entities (PR 177).

There is more to be said about the datum of the primary mode of perception. In a passage in which ‘objectification’ is used for ‘prehension,’ Whitehead says:

This reception of emotional tone is combined with the vector-character of prehensions or feelings in order more fully to describe the primary phase of a moment of experience:

Accordingly, Whitehead attributes to all actual entities this feeling of the emotional tone of other actual entities. In his words, "The more primitive types of experience are concerned with sense-reception, and not with sense-perception" (PR 174). By this he means that low-grade organisms receive and pass along sensa, which are for them emotional forms. They are ‘unspatialized,’ in the sense that the location of the actual entities from which they were derived is very vague. It is only in sense-perception, enjoyed by high-grade organisms, that the sensa are clearly perceived as qualifying some external region of space (PR 174, 177; AI 276).

This emotional character of the datum leads to another factor in human experience that is generalizable. The objective datum is not prehended neutrally, but with a ‘subjective form’ of reception, and therefore emotionally. The objective datum of a feeling was itself a feeling constitutive of a previous actual entity. In the first phase of a moment of experience, the previous feeling is received with a subjective form which conforms to its own subjective form. For example, a person feeling a previous angry feeling will initially feel it with anger. Accordingly, this first stage of a moment of experience is called the ‘conformal phase.’ This doctrine represents the rejection of the sensationalist principle, according to which the primary activity in perception would be a bare reception of a datum, devoid of any subjective form of reception. This conformal, non-orginative phase of experience, which "merely transforms the objective content into subjective feelings," is said to be "common to all modes of perception" (PR 179, 250). Accordingly, Whitehead affirms that even the actual entities studied by physics have emotional responses to their environments. The notion of physical energy in physics is an abstraction from the complex energy, emotional and purposive, which is embodied in an actual entity (Al 239; PR 178).

The notion of ‘purposiveness’ was mentioned in the preceding sentence. In order to discuss this notion, which is also thought to apply to all actual entities, another feature of actual entities must be emphasized. This is the idea that each actual entity is temporally atomic -- it is a brief event, and it is indivisible. This is why Whitehead could adopt William James’ expression, ‘drops of experience,’ to refer to actual entities. It is by virtue of this temporal atomicity that Whitehead can correlate efficient and final causation. He introduces this topic in the following way:

Whitehead’s doctrine of temporal atomicity allows the two forms of causation to be complementary by assigning them to different phases of an actual occasion. The first phase is that of efficient causation, in that the occasion begins as reception of a multiplicity of influences from previous occasions. But once this rush of efficient causes has been allowed in, the monad’s window is closed, as it were, and the actual occasion has to decide precisely how to respond to its given data. "Efficient causation expresses the transition from actual entity to actual entity; and final causation expresses the internal process whereby the actual entity becomes itself" (PR 228). The occasion’s final cause is called its ‘subjective aim’; it is the aim at a determinate ‘satisfaction’ which is the conclusion of the occasion’s process of becoming (PR 1 34). Upon attaining satisfaction, the occasion is then an efficient cause partially determining the occasions which succeed it. It is because the temporal atomicity allows for two kinds of process, the internal process of self-determination called ‘concresence,’ as well as the efficient process of ‘transition’ from occasion to occasion, that there can be freedom in the universe (PR 135). No matter how much is determined for the occasion by the conditions from which it arises, "there is always a contingency left open for immediate decision" (PR 435; cf. 41, 75; AI 255).

Whitehead’s famous ‘ontological principle’ stresses the two kinds of causation. This is the principle that only actual entities can be the causes for anything, so that to ask for a reason is always to ask for one or more actual entities (PR 37). Whereas the acceptance of such a principle leads many to a mechanistic doctrine, Whitehead says that the ontological principle "could also be termed the principle of efficient, and final, causation’" (PR 36f.). For, the reason an actual occasion is what it is will lie in its own process of self-determination as well as in the efficient causation upon it.

Although self-determination is a metaphysical principle, so that every actual entity has at least some iota, it is a matter of degree. And in the low-grade entities studied by physics it is negligible. "For occasions of relatively slight experient intensity, their decisions of creative emphasis are individually negligible compared to the determined components which they receive and transmit" (PR 75). Accordingly, for many purposes the self-determination of the individual occasions can be ignored without serious distortion.

We are now in position to introduce Whitehead’s often-misunderstood doctrine that all actual entities, even those at the electronic level, have ‘mentality,’ or ‘conceptual prehensions.’ Whitehead emphasizes many times that he does not mean by this that all actual entities have intellect, or even consciousness (PR 35, 88, 130, 355, 366, 379, 416, 427). Nor does he mean simply that they all have experience, for actual entities are experiential through and through, even in the earliest phase, which is sometimes called the ‘physical’ phase. Rather, the mental pole is significant to the degree that the occasion originates any novelty, thereby creating something for itself beyond what it received from the past world. To the extent that the occasion has no autonomy over the past, but merely repeats and transmits what it receives, it is dominated by its physical pole. The origination of significant novelty only occurs in living occasions.

However, there is at least some iota of mental functioning in all occasions. One of the basic categories states that "from each physical feeling there is the derivation of a purely conceptual feeling" (PR 40). A ‘physical’ feeling is simply a feeling whose datum is another actual entity. A ‘conceptual’ feeling is one whose datum is a pure possibility, i.e., an ‘eternal object,’ which is Whitehead’s term for a ‘universal.’ These eternal objects include those of the ‘objective species,’ the mathematical forms, and those of the ‘subjective species,’ such as red, anger, aversion, and consciousness. Accordingly, this ‘category of conceptual valuation’ states that, e.g., after having a feeling of the green feeling in a previous actual entity, the present subject will in the second phase of its experience feel green qua green, i.e., as a pure possibility, in abstraction from its ingression in the actual world. The rise of these conceptual prehensions constitutes the essential phase of the mental pole of an actual entity. In commenting upon this category, Whitehead says: "This category maintains the old principle that mentality originates from sensitive experience. It lays down the principle that all sensitive experience originates mental operations" (PR 379)

However, the statement of the category thus far does not indicate the dynamic character of the mental pole. The category does not merely speak of conceptual reproduction, but of valuation. What is received is either valued upward (adversion) or downward (aversion) (PR 388). This is the becoming occasion’s determination of its own subjective form of response to its given data. The dynamic activity involved in conceptual valuation is best suggested by the use of the term ‘appetition’:

Accordingly, mentality is closely correlated with self-determination: "Thus the conceptual registration is conceptual valuation; and the conceptual valuation introduces creative purpose. The mental pole introduces the subject as a determinant of its own concrescence (PR 380).

Actually, it is not the conceptual valuation as such that constitutes purposiveness, but the integration of this valuation with the physical feeling from which it was derived. This integration results in a ‘physical purpose’ (PR 380, 388). Insofar as this is all that occurs in the occasion, there is no significant novelty. The occasion simply receives the physical feelings, conforms their valuations, and transmits them to successors. Its own autonomous experience is negligible for the science tracing the transmissions (PR 374f.). Hence, by virtue of this doctrine of physical purpose, Whitehead can maintain that there is mentality in all actual entities and yet agree that this can be ignored without loss when one is concerned with certain abstractions from the full reality of nature.

Whitehead is impatient with those philosophers who simply state that "physical science is an abstraction." As such this is "a confession of philosophic failure. It is the business of rational thought to describe the more concrete fact from which that abstraction is derivable" (Al 239). In terms of the above discussion of what is truly primary in human experience, we are now in a position to understand a statement in which Whitehead summarizes how the "more concrete fact" from which science abstracts should be conceived: "The emotional appetitive elements in our conscious experience are those which most closely resemble the basic elements of all physical experience" (PR 248).

The uniqueness of Whitehead’s philosophy is probably best summarized in terms of the theory of prehension as a combination of the doctrines of temporal atomicity and of the primacy of causal efficacy. This theory of prehension means the overcoming of the dualistic notion that there are some concrete facts which are merely public and others which are merely private. Rather, the prehensions have public origins, the objective data; they have private subjective forms, based on the private aim of the actual occasion; and then the occasion, having unified its prehensions, passes back into publicity, providing data for new prehensions. Through this account Whitehead means to overcome "a complex of bifurcations, fatal to a satisfactory cosmology," i.e., "the separations of perceptual fact from emotional fact; and of causal fact from emotional fact, and from perceptual fact, and of perceptual fact, emotional fact, and causal fact, from purposive fact" (PR 444).

III. The Correlation of Principles of Metaphysics with those of Physics

The previous discussion indicates how Whitehead believes one can, by generalizing from occasions of human experience, talk meaningfully about the nature of nonhuman actual entities in themselves. And the advantages of some of the principles for making contact with principles of modern physics, such as quantum physics, is readily apparent. But how can Whitehead’s principles account for the aspects of endurance and continuity?

Whitehead accounts for the endurance of things by his theory of societies. "The real actual things that endure are all societies. They are not actual occasions" (AI 262). The simplest type of society is one with purely temporal order: it is a series of actual occasions in which each occasion inherits a common form from the preceding member of the society and transmits it to its immediate successor. The common form is the defining characteristic of the society (PR 50f.). This type of society is called a ‘temporally-ordered,’ ‘serially-ordered,’ or ‘personally-ordered’ society, or an ‘enduring object.’ Examples are photons, electrons, protons, atoms, molecules, and psyches of human beings and other higher animals (AI 238; SMW 161f.; PR 139f., 141, 151, 269, 492). The society endures by repetition: each member repeats the form constituting the defining characteristic of the society. Enduring things are societies of occasions rather than single substances, so that ‘repetition’ replaces undifferentiated vacuous endurance.’ This notion of repetition is central to the move from materialism to organicism in science. For it offers an alternative explanation for the apparent fact that the basic actualities of the world are describable in terms of passive endurances with essential or non-essential modifications. If this alternative is more adequate, the principle basis of materialism is undercut.

The previously discussed ideas of vectors and the conformal feelings of subjective form are used to understand the transmission of energy. Because Whitehead conceives the human psyche not to be a single actuality, but a temporally-ordered society of occasions of experience, and further believes all actual entities to be occasions of experience, he is able to use "the direct evidence as to the connectedness of one’s immediate present occasion of experience with one’s immediately past occasions . . . to suggest categories applying to the connectedness of all occasions in nature" (AI 284). Accordingly, he understands electrons and atoms in terms of "an analogy between the transference of energy from particular occasion to particular occasion in physical nature and the transference of affective tone, with its emotional energy, from one occasion to another in any human personality. The object-to-subject structure of human experience is reproduced in physical nature by this vector relation of particular to particular" (AI 242). This transference of affective tone, or subjective form, is "the most primitive form of the feeling of causal efficacy. In physics it is the transmission of a form of energy" (479f.).

Of course, this one-dimensional personal inheritance from occasion to occasion in the psyche provides no analogical basis for understanding the many-dimensional connections in nature, in which spatial as well as temporal relations are involved. But we also have direct experience of inheritance from our body, which is made up of innumerable actual occasions. Accordingly, the fact that "our dominant inheritance from our immediately past occasion is broken into by innumerable inheritances through other avenues" provides an analogy for understanding both the endurance of a molecule and the fact that it is subject to countless other influences (AI 243).

Whitehead answers the question as to the relation between continuity and quanta on the basis of discrete occasions of human experience which inherit subjective forms conformally:

This is Whitehead’s attempt to state "the more concrete fact" from which physical science abstracts. But each occasion, as well as each of its constitutive prehensions, does have a quantitative aspect as well as a qualitative one (PR 486). The quantitative aspect of the prehensions, along with their spatio-temporal characteristics, are the ‘vectors’ of physics. "The ultimate physical entities for physical science are always vectors indicating transference" (PR 364f.). Mathematical physics translates Heraclitus’ saying, "All things flow," into "All things are vectors" (PR 471).

The occasion takes what it received from others and unifies it into a total satisfaction, which for the moment is private. The quantitative aspect of this satisfaction is the basis for the scalar localization of energy in physics (PR 177). The fact that in the later phases of an actual occasion this scalar form overwhelms the original vector form, and the fact that the scalar quantity of inertia was dominant in Newtonian physics, have led to a tendency to spatialize reality, to ignore the fact that all fundamental physical quantities are vector rather than scalar (PR 268, 319). Although overwhelmed in the satisfaction, the vector form is never totally lost; and the satisfaction will provide the basis for a subsequent vector transference. The fact "that scalar quantities are constructs derivative from vector quantities" is, of course, simply the scientific formulation of Whitehead’s fundamental doctrine that relations have primacy over qualities, that there are no independent actualities with their private qualities (PR 324). "In the language of physical science, the change from materialism to ‘organic realism’ . . . is the displacement of the notion of static stuff by the notion of fluent energy" (PR 471). The vector character of prehensions whereby the cause is incorporated into the effect is the basis for the cumulative character of time, and hence its irreversibility (PR 363). This is another of our basic presuppositions which the materialistic doctrine, with its merely external relations, could not justify.

Besides supporting the primacy of vector quantities, Whitehead believes his doctrine of individual actual occasions with their individual prehensions "gives a reason for the atomic quanta to be discerned in the building up of a quantity of energy" (PR 71, 179):

Although for some purposes the mental pole of the occasions can be ignored, Whitehead says that even the physical world cannot be understood without reference to . . . the complex of mental operations" (PR 366). At least one aspect of what this means is explained in terms of the two species of eternal objects. The intensity of physical energy embodied by actual occasions is a function of the subjective species of eternal objects, while the peculiar form of the flux of energy refers to the objective species, the mathematical forms. The type of analysis normally applied by science, what Whitehead calls coordinate division, "preserves undistorted the elements of definiteness introduced by eternal objects of the objective species" (PR 447). But it abstracts from the total subject of the feelings, and hence from the subjective forms. "Thus insofar as the relationships of these feelings require an appeal to subjective forms for their explanation, the gap must be supplied by the introduction of arbitrary laws of nature regulating the relations of intensities" (PR 447). For physics the laws declaring how its entities mutually react are arbitrary, "because that science has abstracted from what the entities are in themselves" (SMW 155f.).

Also, the endurance of things such as molecules is an arbitrary fact, if material is taken to be fundamental. But if one takes organism to be fundamental, then endurance is the result of evolution (SMW 159). This statement is based upon the notion that all actual entities strive to achieve value. An enduring object represents "the self-retention of that which imposes itself as a definite attainment for its own sake" (SMW 137). An enduring object is the repetition of a certain set of eternal objects whose actualization is experienced as intrinsically valuable. The intensity of the value is increased by the repetition (PR 426). This endurance is compatible with the earlier description of the fact that in each occasion a conceptual prehension is derived from each physical prehension, and that this introduces a purpose into the occasion. For, the activity of lifting out an eternal object and feeling it as an eternal object, i.e., as a pure possibility in abstraction from all physical realizations, is a matter of degree. In low-grade occasions it is not lifted out completely. Accordingly, in the integrative phase of the occasion it is merely reunited with the physical feeling from which it was derived; the resulting feeling is called a ‘physical purpose.’ The only possible alteration is in the intensity of subjective form with which it is felt. It is valued up (adverted), the physical feeling is thereby an element with some force of persistence into the future beyond its own subject." Hence, adversions promote the stability of enduring objects. But if the eternal object which is partially abstracted from a physical feeling is felt with aversion, the future objectification of the value in question is inhibited, and decay sets in (PR 286, 380, 422).

However, Whitehead does not believe there is any evidence for simple repetition based upon strict conformation from occasion to occasion, even in low-grade enduring objects (PR 285). There is some novelty realized, "so that even amid stability there is never undifferentiated endurance" (PR 381). The vibration and rhythm of these enduring objects is explained by the category of reversion, which is in turn explained in terms of Whitehead’s aesthetic principles. ‘Reversion’ occurs when in the mental pole eternal objects are felt which are partly identical with but partially diverse from the eternal objects derived from the physical feelings of occasions in the actual world (PR 380). Reversion thereby introduces a contrast into the conceptual feeling, and as such promotes the depth of intensity that can be felt (PR 381, 424).

Whitehead then describes what goes on in the vibration of an enduring object:

Whitehead thereby does not leave the empirical facts as merely arbitrary, but tries to account for them on the basis of "the doctrine that an actual fact is a fact of aesthetic experience. All aesthetic experience is feeling arising out of the realization of contrast under identity" (PR 427; cf. 285).

IV. The Relation Between Inorganic, Living, and Conscious Organisms

If this paper were to stand alone, this fourth section would necessarily be quite lengthy. However, many of the ideas that would belong here are discussed elsewhere in the volume, especially in the papers by Hartshorne and Overman, and the "Whiteheadian Comments" by Cobb and myself. Hence, I will only point out very briefly some of the ways in which Whitehead’s metaphysical ideas, and his related understanding of the objects of physics, form a foundation for seeing inorganic, living, and conscious organisms within one scheme of thought.

1. On the one hand, Whitehead holds that there is only one kind of actuality. All actual entities, even non-living ones, are ‘organisms.’ Inorganic, living, and conscious organisms are only different in degree, not in kind. Hence, the insoluble problem of all dualisms, understanding how two totally different kinds of actualities can causally interact, is avoided. To affirm that living things emerged out of non-living ones, and that conscious beings emerged out of non-conscious ones, is not to affirm that the lower beings or processes produced something totally different from themselves.

On the other hand, Whitehead also holds that there are many different levels within the one kind of actuality. Living organisms have more ‘mentality’ than non-living ones, which means that they have more power of self-determination. And conscious beings have more self-determining power than non-conscious ones. Accordingly, Whitehead does not reduce the activity of complex beings to a mere function of the activity of the simplest, parts. (Leclerc -- above, p. 104 -- is misleading on this issue.) The higher-level actualities are dependent upon the lower-level ones; but the higher-level ones are equally actual, and have their own efficacy. Hence, the activity of the living cell is not totally a product of the inorganic constituents, but is partly due to the living occasions within the cell. The activity of the human being is not totally a product of the bodily cells, but is partly due to the central series of actual occasions which sometimes is conscious.

2. On the one hand, Whitehead has a doctrine of causality as real influence. Hence, he provides a basis for scientific theory, which is always couched in language which presupposes genuine causal influence (not mere constant conjunction). This point, combined with the previous one, means that he can talk about the causal influence, for example, of molecules within the cell upon the cell’s series of living occasions, which can for practical purposes be regarded as the ‘cell as a whole,’ and he can speak about the returned causal influence of the living occasions upon the molecular constituents. Hence, he can talk about causal interaction between part and whole (when the empirical evidence calls for it). Likewise, he can talk about causal interaction between the central series of experiences in the human being (the mind, or psyche) and the bodily cells.

On the other hand, his doctrine of causal influence is not a doctrine of total determination of the effect by the causes. Hence, to say that the cell is influenced by its inorganic parts is not to affirm that it operates mechanistically; to say that the human psyche is influenced by its body is not to affirm that the human being’s activity is totally determined by inorganic, or even nonconscious, processes. No organism is totally determined by the efficient causes upon it, since every actual occasion has at least some iota of mentality or self-determination. And the higher-level actualities are even less completely determined by efficient causes.

3. Whitehead accounts for the fact that some of the things in the world have no power of self-determination. He does this with his idea of two basic ways in which enduring objects can be organized into macroscopic societies. On the one hand, they can form a mere aggregate, such as a rock. This type of thing, although it is composed of partially self-determining organisms, itself has no power of self-determination. This is because there is no one series of higher-level actualities (‘dominant occasions’) within the society which can coordinate the activities of the myriad members. Hence, the spontaneities of the individuals cancel each other out.

On the other hand, some macroscopic things have self-determination. These are societies in which there is a series of higher-level occasions of experience, a series which is the ‘dominant’ member in the society. This domination is not complete, but it can be strong enough to give the society as a whole a significant degree of unity of response to the causes upon it. Animals, especially the higher vertebrates, exemplify this kind of hierarchical organization. However, this kind of order, in which a society of actual entities acts with a significant degree of unity, is not unique to animals. Whitehead also refers to cells, molecules, atoms, and electrons and protons as organisms with significant unity, to be contrasted with those things which are mere aggregates (SMW 161 f.). Precisely how Whitehead himself understood the relation between the lower-level and higher-level actual occasions within an organism of organisms’ is not clear from his writings. In regard to the living cell, he does refer to the series of living occasions as ‘regnant,’ and to the molecular enduring objects as ‘subservient’ (PR 157). And he does say that atoms and molecules are ‘organisms’ of a higher type than electrons (ibid) Furthermore, he refers to molecules as enduring objects, and he speaks of molecular as well as of electronic and protonic actual occasions (PR 114, 123, 124, 139, 141). He is perhaps best understood as intending that the molecule can be treated as an enduring object (i.e., a serially-ordered society of actual occasions) by virtue of the fact that it contains a series of regnant molecular occasions. Likewise, an electron or a proton would be an enduring object by virtue of the fact that, besides the "yet more ultimate actual entities" within the electronic or protonic society (PR 139), the "electronic and protonic actual entities" (PR 139) are regnant occasions within the society in which they are members. Because of the regnant status of the series of electronic, pro-tonic, or molecular occasions, the electron, proton, or molecule has a significant degree of unity of response to its environment (internal and external), and thus can be spoken of, for practical purposes, as a series of actual occasions.

I believe this is the best way to account for Whitehead’s various statements that are relevant to this issue. But in any case, it is clear that Whitehead means that there are various levels of ‘organisms of organisms,’ or hierarchical societies, which are to be contrasted with those types of societies which do not have a hierarchical order and hence no overall unity of activity. It is by virtue of this distinction between two basic types of organization that Whitehead accounts for those things which manifestly are devoid of the power of self-determination, without positing a dualism between two kinds of actual entities. It is also on the basis of this distinction, along with the notion that there are various levels of actualities, that Whitehead explains our common belief not only that some macroscopic beings have freedom, but also that some have more freedom than others.

Accordingly, on the basis of his fundamental notions, Whitehead does not find it necessary to explain’ our beliefs about living and conscious beings by explaining them away. He is able to conform to "those presumptions, which, in despite of criticism, we still employ for the regulation of our lives," (PR 229) which should serve as "the final test of all science and philosophy" (PR 502).

EXPLANATION OF SYMBOLS FOR WHITEHEAD’S WORKS

AI Adventures of Ideas. Macmillan, 1933.

PR Process and Reality. Macmillan, 1929.

SMW Science and the Modern World. Macmillan, 1926.

Ann Plamondon teaches philosophy at Loyola University in New Orleans.

At present there are two widely divergent schools of thought dominating the philosophy of science (see Hesse 1974, Introduction). The older school is generally referred to as the formalist, or the logical empiricist, tradition. Although members of this tradition¹ have rejected a thoroughgoing logical positivism, their position with respect to fundamental issues in the philosophy of science is in varying degrees indebted to positivistic doctrines. In general, this school can be characterized by its acceptance of a logic of science; that is, its members maintain that there is a logic with respect to such scientific activities as the testing of theories, theoretical explanation, and conceptual change.

The alternative tradition has been referred to as historical relativism (Popper 1970; Hesse 1974, Introduction). It is characterized by the rejection of a logic of science. The members of this tradition² base their discussion of fundamental methodological issues on arguments from historical examples. That is, with respect to those issues for which the formalist tradition describes a logic, these philosophers seem to deny the existence of a logical structure which transcends particular historical examples.

