John Cobb - Whitehead's Process & Reality, Part III - Class Discussions

I would like to thank Jay McDaniel for his many insights which are shared here as he has shown diligence to share with John Cobb's class on Process & Reality. His rich experiences and insights have helped through Whitehead's at times obscure material in relating it helpfully to our present context. Thank you Jay, and to many others in class for their helpful insights. - R.E. Slater

The Many Become One and are Increased by One

article link

Interpreting Whitehead's phrase "the many become one and 

are increased by one" in the context where it appears.

WHITEHEAD VIDEO SERIES

Lesson Nine

Lesson Nine considers selected passages from six paragraphs in a section of Whitehead's Process and Reality called The Category of the Ultimate.  One of the most important ideas presented in these passages is that Creativity is, in Whitehead's words, "the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matters of fact."

His idea is that every actual fact in the universe -- every actual entity -- is a "production of novel togetherness." This means that an entity is not simply "one" but also "many." It is the many becoming one.

The video uses the example of a child's relationship to her parents to illustrate the point.  Her parents are part of who she is, and in her very inclusion of them within her own life, she is more than them. Always she is becoming herself, and the self who becomes at any given moment becomes part of a many which influence her in the future.  - Jay McDaniel

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Whitehead's Relevance to 2020's

Global Coronovirus Pandemic

Introduction by Jay McDaniel

I think of two struggles. Millions of people are struggling with the new situation, the pandemic, and how to respond to it in a deep and constructive way. A small sub-group are simultaneously struggling to understand Whitehead’s Process and Reality through an online course offered by John Cobb through the Cobb Center for Process and Practice and Homebrewed Christianity.

The first struggle is by all means the most important; in many ways the second struggle is but a distraction. Why should anyone care if the world is composed of events, not things, be they morning light or a frightening virus? Why should anyone care if, in addition to an Eternal Companion to the world’s joys and sufferings, namely God, there is also a creative abyss – a creativity – of which the self-creativity of all things, God included, are expressions?

In The Face of the Deep, the theologian Catherine Keller offers a way of seeing why some might care. Building upon Whitehead’s idea that God is the Face of the Deep, but also that there’s more to the Deep than God, I am offered a way of reminding myself that God does not create or even will the sadness, but that God within us as a steadfast love who gives us strength to endure and the courage to respond, each in our all-togetherness. Yes, nothingness is real. And so is love.

God as the Face of the Deep

Amazon Link

First published in 2003, Catherine Keller's Face of the Deep proposes that God is the face of the deep and also that the deep is more than God. 

As I read her work, the deep is akin to Whitehead's idea of creativity and to what Wallace Stevens calls the nothingness from which the earliest single light adds itself to the evening sky. 

If you have Buddhist leanings, you might imagine the nothingness as that creative abyss, sunyata, from which all things create themselves in response to inherited situations. Or to the godhead of which some Christian mystics speak, Meister Eckhart and Jakob Bohme, for example.

​The deep is not the personal God in whom Jesus placed his faith: the Eternal Companion to the world's joys and sufferings. It is not a still small voice within the heart luring toward wisdom, compassion and creativity. It is not the One who seeks to creatively transform and thus redeem all that happens in the world. It is, I suggest, the self-creativity of each and every actuality, God included.

​ A unique feature of Whitehead's work is that, in his view, the nothingness is real in its way, and God is real in God's way. Catherine Keller offers a perfect metaphor for thinking about God. God isn't the whole of the deep, but God is the face of the deep.

In our pandemic age, it may be tempting to think that viruses are created by God. I think they create themselves, as do we, as does God. I find comfort and courage in the idea that God isn't the deep as a whole, but the face of the deep who seeks the well-being of each and all, who is a healing presence, and whose steadfast love endures forever. And I am grateful to Catherine Keller for giving me the language.

- Jay McDaniel, April, 2020

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FROM AN EARLIER POST:

Course Outline: Whitehead's Process and Reality,

by Jay McDaniel

What Is Process Thought? - Lesson 11

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip017UxOdFA

https://vimeo.com/46495775

Lesson Eleven

Relevant Text: Process and Reality, page 39

Key Idea: There are two kinds of reality: actuality and potentiality.