Many philosophers of science see merit in both traditions and cannot be placed within either. However, among these thinkers, few have seen importance in explicating a general logic of science. One philosopher who has insisted on the value of such a logic is Mary Hesse. In a recent work (Hesse 1974, pp. 6-7) she has defended the attempt to explicate a logic of science on the grounds that its function is three-fold: Such a logic (i) provides criteria for ‘good science’ and is thereby normative as well as descriptive; (ii) as normative, it can show the aim of methodology and the adequacy of methodologies in terms of fulfilling that aim; and (iii) it has as its principal aim understanding, not the suggestion of research techniques.

I am in agreement with Hesse in regard to the value and the function of a logic of science. At the same time, I wish to maintain that a logic of science cannot perform these roles unless it has itself received grounding in a more general, viz., metaphysical, theory. I do not intend to attempt a lengthy defense of this thesis. I hope that it will be sufficient to note that an ‘understanding’ which falls short of understanding on the highest level of generality must be interpreted and criticized by this highest level. Such interpretation and criticism are necessary to show the interconnection of concepts on the lower level of ‘understanding’ and to show that these concepts do not involve incompatible presuppositions. In brief, I am suggesting that metaphysics has an essential role in the philosophy of science -- that of the understanding and the grounding of scientific concepts and methodology. That is, the fundamental concepts of a metaphysical system should give an analysis of the foundational concepts of the sciences in such a way that these concepts themselves provide a grounding -- a general logic -- of the methodology of the sciences.

To perform this task a metaphysics must itself be well elaborated and well criticized. Contemporary philosophy of science is in need of a metaphysics which has already met certain logical (consistency and coherence) and empirical (applicability) criteria. This paper takes as a premise that at present the metaphysics which has best met these criteria is a process metaphysics based on the system of A. N. Whitehead. The aim of this paper is to develop a logic of science from certain concepts elaborated in Whitehead’s metaphysics. In what follows I refer to this logic of science as the ‘process view.’ I do not mean to suggest that all process philosophers would or should be in agreement with it. It is based on an interpretation of Whitehead. The term ‘process view’ was chosen because the concept of organism is central in my interpretation; Whitehead called his process philosophy the ‘philosophy of organism.’

I find the organizing principles of this process view in its basic agreement with the formalist understanding of the doctrine of emergence. An elucidation of the agreement here, however, involves concepts which provide a context for an alternative which challenges the formalist position with respect to the logic of other key issues in the philosophy of science, viz., with respect to the nature and status of laws, the role and justification of induction, the model of theoretical explanation, and the intelligibility of conceptual change.

In this paper I shall discuss the aspects of agreement in the formalist and process views of emergence, suggest the fundamental categories for philosophy of science which result, develop the process view based on these categories, and contrast this process view with the formalist view of laws, induction, explanation, and conceptual change.

I. Emergence

According to the formalists, emergence, insofar as this doctrine has validity, is a thesis about unpredictability: (i) the unpredictability in hierarchically structured wholes of properties at higher levels of organization from properties of lower levels of organization and (ii) the unpredictability in evolutionary development of later forms of organization from earlier ones (Nagel 1961, pp. 366-380). These two aspects of emergence usually receive independent treatment. For the process view, there is an important relationship between them. This relationship can best be considered after a discussion of the first-mentioned thesis.

Predictability and unpredictability refer to the possibility of deducing one set of statements from another. The statements which constitute the premises of the deduction are those describing the ‘parts’ of a ‘whole.’ The question is whether or not the properties of the parts (which differ from the properties of the whole they organize), in the specific relationship which organizes the whole, suffice for the prediction of the properties of that whole.

The formalist position is that there is unpredictability in at least two important senses. First, the deduction in question is not possible when the premises are constituted merely of statements about the properties of the parts in that relationship. What must be added are premises elaborating a theory which describes the behavior of those parts in forming wholes. That is, from a statement of a theory describing generally the potentiality of parts to organize wholes and the statement of the condition of a particular organizing relation, a statement describing a whole with particular properties can be deduced. Second, the conclusion as to the properties of the whole may follow from one theory about the potential behavior of parts and the organizing relation in question and yet may not follow from another theory (and the same organizing relation).

At first glance the process view of emergence does not appear to be primarily a thesis about predictability. Rather it seems to be an empirical theory about the modification of parts in forming a whole, or, more precisely, about the reciprocal relationships in wholes between the parts and the plan of the whole. Whitehead expressed this reciprocity of part and whole most clearly in Science and the Modern World.

The parts of the body are really portions of the environment of the total bodily event, but so related that their mutual aspects, each in the other, are peculiarly effective in modifying the pattern of either. This arises from the intimate character of the relation of whole to part. The body is a portion of the environment for the part, and the part is a portion of the environment for the body; only they are peculiarly sensitive, each to the modification of the other. This sensitiveness is so arranged that the part adjusts itself to preserve the stability of the pattern of the body (Whitehead 1925, p. 214).

The concrete enduring entities are organisms, so that the plan of the whole influences the very characters of the subordinate organisms which enter into it. In the case of an animal, the mental states enter into the plan of the total organism and thus modify the plans of the successive subordinate organisms until the ultimate smallest organisms, such as electrons, are reached. Thus an electron within a living body is different from an electron outside it by reason of the plan of the body. The electron blindly runs either within or without the body; but it runs within the body in accordance with its character within the body; that is to say, in accordance with the general plan of the body, and this plan includes the mental state. But the principle of modification is perfectly general throughout nature, and represents no property peculiar to living bodies (ibid., pp. 115-116).

It seems possible that there may be physical laws expressing the modification of the ultimate basic organisms when they form part of higher organisms with adequate compactness of pattern. It would, however, be entirely in consonance with the empirically observed actions of environments, if the direct effects of aspects as between the whole body and its parts were negligible. We should expect transmission. In this way the modification of total pattern would transmit itself by means of a series of modifications of a descending series of parts, so that finally the modification of the cell changes its aspect in the molecule, thus effecting a corresponding alteration in the molecule -- or in some subtler entity. Thus the question for physiology is the question of the physics of molecules in cells of different characters (ibid., pp. 215-216).

There is an important sense, however, in which these passages about modification are referring to the possibility of prediction. Since there is modification of parts to form wholes, the very possibility of explaining or predicting the properties of the whole by those of the parts depends upon a theory about the potential behavior of parts forming wholes, as the formalist interpretation suggests. Further, and still in accord with the formalist position, some theories will be inadequate to the explanation or prediction.

On the other hand, the formalist interpretation affirms the empirical situation emphasized by the process interpretation and lays down the logical structure for explanation and prediction required by this empirical situation.

It would seem, then, that there is a wide area of agreement between formalism and process philosophy about the doctrine of emergence. The most important points of agreement can be listed as follows:

1. Hierarchically structured wholes are not aggregates, because theories about the parts of such wholes (taken individually) do not suffice to deduce their relationship in wholes. Wider theories are required for the deduction; these theories affirm the potentiality of parts to behave differently in and out of the various wholes they can organize.

2. Understanding of a hierarchically structured whole can be achieved by an understanding of its parts only when there is a theory explaining the relations of the parts in wholes. Such understanding is possible because the theory involves statements about the potential relationships of parts in the various wholes they organize. Then the behavior of a part in a given whole can be deduced from its full range of possible behaviors.

3. There is reciprocity in the determination of parts and whole; the parts determine the whole in the sense that the whole is an organization of the parts (the parts in interrelationship), but there is modification of parts according to the wholes they organize and thereby determination of the parts by the whole.

What is important in this agreement of formalism and process philosophy on the doctrine of emergence is that certain presuppositions become obvious -- presuppositions not explicit in a formalist philosophy of science, and indeed, not compatible with its anti-metaphysical stance. The chief of these is the internal relatedness of part and whole. The possibility of deduction (and thereby prediction) set out by formalism has taken account of the theses that parts have potential to act differently in different wholes, that parts are modified according to the wholes they organize, and that a complete description of parts involves reference to this modification. These theses entail that the interrelationship of parts is not distinguishable from their nature. Their possibilities for relationship are constitutive of their nature.

The internal relatedness of part and whole is not reflected in the formalist discussion of laws, induction, explanation, and conceptual change. Hence a logic of science structured on this internal relatedness will constitute a genuine alternative to the formalist logic of science.

II. Organism

In discussing the reciprocity of part and whole, Whitehead used the suggestive terms ‘organism’ and ‘environment.’ ("The body [whole] is a portion of the environment for the part, and the part is a portion of the environment for the body"; "The concrete enduring entities are organisms, so that the plan of the whole influences the very characters of the subordinate organisms which enter into it.") His usage here is clearly a stretching of the ordinary usage of these terms. I wish to suggest that an elucidation of these stretched meanings provides a framework for the discussion of the fundamental issues in the philosophy of science mentioned above.

Whitehead used the term ‘organism’ to refer to physical as well as biological entities. "Science is taking on a new aspect which is neither purely physical nor purely biological. It is becoming the study of organisms. Biology is the study of larger organisms; whereas physics is the study of the smaller organisms" (Whitehead 1925, p. 150). 1 think that there is sufficient evidence that the primary reference of this term is to wholes which are not aggregates. Such wholes, as we have seen, are reciprocally related to their parts. On this interpretation, ‘organism’ can refer to atoms, molecules, even ecosystems; for in each case, there is modification of the parts in accordance with the pattern of the more complex hierarchically structured whole.

This understanding of ‘organism’ makes clear the relatedness of emergence of properties of hierarchically structured wholes and emergence in evolution. Leclerc (this volume) has clearly shown that stability of hierarchically structured wholes (of a low or high level of complexity) is incompatible with the understanding of such wholes as aggregates (see also Leclerc 1972, Chs. 23 and 24; Bohm 1969; Bronowski 1970). This very stability, in turn, is a necessary condition for emergence in evolution. Evolution involves the development of "complex organisms from antecedent states of less complex organisms" (Whitehead 1925, p. 157). But there can be no development of more from less complex on an aggregate view of wholes. An aggregate is no more or less complex than the entities by which it is constituted. An organism composed of subordinate organisms, on the other hand, can display increasing complexity because a new order comes about in the organization.

The presuppositions underlying the unpredictability of properties at higher levels of organization from lower levels (internal relatedness of whole and parts) make possible the development of later forms of organization from earlier ones. Process philosophy is, however, in agreement with formalism with respect to the unpredictability of later forms of organization from earlier ones.

III. Environment

‘Organism’ and ‘environment’ are correlatives. Hence the understanding of ‘environment’ cannot be separated from that of ‘organism.’ Whitehead’s uses of ‘environment’ cluster around two senses, both of which make essential reference to ‘order.’ (1) ‘Environment’ refers to the order expressed by organisms and the order pervading organisms. ‘But the character of an environment is the sum of the characters of the various societies of actual entities which jointly constitute that environment" (Whitehead 1929, pp. 168-169). "The environment automatically develops with the species, and the species with the environment (Whitehead 1925, p. 161). (2) ‘Environment’ refers to the order necessary to sustain order. "Any actual occasion belonging to an assigned species requires an environment adapted to that species, so that the presupposition of a species involves a presupposition concerning the environment" (Whitehead 1929, p. 314). "Also survival requires order, and to presuppose survival, apart from the type of order which that type of survival requires, is a contradiction" (Whitehead 1929, p. 311).

Both senses of ‘environment’ seem to be another mode of stating the reciprocity of whole and parts. They are referring to the internal relatedness of organism and environment. The order of the environment is determined by the organisms it sustains, and the organisms could not remain in (that state of) existence without the order provided by that environment. Each is what it is because of its relationship to the other. Further, what constitutes an environment on one level of abstraction may be an organism to a wider environment. That is, it may contribute to the characteristics of wider environments whose order is necessary for its continued existence. The implication is that there are layers of environmental order.

It seems that the senses of ‘environment’ may be expressed in the following meaning: environment’ refers to the order obtaining in a finite spatio-temporal region relevant to the existence of more special structures of order.³ It is clear that Whitehead intended ‘environment’ to be defined in terms of order. It is also clear that an environment is finite; this follows from his conception of order. Order and disorder are correlatives; order is never complete, merely dominant in some region. It is the reference of order to a finite region that constitutes the justification of setting limits to a consideration of environmental influences. With this understanding of ‘organism’ and ‘environment’ in hand, I wish to turn to the development of the process view of laws, induction, explanation, and conceptual change.

IV. Laws

The formalist tradition in the philosophy of science has maintained some version of the view that a law-like statement is of universal form, capable of being put into conditional form. A true law-like statement is a law (Nagel 1961, Ch. 4; Hempel 1966, pp. 54-58). It is maintained, however, that such a characterization is inadequate to demarcate laws as different in kind from accidental generalizations -- statements such as "All the rocks in this box contain iron" and "All the screws in Smith’s present car are rusty." Hence a set of criteria is required to mark off laws from such accidental generalizations. It is generally agreed that the list of criteria supply some necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for demarcation.

Many criteria have been proposed for marking off laws from accidental generalizations. Space prohibits consideration of more than a sampling of the most frequently mentioned criteria, viz.:

(i) Laws are unlike accidental generalizations in that they make no reference to particular places, times, and objects, or are derivable from more fundamental laws which do not make such reference (Hempel and Oppenheim 1948, p. 156; Achinstein 1971, p.30).

(ii) Laws are unlike accidental generalizations in possessing unrestricted generality (Hempel and Oppenheim 1948, p. 156; Nagel 1961, p. 59; and Achinstein 1971, pp. 26-27).

(iii) Laws are unlike accidental generalizations in supporting subjunctive conditionals (Hempel 1966, p. 56; Nagel 1961, pp. 68-72).

(iv) Laws are unlike accidental generalizations in that they function differently (in an explanation) and we therefore have a different attitude toward them (Smart 1968, pp. 63-64; Nagel 1961, pp. 64-66; Achinstein 1971, pp. 46-48; Scriven 1961, p. 100; Pap 1962, pp. 301-305; and Braithwaite 1953, p. 11).

A consideration of these criteria will be simplified if another kind of statement is added to this discussion -- that of a biological generalization, such as "Albinotic mice always breed true" or "All living matter contains DNA." Biological generalizations have been considered by some philosophers of science as different in kind from laws because of the failure they seem to share with accidental generalizations to meet the conditions for law-likeness (Toulmin 1953, Ch. 2; Smart 1963, pp. 52-57 and 1968, p. 92).

Criteria (i) and (ii) are logically related. The mention of particular places, times, objects guarantees the restricted relevance of a statement to a particular spatio-temporal region and thereby the restricted generality of that statement. According to the process view, these criteria cannot demarcate laws, biological, and accidental generalizations because all of these statements implicitly refer to some environment. The environment referred to by accidental generalizations is the most special. For example, the order which must obtain for a generalization such as "All the screws in Smith’s present car are rusty" to hold true is very special indeed. The order presupposed for biological generalizations to hold is less special and that for laws less special still; but an environmental order is presupposed for all. Hence there is an implicit reference to environments and thereby a reference to particular spatio-temporal regions of varying generality in all of these statements. It seems, then, that laws as well as biological and accidental generalizations fail to meet criteria (i) and (ii).

The distinction intended by criterion (iii) can perhaps be clarified by considering the purported differences in the relationship between a law, a biological generalization; an accidental generalization and their corresponding subjunctive conditionals. It is claimed, on the one hand, that "All freely falling bodies fall with constant acceleration" supports the subjunctive conditional "If a body were a freely falling body, it would fall with constant acceleration." On the other hand, the biological generalization "All ravens are black" does not support "If an organism were a raven, it would be black," and the accidental generalization "All the screws in Smith’s present car are rusty" does not support "If a screw were a screw in Smith’s present car, it would be rusty" (Nagel 1961, pp. 68-69). But this distinction also loses validity when the concept of environment is taken into account. The failure comes about because the truth of the subjunctive conditional involves an environment wider than that to which the biological generalization and the accidental generalization are known to apply. It may well be that the conditions of this wider environment are capable of supporting counter-instances to the biological and accidental generalizations and, hence, these generalizations do not support conditionals about this wider environment. This is to say that we believe the biological and accidental generalizations fail to support subjunctive conditionals because we believe we are unwarranted in extending these generalizations to environments for which we lack important information or to environments we believe to have importantly different features than the original environment. However, if we were making such an extension in the case of a law, we should have the same reservations. We believe the subjunctive conditional to be supported by the law only when we assume the environment presupposed by the law to be so encompassing as to include the case of the subjunctive conditional. Hence it seems that criterion (iii) does not suffice to show that the laws and accidental generalizations are different in kind.

The difference in our attitude towards laws and accidental generalizations referred to by criterion (iv) is evidenced by the relationship of each to counter-instances. A law is not readily abandoned in the face of a counter-instance; an accidental generalization is readily abandoned. The reasons that laws are not abandoned are that laws belong to a theory or that the nature of their support makes abandonment difficult. These reasons constitute a reference to systematic import (Achinstein 1971, pp. 46-49; Nagel 1961, pp. 64-66). Laws belong to a theory and thereby systematize other basic uniformities. Laws are based on support other than instances falling within the scope of prediction of the law. Hence a law is not independent of other laws and its abandonment would require change in these laws. In brief the tenacity with which we hold on to a law is an indication of its place in the body of scientific knowledge at a particular time. In contrast, accidental generalizations do not systematize more basic uniformities and are not supported by the same Variety of evidence as laws. Hence abandoning accidental generalizations does not require widespread modification because these generalizations lack the systematic import possessed by laws. However, systematic import is related to environment; the systematizing power of a law depends on the environment presumed. We hesitate to abandon laws because, for a particular environment, they are useful in systematizing other uniformities. In another environment they may fail to systematize, and, in such circumstances, they would be easily abandoned. But it is difficult to maintain that biological and accidental generalizations do not systematize for any environment. Even though an accidental generalization is a low-level generalization and does not ordinarily systematize other uniformities, there is a sense in which it can usefully systematize phenomena in the special environment in which it holds. We abandon biological and accidental generalizations more easily because of the special-ness of the environment presumed; our reluctance to abandon laws is based on their usefulness in an implicit wider environment. Then a distinction in kind between laws and biological and accidental generalizations cannot be based on systematic import. Systematic import is relative to a particular environment, and the ease with which a generalization is abandoned depends on its usefulness and this, in turn, depends upon the specialness of the environment.

This sampling of the criteria should make it clear that the distinction between laws, biological generalizations, and accidental generalizations is a difficult one to define. Each of these statements presupposes a particular set of environmental conditions in order to hold; and when the notion of environment is made explicit, the usual criteria do not suffice to distinguish between them.

The process view of laws is able to account for the difference between laws and biological generalizations, on the one hand, and accidental generalizations, on the other, by the notion of dominant, but not complete, order in an environment. Accidental generalizations are either true or false. They are true if every organism mentioned in the generalization can be so characterized and false otherwise. A true accidental generalization is, in effect, descriptive of an environment without disorder. Laws, as well as accidental generalizations, depend upon the characteristics of the organisms in the environments for which they are formulated. Whitehead used the term ‘immanence’ to express this feature of laws. But although laws are immanent, they merely represent the dominant order of an environment. They do so because of the element of disorder in wide environments.

In contrast with accidental generalizations, the fact of disorder renders the terms ‘true’ and ‘false’ irrelevant to the characterization of laws. The dominant order referred to by a law can tolerate disorder up to a certain point and the law still systematize the organisms in the environment. For an accidental generalization, the failure of the organisms to exhibit the characteristic(s) referred to in the generalization renders it inapplicable because it is false. Yet the failure of organisms to exhibit the characteristic(s) of the dominant order of the environment described by the law need not render the law inapplicable.

On the process view, biological generalizations also represent dominant orders of environments. As theoretical biology advances, there is reason to believe that biological generalizations will be formulated which range over increasingly wider environments. However, since biological organisms require more special environments than do physico-chemical organisms, there is no reason for thinking that biological generalizations will come to represent dominant orders of environments as wide as those represented by physical laws.

The process view of laws is, then, that they are to be conceived as statements of the dominant characteristics of wide, or general, environments. The point at which an environment is wide enough for its dominant order to be described as a ‘law’ is more or less arbitrary. Any particular law is an abstraction of a dominant order on a certain level of generality from the total existing order. This is due to the fact that an environment is bound up with wider environments whose characteristic features are not those dominant in it. But, in turn, the characteristic features of the wider environments are abstractions. Hence even the most general laws are not universal but represent a dominant character of a particular level of a hierarchy of order.

Further implications for characterizing laws can be drawn. First, since there is disorder and laws represent merely the dominant environmental order, all laws should be conceived as fundamentally statistical in character. They are the ‘communal customs,’ the ‘large average effects,’ the ‘average regulative conditions’ to which Whitehead refers. Second, since laws are immanent and since neither the environment nor the organisms it supports are unchanging, an environment can become incapable of supporting the organisms it once supported. New dominant orders, capable of supporting new types of organisms can arise. Then it is clear that an order can pass out of dominance and new dominant orders can arise. Laws are, in brief, capable of evolving.

Hence the process view of laws conceives them as statements of dominant orders of environments. Since environments are finite spatio-temporal regions, laws are restricted and not universal.⁴ Because of the disorder in any environment, laws are essentially statistical in character. Finally, since laws are capable of evolving, they are non-necessary statements (Cf. Bohm 1957, pp. 137-140 and pp. 146-152. See also Bohm 1969).

V. Induction

On the whole formalists have given priority to deductive reasoning in science. They have pointed out important reasons for calling the role of induction into question. Two general areas of issues are relevant to discussing the process view. First, the role of induction in theory formation is very much a matter of dispute. One problem that has been pointed out here is the occurrence of new terms in theories which are not found in the observational data (or lower-level uniformities) on which they are based and which they systematize. It is not clear how the introduction of these terms can be justified (Hempel 1966, pp. 14-15). Another difficulty is that theory seems to be prior to observation in an important sense, viz., a theory is presupposed in ascertaining the relevant data, or uniformities (Hempel 1966, pp. 11-12; Popper 1963, pp. 46-47). These difficulties have led to a variety of positions about induction within the formalist tradition which range from the view that theory formation is not in its essence inference from particular to general (Goodman 1955, p. 68), to the view that there is no inference involved in theory formation, only conjecture (Popper 1963, p. 192; Hempel 1966, p. 15). The second area of issues concerns the problem of the justification of inductive inference. The formalist tradition conceives this problem tobe the justification of a general principle of induction (a principle which, in conjunction with observational data, could provide a deductive inference to the general conclusion). It is argued that all possible ways of justifying such a principle lead to difficulties: An empirical justification involves an infinite regress, while a metaphysical justification (one based on synthetic a priori categories) involves triviality or circularity (Popper 1959, Ch. I and 1963, p. 47). The charge of circularity seems especially appropriate to the conception of metaphysical method held by Whitehead. Whitehead maintained that the categories of speculative philosophy were in an important sense ‘generalizations’ from experience. In face of the apparent insolubility of the justification of a general principle of induction. formalists have limited the required justification to the role of induction in making valid inferences to predictions; this constitutes the "new riddle of induction" (Goodman 1955, p. 68).

The process view I am presenting takes the problems raised by the formalists to be genuine. Theoretical inference is not in its essence a generalization from particulars; it is not a general principle of induction which requires justification, but rather, a justifiable inference pattern. The process view approaches these problems by an application of the notions of organism and environment. The framework of organism-environment provides an explication not only of the role of induction in prediction, but also a role for induction in theory formation. That is, on the process view, inductive inference to theories and to predictions are essentially related.

The process view of induction takes the following passage from Whitehead (1929, p. 314) to set the solution to the "new riddle of induction": "Thus the basis of all probability and induction is the fact of analogy between an environment presupposed and an environment directly experienced." A reconsideration of the internal relationship between organism and environment will allow the development of a justifiable inference pattern based on this passage.

An inductive inference (such as that involved in theory formation) shifts reference from one environment (E) to another (E*). Each environment is necessary for the existence of its organisms. The organisms of E (o) cannot exist without the order provided by E, and those of E* (0*) cannot exist without the environmental order of E*. Hence an analogy between organisms of the different environments will provide a warrant for an inference as to the analogy between the environmental orders. Further, since laws are a statement of dominant environmental order, there is a context for inferring predictions about the behavior of other organisms in the environment to which reference has been shifted -- organisms not explicitly considered in the original analogies. The inference pattern can be schematized as follows (see Hesse 1968 and 1970; Plamondon 1973):

where E and E* represent environments;

AN represents an analogical inference;

/ / / / / / / / AN represents an analogical relation; and

D represents a deduction from E* to predictions.

This inductive inference pattern fully accounts for the notions which suggested a limitation to the role of induction in scientific reasoning. First, new terms can be introduced in inference to theories because the laws constituting the theory are abstracted from an environmental order developed by analogy from another environmental order. Second, the induction to the new set of laws is not a generalization from particulars; the role of prior theory in guiding observation (of data or selection of uniformities) is accounted for. Third, it is an inductive inference pattern and not a general principle of induction that is being explicated. In addition to the explication of the inference pattern, the categories of a process philosophy of science provide for the justification of the inference pattern as well. Because of the internal relatedness of organism and environment, the positive analogy between organisms of the two environments justifies an inference with respect to the analogical relationship of the two environments. Inductive inference to theories is thereby justified. Prediction of the behavior of (as yet) unobserved organisms in the environment inferred to is grounded, ultimately, in the analogy between the environments. In brief, theoretical inference takes place by way of a model whose order is already known; the environment F is a model for the elucidation of E*.

The reference of the problem of induction to the organism-environment relation seems to me to be essential. Without the internal relatedness of organism and environment, no inductive inference can be justified. I take this to be Whitehead’s meaning when he writes: "The question, as to what will happen to an unspecified entity in an unspecified environment, has no answer" (Whitehead 1929, p. 312).

VI. Explanation

The formalist view of explanation involves the ideal of deductive form (Hempel and Oppenheim 1948; see also Braithwaite 1953, Chs. l-2; Nagel 1961, Ch. 2; Popper 1959, sec. 12). The explanans consists of statements of antecedent conditions and general laws. The explanandum is a description of the empirical phenomenon to be explained. There are three formal conditions and one empirical condition which must be met for an explanation to be given. The formal conditions are: The explanans deductively entails the explanandum; the explanans contains at least one universal law which is actually used in the deduction; and the explanans has empirical import. The empirical condition of adequacy is that the statements of the explanans have not been falsified. In addition, it is claimed that prediction has the same logical structure as explanation.

It is clear that the process philosophy of science as developed thus far cannot accept the deductive model of explanation. The model requires at least one universal law to be included in the explanans, yet there are no universal laws on the process view -- all laws are statistical in character.

The process view of scientific explanation can be developed from Whitehead’s general understanding of explanation. He maintained that scientific explanation is to be conceived as a species of metaphysical explanation. They share a common aim, viz., the understanding of facts (less general principles) in terms of general principles (more general principles). These explanatory principles are attained by a method Whitehead calls (descriptive) ‘generalization.’ This ‘generalization’ consists in the discovery of generic principles from a study of specific facts (or lower-level principles). Generic principles give ‘synoptic vision.’

The method of generalization by which science and philosophy explain is easily given a negative characterization: This method is not in its essence deductive. Rather the role of deduction is in the verification process -- in testing the scope of the principles arrived at by generalization.

Whitehead’s understanding of explanation adds further support to the impossibility of conceiving explanation in the process philosophy of science in terms of the deductive model. The essence of explanation is not deductive; the explanandum is not explained by virtue of being deductively derived from the explanans. The role of deduction is an auxiliary one bound up with confirmation. This was made clear in the explication of justifiable inductive inference on the process view. In this inference pattern the deductive inference is to predictions which test the proposed dominant order of an environment elaborated analogically, not deductively, from the model of another environmental order.

Any attempt at a positive characterization of generalization is hampered by Whitehead’s occasional references to the impossibility of such a characterization. He uses such terms as ‘self evidence’ and ‘direct insight’ in describing this method. On other occasions, however, he seems to attempt a positive characterization: "Words and phrases must be stretched toward a generality foreign to their ordinary usage; and however such elements of language be stabilized as technicalities, they remain metaphors mutely appealing for the imaginative leap" (Whitehead 1929, p. 6). It is the notions of metaphor and the stretching of meanings which I find to be the key in a model of explanation for the process view. A view of scientific explanation as metaphorical has been developed as a supplement to the deductive model of explanation by some contemporary philosophers of science (Black 1962, pp. 25-47 and pp. 219-243; Hesse 1966, pp. 157-177; MacCormac 1971). 1 shall sketch the model they propose and then relate this model to the process framework of organism-environment.

According to the metaphorical view of explanation, there is a literal description of both the explanans and the explanadum. However, language is used metaphorically when words ordinarily used in the literal description of the explanans are transferred to the explanandum. In this transfer, the meanings of the terms of both the explanans and the explanandum undergo change; they come to be seen as analogous. Explanation consists in a metaphorical redescription of the explanandum. This view is not committed to the thesis that all metaphors explain. A necessary condition for a metaphor to explain is the existence of a positive analogy between the two domains (explanans, explanandum). The function of theory in an explanation is to pick out this positive analogy; theoretical concepts are metaphors in this sense. In the picking out of the analogy, there is a meaning shift which consists in an extension of meaning. This extended meaning corresponds to the generic meaning referred to by the process view of explanation by generalization.

The process view is a metaphorical view of explanation. The essence of explanation is not deduction but a ‘synoptic vision’ gained in finding generic categories from restricted fact or laws. The abstraction of such categories is based on analogy, yet involves new meaning. The ordinary usage of terms is stretched in the generalization. The stretching suggests application of the category beyond the facts or laws from which it arose. A coherent set of generic categories constitutes a theory. The theory is essentially an abstraction of analogies between systems. Theories in science abstract analogies between more special systems; metaphysical theories abstract analogies between more general systems, e.g., the sciences themselves.

The explanatory function of metaphor turns on the stretching of language by the metaphor. This stretching is made possible by analogy and makes possible new hypotheses. The necessary condition of analogy for the explanation links the metaphorical view of explanation to the process framework of organism-environment. This is because the inference potential of analogy is grounded in the internal relatedness of organisms and the environment which sustains them. This suggests that the stretching of language is dependent on the environment as well. In brief, this suggests that meaning is environmentally dependent.

The dependence of meaning on a presupposed environment explains how the stretching of meaning in a metaphor is possible. It is possible because the extended meaning depends, not upon the original environment presupposed for the original meaning, but upon a different environment presupposed for the stretched meaning.

The change in the presupposed environment brings with it changes in the presupposed dominant order. This shift in environmental order underlies the suggestiveness of the metaphor; the new dominant order makes possible new associations of terms -- associations not possible prior to the metaphor. Such associations were not possible because they were not included in the systematic associations of terms in the original environment. They are now possible because of such systematic associations in the new environment.

Hence the role of metaphor in explanation depends not only upon analogy, but also upon the more detailed specification of the presupposed environment brought about in the stretching of meaning by the metaphorical use of language.

VII. Conceptual Change

The formalists make a radical distinction between observational and theoretical language (Hempel and Oppenheim 1948; Nagel 1961, Chs. 2 and 5; Popper 1959, sec. 12). Their view is that there is a fundamental observational language the terms of which have a fixed meaning. This thesis of fixed meaning is referred to as meaning invariance. The observational language is thought to be prior to and independent of theoretical language. The theoretical language, however, is dependent on the observational language; theoretical terms are given meaning by observational terms. Successive (or competing) theories do not, then, give a different meaning to observational statements.

This distinction allows conceptual change to be explained by the deductive model. An earlier theory is explained by its successor by deducing it from the later theory and statements about the domain of application. The deduction presupposes that the meanings of the terms of the two theories are fixed; the deduction could not be carried out if the meanings of terms changed in the successor theory.

The process view is incompatible with this understanding of conceptual change. This is because the concept of environment entails meaning variance. Meaning is environmentally dependent and varies with environmental variation. This constitutes a reversal of the formalist position in an Important sense. Observational meaning becomes dependent on theoretical meaning. The meaning of scientific terms depends on a theoretical framework.

It is clear that the thesis of meaning variance has implications for an understanding of conceptual change. What these implications are is, however, a matter of dispute (see Achinstein 1964; Feyerabend 1962, 1963, and 1970; Hanson 1958; Kordig l971(a) and 1971(b); Shapere 1964 and 1966; Shea 1971; Toulmin 1972). The radical interpretation currently under discussion (Kuhn 1970a and 1970b) is that a change of theoretical framework entails a change of meaning for every term in a scientific theory. Conceptual change is therefore ‘revolutionary.’

The difficulty in conceiving conceptual change as revolutionary is that this understanding seems to make conceptual change unintelligible. Serious difficulties arise with respect to how to conceive of the relationship of the ‘same’ term in successive theories. In particular, if the terms are discontinuous in meaning, it is not clear how one could ever come to understand the terms in the later theory.

The process view does not accept this radical interpretation of the implications of meaning variance. There is not an absolute discontinuity between the ‘same’ terms in successive theories. This follows from an understanding of the ‘change’ that takes place in an environmental change. The change can be understood as a displacement in the environmental order. Such displacement is a displacement with respect to the analogies and similarity relationships of the environment. This presupposes a connection with the order displaced. A discontinuity of order, on the other hand, would be a replacement of one order with another. Such replacement would constitute an unintelligible change.

On the process view conceptual change is based on an interpretation of meaning variance as a function of displacement in theoretical framework. In the displacement of a conceptual framework, the meanings of terms can be extended or stretched. This suggests that the model for conceptual change can be taken from the metaphorical model of explanation.

The view that explanatory categories in science are to be conceived as metaphors has built into it a mechanism for conceptual change by way of metaphor. The same features which account for the explanatory function of metaphor account for the possibility of intelligible conceptual change. These features are, first, the positive analogy of the term in successive theories and, second, the hypothesis-producing potential of placing the term from the earlier into the later displaced framework. Without the first, there seems to be no possibility of understanding the meaning of terms which appear in both theories. The analogies between the terms in the two theories make possible the understanding of the meaning of the term in the later theory. Withou.t the second, no sense can be made of a real change in meaning. The hypotheses suggested by this aspect of the metaphor lead to the development of the framework which gives the term its new meaning. The meaning is changed because the term has a different association with the other terms in the respective framework.

In contrast to the revolutionary view of conceptual change, the process view can make sense of the relationship of the ‘same’ term in successive theories. The meanings of the ‘same’ terms are given continuity by the positive analogy of the terms in both theoretical frameworks. It is just because of this analogy that it makes sense to use the same sign in both frameworks. The meaning of the term in the earlier theory is the basis for the extended meaning of the term in its successor.

The stretching of meaning in conceptual change is essentially the grasping of a clearer generic meaning of which the meanings in the earlier theory are species. Successor theories represent ‘synoptic vision’ with respect to meaning.

VIII. Science and Logic

In concluding I wish to emphasize that the process philosophy of science turns away from the deductivism of formalism. It conceives the logic of science as a thoroughgoing inductivism. This inductive logic is grounded in the fundamental process categories of organism and environment. The application of these categories gives an understanding to scientific methodology not only in the sense that these categories show an interconnection between the fundamental issues and a consistent logic of their solutions, but also in the sense that this methodology has itself been set within the framework of a metaphysical system.

NOTES

1 For example, Carl Hempel, Karl Popper, and Ernest Nagel.

2 For example, P. K. Feyerabend, N. R. Hanson, T. S. Kuhn, and S. Toulmin.

3 In terms of Griffin’s distinction (below, pp. 123f.) of metaphysical and cosmological principles, I am taking ‘environment’ to be a metaphysical category. Any particular environmental order, however, is cosmological.

4 Laws of nature on the process view are cosmological, not metaphysical, generalizations. See Griffin (next article.).

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RESPONSE TO PLAMONDON’S PAPER

By Bernhard Rensch

Bernhard Rensch is at the Zoologisches Institut of the Westfaelischen Wilhelms-Unversitaet in Muenster, West Germany.

I believe that we have not only to do with generalizations in biology, but also with a great number of laws. But in consequence of the enormous structural and biochemical complication of living beings, many laws thwart one another. Mendel’s first two laws, for instance, are infringed by the law of mutation, which is valid in all animals and plants. In this way exceptions arise and we only speak of rules. In other cases the interaction of different laws is much more complicated. But it is possible to assume that ultimately all biological events are determined by laws, mainly by causal laws, in some cases by laws of probability (effective in gene recombination and mutation), the law of conservation of energy and the lawful acting of microphysical constants. We therefore have to do with a determination in a broader sense, a polynomistic determination (cf. my Biophilosophy, 1971).

Ivor Leclerc previously taught at the University of Glasgow and is now Professor of Philosophy at Emory University.

I.

The philosophical issue which is quite fundamental to scientific thought is that of the ultimate nature of the physical. It is necessary today that this issue be very much to the fore because the course of scientific development in the last hundred years and more has rendered unacceptable the conception of the physical which had dominated scientific thought since the seventeenth century. In particular this issue is of primary importance to the consideration of the philosophical problems involved in biology, the topic of this book.

The most effective approach to this fundamental issue at the present time is to start with the conception of the physical which has determined modern scientific thought until this century. To become clear about that conception is also important because there is still a very considerable carry-over of features and aspects of that conception in contemporary scientific thinking as tacit presuppositions, presuppositions which are inconsistent with the new conception of the physical now requisite and in our time in the process of formulation.

Modern science was grounded in the seventeenth century in a radically new conception of the physical, the conception of the physical as ‘matter.’ It is of crucial significance for scientific thought today to appreciate what is entailed in that conception of the physical. The concept of ‘matter’ goes back to Aristotle,¹ and throughout the entire medieval epoch until the beginning of the modem period the Aristotelian conception persisted of ‘matter’ as the correlative of ‘form’ in the physical existent. That is, ‘matter’ meant one ingredient in the physical existent, that which is formed, that which is the recipient of definiteness -- as such it itself being without any definiteness or character; the other ingredient was ‘form,’ that whereby the existent was ‘what’ it was, with a particular definiteness as this or that. Further, in medieval thought it was explicitly maintained that the component which is ‘matter’ was sheerly passive -- ‘matter’ was a passive recipient, a merely passive potentiality for ‘form’; by contrast all activity or agency was ascribed to ‘form.’²

The great philosophical innovation of the seventeenth century was to conceive ‘matter’ as per se the physical existent; ‘form’ was separated from matter to become an independent, mental or psychical, existent. This dualism of all existence into two ultimate kinds, physical and mental, has been determinative of almost all thought since that time. It is a doctrine which today needs to be subjected to searching scrutiny. What is of immediate significance to us is that, in conceiving the physical existent as ‘matter,’ seventeenth-century thought accepted and carried over as the essential connotation of ‘matter’ (which is indeed grounded in the etymology of the term³) what it had been in the medieval epoch, namely of sheer passive potentiality. Thus in the modern conception, the physical existent as ‘matter’ was in itself completely devoid of activity or agency -- it was strictly ‘inert,’ as Kepler was the first to characterize it; it was ‘movable’ but could not move itself, as Newton insisted. Since the physical as ‘matter’ was without activity, this entailed that it was in itself changeless, i.e., without any internal change, and thus incapable of any process of ‘becoming.’ The only change possible in respect of the physical as ‘matter’ was a purely external change of place, i,e., of being moved from one place to another.

But the result of the development of science has been that in this century there has occurred a de facto abandonment of that early modern conception of the physical. It is now on the whole implicitly or explicitly accepted in the basic sciences that physical existents are somehow and in some respect ‘active.’ This, as Whitehead among the earliest clearly appreciated, amounts to a radical change in the philosophical conception of the physical, a change indeed no less radical than had been the introduction of the conception of the physical as ‘matter’ in the seventeenth century.

The fundamental philosophical implication of the contemporary scientific development, as Whitehead perceived, was the rejection of all which was entailed in the concept of ‘matter.’ That concept had implied that the physical existents were sheerly passive, in themselves changeless; the necessity today is to conceive physical existents as ‘active,’ as in a process of becoming. Secondly, the concept of the physical as ‘matter’ implied that physical existents are capable only of undergoing locomotive change, and accordingly the science of physics had understood physical existence solely in terms of bodies in motion. The conception of the physical as in a ‘process of becoming,’ on the contrary, entails other kinds of change in addition to locomotion, kinds which are not reducible to locomotive change. This opens up new vistas for the understanding of physical existence which, as Whitehead saw, bring the sciences of physics and biology much closer together than had been possible on the antecedent conception.

II.

The general philosophical problem of the nature of the physical has to be articulated into a number of more special, interconnected problems. This had been clear to the more perspicacious thinkers of the seventeenth century, such as Descartes. It was seen that there was the problem as to what precisely was entailed in the conception of the physical as ‘matter’ in respect of the diverse plurality of entities in which the physical manifests itself. It was not sufficient to maintain simply that they were all ‘material.’ For in some respect there is a difference in status among these entities. The problem of this difference in status had come to the fore toward the end of the first quarter of the century as a result of the rejection of the medieval Aristotelian conception of organic entities as constituting unitary wholes and as such identifiable as primary physical existents.

In the early seventeenth century the conviction had grown that these wholes, of which living organisms were the paradigm instances, were not integral wholes but were rather composites, strictly aggregates -- which is to say that they were wholes which were no more than the sum of their constituents. Thus, it was maintained, it was the ultimate constituents which had to be conceived as the true primary physical existents. These were conceived as the ultimate units of matter, in themselves not further divisible, i.e., ‘atomic’ in the etymological sense of the term. Since the material atoms were the primary physical existents, it meant that all other entities had the derivative status of mere aggregate collections, their features as composites being no more than the arithmetical sum of the features of the constituents.⁴ This was incontestably demonstrable, it was thought, in experiments in mechanics, in which it made no difference what mass of matter was used, for the laws of motion were indifferently exhibited by all composites; clearly therefore these laws must hold too for the indivisible atomic constituents of those composite bodies.

Thus, in terms of this theory, the philosophical problem concerning the status respectively of the plurality of entities received a relatively simple solution. This was to conceive all entities as divided into two groups, the one constituted by all the primary physical existents, the atoms of matter, and the other constituted by all the various aggregate composites of the primary existents.

Although this theory of material atomism came to dominate by the end of the seventeenth century -- and continued to do so completely until the present century -- we should take account of the alternative theory of Descartes in order further to elucidate the philosophical problem of the status of the plurality of entities. Descartes regarded the theory of material atomism as involving insuperable difficulties, such as that of divisibility, difficulties which he was able to avoid with a very different conception of the physical as ‘matter.’ Descartes maintained that the physical per se was constituted by one entity, a one res extensa; that is, there was one ultimate physical existent, a single ‘matter’ indefinitely extended and indefinitely divisible. The plurality of entities, the bodies which are the subject-matter of the science of physics, he conceived as derivative from the one res extensa or matter, constituted by the differential locomotion of parts of the one ultimate res extensa. Thus, despite his difference from the theory of material atomism, Descartes similarly divided all entities into two basic groups, in his case a one primary physical entity, and the group constituted by all derivative entities, the plurality of bodies which, he agreed, were composites of varying degrees of complexity by reason of the differential motion of their constituent parts. Both Descartes and the material atomists were agreed that the character of all composites was no more than the arithmetical sum of their parts, and that the character of composites was accordingly exhaustively analyzable and understandable in terms of the locomotion of the constituent parts. Descartes, for example, explicitly regarded human and animal bodies as complex machines. That is, biological organisms had a status no different from any other composite.

III.

In the subsequent centuries scientific inquiry has revealed an increasing number and complexity of entities, but the philosophical problem of the relative status of these entities has been largely ignored. Yet the philosophical problem has become ever greater. For the diversity of entities -- in physics: atoms, electrons, protons, neutrons, positrons, etc., etc.; in chemistry: atoms and molecules; in biochemistry and molecular biology: highly complex structures of simpler molecules, and cells; in biology: again molecular structures, cells, structures of cells into organs, a vast variety of different kinds of organisms -- is not being conceived in these sciences as mere aggregates understood mechanically in terms of the locomotion of constituents. Rather it has become increasingly clear that composite entities are constituted by relatednesses or patterns of relationship among the constituents.

The scientific problem is the clarification of the relations of the entities constituting a composite, for example the number of constituents and the pattern or structure displayed in their relationship to each other. The philosophical problem is respecting the relations per se, to understand the nature of relations, and particularly those involved such that they result in just those composites with just those features exhibited by the composites. For example, consider the chemical theory of molecules as exhibiting definite structural relationships of their constituent atoms. The philosophical issue is that, since the particular features of the molecules (as gaseous, liquid, solid, as acid or alkaline, etc., etc.) are directly correlative to structural relationships, the composite wholes could not be the mere arithmetical sum of the constituents; ‘structural relationship’ implies something more than ‘arithmetical sum.’ The philosophical problem is how ‘structural relationships’ and the features dependent upon them are to be accounted for.

This philosophical problem of the nature of relations drives us back to the more ultimate problem of the nature of the physical existents: what must be their nature such that they can have relations which are constitutive of structural composites? For example, what must be the nature of physical existents such that the composite, the molecule of water, not only consists of one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms, but that they are at a particular distance from each other and in a particular three-dimensional pattern? It is evident that this composite structure is completely inexplicable in terms of the physical existent conceived as ‘matter.’ For the concept of matter’ contains nothing whatever whereby such a structural relationship could result. The locomotion of material particles might fortuitously eventuate briefly in such a geometrical pattern, but there is no reason whatever in their nature as ‘matter’ why they should continue in that pattern -- on the contrary, their not so continuing is what would follow from the concept of ‘matter.’ Also the conception of the constituent entities as ‘matter’ provides nothing whereby there could be what are termed ‘valency bonds’ between the atoms. It is evident that quite a different conception of the nature of physical existents is necessary.

Philosophically considered the conception of the physical as ‘active’ provides the requisite basis for the physical existents to be in structural relationship. Leibniz had seen this in the seventeenth century, and so had Kant in the next century (in his pre-critical writings). For if a relationship is to make a difference to the entities involved, as opposed to being purely ‘external’⁵ -- and such a difference is precisely what is involved in a ‘structural relationship’ -- then that relationship can only be effected by the acting of the entities concerned; since unless they act to bring about a relationship, any relationship which there might be would be entirely external, as it is in the case of the physical conceived as ‘matter.’ The fundamental acting of a physical existent must therefore be relational acting. This is what both Leibniz and Kant maintained. And this is what Whitehead has maintained in this century with his doctrine of ‘prehension’ -- acting for him is a prehensive relating. In terms of such acting not only is structural relationship accounted for, but also the phenomenon of ‘bonds’ between the entities.

IV.

We need now, with the conception of the physical as ‘acting,’ to return to the philosophical problem raised in Section II of the status respectively of the different kinds of entity. Specifically the question here is: which are to be identified as ‘acting’ entities in the primary sense -- as opposed to being only derivatively acting, that is, by virtue of the acting of the constituents of the entity in question? For example, are we to conceive chemical atoms as active in the primary sense while molecules are active only derivatively? But atoms, in current theory, are themselves composites; does this then imply that they too are derivatively active, it being their constituents, electrons, protons, etc., which are primarily active? But some at least of these constituents, e.g., protons, would themselves seem to be composite, so that by the logic of this argument the truly active entities must be identified with the ultimate constituents, those which are not themselves composite.