In Whitehead's philosophy something is "real" if it can be experienced as an object of one sort or another and thus, as an object, make a difference in experience. Lesson Eleven introduces the idea that some objects of experience are possibilities rather than actualities. They are real but not actual, because they do not feel or prehend their surroundings and do not make decisions. The most abstract of these objects are what Whitehead calls eternal objects. They are pure potentials which may be actualized in some universe or cosmic epoch, even if not our own. These objects are similar to Plato's Forms, and Whitehead was indeed influenced by Plato. The lesson concludes with remarks concerning the creative and performing arts and the natural sciences, suggesting that they are ways of exploring and presenting potentialities.

What Is Process Thought? - Lesson 12

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoEyC2tEqI4

https://vimeo.com/46495772

Lesson Twelve

Relevant Text: Process and Reality, page 23

Key Idea: Propositions are not simply statements of belief; they are lures for feeling.

Lesson Twelve discusses Whitehead's idea of a proposition -- or lure for feeling -- showing how propositions are means by which novelty enters the world. By way of illustration, this segment plays some of the music of the jazz musician, John Coltrane, and presents propositions in light of the innovative spirit of jazz. Whitehead proposes that, at every moment of our lives, we are improvising responses to given situations, adding our own voice to the very history of the universe. Other creatures are doing this, too. We live in an improvisational universe, in which indeterminacy is as real, and as important, as determinacy. Thus, for Whitehead, the future is always open, and the future is never entirely pre-determined by the past or the present. This is the case even for God, who knows what is possible in the future, but not what is actual until it becomes actual.

What Is Process Thought? - Lesson 13

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EV6aZuGRjg0

https://vimeo.com/46495773

Lesson Thirteen

Relevant Text: Process and Reality, page 51.

Key Idea: Prehensions are the means by which entities are present in others. 

Lesson Thirteen introduces two of the most important ideas in Whitehead's philosophy: prehensions and subjective forms. . Every actual entity, every moment of experience, consists of acts of experiencing or prehending many realities which "become one" in the act of experiencing them. The realities can be other actual entities or pure potentialities, or combinations of them. Prehensions may be conscious or unconscious; in human life most are unconscious. Consciousness is but the tip of the experiential iceberg. Prehensions are the most fundamental element in actual entities, the means by which the universe is held together and things are present in one another. Lesson Thirteen takes a conversation between a mother and her daughter as a way of illustration prehension and their complementary notion: subjective forms.

What Is Process Thought? - Lesson 14

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DPYa6cYfsk

https://vimeo.com/46495774

Lesson Fourteen

Relevant Text: Process and Reality, page 34.

Key Idea: Reality is thoroughly social. Molecules and atoms, planets and stars are societies, too. There are no self-contained facts.

Lesson Fourteen introduces the ideas of nexus and society to readers. Most of the macroscopic objects that we perceive around us are not single actual entities, but rather aggregates of actual entities unified by their prehensions of one another (nexus) and perhaps also by a common characteristic which they inherit from predecessors in the the nexus, thus giving them more specific definition (society). There are many kinds of societies.  A human being is a society too. She is a personally-ordered society who consists of many moments of experience (many actual entities) in succession, each inheriting from the predecessors with special intimacy. There is no single person who underlies the change; there are many subjects in succession. The idea is very Buddhist: "No thinker thinks twice and no experiencer experiences twice." Lesson Fourteen ends by offering the idea that perhaps the universe as a whole is gathered into an ongoing Life, too. This is what Whitehead means by the consequent nature of God.

What Is Process Thought? - Lesson 15

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC1-1x8pBek

https://vimeo.com/46628037

Lesson Fifteen

Relevant Text: Process and Reality, page 81.

Key Idea: The body plays an essential role in human life: the withness of the body.