This position is very persuasive, and has been adopted by a number of thinkers, for example, Leibniz in the seventeenth century, Kant in the eighteenth, and Whitehead in this century. Whitehead’s ‘actual entities,’ like the ‘monads’ of Leibniz and Kant, are such ultimate acting entities. Thus this position, like that of material atomism, makes a basic distinction in status among entities between those comprising the ultimate constituents, which are ‘simple,’ in the sense of not being composites, and those which are composites. Further, in this position, as in material atomism, all composites are alike in philosophical status; that is, there are no fundamentally different kinds among them -- analogous to the difference in kind exemplified by constituents and composites -- which means that the diversity among composites is to be understood entirely in terms of degrees of complexity of relationships among the constituents.

The question must be raised as to whether the diverse plurality and character of composites is adequately explicable solely in terms of the acting of the ultimate constituents. Further, does that theory adequately account for complex composites as constituted by hierarchical structures of less complex composites, e.g., of structures of atoms to constitute molecules, of structures of molecules to constitute cells, of structures of cells to constitute a biological organism? Are such hierarchies of composites necessitated at all by the theory of actual (or acting) entities as solely the ultimate constituents, any more than it is by the theory of material atomism? In the case of the latter theory the fact of such hierarchies of composites is strictly gratuitous, as it is merely a state of affairs which is empirically found to be the case; in terms of that theory composites cannot be any more than pure aggregates. In the former theory, since acting is relating, composites are not mere aggregates; but is the fact of hierarchies of composites constituting more complex ones any more than a merely empirically discovered state of affairs? Why should there be such hierarchies? Is it necessitated by the constituents as relationally acting? That necessitates only that there be structured composites, but not hierarchical structures of such composites.

Yet the evidence of scientific research testifies to these hierarchies having an importance of a kind too great for their existence to be merely fortuitous. An alternative theory seems to me to be necessary to account for them. For such a theory, the first requirement is to reject the view of acting pertaining only to the ultimate constituents of composites. This opens up the way for a conception of composites as per se acting entities. I have elsewhere⁶ propounded such a theory -- which can be only adumbrated here -- in which the actings of the constituents integrate to compose a single, higher-level entity, which per se as an integral whole acts relationally with respect to other such entities. An atom, composed of electrons, protons, etc., would be an instance of such a composite entity having its own agency as such, i.e., not derivatively from its constituents. Likewise molecules would be higher-level entities, per se the subjects of non-derivative agency. Still higher-level composites constituted of a hierarchy of lower level entities are biological organisms.

On such a theory, therefore, composites of various grades of complexity would have the status of being actual physical existents in their own right, and not as such ‘reducible’ to their ultimate constituents -- as in the theory of material atomism, molecules and biological organisms are reducible to the ultimate constituents.

V.

Closely connected with the foregoing issues is another set of philosophical problems. These have become of increasing moment with the developments of our time in molecular biology. The central problem is to explain the fact that some complex molecular structures come to have biological features.

This problem has, of course, been under consideration for the past hundred years and more, and gave rise to the theory of ‘emergent evolution.’ This concept of ‘emergence,’ however, philosophically considered, is no solution; rather it only more specifically raises the problem, namely of how emergence is possible. Now there is not only emergence of something, but also emergence from something. And with the dominance of the conception of the physical as ‘matter,’ this meant that what emerges are ‘biological’ entities from ‘matter.’ In terms of the physical as ‘matter,’ the biological entities could, however, not be fundamentally different in nature from their material constituents; that is, biological entities are intelligible purely in terms of their chemical constituents, which in turn are reducible to their ‘physical’ constituents, which is to say that biological entities are basically intelligible in purely mechanistic terms. This doctrine has been opposed by thinkers maintaining a doctrine of ‘vitalism,’ namely that biological entities, manifesting the feature of ‘life,’ are generically different, i.e., not reducible to ‘matter.’ Since, however, biological entities evidently have the ‘material’ entities as their constituents, it is inexplicable, on the given presuppositions, how the emergence of life is possible.

Other thinkers, recognizing the impossibility of the derivation of something with a generically different feature from what is completely devoid of that feature, have put forward a doctrine of ‘panpsychism.’ This involves a complete rejection of the doctrine of the ultimate existents as ‘matter’; the doctrine maintains instead that they are fundamentally ‘psychical’ in nature. This had been the doctrine of Leibniz in the seventeenth century, and Leibniz saw the philosophical implications of this theory with great clarity. It entailed that bodies, equated with ‘matter,’ must be derivative from the ultimate psychical constituents as composites of them, all the characteristics of ‘body’ (extension, impenetrability, mobility, etc.) as well as the passivity of ‘matter’ being analyzable as features displayed by composites of such psychical existents in relation.⁷ Apart from the particular difficulties in which Leibniz’s theory is involved, such as that it has the consequence that all relations must be phenomenal (thus necessitating his recourse to God as the principle of pre-established harmony), the doctrine of panpsychism has a paradoxical consequence. This is that the ‘physical’ existent is essentially ‘psychical’ in nature.

Now a paradox betokens something amiss with the theory. The root trouble with it is that, although it intends to overcome the consequences of the ontological dualism introduced in the seventeenth century, it proceeds by tacitly accepting that dualism. For it is that dualism which had elevated the psychical or mental into the status of an independent existent; and panpsychism proclaims this to be the only kind of existent. What is necessary in the situation today is a rethinking of the general problem of the nature of the physical, and, in getting clear about that, of the particular problem of the ontological status of the psychical or mental. That is, it is to be determined what kind of being or existence is to be accorded to the psychical or mental, and what therefore is its relation to the physical. A solution to this should enable us to explain how complex molecules are able to have biological characteristics.

VI.

The philosophical issue here -- and it is a quite fundamental one -- is whether the basic acting of an existent is, or can be, a psychical or mental act. That is, it is necessary to question the ontological thesis of Descartes -- which is in fact a Neoplatonic one, going back to Plotinus in the 3rd century AD. -- which has been the foundation of most modern philosophy. Descartes had maintained that the only act of being is an act of ‘thinking’; physical existence in his doctrine is without any acting of its own -- it simply ‘is,’ by God’s creative act. But the philosophical situation has been radically altered by recent scientific developments, which have demonstrated that the physical is in itself ‘active.’ The question we therefore today face is whether there are two ultimate and distinct kinds of acting, physical and mental -- that is, actings constitutive of two ultimate and distinct kinds of existent. I submit that molecular biology evidences to the contrary. The need therefore is for an alternative theory of the status of the psychical or mental.

We have seen that physical acting must be a physical relating, that is, a relating of one physical existent to another. This is what Whitehead was maintaining in his doctrine of ‘prehension’:⁸ for him the basic acting of an actual entity is an act of ‘prehending,’ i.e., of ‘grasping’ another actual entity. He specifically termed this basic act a ‘physical prehension,’ thus making terminologically explicit that for him the basic act is a physical relating.

Now in analyzing we necessarily employ general or universal terms -- here, ‘acting,’ ‘prehending,’ ‘relating.’ But what exists are individual instances, concrete, definite; that is, each individual relational acting has a very specific definiteness or character whereby it is that uniquely determinate, individual act, and distinguishable as such. There are two points being made in this. The first is that every ‘act’ is necessarily individual and perse unique; that is, by its nature as an ‘act’ it is there and then, and that act cannot be again -- which is to say that it is not repeatable; ‘repetition’ must necessarily consist in a numerically different act, with the same character or definiteness. For -- and this is the second point -- it is ‘definiteness’ which is universalizable, i.e., capable of being shared by many, for such a capability is precisely what constitutes the nature of the ‘universal’; as Aristotle said, "that is called universal which is such as to belong to more than one."⁹

This enables us to recognize a fundamental distinction between a physical act and a mental act. A physical act is an individual particular relating to another individual physical entity. A mental act on the other hand is concerned with the universal or general; it has the universal as its object. A mental act is a grasping of a universal character or definiteness. This was in fact clear early in the history of philosophy, whence mental acting was termed ‘conceiving,’ from concipere, to take hold or lay hold of, to take to oneself, to take in, take, receive. That is, in its original philosophical use, the term conceiving’ meant a mental ‘taking hold of’ the form of definiteness manifested in an individual existent. The abstract noun ‘conception’ means the act of conceiving and/or the fact of conceiving, i.e., of taking hold of and holding something in the mind, and thus frequently also connotes ‘what’ is so held -- in this being synonymous with ‘concept,’ or ‘thought,’ or ‘idea’ in its modern usage. ‘What’ is so held as a universal. Even when we speak of ‘conceiving’ an individual or ‘having a concept of’ an individual, we are conceiving that individual in terms of the universals which determine its definiteness or character.

There is a necessary relation of the mental to the physical act, in a twofold way. The first is that the definiteness which is conceived, i.e., grasped and held by the mental act, must initially be derived from the physical. This is indispensable if there is to be knowledge of the physical, as the history of philosophy of the last three centuries has made clear.¹⁰ The second is that mental acting is required by the physical in the process of physical acting. The reason for this is that physical acting is not either simply fortuitous change nor is it a mere mechanical interconnection; physical acting as a relating is ‘directed to’ another entity, and this entails the factor of ‘end’ -- this is not a mere anthropomorphic projection; the concept of ‘end’ is implied in the concept of ‘acting.’ Now acting as directed to an end necessitates the mental, for ‘end’ cannot be involved without the mental. This means that the theory of mental acting as constitutive of a distinct and separate mental or psychical existent is untenable; mental acting must be seen as a factor or ingredient in the total physical existent -- which was Whitehead’s doctrine in conceiving the mental as one ‘pole’ of an actual entity.¹¹

VII.

We are now in a position to deal with the problem of how it is possible for biological features to develop in complex molecules. Biological molecules -- -such as for example the DNA molecule -- are found to be complex structures of less complex chemical molecules. What distinguishes the biological molecules is not only greater complexity of structure, but certain features of activity not possessed by the less complex chemical molecules. Now activity can in no way arise from what is completely in itself devoid of activity. But we have shown that the conception of the physical as matter,’ i.e., as devoid of acting, is to be wholly rejected. This means that the difference between the very complex biological molecules and the less complex chemical ones must be analyzed in terms of degrees in complexity of activity. Further, this higher degree of complexity of activity is bound up with the higher complexity of structure.

The factor which makes possible not only complexity of structure, but any structural relationship at all, is the mental acting which is ingredient in the physical existent -- structural relationship, as the outcome of inter-acting, entails the factor of ‘end,’ which necessitates mental acting. What is requisite to account for degrees of complexity of structure is conceptual origination in respect of ends, and this is precisely the function of mentality. For, as we have seen, mental acting initiates by conceiving, i.e., grasping, the definiteness of the physical, and holding it in abstraction in its universality. In its abstract universality the definiteness is a possibility for actuality. But every abstract definiteness, in its universality, is related to every other universal definiteness;¹² it is in the nature of mental acting to be able to grasp, conceive, an alternative definiteness. There is clearly a continuous spectrum of alternatives, and there must be degrees in mental capacity to conceive alternatives at varying ‘distances’ from any given definiteness.¹³

It is the conceiving of alternatives different from the past which enables physical acting to actualize changes in structural interrelationship and achieve greater complexity of structure. And greater complexity of structure in turn involves the possible conception of ever more complex alternatives, which can thus result in patterns of physical acting. Such structures of greater complexity accordingly are able thereby to have a range of alternative responses to environmental changes -- in contrast to the much more restricted and unvarying responses of which simpler structures are alone capable. It is this greater capacity for a range of alternative responses which constitutes the basis for the capacity for ‘adaptation’ to the environment characteristic of biological organisms, both in the sense of the adaptation of the organism to its environment, and the organism’s adaptation of its environment to it -- under the latter, basic is the inclusion of parts of the environment into its own complex structure as ‘food.’

VIII.

In conclusion I shall deal briefly with one more philosophical issue which is of the utmost moment for contemporary scientific thought. This is the problem of the nature of change involved in the physical, that is, the problem of motion, motus, what the Greeks called kinesis. In terms of the theory of the physical as ‘matter, as we have seen, only one kind of change is possible, namely locomotion, change in respect of place. But with the rejection of that theory of the physical, with on the contrary a conception of the physical as ‘active,’ we face a quite different situation respecting the problem of change.

To conceive ‘acting’ as basically analyzable into locomotive change -- as seems to be the tacit presupposition in much scientific thinking still -- is entirely inadequate. As we have seen, physical acting must be fundamentally a relating, and relating cannot be understood in terms of mere ‘impact,’ for this can result at most in only change of place -- and indeed, as was clear to thinkers like Descartes, Newton, Leibniz and Kant, on the conception of the physical as in itself passive ‘matter,’ even change of place could not occur upon mere impact, there being necessary also an ‘act’ setting the impacted body into motion. Physical acting conceived as a relating, as Kant particularly insisted, entails an internal change being effected in the other entity.

This means that fundamentally the ‘change’ entailed in the ‘acting’ of a physical existent cannot be essentially locomotive change; rather locomotive change must be seen as either only one aspect of the change involved in and constituting ‘acting,’ or as only the resultant of the change involved in ‘acting’-- the latter is the view of Leibniz and of Whitehead; I would myself incline to the former alternative. But this difference does not affect the important point, which is that the interrelatedness of physical existents is not to be understood as being essentially mechanistic.

This is not to deny that physical interrelationships can be conceived mechanistically. Today it has become most important to understand correctly the concept of ‘mechanism.’ To conceive something mechanistically is to conceive it in terms of locomotion. In the theory of the physical as ‘matter,’ the relations of physical entities can be conceived and understood only mechanistically, i.e., only in terms of their locomotive changes. In the conception of the physical as ‘acting,’ on the other hand, change of other kinds in addition to locomotive change are admitted, so that a mechanistic analysis must accordingly be only of an aspect of physical acting, which means that since it leaves out of account other aspects or features of change or motion, it is an abstraction. Of course there can be no disputing that for some purposes such abstraction is entirely legitimate and indeed necessary. But what has to be avoided is what Whitehead has called the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness,’ namely mistaking the abstraction for the whole concrete, in this case taking locomotion to be the only kind of motion or change.

For an understanding of the change or motion fundamental in physical acting, it is necessary to concentrate on that acting as producing structural relationships. This is clearly requisite in molecular biology, but it is not less so in chemistry. This emphasis on acting’s producing structural relationships is also necessary today in physics; to put the primary emphasis on this instead of on locomotion will complete thc revolutionary transformation which has been occurring in twentieth-century physics.¹⁴ This also basically alters the relation to each other of the sciences of biology, chemistry, and physics. In the earlier conception of the fundamental motion or change of the physical as locomotion, it was necessary to conceive biology as reductive to chemistry, and chemistry as reductive to physics. But with the different conception of physical change as acting necessitated today, the sciences of physics, chemistry and biology must be seen as concerned respectively with entities exhibiting different grades of complexity of structural interrelationship. These different grades of complexity will also represent different kinds of physical existents -- for such structures must be more than mere aggregates, as we have seen -- with distinct features. The biological kind, for example, by virtue of its structure’s making possible the requisite degree of conceptual origination, is that having the characteristic of ‘life.’

NOTES

1. But the term ‘matter’ is much later, and has a different etymology from the Greek hyle, a difference which has influenced the connotation of the term in later usage. See note 3 below.

2. This conception of ‘matter’ as essentially passive, with ‘form’ the principle of activity, is Neoplatonic, and doubtfully to be ascribed to Aristotle.

3. Materia means the stuff of which things are made, e.g., by a craftsman; it is the recipient of a form given to it. The word is from the same base as mater, mother; in ancient times the role of the mother in generation was thought to be merely the recipient of the new life sown in her, she herself contributing nothing to it. Cf. F. M. Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology (1937), p. 187.

4. Cf. Newton, Principia, "The Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy" at the beginning of Book III.

5. Which means that it would be a relationship only to an external observer; as far as the entity itself is concerned, it is devoid of any relationship at all.

6. In my The Nature of Physical Existence (Humanities Press; 1972), ch. 24; cf. also "The Problem of the Physical Existent" in International Philosophical Quarterly IX (1969): 40-62

7. For a more detailed analysis of Leibniz’s theory see my The Nature of Physical Existence, chs. 22-24

8. The term derives from prehendere, to grasp, seize, catch; cognate with , to take in, hold.

9. Metaphysics, 7, 1038b11.

10. Or should be seen not to have done so; this was quite clear to Kant -- cf. Critique of Pure Reason, beginning of Introduction.

11. Because the confusion still persists, it should perhaps be explicitly stated that the ‘mental’ does not entail ‘consciousness’ -- the latter is a feature possible only for fairly high-grade mentality.

12. This is what Whitehead speaks of as its ‘relational essence’ -- see his chapter on "Abstraction" in Science and the Modern World.

13. I say ‘must be’ because we humans not only are not capable of conceiving all alternatives, but quite evidently differ quite considerably among ourselves in respect of the capacity to conceive alternatives. The range in diminishing capacity clearly manifests itself in the other primates compared with man, and on further down the scale in animal species. There is no intrinsic reason why this diminishing capacity should not extend indefinitely, to the simplest physical existents.

14. It seems to me that this is the direction in which the thought of David Bohm is going.

David Griffin teaches philosophy of religion at the School of Theology at Claremont and Claremont Graduate School and is Executive Director of the Center for Process Studies.

The above three authors (ed: Rensch: Arguments for Panpsychistic Identism; Wright: Panpsycism and Science; Hartshorne: Phisics and Psychics: The Place of Mind in Nature) obviously agree on many points. They all agree that our knowledge of our own experience is primary, in comparison with which all scientific knowledge is derivative and inferential, and that no system based on the latter is acceptable if it makes ‘mind’ (used broadly to refer to experience at any level) less real than non-mind. They also agree, in Wright’s words, that "emergence of mind from no mind at all is sheer magic." And, on the basis of these two points, they also agree, in Hartshorne’s words, that " ‘mind’ is not confined to a corner of nature but is everywhere in it, just as behavior is." And on all these points they are at one with Whitehead.

However, they do not agree with each other on every topic. I will point out four topics upon which there are differences among the three men, and upon which one or more of them is in disagreement with Whitehead: (1) The use and meaning of ‘panpsychism’; (2) the mind-brain relation; (3) freedom and determinism; (4) philosophy and science. Hartshorne’s position on the latter three points is close to Whitehead’s, so the statement of his position can be taken as a statement of Whitehead’s. However, in regard to the first issue, a distinction between them must be made.

1. The Use and Meaning of ‘Panpsychism.’ Hartshorne has used the term panpsychism.’ But the term literally suggests that all things have or are psyches, while he (as well as Wright) stresses that only genuine individuals, not aggregates (such as rocks), have or are psyches. For this reason he now prefers the term ‘psychicalism.’

However, Whitehead never uses the term ‘panpsychism,’ and his probable reasons for avoiding it would also apply to ‘psychicalism.’ He uses the term ‘soul’ (the translation of ‘psyche’) only for the series of dominant or presiding occasions in the higher vertebrates. There are hence three differentiating characteristics implied by his use of the term ‘psyche’ which make it inapplicable even to all individuals. A psyche is a series of (1) very high-grade occasions which (2) are the dominant occasions in an organism and (3) are ordered into a personally-ordered society. It is this high-grade society which is termed the soul. Accordingly, if ‘psyche’ is understood as Whitehead uses it, Whitehead is no panpsychist, or even a psychicalist.

However, sometimes the word ‘panpsychism’ is used to mean that all things, or better, all individuals, have minds. Whitehead uses the term ‘mind’ in four ways. Hence, deciding whether he is a ‘panpsychist’ in the sense of attributing mind to all individuals depends upon which of the four meanings of ‘mind’ is in view. In the first place, Whitehead sometimes uses ‘mind’ synonymously with ‘psyche’ (as in speaking of the mind-body relation); hence the considerations in the previous paragraph would apply here also. Second, Whitehead sometimes uses ‘mind’ to refer to a purely mental substance, one which has no essential connection with physical actualities, and as such is not essentially subject to efficient causation. This use of ‘mind’ does not refer to anything in his own system, of course, but is a purely historical usage. It applies to Descartes’ view of the human mind. It applies also to Leibnizian ‘monads,’ since they were not subject to efficient causation from other monads, and had no ‘physical’ properties. Hence, since Whitehead believes every actual entity is subject to efficient causation, he obviously is not a panpsychist in the sense of believing that all individuals are Cartesian minds or mental substances.

Third, some actual occasions have ‘intellectual operations,’ which involve consciousness. Whitehead says:

This passage makes clear that Whitehead does not like to use ‘mind’ in this sense, since it suggests a Cartesian substance. But, more importantly, Whitehead does not attribute ‘mind’ in this sense to all genuine individuals, since some, indeed most, actual occasions are blind -- "‘blind’ in the sense that no intellectual operations are involved" (PR 326). Otherwise expressed, most occasions have no consciousness. Hence, in distinction from Wright, Whitehead believes the term ‘consciousness’ should be reserved for a very high-grade and rare form of experience.

However, there is a fourth sense in which Whitehead uses the term ‘mind,’ and in this sense he does attribute it to all actual occasions. Every actual occasion has ‘mentality,’ which for Whitehead simply means that it has an appetitive element, an aim towards the achievement of some value. Whitehead says:

As this and other passages indicate, all genuine individuals (actual entities) have ‘mind’ in this sense, although it is a variable which is present only ‘negligibly’ or ‘in germ’ in low-grade individuals.

There is yet another possible meaning to ‘panpsychism.’ It could mean only that all actualities have or are experiences. This is the denial of what Whitehead terms ‘vacuous actuality,’ i.e., actual things which have no inner reality, and hence are not subjects for themselves, but are mere objects for others. Cartesian ‘extended things’ and Hobbesian atoms are examples. Whitehead denies all such vacuous actualities, affirming instead that all actual entities are ‘occasions of experience.’

The conclusion of this discussion is that Whitehead’s position can be legitimately called panpsychism, if this means attributing experience to all genuine individuals, and also if this means attributing ‘mentality’ to all of them (with the proviso that the mentality may be present only in germ.) However, since Whitehead did not use the term ‘panpsychism’ himself, and rejects most of its normal connotations, it is probably more confusing than helpful to use it or any other derivate of ‘psyche’ to describe his position. Insofar as a short-hand term is needed, ‘panexperientialism’ would be better, as long as the ‘pan’ is taken to refer to all genuine individuals. In the ensuing discussion I will sometimes use this term to refer to the position which Wright, Hartshorne, and Rensch hold in common with Whitehead. When ‘panpsychism’ is used, it is used as a synonym for panexperientialism.

2. The Mind-Brain Relation. Whereas all three men are, with Whitehead, panexperientialists, they differ on the whole-part constitution of experiencing things. One aspect of this difference is a difference on the relation between the human mind and the brain. Hartshorne’s position is closest to Whitehead’s, while Rensch’s is most removed.

Rensch distinguishes between protopsychic phenomena, which he attributes to inorganic entities, and real psychic phenomena, which arise out of certain systemic relations among protopsychic entities. The whole which has the real psychic qualities does involve integrations of the protopsychic qualities, but is not thought to involve a new entity in which the psychic qualities are located, and which might be thought to interact with its parts. The relation between ‘mind’ and ‘brain’ is analagous. Psychic qualities of the human type arise out of the systemic relations among the parts of the brain. But the ‘mind’ is not a new entity which emerges which might then interact with the brain. Rather, brain and mind are numerically identical; ‘mind’ is the name for the brain processes as experienced from within.

Hartshorne and Whitehead believe that some ‘wholes’ are indeed aggregates, whose properties are due entirely to the properties of the parts and the relations among them. But they believe there are other types of wholes, in which a new level of actual entity arises out of the systemic relations among the parts. For example, the living cell is not analyzable exhaustively into its inorganic parts (molecules, atoms, etc.). There is also a series of living actual entities, which have a more complex type of experience than do the inorganic entities. The difference from Rensch’s position is subtle: it is agreed that the peculiar experiential qualities of cells are dependent upon the systemic relations among the parts, and it is agreed that the higher-level experiences are integrations of the data provided by these parts. The difference is that a higher-level ‘stream of experiences,’ as fully actual as the lower level ones, is thought to emerge out of the systemic relations. And this higher-level series of experiences is thought to have its own causal efficacy, which can influence the enduring parts upon which it is dependent.

The relation between the mind and the brain is understood analogously. The brain is composed of myriads of cells with complex systemic relations. Each cell has its own experience. ‘Mind’ is a word for that stream of experiences which integrates data (feelings) from the cells into higher-level occasions of experience, some of which attain consciousness. The mind, while not being an ontologically different type of individual than the cells, is numerically distinct from them, and can thus be thought to interact with them. Its integrations of data received from the cells constitute new experiences which provide data (feelings) which can in turn affect the cells.

Rensch is not animated primarily against this kind of interactionism. Most of his arguments against interactionism are directed against a dualistic form of it. He does offer one argument which would apply also against a panexperientialist interactionism. But, as Hartshorne mentions in his "Response" to Rensch’s paper, the latter conceded in conversation that measurement could not be precise enough to press this argument.

3. Freedom and Determinism. The issue of freedom and determinism is the one on which disagreement is strongest. Rensch affirms classic determinism (see Rensch 1971a and 1974, as well as his "Responses" to Plamondon’s and Koestler’s papers). For him, the attribution of ‘mental’ characteristics to entities does not imply attributing self-determination to them. Wright, on the other hand, virtually identifies the two issues, speaking of "the adoption of dual-aspect panpsychism in place of determinism." This accords with Whitehead’s view, for whom the ‘mental pole’ of an entity is that entity’s self-determining operations. As stated above, Whitehead attributes ‘mentality’ in this sense even to the lowest-grade individuals.

However, the dramatic difference from Rensch’s determinism results only when this attribution is combined with the different view on whole-part relations discussed above. Whitehead believes that the mental pole of low-grade entities is negligible. Furthermore, whatever iota of freedom there is in low-grade individuals is cancelled out in aggregates in which there are large numbers of individuals without any higher-grade individual to coordinate their spontaneities. Hence, a significant degree of freedom emerges only because of the emergence of higher-level actualities with non-negligible self-determination. The behavior of macroscopic entities, such as human beings, is free to a significant extent, due to the fact that such a higher-level actuality, the mind, has a significant degree of causal efficacy back upon the body. Whitehead expresses terminologically the significant degree to which the mind controls the body by referring to moments in the stream of human experience as ‘dominant’ occasions of experience. Wright’s paper, and Hartshorne’s even more clearly, reflect Whitehead’s position on this issue.

4. Philosophy and Science. If a scientist held a panexperientialist philosophy of nature, rather than a materialistic view, should this have any implications for his work as a scientist, e.g., in methodology, in the interpretation of results, or at least in the choice of projects? Rensch’s version of panpsychism would not seem to have any such implications, and his paper does not discuss this issue. Hence, I will limit this discussion to a contrast of Wright’s position with that of Hartshorne and Whitehead.

Wright mentions that a scientist’s panpsychist beliefs might suggest certain research topics to him. But otherwise he believes that one’s scientific work should be kept separate from one’s philosophy of science. In particular, one’s view that all individuals have a subjective side, and exercise free choice, must not be allowed to influence one’s scientific procedure or interpretation. One must presuppose determinism (even though science itself has now revealed it to be only statistical), and all ‘subjective’ terms must be excluded from attempts at precise scientific formulations.

Hartshorne agrees that the advantages of panexperientialism are primarily philosophical, in helping one achieve a unified view of reality in which the results of science are coordinated with aesthetic, ethical, and religious values. However, he also believes it can be helpful to science as such. Although he suspects that the nature of this help is largely for the future to disclose, he does suggest some presently recognizable advantages of thinking of all individuals as having subjective or experiential qualities.

The difference between the two men here rests upon a different understanding of science. Wright holds that it deals not with things in themselves, but with the contents of the minds of normal observers, and in fact only those contents which are verifiable by other persons. Hence, all subjective aspects must be excluded -- even though as a panpsychist one believes the subjective to be the primary reality. As a scientist, one does not use one’s own immediately known psychic characteristics to interpret other beings. Hartshorne does not believe that science is limited to a purely behavioristic viewpoint. The scientist qua scientist could use subjective notions such as memory, feeling, anticipation, and purpose to explain the behavior of individuals.

This difference is in turn based upon a more basic difference. Hartshorne believes that the scientist should be trying to explain the behavior of the various phenomena studied. In his list of advantages he refers primarily to the possibilities ‘psychicalism’ gives for understanding causality (both efficient and final), and hence for explaining why things behave as they do. Wright believes that the task of science is simply to describe, not to explain. Hence, while he agrees with Hartshorne that explanation requires subjective notions, he does not see a need to introduce such notions into science.

Hartshorne is here in fundamental agreement with Whitehead. The latter does in places say that science’s methodological exclusion of all subjective characteristics, such as feeling and final causation, is justifiable, as long as it is recognized as a method that deals with only part of the evidence (MT 154-156; FR II). However, he also suggests that the categories used by science in the past four centuries are not irreformable, and that these categories have now become too narrow for science itself. He believes that this is true in physics as well as in the biological sciences (SMW 97, 121-122). In particular, he believes that the fact that the human mind is now considered a genuine part of nature, thanks to the theory of evolution and the science of physiology, means that the categories needed to describe it should be generalized to other natural unities. And he believes that this expansion is needed if science is to fulfill its original motivating drive, which is to find explanatory descriptions of the facts of reality. In his view, without the drive to find satisfactory explanations, the scientific mentality would never have developed (Al 161-164; MT 148-149).

EXPLANATION OF SYMBOLS FOR WHITEHEAD’S WORKS

AI Adventures of Ideas. Macmillan, 1933.

FR The Function of Reason. Princeton University Press, 1929; Beacon, 1958.

MT Modes of Thought. Free Press, 1966.

PR Process and Reality. Macmillan, 1929.

SMW Science and the Modern World. Macmillan, 1926.

Charles Hartshorne has taught philosophy primarily at the University of Chicago, Emory University, and the University of Texas; at the latter he is now Emeritus Ashbel Smith Professor of Philosophy.

Charles Peirce (1931, pars 1.252, 255) divided empirical science into two branches, physics and psychics, both terms being used broadly, so that physics includes astronomy, geology, etc., while psychics includes biology, sociology, linguistics, history, and so forth. Peirce distinguished psychics from physics by attributing to the former but not the latter the admission of final causes. He did not hold that the division between the two forms of knowledge expresses an absolute and ultimate distinction in the nature of things. As an ‘objective idealist’ he thought that it is in psychics not in physics that the universal principles are encountered. On his view, the ultimate constituents of nature are all at least sentient, and there are no cases of efficient causation entirely devoid of any teleological aspect. I shall argue in my own way for the ultimacy of the psychical account of nature.

In physics, what properties are assigned to natural processes? Or, what questions is the physicist seeking to answer? In part he is seeking to predict, and in this sense explain, our sense perceptions. But in order to do this he finds it sufficient to attribute to physical nature apart from our experiences a remarkably limited class of properties: geometrical (spatio-temporal) quantities and patterns and ways in which changes in the quantities and patterns in one process cause changes in the quantities and patterns of other processes. These are all structural (spatio-temporal-causal) properties, as contrasted with qualitative ones, e.g., blue, sweet, pleasant, as given in sensation. The difference between positive and negative electricity, or between high and low frequency waves, may seem, and in nature may be, partly qualitative; but physics as a theory of nature takes into account only the spatio-temporal aspects or consequences of such qualities, whatever the latter may be. Physics thinks of nature as causally related spatio-temporal geometrical structures. Qualities as such, what Peirce (1931, pars. 1.300-318) called monads, firsts, or ‘feeling qualities,’ are omitted from the account of things found in physics and chemistry, except for the methodological point that we detect the presence of the various magnitudes and spatio-temporal structures by our qualitative human sense perceptions, visual or tactual. Thus we detect long wave lengths of light by our perceptions of red and short ones by our perceptions of blue. But in principle, I presume, we could design a machine to do this detecting for us, and then the red and blue as sensory qualities would be dispensed with. It has been said that a blind man can understand the whole of physical science. And in any case, when a physicist discusses the velocity of light, or the red-shift which shows that the universe is expanding, he is talking about something that would be there in nature if there were no animals with sensations of color left. It is not an official doctrine of physics, whatever some philosophers or some physicists may hold, that nature is dependent upon man for its existence or basic properties. Here I agree with Popper, as well as Einstein, against some quantum physicists.

In psychics a much greater range of properties is dealt with. Spatio-temporal-causal properties -- the shapes, motions, bodily behavior and interactions of animals, plants, and other things -- are not ignored. But psychics asks questions going far beyond those put in physics: how or what does an animal feel, intend, think purpose, love, or hate? Also why does it move or behave as it does? Here ‘why’ connotes, as it does not in physics, "With what motive, intention, or purpose, or inspired or irritated by what pleasant or unpleasant sensation or memory?" Not a whisper of this is officially present in what physicists or chemists say about their subject matters, even though sometimes physicists, in intended metaphor, speak of the ‘excited’ or ‘satisfied’ states of atoms.

Thus we have two forms of inquiry, the one restricting itself to the study of behavior, the description of behavior being austerely limited to geometrical and arithmetical properties, and the other also studying behavior, but interpreting it as far more than merely that, and as having its meaning, and perhaps also in part its causal explanation, in terms of a large class of concepts excluded from the physicists’ explanations. A central question of our culture simply is, "What is the relation between these two forms of inquiry?" Either the additional concepts of psychics are ultimately relevant to the whole of nature, or they are not. If they are not relevant, then mere behavior, as causally conditioned spatio-temporal changes and nothing more, is the only universal principle, and what we learn by studying animals adds nothing (beyond unusual complexity or subtlety) to our concept of reality in general. At most, such study so interpreted shows us that one corner of nature is in some respects absolutely peculiar, revealing the introduction of unprecedented forms of reality not to be explained by anything found in the rest of nature. This hard dualism appeals to few scientists; so we need not be surprised that there is a tendency to insist that the additional psychical concepts are mere complications, or mere ‘emergent properties,’ which should not influence our basic conception of reality or knowledge.

The sense and degree to which psychologists are behaviorists gets its significance from the fact that, in studying animals, that is, the sort of thing that we ourselves are, we have a dual access to reality, which we do not have in studying inanimate nature. We know what it is like to be a person studying rocks or molecules, in a sense in which we do not know what it is like to be a rock or a molecule. By memory we can generalize about the nature of our own experience, and then by analogy form some conception of the nature of ape, canine, or porpoise experience. But, with a rock, all that we seem to have are our human perceptions of it, these perceptions being how the rock influences our psychophysical being under certain conditions. We know the rock ‘from the outside,’ ourselves ‘from the inside.’ We know animality by being an animal; we do not know inanimate nature by being inanimate. This is simple, but I believe it is not superficial.

Either we can learn something about nature at large by reflecting upon ourselves as samples of natural fact, or we cannot. I hold that dualists and materialists alike are in effect telling us that from animals we can learn only about animals, but not about gases, fluids, or minerals. Note that if it is conceivable that these thinkers are wrong, they are barring the path of inquiry. For, if we can learn from animals something important about inanimate nature, we can do it only by rejecting both dualism and materialism. The dualist says that the psychical aspect found in animals occurs only there, and the materialist, too, says this, adding, however, that even in animals it is nothing theoretically very crucial but is only a special case in the panorama of reality.

What is the third possibility? Obviously this, that the ‘additional’ factors (over and above mere behavior) that are dealt with in psychics but ignored in physics are in principle universally applicable, provided we conceive these factors in their fully generalized variables. Just as physics generalizes variables of movement so that they can apply not only to a human hunter and his fleeing prey, but also to stars, planets, atoms, and photons, so psychics needs to generalize such ideas as feeling, perceiving, remembering, anticipating, intending, liking and disliking, so that they can apply not only to animals, but even to the real individual constituents of the vegetable and mineral portions of nature.

Say what you please about this being a reversion to ‘primitive hylozoism,’ or ‘primitive animism,’ it remains true that it is one of the three options we confront (if we ignore mere subjectivism or positivism) and that the other two are also open to easy rejection. How popular is dualism among scientists? How many scientists or philosophers are really happy with materialistic monism? Psychical monism avoids the most obvious demerits of its two rivals. It is a monism, yet it is not a materialism. I am confident that in time these two advantages will reverse the contemporary fashion among some philosophers and some scientists of inclining toward materialism. We cannot remain mere dualists, for that means giving up the hope of universal explanatory principles; and we cannot agree upon the materialistic form of monism, not only because it is an attempt to explain away mind, but also because it leaves ‘matter’ essentially mysterious. Neither psychics nor physics can satisfy us so long as the former is taken to exhibit either a purely special case of general but merely physical principles, or a sheer exception to the general principles. Rather, what we now know as psychics is indeed a special case of the general principles. However, the principles themselves are not merely, or most basically, physical but are psychical in a generalized sense. On this view ‘mind’ is not confined to a corner of nature but is everywhere in it, just as behavior is. But mind is the substance, and mere behavior, in the sense of spatio-temporal change, is the shadow, the skeletal outline only, the causal geometry, of nature.

In asking about mind or the psychical in nature I am not asking only, or even chiefly, Where in nature is thinking going on? I am asking also, and more particularly, Where in nature is there feeling, perceiving, remembering, desiring, liking and disliking, not necessarily in the higher forms of these functions that we human beings are capable of, but in some form, however primitive and simple, however odd or strange, when compared to our human forms?

First I had better say something about what makes our human way of experiencing and thinking different from that of other animals. The key to our human superiority is, scientists agree, in our symbolic power, as shown in all human languages. What is sometimes called the ‘language’ of birds, or bees, or monkeys is a very different thing from any human language. There is nothing like grammatical structure, systematic ways of combining words into sentences and paragraphs, nothing like nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, pronouns. Grammar is uniquely human. Capacity for it is common to all races and both sexes, and that alone is enough to show what is wrong with racism and male chauvinism.

Psychology can study the behavior of animals and try to guess what forms of perception, emotion, memory, and perhaps learning or problem solving of simple kinds are going on in these creatures. But the question arises, Where is the lower boundary of this science of animal mind? There is a book on "the psychology of microorganisms." I believe the book justifies its title. If so, mind in a broad sense pervades the entire animal kingdom. But what about plants, and what about so-called inanimate nature, the rocks and other minerals, and the liquids and gases?

First the plants. Modern botany accepts the cell theory of living things. All living things that we can see without a microscope consist of many far smaller living things that we cannot see, each of which is an organized individual. Is there a psychology of single cells? They do react to stimuli, and they do organize their internal activities remarkably well. This is most obvious in single-celled animals and plants, but I believe it is a reasonable assumption in all cells. It follows that, even if it is right (and some dispute this) to deny feeling or sensation to a tree or flowering plant, still the cells of which trees or plants consist may feel, may enjoy their activities. In that case, mind in some form may pervade the entire kingdom of living things. I take this view, and so do some other philosophers and some scientists. But some of these (e.g., Cochran 1971) go further. They believe (with Wordsworth and Shelley) that mind is everywhere in nature, even in inanimate things.

What are the reasons for thinking that inanimate objects such as rocks and chairs are devoid of mind? I can see four reasons:

1. Their inertness, inactivity, motionlessness. They do not seem to do anything.

2. Their lack of freedom in the sense of initiative, creative departure from mere routine. The predictability of astronomical events is a good example. The sole motions seem wholly matters of routine, or statistical upshots of huge members of microevents, as in the sun’s corona.

3. Their lack of individuality in the sense of unity and uniqueness. If a chair has parts -- pieces of wood, metal, plastic, etc -- why assign feeling or memory, say, to the whole chair rather than to each piece of wood, each nail or screw? In non-living things visible to the naked eye there is no clear distinction between whole and part, and no dynamic unity, as though something like a sequence of experiences were influencing the parts.

4. Their lack of apparent intrinsic purpose.

These are four valid reasons for denying that rocks or chairs are individual cases of mind. But this is compatible with psychicalism, which asserts, not that all things are or have minds (as the word ‘panpsychism’ may seem literally to connote), but only that all concrete or physical things (a) are minds of some high or low kind, or (b) are composed of minds, and that only active singulars are individually sentient.

Macroscopic inanimate objects are now known to be not the unitary, simply solid, inactive things they appear to be, but rather collections of numerous distinct, highly active things (molecules, atoms, particles). And there is no evidence that such things are wholly devoid of initiative; what evidence there is suggests the opposite.

As for purpose, we must distinguish between conscious purposes, formulated conceptually and deliberately aiming at more or less remote future results, and primitive, short-run, naive intentions. For example, when a bird sits on eggs, this may have nothing to do with foresight of the potential fledglings. It may be that the animal merely feels like assuming this posture, feels comfortable in it, and when forced to leave the eggs has a desire to return to them. Even so, this is a genuine though short-run purpose. Much more naive cases can be imagined. Fully generalized, concern for the future is a variable with an enormous, indeed infinite, range. There may be purpose, or at least desires, referring only to a tiny fraction of a second ahead, just as there may be memories with similarly short-run effective scope toward the past. To know that an active singular represented no value on this variable we should have to have absolute knowledge such as only deity could have. And with Leibniz and Berkeley I see no reason why God should create such entities, nor what his knowledge of them could have in common with his knowledge of sentient creatures realizing values. The latter knowledge is sympathetic participation, the former could be nothing of the kind. In the philosophies of Peirce and Whitehead, and even more explicitly in mine, sympathy, ‘feeling of feeling,’ is an ultimate principle, applicable to deity and every other singular actuality.

It is worth noting, too, that Darwinism explains the seemingly purposiveness of organs and other inherited factors by natural selection operating between groups of individuals assumed to be striving to achieve various short-run objectives, as when the rabbit tries to mate or to escape the fox. Individual purposes are really implicit in the scheme all along, and what is explained is not purpose as such, but only how through many generations there has been a slow increase in the variety and complexity of the purposes. Mutations are indeed not, so far as we know, selected by any overall purpose favoring evolution; but this is compatible with there being short-run and very naive purposes, desires, or feelings in the atoms and molecules constituting the genes, as well as in every cell and every metazoan with a nervous system.

Cosmic teleology may be seen in the basic laws which evolutionary explanation assume and which made possible the glorious ‘web of life’ of which Darwin so wonderfully speaks. But the laws are statistical; they are not Newtonian or classical. They explain how the details of evolution were possible, not why precisely those details occurred. Biology is a fantastically unpredictive science, and this is no mere matter of complexity. I hold that it is absurd in principle to think of predicting details of animal behavior (not to mention animal feelings). Even Skinner is not really doing that. The illusion that he is doing it arises partly from not taking seriously the full meaning of ‘details.’ Tell him the kind of action you want the pigeon to perform and he may give what you ask; but by details I do not mean a kind of action, but the precise unique movements.

What are the advantages of giving up the notion of mere dead, mindless physical things? Are there any advantages to scientists? With Leibniz I suspect that the main advantages of the doctrine are philosophical, in enabling us to arrive at a view of life and nature in which the results of science are given their significance along with the values with which art, ethics, and religion are concerned. In a list of advantages that could be given, some would be relevant to strictly philosophical, religious, aesthetic and ethical issues. The partial list given here will be limited to some advantages which are of relevance to scientists as well as philosophers:

1. We get rid of the problem, "How could mere matter produce life and minds?" Instead, the problem is only, "How did higher types of mind develop out of lower types?" But we have that problem anyway in the evolution of animals. So we have reduced two problems to one.

2. We do justice to the fact, which strikes nearly every scientist, that between so-called ‘lifeless’ matter and primitive forms of living matter there is only a relative difference, not an absolute one. Science thinks of life as a complication of what was there all along. On the view I am defending, this is correct. In principle, life (in a generalized sense) and mind were there all along, but in primitive forms, much more primitive even than in a single plant cell.

3. Psychicalism has the signal advantage, hinted at by Francis Bacon, that it can construe causal connectedness of events in terms of generalized concepts of memory and perception. Materialism and dualism lack these resources and are in Hume’s predicament about causality. Memory and perception are effects whose causes are intrinsically given to them. These are our only clues to the intelligible connectedness of events.

4. A special case of psychicalism’s advantage in understanding causal relations is its ability to do what many scientists and philosophers have despaired of doing, give some explanation of how mind and body are related in animals. Why is it that one’s thoughts and feelings vary with changing states of one’s body, and why is it that with changing states of one’s mind one’s body also changes? If one suffers some terrible disappointment, it may make one physically sick; and if one catches a disease one may become delirious and think and feel in strange ways.

Take the case of pain. We have this feeling if certain cells of ours undergo damage. But if the cells have their own feelings, they can hardly enjoy being damaged. So what is our suffering but our participating in their suffering? Hurt certain of my cells and you hurt me. Hurt my friend and you hurt me. My cells are the friends I have always with me and always care about, whereas my other friends I may be separated from and may forget or learn to dislike. The mind-body relation, I suggest, as Plato hinted long ago, is a relation of sympathy; it is the most instinctive of all forms of sympathy, the form we are born with and do not have to learn. I seriously believe, and not alone I, that this is the key to the influence of body upon mind. There is mind on both sides of the relation, but mind on very different levels. The gap between the levels is crossed by a kind of sympathy. We share in the emotional life of our cells. That is why, in good health, we can have a feeling of wellbeing. Our cells are enjoying themselves, and our sense of the goodness of being alive is partly our vague sense of the goodness of their lives for them. This is how the bodily cells influence our feelings.

"But why," you may ask, "do our feelings influence the bodily cells?" I answer, "By sympathy in the reverse direction." We in our human way share in the subhuman emotional life of cells; they in their subhuman way share in our emotional life. Since cells are limited creatures, compared to us, the vagueness I just spoke of in our sense of cellular feelings must be much more extreme in the cell’s sense of our feelings. The higher type of mind can have better grasp of lower types than lower types can have of higher types. That is why we human beings have science and other creatures do not.

I admit one possible objection. Scientists do not much like the idea of mind influencing body. ‘Interaction’ is the name given to this doctrine. It would be simpler for physiology if one could suppose that physical activities in the body are entirely uninfluenced by our thoughts and feelings. I am not impressed by this argument, since I think that nature is not constructed for the convenience of physiologists. And one still has to find some way to relate our experiences to physiological facts.

5. We solve the problem which Berkeley saw so clearly of relating primary and secondary qualities in the scheme of things. The primary qualities are abstract causal-geometrical relationships; the secondary qualities are more concrete and apply to the terms standing in these relationships. They give something of the internal natures of events, whereas causal geometry only relates events to other events. Psychicalism holds that something more or less like our secondary qualities are in all active singulars.

6. Including, as one should, the more objective of the so-called tertiary or value qualities with the secondary (the two are really inseparable), we can give a psychical account of the relation between perception and behavior and go part of the way toward answering the question "Why?" of behavior. Thus, why do animals tend to eat sweet things and avoid bitter tasting things? Because these qualities are intrinsically emotional, the one positively, the other negatively, reinforcing eating. To taste something as sweet is already an incipient acceptance of it, to taste it as bitter is an incipient rejection of it. This account can be connected, as I have shown elsewhere (Hartshorne 1934, pp. 243-266), with relevant facts of physiology and evolutionary biology. But mere physics cannot include such an account.

7. Carlyle said, "To know is to sympathize." It is arguable that at least knowledge of our friends, and even of our enemies, is of this nature. The doctrine of mere matter, mere mindless and feeling-less stuff or process, puts a limit to the things with which we can sympathize. But the psychicalist view holds that physical nature is mind in other than human forms with which we have more or less mutual participation. A great physicist once said to me, "To understand an atom you must sympathize with it." Perhaps he knew what he was talking about. This man understands molecular structure so well that he has been called ‘Mr. Molecule.’

Wright, Thorpe, Zucker, and Waddington ask what psychicalism could contribute methodologically to scientific work. My view is that the help natural science can derive from a current philosophy is largely for the future to disclose. A philosophical insight implies a program of empirical research for a thousand or five thousand years. Parmenides and Zeno produced Democritus with his atoms, and after twenty centuries Dalton, Lobachewsky, Planck, and others began to find something like the right way to conceive the smaller active constituents. However, I do think a few examples can be given even now.

Even if science is necessarily limited to a purely behavioristic view of its results (which I do not grant), psychicalism can at least have heuristic value. As a minor illustration: I have written two books (The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation, 1934 and Born to Sing, 1973) which, with all their faults (especially apparent to me in the earlier work), contain pointers, I believe, by which competent investigators might be helped to deal with some problems in psycho-physiology and in the study of animal behavior. In both cases psychicalistic ideas were useful in arriving at some empirical facts, for example, about the composite nature of ‘loudness’ as a variable of sense experience (Hartshorne 1934, pp. 61-72), or the biological significance of ‘highly developed’ bird song, or of contrast and uncertainty in the sequence of songs or phrases (Hartshorne 1973, pp. 106-112, 117f, 119-136, 151-188).

In a recent issue of the journal Behavior there are two articles (Baker 1973; Dawkins 1973) making positive use of one feature of process philosophy, its concept of creative novelty transcending causal determinateness other than statistical. Process philosophy is not referred to, but it is that philosophy which best fits what these investigators are doing.

It is arguable that, had Einstein known a metaphysics more favorable to quantum physics than the Spinozism and other similar doctrines influencing him, he might not have spent the latter decades of his life vainly attempting to recover the absolute ‘incarnate reason’ of classical causality which had been made irrelevant by twentieth-century discoveries, including his own. Materialism and unqualified mechanism seem no longer helpful, even in physics.

The greatest geneticist I have known (Sewall Wright) believes with me that there is nothing in all nature except mind on various levels. The greatest two philosophers of recent times, on my criteria, also believed this. So have many other fine intellects. I am proud to be in their company. We are not a majority, but an elite minority.

It is in order to ask why a view with so many advantages should be a minority view. There are several possible explanations. (a) I have already discussed the primary one: since, owing to the limited resolving power of our perceptions, the sentience of most of nature is hidden from our direct and distinct experience, it was natural enough for early civilized man to form the division of nature into animal, vegetable, and mineral or inanimate. Crystallizing into common sense, and backed by Aristotle, the view acquired massive inertia which lasts to this day. (b) It was also strengthened and seemingly confirmed by the Newtonian period in science which, like Greek atomism, but even mote so, did indeed view matter in terms contradictory to psychical conceptions of it. The fact that science has now destroyed the Newtonian framework (so far as relevant to the issue we are discussing) seems not to have been properly grasped by most philosophers, though Whitehead (1926) has spelled out the story with great power. (c) When Darwinism destroyed the old teleology (which never was a good form of psychicalism, since it implied that the divine psyche was the only one that decided anything), biology seemed to confirm the prejudice against attributing purpose or other psychical factors to nature in general. But since more than one of the leading living Darwinians hold the psychical view, this reason can scarcely be conclusive against psychicalism as such. And indeed it is not logically relevant to that issue, but only to the question, Just what form of psychicalism is worth considering? (d) Science and philosophy alike require constant vigilance against the danger of anthropomorphism. It is easy to caricature psychicalism so that it looks like an anthropomorphism. We psychicalists are accused of attributing human traits to the subhuman, yes, even to the inanimate. In fact we attribute not a single specifically human trait even to apes, let alone to atoms. We do not say that apes or atoms remember, perceive, or know as human beings remember, perceive and know. Yet there is evidence that apes do remember, perceive, and know. In the broadest behavioral sense, remembering is taking account in present action of past events (experience) within the individual in question; perceiving is taking account in present action of past events in the environment. Even atoms take at least the immediate past into account; for if they did not there could be no causal account of their behavior. Therefore, the psychicalist holds, they either remember or perceive or both. (For good reasons it is perception, not memory, that is to be thought of as strictly universal. In the first experience of a new individual, memory must by definition be lacking; insofar as electrons and the like lack enduring individual identity, neither can they remember. But they must perceive, take account of, past events around them.)

I believe the charge of anthropomorphism can with good reason be reversed. Those who say that, apart from the specifically human forms, or the specifically mammalian or animal forms, nature is devoid of psychical traits altogether are indeed exaggerating the role of man or manlike creatures in the world. They are saying that our kind of creature introduces mind as such into nature. Apart from us and our kind there is nothing with intrinsic life, feeling, value, or any sort whatever. Is this not in a class with the idea that our planet is at the center of the universe? Behaviorists point to the public observability of behavior compared to mind taken as something more than just behavior. But if science officially limits itself to behavior, this does not mean that unofficially we cease to acknowledge, in ourselves at least, such qualities as pleasure, pain, sweetness, sourness, fragrance, happiness, joy, sorrow, love, and hate. If we refuse to grant anything generically (of course not specifically) like these to other creatures, we are indeed self-centered or anthropomorphic, whatever we may say.

A version of the charge of anthropomorphism is the objection (urged, e.g., by Dobzhansky) that psychicalism takes a special late form of reality and imputes it also to earlier forms (the charge of ‘preformationism’). But this begs the question, which is precisely whether mind as such or in general is a special form of reality. Animal mind is indeed a special form. But as the psychicalist uses the words, mind, or the psychical, is an infinite variable, coextensive in range with ‘active singulars,’ and what is not an active singular he takes to be an aggregate of singulars or else an abstraction there-from. Viewed from without, or through the sense organs, the psychical appears as behavior, but from within, or in itself, it is feeling, memory, anticipation, and the like. On the higher levels only does it include what we normally mean by ‘thought’ or ‘consciousness.’ Lower creatures feel but scarcely know or think, and if we speak of them as conscious, as Wright does, we stretch the sense of the word. This can be done, but then we need another word to distinguish high-level, thoughtful, cognitive experience or feeling from mere experience or feeling. The verbal confusion arises because in adult human beings, feelings are always more or less thoughtful or conscious. But how far is a baby ‘conscious’ of its feelings? Does it not simply feel, without judging how it feels, which is what ‘conscious’ normally connotes? (e) The disinclination of many to accept psychicalism probably arises partly from the immense demands which the doctrine make upon one’s imagination. How are we to imagine feelings as different from ours as an atom is from our bodies? However, since physicists now agree that the structural aspects of atoms are unimaginable, though mathematically expressible, I wonder if this ground of objection retains any validity. Once more I suggest that the ‘pathetic fallacy’ is to be balanced against the possibility of a ‘prosaic fallacy’: supposing the world to be as tame as our sluggish convention-ridden imaginations imply (f) An objection sometimes raised to the doctrine of psychicalism is that it seems to violate the valid principle that concepts must express contrast. If ‘mind,’ at least as ‘feeling,’ applies everywhere, do not these concepts lose all distinctive meaning? However, as Leibniz showed, two contrasts remain: that between active singulars and groups of these, only the former of which literally feel; and that between low and high levels or degrees of feeling, or minding. Thus contrast is preserved. This logical discovery of Leibniz seems insufficiently appreciated.

Conclusion

Since the only non-question-begging reason for denying feelings to some parts of nature is their lack (for our direct perception) of signs of activity, individual unity, initiative, and purpose, and since physics and chemistry have demonstrated how limited in penetration our mere sense perceptions are, how radically they fail to disclose what is really there in nature, it follows that the entire traditional foundation for materialism and dualism alike has been destroyed by the advance of knowledge. These doctrines are based on imputing to sense perception an adequacy for direct disclosure of the secrets of nature which we now know it does not have. There is no part of nature which we know or could know to be lacking entirely in any of the four respects mentioned. Consequently the concept of ‘mere dead insentient matter’ is an appeal to invincible ignorance. At no time will this expression ever constitute knowledge. Long ago Leibniz saw this with wonderful clarity, but he hid the importance of his insight by interweaving it with some of the most extraordinary fantasies in intellectual history, as well as with the consequences of some pseudo-axioms that he for the first time conceived with full sharpness so that their logical implications were apparent. The reactions of many scholars to this dazzling mixture have been a revealing test of their naivete in metaphysics. Some have defended it as not necessarily untrue in essentials; most have attacked it as so incredible that we have little to learn from it except how far one great mind managed to go ingeniously wrong. Yet the truth, as I see it, is that, in spite of some fundamental blunders, Leibniz took the greatest single step in the second millennium of philosophy (in East and West) toward a rational analysis of the concept of physical reality.

REFERENCES

Baker, M. C. 1973. "Stochastic Properties of the Foraging Behavior of Six Species of Migratory Shorebirds." Behavior 45:24 1-270.

Cochran, A. A. 1971. "Relationships Between Quantum Physics and Biology." Foundations of Physics 1:235-249.

Dawkins, R. and M. 1973. "Decisions and the Uncertainty of Behavior." Behavior 45:83-103. Hartshorne, C. 1934. The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation. University of Chicago Press (reprinted by Kennikat Press, 1968).

Hartshorne, C. 1973. Born to Sing: an Interpretation and World Survey of Bird Song. Indiana University Press.

Peirce, C. S. 1931. The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Edited by C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss. Harvard University Press.

Whitehead, A. N. 1926. Science and the Modern World. Macmillan.

Whitehead, A. N. 1938. Modes of Thought (see especially "Nature and Life"). Macmillan.

Sewall Wright has been Ernest D. Burton Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and Leon J. Cole Professor of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin. He has been Professor Emeritus at Wisconsin since 1960.

I am speaking here as a zoologist, specifically a geneticist, who has been concerned with the implications of his field for the philosophy of science. While it is a field that is much less mature than physics, it occupies such a central position in the general field of knowledge that its implications should be given special weight.

A physicist or chemist can get along fairly well with a commonsense dualism in attempting to discover the laws of nature which govern the vast world of inanimate things. The occurrence of beings like himself, composed of matter that seems to be inhabited by minds capable of some control over the course of events, may be somewhat disturbing, but mankind constitutes such an infinitesimal portion of the cosmos that the physical scientist may for the moment ignore it in his difficult task of finding the basis of cosmic order.

The humanists and social scientists can adopt the same commonsense philosophy while concerning themselves solely with the activities of human beings.

The biologist is continually in trouble. The objects of his study range from a class of molecules that have the basic self-duplicating property of living things, through cells which suggest purely physical systems, through animals which give increasing evidence of having minds, to human beings in whom streams of consciousness seem to involve continual choices of action, at the opposite pole from control by impersonal laws of nature. The zoologist cannot escape the problem of the relation of matter and mind.

Implications of Physical Science

Let us compare further the two kinds of knowledge which must somehow be reconciled in a unified philosophy of science. While the physical scientists have not yet arrived at a fully satisfactory account of the most elementary particles, they have acquired precise knowledge of the hierarchy of entities starting from proton, neutron and electron, through atom and molecule, to objects of our own order of size for which the precision of the laws of mechanics have made possible the extraordinary achievements of technology. Beyond this comes the detailed knowledge of the surface of the earth of the geologist, the astronomer’s knowledge of the sun and planets, stars in general, our galaxy and the array of galaxies, leading again to the fringes of knowledge in cosmological studies.

The dominant philosophy of physical science since the time of Galileo, with some wavering in the present century, has been that of the famous dictum of Laplace:

Streams of Consciousness

In marked contrast is the kind of knowledge provided to each person in his own stream of consciousness. At any moment this has a focus, but one which shifts continually, now on perception of the outside world, now on a memory which has somehow been stored out of mind (perhaps for many decades), now on an emotional state, now on a toothache, now on construction of an abstract pattern of thought, now on communication with others, but again and again on the often painful process of choosing among courses of action, and then of acting.

Nothing could contrast more than the precise determinism of our knowledge of the external world when pains are taken to control conditions, and the fitful character and apparent freedom of choice of the stream of consciousness.

The latter, nevertheless, is obviously the primary reality. The former is wholly derived from bits of the streams of consciousness of many observers and is restricted to those aspects which can be communicated. It can be stored best in books, but actively exists only in minds, within which it appears to consist of a set of rather pale second-hand deductions. Its restriction to the so-called primary properties of matter (location in space, changes in this, and association of matter with forces describable in turn only by changes in location) contrasts with the richness of the stream of consciousness. Colors and sounds are reduced to wavelengths; sensations of heat and cold are reduced to readings on a thermometer; taste, smell, feel are ignored in precise formulations.

It now turns out, moreover, that even position in space is not absolute but relative to circumstances of the observers, each of whom has his own private four dimensions of space and time for locating events. Apparently exact agreement is possible only because communication is restricted to observers who are not moving relatively to each other at velocities of more than a minute fraction of the velocity of light.

Moreover, all of this common knowledge of the so-called primary properties is based on measurements in terms of units: centimeter, gram, second, with operational definitions which are recipes for voluntary actions. Reality clearly consists primarily of streams of consciousness. This fact must take precedence over the laws of nature of physical science in arriving at a unified philosophy of science, even though it must be largely ignored in science itself.

Statistical Laws of Nature

In my own case, I started as a student with the usual conviction that biology, and science in general, requires a rigorously deterministic viewpoint. I still, indeed, hold this viewpoint in practice, but with a radical revision of the philosophical implications of science. My deterministic viewpoint in zoology was somewhat disturbed by reading Bergson in 1912, but not for long. What really made over my thinking was reading (in 1914) Karl Pearson’s Grammar of Science (published in 1892), and a book, The Origin and Nature of Life (1912), by the biochemist, Benjamin Moore. Curiously enough the philosophic position that I arrived at was not held by either and was vigorously opposed by Pearson.

What I derived from Pearson was a different attitude toward what I then considered the absolute laws of nature. He treated them as merely condensed descriptions of how things are observed to behave, no different in kind from statistical laws describing human behavior, such as the law of supply and demand or the regression of marriage rate on the volume of trade.

Another idea that he firmly implanted was the uniqueness in principle of every event:

Thus it is not possible to deal deterministically with single events. Science can only deal with classes of more or less similar events and thus is necessarily statistical.

The Physical and Biologic Hierarchies

From Moore, I derived a vivid appreciation of the importance of the hierarchic structure of existence. The crucial point was that a living organism is more comparable to a molecule or atom among inanimate things than to a mere unorganized aggregation of materials like a stone. Conversely a molecule or atom might seem much like a little organism if we could observe the incessant activity which the physical scientists now attribute to them.

These ideas and others seemed to me to point to dual-aspect panpsychism as the simplest synthesis, in spite of the opposition of Pearson to any metaphysical speculation and Moore’s ignoring of the issue.

I must admit that I have not found many scientists who appreciate its simplicity. The only member of the faculty of the University of Chicago with whom I discussed it during my long stay there who at all shared this viewpoint was Charles Hartshorne of the Philosophy Department, who had arrived at it along an utterly different route. Among zoologists, much the closest in viewpoint seems to be Bernard Rensch, who probably also arrived at it along a different route.

Matter and Mind

There have been several different views of the relations between matter and mind. It is impossible, as brought out by Berkeley and Hume, to disprove solipsism, the view that the observer’s stream of consciousness is all that exists. Most babies, however, probably learn within a week or two after birth that they are subject to combinations of unwished-for sensations of such consistency as to indicate something real. With the later dawn of self-consciousness, they learn that there are others with streams of consciousness like their own who can be communicated with. I should emphasize here, to avoid what seems to be a common misunderstanding, that the term ‘consciousness’ by no means necessarily implies self-consciousness.

Primitive peoples are said to share the animistic viewpoint that all things are more or less like human beings in their capacities for spontaneous action. At a later cultural stage a sharp distinction is usually made between two kinds of existence which, it is supposed, may occur separately as mindless matter and as disembodied mind but, at least in man, in an association of body and soul. It is usually thought that this is indissoluble in life but that the soul persists after death without communication with the living. The spiritualists, including some scientists, however, believe that communication with disembodied spirits is a real phenomenon. The regularity with which supposed evidence has been shown to be fraudulent, as well as the difficulty of reconciliation with natural science, has led most persons to profound skepticism.

Modern science has developed in the main under the concept that nonliving matter is wholly mindless and is subject to completely deterministic laws of nature. A good many scientists have held, however, that there is some vital principle in all living things, not necessarily mind, which is absent in nonliving matter. The list of leading recent biologists who have been vitalists includes Hans Driesch, S.H. Jannings, Ralph Lillie and Edmond Sinnott. Bergson developed his philosophical system around the concept of an elan vital.

Most scientists as well as most nonscientists have probably assumed that the higher animals, at least, have minds; though some, no doubt, have followed Descartes in considering all living beings other than man as mere automata.

The prevailing trend in biology, however, has been away from vitalism and any causal influence of mind on the course of events, toward a complete reduction to the principles of physics and chemistry. Jacques Loeb was the leader in America at the beginning of this century in insisting on the exclusion of all but physico-chemical explanations in biology. The limit of this trend would seem to be complete materialism, the denial of mind as a category of existence. This, however, is an absurdity. Mind, even though denied any role in the inexorable course of events, must be retained at least as an observer.

Emergence of Life and Mind

If the nonliving world is completely devoid of mind and if, as it seems necessary to believe, there was a time when no life could have existed, living beings must either have had a supernatural origin or have been developed somehow from nonliving matter. Linnacus accounted for the origin of all species of plants and animals by separate creation. Lamarck, by advocating evolution, pushed creation back to a possible single origin of life.

The apparent gap between nonliving and living has now been bridged by nucleic acids, a class of polymeric organic molecules composed of a succession of small units (nucleotides) of four sorts, the order of which determines an indefinitely large number of different specificities. The latter is also true of the proteins (composed of 20 kinds of amino acids). They are the principal component, other than water, of all living forms, but the nucleic acids alone have the remarkable property of being capable of duplicating their patterns, whatever they may be, from small molecules in their medium. They may be considered living molecules. They can evolve by duplication of their specificities as of the new type if, by any accident, they undergo a change (or mutation). They, as genes, are the units of heredity. They determine the synthesis of protein molecules of the most diverse specificities according to a code in which succession of three nucleotides determine one amino acid. The essential identity of the code in the most diverse organisms is strong evidence for a single origin of life on earth.

Nucleotides and amino acids are substances which, there is reason to believe, could have been formed, and polymerized into nucleic acid and protein respectively, under certain conditions on a lifeless earth. The origin of living organisms from lifeless matter is thus a reasonable hypothesis.

This brings us back to the question of the origin of the mind. Lloyd Morgan (1933; cf. Wright 1935) treated the origin of mind in the course of evolution as a phenomenon of the same sort as the emergence of a new organ or physiological capacity. A new organ, however, involves nothing more mysterious than differential growth, leading for example to an outpocketing from flat tissue that turns out to be useful and can be further elaborated. Similarly, loss, addition or rearrangement in a protein molecule may enable it to bind other molecules in such a way as to catalyze a new metabolic process. Emergence of either of these sorts, however surprising their consequences, poses no serious philosophical difficulty. Emergence of mind from no mind at all is sheer magic. We conclude that the evolution of mind must have been coextensive with the evolution of the body. Moreover, mind must already have been there when life arose and indeed must be a universal aspect of existence -- still assuming that mind cannot arise from nothing.

The emergence of mind in the course of individual development from the fertilized egg presents a similar problem and one that is an everyday occurrence instead of a single event in the remote past. It would appear that the mind of a human being must develop from something of the nature of mind in the fertilized egg and, back of this, in the separate germ cells and in the nucleic acid molecules.

Panpsychism

As already noted the living cell, because of its tightly organized character, is more comparable to a molecule than to a mere aggregation of matter. It may be thought of as a supermolecule composed principally of C, H, O, N, P and S. Multicellular organisms, including man, are in turn not mere aggregations of cells, but so tightly organized that they may be considered super-super-molecules, ultimately with properties which are wholly those of the component atoms in the very complex combination. The arguments from continuity require the presence of mind in cells and, back of this, in molecules, atoms, and all that exists.

This can be looked at in two ways: According to dualistic panpsychism, matter and mind are two modes of existence which are universally associated. In the philosophy of Spinoza such an association was a necessary consequence of his identification of God and the universe and his conception of extension and thought as two of the attributes of God.

This dualistic panpsychism is not quite the same as monistic panpsychism, according to which mind and matter are merely two aspects of the same reality: as it is to itself and as it seems to other minds with which it interacts.

FIG. I/3.2 GRAPHIC HERE

If A and B represent two minds, largely private, but nevertheless capable of interacting directly or indirectly: A perceives certain regularities in its stream of consciousness which it ascribes to an external reality, B; but, as it does not enter into B’s stream of consciousness, it in general tends to consider B as merely an unconscious source of disturbance, i.e., as matter. B similarly deduces matter, A, from the interaction with A’s stream of consciousness.

Each is aware of many such external realities and these are perceived to have interactions with each other which can be arranged in a coordinate system consisting of two dimensions of direction in addition to one of remoteness. The order of succession of events provides a fourth dimension, time.

In certain cases, the behavior of external matter is of such a nature as to indicate the presence of a stream of consciousness, another mind, with which varying degrees of communication become possible. In still other cases, the external reality parallels the internal so completely as to compel identification as a peripheral aspect of the observer himself, his own body. In most eases, however, there is no indication of any mind and the objective world thus seems to consist largely of mindless matter.

Under the dual-aspect view, the objective world of natural science with its hierarchies of physical and biological entities must exactly parallel an inner world of mind. Because of the flowing character of the latter, parallelism should be sought not in matter as mere mass and occupation of space, but rather in the incessant action which modern physics finds in its units; the wavelike properties of proteins, neutrons and electrons, photons and its other elementary entities, down to Planck’s quanta as the ultimate known units of action. At a higher level is the incessant action within molecules, including nucleic acid and protein. The metabolic activities within a cell, and its activities in relation to other cells may be considered the external aspects of the cell’s stream of consciousness. Introspection throws some light on the matter in the case of the multicellular organism. My own stream of consciousness obviously includes that of only a minute portion of my cells at any time. In a considerable part of the time (in dreamless sleep) it does not exist, although the cells continue their activities. When it does exist, it focuses now on one thing, now on another, the external aspects of which are the integrated activities of different but overlapping sets of cortical neurons which come successfully into dominance. That there is any unity in the stream of consciousness indicates that those of separate cells fuse. They cannot be the windowless monads of Leibniz.

The store of memory, carried along out of mind in ways that are the object of active research, undoubtedly contributes most, by activation of its components, to the unification, except in the rare cases in which two independent stores are built up, giving the basis for dominance at different times of one or the other of two personalities.

When we pass to the next higher step in the biologic hierarchy, the social organism, we at once perceive a difficulty. We speak of the ‘spirit of America,’ but it is difficult to think of this as anything but a figure of speech. It can, indeed, exist only as a feeling of consensus in the minds of separate individuals.

Choice and Determinism

Subjectively, mind seems to involve the continual exercise of choice, always of course within a limited range of possibilities. How is this freedom to be reconciled with the apparent determinism of natural science? Part of the answer is, already noted, that the laws of nature are ultimately statistical and no more preclude choice on the part of individual components than do statistical laws of human behavior.

There could not be statistical regularity, however, without at least some regularity in the behavior of individuals. Freedom of the will is sometimes treated as if it were equivalent to caprice, but mere chance is as little characteristic of free choice as absolute determinism. If one situation is much like another, the choice of the best course of action is likely to be the same. Apparent determinism along a chain of cause and effect may be looked upon as the external aspect of a sequence of choices.

It is to be noted that physics itself has had to abandon Laplace’s concept of absolute determinism since Pearson wrote the Grammar of Science. Because of Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy, physical science has had to arrive at statistical mechanics as its ultimate form of statement.

This still leaves the question as to how the larger organisms can behave other than by statistical laws which should simulate complete determinism with the utmost precision because of the large number of elementary components (some 1032 protons and neutrons). It is, however, of the essence of an organism (as of a man-made machine) that it contains numerous switch or trigger mechanisms which bypass purely statistical behavior. I like an illustration of this which I used in a class discussion in May, 1927, a day or two after Lindberg’s flight across the Atlantic, which seemed almost as sensational an achievement then as the first flight to the moon a few years ago.

It was a rather remarkable phenomenon from a purely physical standpoint when a great mass of material rose from the ground in Long Island, moved steadily in spite of buffeting winds across the Atlantic and finally settled down gently at the Paris Airport. Yet if an engineer could have studied the air pressures on wings, cabin and ailerons (the movements a the latter under control of the lever), the motion of the propellers, the mechanical connections of these to the motor, and the gas explosions in the latter, he would have found that the plane was merely following a necessary course, determined at all moments by well-established physical principles -- except that this would not account for the motions of the levers. This, however, would have involved only an infinitesimal portion of the total energy transactions.

A physiologist, taking up the analysis at this point, would find that the levers moved as they did because of a certain succession of muscle contractions in the pilot’s arm. He might trace the energy transactions in the latter in full detail to the consumption of a certain amount of glucose and find that they were strictly in accord with the conservation of energy, except that he might not understand why there was a particular succession of stimuli from neuromuscular junctions. Another physiologist would find that these were controlled by a chain of neurons from the brain connected by synapses. The energy transactions are here infinitesimal compared with those in muscles, but again have been shown to be in accord with the conservation of energy. He might not understand just what happened in the synapses which determined which neurons were activated, but would find that only an infinitesimal amount of the energy of the nerve currents was involved. The flight of the plane would be fully accounted for deterministically except for the product of a succession of infinitesimals. Yet the whole was according to Lindberg’s plan.

A high degree of freedom of choice by the whole is thus consistent with apparent deterministic behavior of the parts. This is very different from control of the whole by minute indeterminacies, something that is prevented by self-regulatory processes.

Respect for the choices of the entities at all levels in the hierarchy does set limits to the freedom of each. The dual-aspect hypothesis implies that each event depends 100 percent on choice as the inner aspect of physical causation, but, with the whole history of the universe converging on it, it depends on the resolution of the choices of all entities at all levels in the hierarchy. The whole can dominate only in ways that involve concurrence of the parts.

Clifford and Pearson

As I have noted, I arrived at this dual-aspect panpsychism in 1914 after reading Pearson’s Grammar of Science and Moore’s Origin and Nature of Life. I was surprised after looking into these books for the first time in 60 years to find that I had not taken this philosophic position directly from either author. Pearson did, however, insist that the field of science is the contents of the minds of normal observers, not the things themselves. He said:

Pearson’s definition of consciousness differs from mine:

Pearson thus did not consider mere instantaneous awareness of a sensation as consciousness. He included decision making in consciousness but considered its apparent freedom a delusion.

With respect to metaphysics he wrote:

Obviously I did not derive the concept of dual-aspect panpsychism directly from Pearson. There is also no suggestion of it in Moore. It was however, the ideas which I derived from them that led me to it in 1914.

The first reference to this viewpoint, which I encountered later, was in a paper by Troland (1922), who presented it very clearly and referred to a number of earlier presentations going back to Fechner in 1863 and included Clifford (1879), which I then read and found a very clear presentation. Pearson (who had edited a posthumous volume of Clifford’s mathematical papers) fully accepted Clifford’s concept of matter and of physical phenomena, frequently using the term ‘construct’ (which he credited to Clifford), but rejected his monistic concept (without giving any exposition beyond the vague reference to "Clifford’s ‘mind stuff,’" quoted above). This reference did not tempt me in 1914 to look up Clifford, but I evidently reconstructed his position from what Pearson did accept of his views on matter, as more acceptable to me than Pearson’s. Pearson seems to have derived his philosophy of science largely from Clifford but left out the keystone. After taking the Grammar of Science back to the library and reading Moore’s book and mulling over them, I seem to have put Clifford’s keystone in place without realizing that Pearson had rejected it.

My purpose, and I presume that of all others who have approached the subject from the scientific side, has been to find a metaphysics which, with the minimum of speculation, finds a place for the obviously primary reality of the stream of consciousness, while fully accepting the findings of science. Those who have reached a similar conclusion on the primacy of mind, but from the viewpoint of philosophy, such as Whitehead (1925) and Hartshorne (1942, 1954), have built up more elaborate metaphysical systems.

This difference in aim has led to some divergence in dealing with the Universe as the world of mind, within which all subordinate minds must be included in some sense, from either point of view. The question is whether, at one extreme, the mind of the Universe is all-knowing and omnipotent, or at the other, it is merely that which is superimposed on the point-to-point interactions of the minds of the components as the integrating factor, in much the same relation as that of my mind to the minds of my cells and lower entities in the hierarchy of existence. As one concerned with the philosophy of science rather than philosophy in general, I must take the latter view, recognizing that there is a great deal that science does not and probably never will know.

When the astronomers tell us that it requires more than a billion years for a message to pass from certain observed objects to our galaxy at the maximum velocity accepted by physics (3x 10¹⁰ cm/sec.) and that, apart from this, there is integration only by universal gravitation, the universe seems rather loosely integrated. It is possible that my time scale is too infinitesimal to recognize organization on a cosmic scale, but here I am disturbed by the big-bang theory of cosmology. If the universe, as we know it, is exploding and has been doing so for only a moderate number of billions of years, after a condensed phase in which all prior organization must have been obliterated, the likelihood of a high state of organization as a whole seems small indeed.

The astronomers do not, however, appear to have reached definitive views on cosmology. Perhaps there was no big bang. Perhaps there are means of communication vastly more rapid than the velocity of light. A philosophy of science must, however, restrict itself to interpretations based on the current findings of science with the caveat that these are certain to change in ways which we cannot predict.

Science and Philosophy

Finally, what differences in the methodology of science are suggested by adoption of dual-aspect panpsychism in place of determinism? I fully agree with Pearson here that science is restricted to verifiable knowledge and thus must exclude the knowledge of our streams of consciousness, because it is unverifiable by anyone else. We must continue to accept a rigorous determinism as far as possible, and supplement this by probability distributions where necessary, even though we interpret the determinism philosophically as the external aspect of choices throughout the hierarchy of existence and make use of this philosophical interpretation in choosing topics for research. Some use of subjective terms may be warranted in describing the behavior of human beings and perhaps of higher animals to avoid ponderous circumlocutions, but should be avoided in attempts at the most precise formulations. I stated this emphatically in the first paper in which I indicated my philosophical position, a review (1921) of a book by C. M. Child on The Origin and Development of the Nervous System:

I took the same attitude on the roles of science and philosophy in my first major paper on evolution in 1931. In this paper, I tried to interpret evolution as a continually shifting balance, spatially and temporally, among what I called the pressures of mutation, selection, and migration on gene frequencies, in conjunction with the effects of random drift composed of random variations in these pressures and of local accidents of sampling. These provide material for inter-group selection at a level, the interaction system, higher than that provided for by mass selection of individual mutations. There was no reference to any role of mind except in a paragraph immediately before the summary in which I indicated both my philosophic position and what I considered the necessity for restriction to deterministic and probabilistic statements in a scientific treatment. I would like to cite this paragraph which has continued to be my position in many papers on the subject:

I would now write ‘individual selection’ and ‘selective diffusion’ in place of ‘individual adaptability’ as referring to coefficients which are actually used in the mathematical formulation but which nevertheless represent processes which may involve choices made by individual organisms. Otherwise this quotation reflects my position in this and all later papers on the subject.

No doubt Pearson was correct in feeling some danger to science in accepting a philosophy of science which recognizes choice as real, but I do not think that this is serious if it is also recognized that determinism is necessarily the external aspect of the chains of choices at all levels. There is also a danger of which I think Pearson was not sufficiently aware in being satisfied with a statistical description as ultimate. This may lead to premature abandonment of analysis in cases in which analysis could be pushed further by one who believes firmly that there is a deterministic mechanism to be found. The remedy is a clear recognition of the danger and a lively interest in carrying analysis as far as possible up and down the hierarchy of being.

Pearson undoubtedly felt more satisfied with a merely statistical account of resemblance’s of individuals to their parents and more remote ancestors than did geneticists with a deterministic metaphysics. He violently opposed the Mendelian analysis of heredity after its rediscovery in 1900. The latter indeed is also statistical. The geneticists, however, were not satisfied with merely enunciating laws of heredity. They looked on the latter as indicative of real entities and became concerned with where they were in the cells and what they did. Geneticists passed from the formal genetics of individuals to cytogenetics at the cellular level, to the biochemistry of DNA in duplication and in protein synthesis at the molecular level, back to physiological and developmental genetics again at the cellular level and back to the level of the individual in behavioral genetics and beyond the individual to population genetics and the theory of evolution. All have been pursued rigorously from the external deterministic and probabilistic standpoints. This process is, I think, a necessary precursor of any attempt at a philosophical interpretation.

There is also the opposite danger that failure to accept the reality of choice, a fatalistic acceptance of absolute determinism, may lead to such slackening of individual and social effort as to bring about the end of civilization.

My final conclusion is that there is real satisfaction in a philosophy which can bring under a common viewpoint the vast body of secondary but verifiable knowledge of the external world which constitutes science, with its necessarily deterministic and probabilistic interpretations, and the primary but private knowledge which each of us has of his own stream of consciousness, more or less continually directed toward the finding of an acceptable course through the difficulties of the external world by means of voluntary actions.

REFERENCES

Bergson, H. 1911. Creative Evolution, trans. by Arthur Mitchell. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

Child, C M. 1921. The Origin and Development of the Nervous System. Univ. of Chicago Press.

Clifford, W. K. 1879. "On the nature of things-in-themselves." Lectures & Essays. Edited by Leslie Stephen and Frederick Pollack. London: Macmillan & Co. Vol. 2.

Hartshorne, C. 1942. "Organic and Inorganic Wholes." Phil. & Phenom. Research 3:127-136. (Expanded as "A World of Organisms." C. Hartshorne, The Logic of Perfection. LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court Pub. Co., 1962).

Hartshorne, C. 1954. "Mind, Matter and Freedom." Sci. Monthly 78:314-320. (Reprinted in The Logic of Perfection.)

Jennings, H. S. 1933. The Universe and Life. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.

Lillie, R. S. 1945. General Biology and the Philosophy of Organism. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

Loeb, J. 1918. Forced Movements, Tropisms and Animal Conducts. Philadelphia & London: J. B. Lippincott Co.

Moore, Benjamin. 1912. The Origin and Nature of Life. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

Morgan, C. Lloyd. 1933. The Emergence of Novelty. London: Williams and Norgate.

Pearson, Karl. 1892. The Grammar of Science. London: A. & C. Black.

Sinnott, E. W. 1955. The Biology of the Spirit. New York: Viking Press.

Troland, L. T. 1922. "Psychophysics as Related to the Mysteries of Physics and Metaphysics." Jour. Washington Acad. Sci. 12:141-162.

Whitehead, A. N. 1925. Science and the Modern World. New York: Macmillan & Co.

Wright, S. 1921. "The Origin and Development of the Nervous System" (review of book by C. M. Child). Jour. Hered. 12:72-75.

Wright, S. 1931. "Evolution in Mendelian Populations." Genetics 16:97-159

Wright, S. 1935. "The Emergence of Novelty" (review of book by Lloyd Morgan). Jour. of Hered. 26:369-373.

Wright, S. 1941. "A Philosophy of Science" (review of book by W. M. Workmeister). Amer. Biol. Teacher 3:276-278.

Wright, S. 1948. "Evolution, Organic." Encycl. Brit. 8:915-929.

Wright, S. 1953. "Gene and Organisms." Amer. Nat. 87:5-18.

Wright, 5. 1964. "Biology and the Philosophy of Science." The Monist 48:265-290. Also in Reese, W.L. and Freeman, E. (eds.), Process and Divinity: The Hartshorne Festschrift, pp. 101-125. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Pub. Co., 1964.

Bernhard Rensch is at the Zoologisches Institut of the Westfaelischen Wilhelms-Unversitaet in Muenster, West Germany.

1. Introduction

We have not yet formed a consistent epistemological picture of the world. Many philosophers and scientists hold a psychophysical parallelism or they defend an interactionism, an idealism, a materialism or an identism. I will try to discuss some arguments in favor of a panpsychistic identism, a conception which can be regarded as a special version of materialism or as a link between materialism and critical idealism. Being a biologist who, since my student days, has been also concerned with philosophical questions, I believe that certain biological considerations may help clarify and perhaps solve some epistemological problems.

When I wrote Biophilosophie in 1968 (English edition 1971), my conception was mainly based on biological facts and classical epistemology. In this paper I will also consider some more recent publications on identism and materialism and mention my objections to psychophysical parallelism and interactionism.

2. Definitions and Methods

Discussions of epistemological problems often turn on different semantic interpretations. I believe that it is possible to avoid such difficulties to a large extent by clear definitions. It may be useful therefore to begin by briefly defining some main concepts which I will apply. As far as possible I will try to follow their classical meaning.

By psychic phenomena I understand all immediately ‘given’ conscious experiences, that is to say, sensations, mental images, feelings, thoughts and processes of volition. All these experiences are absolutely indubitable reality for each human individual. I base my philosophical deductions on these reliable facts, but I do not hold a phenomenalism which pretends that objects only exist so far as they are perceived by a sentient being.

All psychic phenomena are merged in a stream of consciousness. All psychic experience is therefore part of a process. In recent times this fact has been mainly emphasized by Wundt (1874, c.f. 1908), James (1890), Ziehen (1913) and Whitehead (1929). Ziehen called the basic elements of consciousness ‘gignomena,’ which means ‘something which is becoming.’

Consciousness or awareness should not be confused with self-awareness. The latter concept supposes the existence of a concept of one’s own self, which is only developed in man and apparently in apes, who are able to recognize themselves in a mirror.

Feigl (1958, 1967) called psychic phenomena ‘raw feels.’ He could choose this concept because the verb ‘to feel’ is often used for perceiving and connected mental processes. But ‘to feel’ has a twofold sense. The word is also used for positive and negative feeling tones accompanying sensations, mental images or more complex thoughts. As we need a clear concept for these ‘real’ feelings, it seems better to avoid the term ‘raw feels.’

Sometimes, mainly introduced by psychoanalysts, the word mental is used to include unconscious brain processes. But this contradicts the meaning of ‘mental’ which always means ‘conscious.’ The wrong use of ‘mental’ obscures the fundamental difference of immediately ‘given’ psychic phenomena and scientifically deduced physiological brain processes.

The term identism will be used in my lecture in the sense of a factual identification of mind and matter. This means for instance: the sensation ‘red’ is a certain brain process. If we would admit that the properties of the physiological and the psychological side were not the same, we would still have to do with a kind of dualism, at least what Kim (1966) called a ‘dualistic materialism.’

It is certainly desirable to use the principle of parsimony (economy) corresponding to Occam’s razor: "entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem." However, its value sometimes seems to be overestimated (Smart 1966; Hinton 1970). The parsimony of the components of an explanation cannot be regarded as an argument for truth (economy argument), for there are too many cases in which initial explanations proved to be much too simple. The former conceptions of atoms, of gene action and of contraction of muscles are typical examples. And all monistic philosophical tendencies finally lead to a whole series of irreducible ultimate entities and laws (cf.. Rensch 1971 a, 1974).

3. Critique of Psychophysical Parallelism and Interactionism

Although recent epistemological literature shows an increase of discussions on materialism and identism, dualistic views are still prevalent.

As I already pointed out in a previous symposium on reductionism at the Villa Serbelloni (Rensch 1974), there are objections to dualistic views. This is particularly true with regard to psychophysical parallelism.

A. Parallelism

Biological analyses of brain processes lead to the conclusion that they are causal events like all physiological processes. We always find a sequence of biochemical and physical processes, including changes between kinetic and potential energy. It is therefore very probable -- and at least demonstrable for the single sections by electrophysiological methods -- that a human brain-guided action, which is released by a sensation, is a gapless sequence.

Let me demonstrate this by the following simple example. A person sees a candlestick, and grasps it. In this case, light rays from the candlestick stimulate the sense cells in the retina and release excitations which run to the visual center of the forebrain. There these excitations release further excitations which -- possibly mediated by fibers of associative regions -- run to the motoric center of the right hand and from there to the muscles of the right hand, where they cause contractions, so that the hand moves towards the candlestick and grasps it. The excitations of the sensoric and the associative regions normally correspond to conscious processes. The statement that we have to do here with a continuous process, without a temporal gap between physiological and conscious components, led to the conclusion that the latter run parallel. But this means that the psychic phenomena were only epiphenomena, apparently not necessary for the described action. And we know that they can really fail. When we are used to grasping the candlestick every evening, corresponding sensations and thoughts can be totally lacking. The same is the case when we climb well-known stairs, play a well-known melody on the piano and so on. Such often-performed actions gradually become unconscious, run off ‘mechanically’ as a continuous process.

However, if psychical processes are not necessary, but are only epiphenomena, then they would be superfluous events. They would not have any selection value, and it would not be understandable why they have been developed, maintained, improved and have become more and more complicated during phylogeny.

Running parallel also means that mental processes must be synchronized by innumerable specific laws, for all kinds of sensations -- red, sweet, cold, painful and so on -- all mental images, feelings, thoughts and acts of volition must have a special physiological correspondence. And these supposed laws (Ziehen: laws of parallelity) could not be reduced to a general principle like the many causal laws which are consequences of general causality. Geulincx and Leibniz compared the psychophysical relations with two running clocks regulated in a parallel manner by divine influence. But this figurative comparison does not explain anything.

B. Interactionism

Philosophers like Lotze, Rehmke, James, Becher, Popper, and many others, brain physiologists like Adrian, Sherrington and Eccles, and most psychoanalysts suppose that mind and matter are totally different, but that a psychophysical interactionism takes place. They assume that sensory excitations ‘cause’ sensations, and volition ‘causes’ excitations of brain neurons.

The assumption of interactionism has the advantage that it explains why increasingly complicated psychic phenomena evolved and why they must not be regarded as epiphenomena. When psychic processes are capable of directing the behavior of animals, it becomes understandable that they successively improved by natural selection. These conclusions of Huxley (1962) and Thorpe (1966) are plausible on the basis of a dualistic conception.

However, the hypothesis of interactionism meets with difficulties. The law of the conservation of energy would be infringed if psychical phenomena would ‘cause’ physiological brain processes, for they would yield additional energy, and if physiological brain processes would ‘cause’ psychic phenomena, energy would get lost. This objection was already discussed at the end of the nineteenth century. The German philosopher Rehmke (1905) tried to find a way out of the dilemma. He assumed that this interactionism means that kinetic energy of excitations would be transformed into potential energy of psychic processes and vice versa. However, psychic processes are not something inactive like potential energy. And the supposed transformation is not compatible with a dualistic conception which assumes that psychic phenomena are ‘immaterial’ and fundamentally different from material processes. Ostwald (1902) believed that the energy of excitations would be transformed into ‘psychic energy.’ This would mean that psychic phenomena are only regarded as a new kind of physiological process and not as something totally different. Only a panpsychistic identism would avoid such difficulties.

My main objections to all dualistic opinions, however, still remain to be given. Parallelists as well as interactionists presuppose the existence of two totally different kinds of realities. They regard scientific facts as primary reality. However, this is not true. Primary facts are only the experienced psychic phenomena, and all scientific ‘facts’ are the result of conclusions, drawn by logical processes of induction and deduction.

Moreover we must ask: If psychic phenomena were something immaterial, fundamentally different from matter -- although having figurative qualities and spatial and temporal characteristics -- occuring point-like in the brains of animals and man, whence should they have come? Dualists must suppose that they did not exist on our planet, and probably in the whole solar system, before animals and man existed. We will come back to this decisive question when the arguments for panpsychistic identism are discussed (Part 6).

4. Different Versions of Identism

The objections against dualism suggest the preference of a monistic conception, and this means an identistic opinion. As many and partly contradictory versions of such epistemological views exist, it would be going too far to discuss these conceptions and their historical roots in more detail. I will therefore restrict my statements to some characteristic examples.

The main founder of identism -- partly anticipated already by Parmenides -- was Spinoza. His epistemological conception was based on purely rationalistic deductions. In his Ethics (1677; cf. 1914, Proposition VII, part II) he wrote that the ‘thinking substance’ and the ‘extended substance’ are one and the same, which is comprehended now through this, now through that ‘attribute.’ But this ‘substantia’ did not mean ‘matter,’ but something neutral, comprising both matter and mind. He did not clearly speak about the mode of connection between both attributes. In part I of Proposition XXIX he only mentioned that all is determined by necessity of the ‘divine nature’ (for correspondence to modern panpsychistic identism, see Rensch 1972). Later on, the detailed analysis of psychical phenomena allowed more exactly founded identistic views.

Fechner (1907), physicist and founder of psychophysics, emphasized that matter, space, time and laws are abstractions from conscious processes. He called his view ‘materialistic,’ in so far as "it does not allow the possibility of any human thought without a brain and a movement in this brain." However, he concludes that it is a conception of identity "in so far as both, body and soul, are only two modes of appearance of the same essence which it is possible to attain from an inner or an outer point of view." The philosophers Avenarius (1888-1891), Mach (1922, p. 255) and Ziehen (1913, 1934, 1939) also held a panpsychistic identism. Schlick (1925) held a similar opinion. He wrote (p. 267, my translation): "The world is a richly varied configuration of interdependent qualities; some of these are given factors in my (or another’s) consciousness, and I call these subjective or psychic, others are not directly given to any consciousness and these I term objective or extramental -- the concept of the psychical does not arise in this connection." This view comes very near to my own conception; however, it differs, because Schlick also writes (p. 293): "Consciousness cannot be the essence of the brain particles for they are present even when consciousness is absent, as in death or sleep." I would object that in death and sleep the biochemical compounds may be identical, but not the type of electric potentials and fields which is necessary for the stream of consciousness. It would be possible and more consistent to assume that all ‘matter,’ including electrical fields, has a protopsychical nature, but can only become experienced when it is integrated in certain complicated physico-chemical systems and pertains to a stream of consciousness (cf. Part 6).

Whitehead’s, considerations (1929) also led to a panpsychistic view. He wanted to make the results of scientific findings compatible with metaphysics. He supposed that our mental phenomena are derivative modifications of primitive elements and that even elementary particles have a certain mental quality. He therefore spoke of ‘physical feelings.’ This term may perhaps lead to misunderstandings, because ‘feeling’ normally means human or animal perceiving, or it denotes only the positive or negative feeling tones which accompany sensations and mental images. I prefer to speak of the ‘protopsychic nature or essence’ of the so-called ‘matter,’ the ‘ultimate last.’ When phylogenetic and ontogenetic considerations led me to coin this term (in 1968), I was not yet aware that it corresponds more or less to Whitehead’s ‘physical feeling.’

Among present philosophers, apparently Feigl (1967) is a prominent representative of those identists who deduce their conception from the experienced psychic phenomena. He characterizes his view in the following manner (p. 107): "It shares with certain forms of idealistic metaphysics in a very limited and ([ hope) purified way, a conception of reality and combines with it the tenable component of materialism, viz., the conviction that the basic laws of the universe are ‘physical.’" This conception of present psychophysiological knowledge allows the assumption that certain types of cerebral processes are identical with the experienced ‘raw feels.’ I share this view, but I disagree on an important point. Feigl emphasizes that he rejects panpsychism which "pervades all of physical reality" (p. 84). I believe that this restriction is contradictory. Feigi identifies certain physiological brain processes with psychic phenomena in a panpsychistic sense, but he seems not to consider the fact that all the basic elements of brain processes, the molecules, atoms, ions, particles, electric currents and electric fields, can also occur outside the brain and in non-living conditions. In any opinion the identification of physiological brain processes and mental processes inevitably leads to the consequence that all matter must have a protopsychic nature, a prestage of consciousness in its most general sense. I share this opinion with Hartshorne (1967). Among present scientists, Wright (1953, 1964) and Birch (1974) hold a panpsychistic identism.

Some strict materialists deny in effect their own mental processes and only recognize chemical and physical processes. But in so far as materialists also discuss sensations, mental images and thoughts as experienced realities, they could perhaps more correctly be called materialistic identists. But all types of identism, including the panpsychistic version, which is more justified in my opinion, allow a physiological, chemical and physical analysis of the relevant brain processes and can lead to a ‘physicalistic’ picture of the world, provided that one agrees that ‘matter’ must not only be characterized by energy or mass, spin, charge and spatial and temporal characteristics, but also by the protopsychical nature of these characteristics. The question, whether such identism can be based on facts, depends to a large degree upon our knowledge of physiological brain processes. It will therefore be useful to review briefly some main findings of this fascinating science.

5. Support for Identism Based Upon the Relation of Brain Processed and Conscious Phenomena

One consideration supporting identism is the precise correspondence between many physiological brain processes and psychic phenomena. At present, brain physiology is one of the most exciting fields of biological research. Skillful cytological, biochemical, electrophysiological, autoradiographical and psychological methods, brain operations and psychiatric observations have led to a rapid advance during the last two decades. However, in spite of all progress, our knowledge of the relations of physiological brain processes to conscious phenomena is still quite limited and not yet sufficient to come to a definite decision for a dualistic or an identistic opinion, particularly interactionism or factual identism. But I believe the arguments for identism already prevail.

The correspondence of certain psychic processes to physiological brain processes could be proved by many observations and experiments. I will mention only a few. (I) The destruction of single forebrain-regions often leads to the loss of corresponding sensations or mental images. (II) All kinds of brain operations alter the personality of a patient to some degree; many pharmaca, particularly lysergic acid, alter the brain functions to great extents; and the male and female sexual hormones cause the psychic differences between man and woman -- injections of the opposite hormone can alter the sexual mentality to a high degree. (III) Recent investigations have shown that neurons in the sensory regions seem to be biochemically specialized for transmitting particular sensations. (IV) A close correspondence exists between stimuli and sensations. Those stimuli, and only those, which can be arranged in unidimensional series like light rays, sound waves or degrees of temperature correspond to sensations which can also be arranged in a continuous series. The same holds good for the intensities of stimuli and sensations. (V) Long-term memory, which is based upon material memory traces and therefore (unlike short-term memory) cannot be extinguished by electric shocks, can be prevented by the injection of compounds which prevent the formation of proteins. (This indicates that protein-compounds are involved in material memory traces.) (VI) Innumerable electrophysiological investigations have proved that the oscillations of action potentials in the brain are different when different conscious processes occur. The electroencephalogram (EEC) of a relaxing person mainly shows regular alpha-waves; when the person begins to calculate, finer beta-waves are superimposed on the alpha-waves. (VIII) In non-narcotized patients Penfield (1955, 1968) could raise mental images of known persons and of voices by electrical stimulation of the temporal lobe of the forebrain.

In spite of all our knowledge about direct correspondence of physiological brain processes and psychic phenomena, some modern philosophers and psychologists still doubt that any kind of localization could be possible. They do not deny that our consciousness is connected with our body and head. But Nagel (1970, pp. 217-218) believes that "a thought has no location at all"; Feigi (1967, p. 39) writes: "it is simply nonsense to ask about the location of a concept"; and Polten (1973, p. 55) even pretends "that physiologists certainly have not shown any necessary connection of memory with brain tissues and it is arguable that it cannot be done in principle." I hope that my brief remarks about the correspondence of physiological brain processes and psychic phenomena sufficiently show that such skepticism is not justified.

Certainly, we are only beginning to understand the psychophysiological correspondence. However, most brain physiologists are already convinced of a correspondence of material brain processes and conscious phenomena and their research is guided by this idea. Much further investigation will be needed, but the hypothesis of an identity of psychic phenomena and corresponding physiological brain processes already has a sound basis.

6. Arguments Supporting the Panpsychistic Version of Identism

Kant (1787) assumed that something extramental exists, but in his time physics and chemistry had only analyzed this ‘matter’ in a very insufficient manner. He therefore argued that the ‘thing in itself’ is inscrutable and developed a philosophy which is termed ‘critical idealism.’ At present, we have quite detailed knowledge about molecules, ions, atoms, elementary particles, electromagnetic waves, electric fields and all kinds of material processes, but we are still not yet able to say what ‘matter’ ultimately is like. As I tried to show in the preceding part, we also know something about the structure and function of that part of brain matter to which psychic phenomena correspond.

This psychophysically acting brain substance is, however, composed of the same atoms, ions and elementary particles which we find outside living beings. And the same holds true for oscillations of electric currents and electric fields which the brain produces. All this psychophysical substrate is developed during embryogenesis from compounds of the blood stream coming from the placenta, and that means that it ultimately derives from the food of the mother. After birth the brain cells in question are nourished by the food of the growing child. Some weeks later the brain cells no longer divide, but they show an almost frequent turnover of many of their protein compounds. Hence, there is no particular ‘psychophysical matter’ involved in the brain cells and their functions. Only a special systemic order of atoms in certain molecules of different types of brain cells, steady activity of these cells and excitations coming from sensoric nerves and running to associative and motoric centers are the basis of the peculiarity of brain function. We must therefore ask: Whence can the correspondent psychic phenomena come, if they should be something totally different from matter?

This question seems to be unanswerable. Sherrington (1940) raised it, but did not find an answer. However, when we attribute a protopsychic nature to all matter, then conscious phenomena become understandable. When atoms form a molecule, absolutely new chemical and physical characteristics arise in consequence of new systemic relations. For instance, by combination of the light metal sodium with the gas chlorine, salt arises, the characteristics of which are totally different from the characteristics of its atoms. If we now ascribe a protopsychic nature to atoms, the protopsychic characteristics, too, could produce new protopsychic characteristics by these new systemic relations. The much more complicated integration in large molecules of neurons and of neurons in an active brain would lead to still more complicated systemic relations and not only to protopsychic ones, but also to real psychic phenomena, to sensations and mental images. Panpsychistic identism assumes that the physical characteristics are also the psychic characteristics. But they can only be experienced if they belong to a complex physiological process in a human or animal brain, which we call the ‘stream of consciousness.’ Motoric excitations and many excitations in the brainstem and the cerebellum do not belong to this process.

This panpsychistic conception may appear to be nothing more than a bold hypothesis. However, it can be supported by other considerations (Wright 1964; Rensch 1968, 1969, 1971, 1974). In the first place the phylogenetic development of psychic processes suggests this assumption. Certainly, sensations, mental images, feelings and thoughts are private experiences of each human individual. But they are indubitable reality. We can be informed about corresponding phenomena of our fellow men by language, and it would be absurd to hold a solipsism. It is more difficult to judge about psychic phenomena of animals. We can do it only with conclusions from analogy. But these conclusions are very cogent in higher animals. In a little lesser degree the behavior of lower vertebrates allows the conclusion that these animals have sensations, feelings and memory. Fish can learn different optical or acoustical tasks. Large species master up to six successively learned visual discriminations simultaneously. Fish are subject to the simultaneous color contrast and to optical illusions in the same manner as man. Of course, we can never exactly know what kind of sensations, feelings and mental images they experience. But it is sufficient for our questioning that the conclusion is justified that fish, too, absolutely behave as if they have psychic phenomena. Moreover, electrophysiological investigations show continuous, changing oscillations of electric potentials. This allows the conclusion that their perceptions and mental images are united in a stream of consciousness in waking conditions.

However, some higher invertebrate animals also show similar achievements. Bees, bumblebees and cuttlefish like the Octopus have well-functioning eyes. Their brain is divided in regions with different coordinated functions, and it is composed of several hundred thousands of nerve cells (the honey bee has about 800,000). They can learn to discriminate colors and black and white patterns and can master all 3 or 4 learned tasks on the same day. Bees are also subjected to simultaneous color contrast. It is therefore possible and even probable that they experience sensations and memory, that is to say, conscious phenomena, but surely not in the sense of human experience which is connected with a concept of one’s own self. It is natural to assume that they also experience positive and negative feeling tones, because they prefer certain tastes and reject other ones. The satisfaction of all feeding, copulating and cleaning drives in animals is probably guided by such feeling tones.

In animals of still lower levels of organization the conclusions from analogy are much vaguer. However, the lowliest worms have sense organs, nerve cells and nerve centers, and these cells function more or less in the same manner as those of higher animals. And these animals can learn at least in the sense of conditioned reflexes. The same is possibly the case in coelenterates. If we suppose that the lowest multicellular invertebrates would also have sensations, these would be separated events -- they would not belong to a ‘stream of consciousness.’

Protozoa have no nerve-like fibers (as formerly assumed), and they cannot learn. However, unicellular organisms show positive and negative ‘sense reactions’ to chemical stimuli, particularly to those which indicate food or a partner for copulation or conjugation. It seems therefore to be possible to assume that they have single sensations or prestages of sensations. Such speculation can only be based on the fact that all animal evolution was a continuous process and that sensations of multicellular animals must have some phylogenetic prestages.

If we regard sensations as immaterial things which are totally different from all material, physiological processes, it would be difficult to imagine from where these psychic phenomena should have come. Wright (1964, p. 113) wrote: "Emergence of mind from no mind is sheer magic." But when we suppose that all matter has a protopsychic nature -- an assumption which was already suggested by our considerations of the brain functions -- then the phylogenetical development of sensations and other mental processes would become understandable. The integration of certain atoms and complicated molecules into neurons in the course of phylogeny, and further on into nervous systems and brains, could produce psychic processes. These would arise by new systemic relations, beginning with protopsychic prestages of sensations and leading to real sensations, memory and all higher psychic phenomena.

This assumption has a particular advantage. It would mean that the whole evolution of our earth and of life could be regarded as a continuous causal process. At present it is increasingly probable that life originated gradually from inorganic matter due to causal biochemical processes. In prebiological times, prestages of organisms, at first so-called protobionts, developed in the ‘primeval soup.’ About 3 billion years ago true unicellular organisms had already developed (cf. Fox 1965, 1971; Oparin 1968; Buvet and Ponamperuma 1971; Kaplan 1972). This continuous development suggests the assumption of a corresponding development of protopsychic and psychic phenomena of organic matter in the sense of a panpsychistic identism.

The panpsychistic hypothesis becomes perhaps still more convincing when we consider the individual development of mental processes of man. A fertilized human egg and the following multicellular stages do not indicate sensations or other psychic phenomena. Only after sense-cells, nerve-cells and a brain have been developed can the fetus have sensations, and after birth the behavior of the young child shows that it surely experiences sensations with positive and negative feeling tones and begins to develop associations and memory. If these phenomena would be something immaterial, fundamentally different from material physiological processes, we must ask again:

Where do these psychic processes come from? Should we believe that a ‘soul’ has been ‘inserted’ in some stage of the ontogenetical development? And how can it happen that this ‘soul’ shows characteristics of parents and grandparents? Twin research has clearly proved that many psychic characteristics are inherited.

All mental characteristics are ultimately transmitted from parents to children by the germ cells and by the arrangement of genes on the threadlike molecules of desoxyribonucleid acid (DNA), the general chemical structure of which is well known. As these molecules are capable of transmitting psychic characteristics from one generation to the next one, it is natural to assume that molecules have a protopsychic nature. And as they are composed of atoms which also compose other types of molecules, it becomes probable that all molecules, atoms and their elementary particles have such a protopsychic nature. This allows the conclusion that sensations and mental images arise by the integration of protopsychic characteristics of ‘matter.’

When we now ask what physics knows about ‘matter,’ we can state that the present concept no more means something ‘solid,’ ‘substantial.’ Mass is equivalent to energy and can become radiation. ‘Matter’ can only be defined as a complex of relations between energy, charge, spin, speed and spatial and temporal relations. And all these concepts do not mean something ‘solid.’ This fact allows us to try a description of ‘matter’ by a mathematical ‘world formula.’ It was an unnecessary former hypothesis that all these components must have a ‘carrier.’ Our present conception of matter is much more compatible with panpsychistic identism than all former conceptions.

Summing up, we can state that many considerations speak in favor of a panpsychistic identism:

(1) the precise correspondence between many physiological brain processes and psychic phenomena; (2) the fact that the psychophysical substrate of our brain contains the same atoms, elementary particles and fields of energy which can occur outside the brain; (3) the phylogenetic development of psychic phenomena can be understood best when we suppose a protopsychic nature of all ‘matter’; if we assume that mental phenomena would be something fundamentally different from physiological processes, it would be difficult to conceive whence it should have come in the course of evolution; (4) the ontogeny of psychic phenomena is a still stronger argument in favor of panpsychistic identism, particularly because DNA-molecules are able to transmit mental characteristics to the next generation; (5) present physics no longer defines matter as something ‘solid,’ but as a complex of relations between energy, charge, spin, speed and spatial and temporal characteristics; this definition is compatible with panpsychistic identism, when we assume that matter is something protopsychical. One final comment: The assumption of protopsychic matter is no more revolutionary than our epistemological knowledge that all objects which we see have no color, because color only arises in sense cells and brain.

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RESPONSE TO RENSCH’S PAPER

By Charles Hartshorne

Charles Hartshorne has taught philosophy primarily at the University of Chicago, Emory University, and the University of Texas; at the latter he is now Emeritus Ashbel Smith Professor of Philosophy.

There is an apparent contradiction between the mutual influence between mental and bodily events and the doctrine (which I hold) that the data of experience are independent of that experience. The contradiction is removed by the following theory, derived from Whitehead, and so far as I know, first clearly stated by him. If mind, call it M, and body (physiological process), call it B, interact, then any mental state M at time t, which influences a bodily state, say B at time t¹, will be temporally prior to that bodily state, and it will be temporally subsequent to any bodily state which influences it. Then, assuming that events depend only upon their temporal predecessors, the independence of the data will be preserved. In Whitehead’s system, all influence is taken to have the temporal structure of antecedent and independent condition and subsequent dependent result.

Rensch cites experiments in which electrical stimulation of the cortex produced, without detectable time interval, psychical phenomena. He admits (in conversation) that strict simultaneity is not absolutely proved. Since the causal concept above explicated says nothing about the extent of the time difference between condition and its most immediate results, it is not clear how such observations or any others could show the invalidity of the concept. Here, too, the issue seems logical, not factual.

John B. Cobb, Jr., is Professor of Theology at the School of Theology at Claremont, Avery Professor of Religion at Claremont Graduate School, and Director of the Center for Process Studies.

Common to the four essays of Part Two is an opposition to the reductive determinism so often viewed as the appropriate consequence of science. It is appropriate that determinism had its spokesman at the conference in the person of Rensch, and that Rensch defends it again in his comments on Koestler’s paper. This dominant view holds that, when prediction of behavior and thought is not possible, this is because of the complexity of the determining factors rather than because of indeterminacy or freedom.

Zucker describes three strategies for responding to the scientific tendency toward reductive determinism. One of them, that of Carl von Weizsaecker, is to carry through the Kantian program to the end. It will then be seen that scientific axioms are themselves a function of the structures of human thought. Whitehead’s philosophy is incompatible with this program, since he believes that the laws governing our cosmic epoch are contingent, exemplifying only some among the many possibilities investigated by mathematicians. The characteristics of our world are, for Whitehead, in principle to be discovered empirically.

The second strategy is to cultivate the simples appropriate to each order. This strategy assumes that the simples are hierarchically ordered and that the wholes that are the simples of each level are more than the sum of their parts. Koestler’s paper develops a position of this kind with sophistication and appropriate caution. Holons function as the simples at each level of analysis; but he recognizes that these are subject to analysis in terms of other holons. Hence reductionism is not overcome by a hierarchical ordering of holons as such. Even the fact that at the lower end the holons dissolve "in the indeterminacy of the Janus-faced electron" (above, p. 65) does not overcome the threat of reductionism to human freedom; for Koestler knows that the "indeterminacy of the micro-level cannot be transferred. . . . to the macro-level" (above, p. 60). The question is instead whether at the higher levels the agent of thought or action can itself be a part (perhaps a holon) into which the event is analyzed. If the self that acts or thinks were a part of what is experienced, then Koestler believes we could not affirm human freedom. But because the self that objectifies itself is never itself finally objectified, human freedom is real.

From a Whiteheadian point of view the transcendence by the agent of its participant holons is indeed essential to freedom, but it is understood in a way that is not dependent on the peculiarity of high-grade human experience. As Capek shows, determinism, and with it reductionism generally, has followed from the spatialization of time, a spatialization still too readily applied in our sciences. Once that is wholly uprooted from our thought and time is recognized as primary, the threat to freedom is greatly weakened. The holons now appear as the effects of the past in the new agent-event, but this new agent-event transcends the holons as the present always transcends the past. The event cannot be an object for itself, since to be object is to be past, whereas the present is always subjectively immediate. In its subjective immediacy every agent-event or experience constitutes itself in relation to its holons, objects, or past. In a world of process, determination by the past is never complete.

Hartshorne points out another factor in this alternative to reductionism which also strengthens Koestler’s basic case. For him, as for Whitehead, there is an important distinction between wholes, such as animals, that give rise to and include a new order of entity, such as the animal’s individual experience, and other organic wholes, such as vegetables, in which this does not occur. Where no new or higher-order individual entity appears, the freedom of the whole is still to be found only in its individual parts, although this may be enhanced by their participation in the whole. Where a higher-order entity does emerge, radically new dimensions of freedom may also occur.

In Zucker’s third strategy to counter reductionism, attention is directed to the nature of the individuals which science studies. If these individuals can be understood as wholes that have properties quite other than those traditionally assigned them by reductive determinism, then the meaning of reduction is profoundly altered. Whitehead contributed to this counter-strategy as well as to the preceding one.

In his early writing, Whitehead defined nature in terms of the public sphere, that which is given to the knower through sense experience. Thus nature was the external aspect of events. Beginning with Science and the Modern World, Whitehead concluded that science itself requires that the knower be included in nature, and he supplemented his earlier treatment of events with a discussion of their internal aspect. Process and Reality provides an elaborate treatment of the internal development of events as perceptual processes, and it can be read as an account of how the outwardly perceived is related to the inner perception. Each ‘microscopic process’ of the becoming of an individual entity or event is a particular internalization of the entire ‘macroscopic process,’ which is the whole actual world as it gives birth to that event. One purpose of this conference was to discover whether thinking of this sort is relevant to biological theory on such subjects as evolution.

Bohm’s paper indicates that, whether or not biologists are ready to take account of internality in their theoretical formulations, there is at least one physicist who sees this as the way ahead in quantum theory. His idea of an enfolded or implicate order is correlative with Whitehead’s notion of microscopic process as internalizing the macroscopic one. Enfolded into each entity is the order of the public world, so that the order of natural entities is not, as generally supposed, only or primarily the pattern of external (spatio-temporal) relations among events, but also the internal order within the individual entity.

Bohm’s vision is remarkably congruent with that of Whitehead. They share in criticizing ‘simple location.’ What is in one respect localized is in another respect "enfolded throughout the whole of space (and time)" (above, p. 40). For both thinkers the physical is characterized by dominant inheritance from the past, the mental by appropriation of the new (above, p. 41). Still, there are significant differences. Bohm interprets the implications of his theory as close to that of Spinoza (above, p. 41), whereas Whitehead consciously differentiated himself from Spinozistic monism. For Whitehead each entity or momentary event is a holomovement enfolding in some measure, however trivial, its entire given universe, but the universe in its entirety is made up of innumerable past individual holomovements. They resemble one another through their enfolding of much the same universe of events, but they differ because no two have identical perspectives. Bohm, after developing the notions of implicate order and holomovement in relation to particular entities or events, attributes this order to the universe as a whole rather than to its individual parts. What Bohm calls ‘the implicate depths of the holomovement’ corresponds with what Whitehead calls the ‘primordial nature of God.’ But for Whitehead this principle of novelty and concretion by itself is abstract and does not include or subordinate to itself the events of nature to which it provides ordered novelty and novel order. Thus Whitehead is pluralistic where Bohm tends toward monism in his stress on the underlying unity.

Zucker’s proposals for mathematical formulations of the implicate order indicate that the basic concept is open to a Whiteheadian pluralistic and realistic interpretation. He shows also the concrete steps in mathematical physics that will be required if the potential of Bohm’s vision is to be actualized and is eventually to inform biology.

From a Whiteheadian perspective, Bohm’s emphasis on an implicate order oriented to quantum theory needs supplementation by Capek’s emphasis on the primacy of time oriented to relativity theory. Perhaps the implicate order of quantum physics can be understood more relativistically and perhaps relativity theory can be reformulated in terms of quanta. If so, theoretical physics may break out of its present impasse. Whitehead’s philosophy of nature may hold the potentiality of assisting science in achieving this unification of quantum and relativity theory.

Bohm notes that we also need "a development that is capable of making full contact with modem science, and yet opens up a way to assimilate common experience and general philosophical reflection on this experience, to give a single, whole, unfragmented world view" (above, p. 42). One of Whitehead’s great appeals has been that his union of the objective and subjective worlds overcomes in principle the dualism of fact and value and of natural science and the humanities. Perhaps the developments required in quantum and relativity theory to bring them into unity with each other will also lead to a mode of thinking that will unify science with the other dimensions of human thought and experience. Perhaps Whitehead can help to nurture this process as well.