Lesson Fifteen introduces three ideas that are important to Whitehead in Process and Reality: the withness of the body, experience in the mode of causal efficacy, and experience in the mode of presentational immediacy. Experience in the mode of causal efficacy is visceral experience. It occurs when we feel affected or influenced by bodily states and by realities outside our bodies in direct, energetic ways. It is an important part of bodily experience and serves a perpetual reminder that, in our daily lives, we are with our bodies and our bodies are with us. Whitehead calls it the withness of the body. This does not mean that our minds are precisely identical with our bodies; we can have attitudes toward our bodies which are healthy or unhealthy, and these attitudes occur in our minds. But our bodies are marvelously intricate and complex systems of energy which nourish us, give us a sense of direction, offer us wisdom, and connect us with the world. And ultimately, says Whitehead, the whole world is like a body to us. Even God -- if God exists-- is embodied. The universe is God's body.

What Is Process Thought? - Lesson 16

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFtSNpSl3Fc

https://vimeo.com/46774198

Lesson Sixteen

Relevant Text: Process and Reality, page 43

Key Idea: Decision is the very meaning of actuality

Lesson Sixteen focuses on Whitehead's idea that the very meaning of actuality lies in the notion of decision. In Whitehead's philosophy a decision is not a "conscious" decision, but rather a subjectivity activity -- conscious or unconscious -- in which some possibilities for responding to a given situation are excluded or cut off, while others are then actualizes. A woman climbing a mountain, movement by moment, is making conscious decisions which constitute her very actuality in the moment at hand. And so, thinks Whitehead, are the energy-events within the very depths of atoms. Understood in this way, decision is one of the primary expressions of the ultimate reality of the universe: creativity. Decisions may be wise or unwise, productive or destructive, violent or graceful -- whatever their nature, they are the very reason why things unfolds as they do. From Whitehead's perspective the universe is not simply an unfolding of abstract ideas. The world is not the outcome of mathematical formulas. It is the outcome of decisions.

What Is Process Thought? - Lesson 17

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfReIiriFbU

https://vimeo.com/46896198

Lesson Seventeen

Key Text: Process and Reality, pages 48-51.

Key Idea: Every moment of human experience is a concrescence of the universe.

Lesson Seventeen offers the most systematic summary of Whitehead's idea of experience available in this series of videos. The diagrams were created by a student at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, USA. There is a danger in diagrams, insofar as they can lead people into overly-static and linear ways of looking at the world. Whitehead's philosophy is more holistic and dynamic. This means that, when we think of experience, we need to hold onto diagrams with a relaxed grasp, fully aware that experience is always more than images. Nevertheless, the diagrams may help viewers more fully understand Whitehead's concept of experience. In the narrative the experiencing subject is imagined as a human being, but it is important to remember that, in Whitehead's philosophy, there is subjectivity everywhere: in the infinitely small and the infinitely large. Even in the depths of atoms, and even in the depths of God, there is something akin to what is depicted in the diagrams: prehending, subjective form, and decision. However, in God, as Whitehead understands God, there is no perishing of immediacy. God is the inclusive and everlasting act of concrescence who shares in all finite moments such as those depicted above. (See Lesson Nineteen.)

John Cobb - Whitehead's Process & Reality, Part III

I've been thinking, everything I've been working on since 2011-2012 has been pointing towards this direction. That the non-process Western philosophies I grew up with, and the Continental philosophies I recently have learned, were not revealing a process-based world shown to us in quantum physics, the neurosciences, the postmodern arts, and so many other disciplines. It took a process-driven cosmology that knows how to dip its toes into the paradoxical realms of metaphysics and ontologies of the natural and spiritual worlds to do this. Like the many layers of an onion, the more you peel the onion the deeper its layers go down until there is nothing left. And in its nothingness you've missed the whole. Process says the reality was the relationship of the onion to itself in its parts, to its whole, and including the exploration of the observer and his/her/its connection to the cosmos. A dualistic, or binary, concept of today's postmodern world is no longer relevant. We must turn to nonlinear complex processes to better explain the world of the unseen, the hidden, and the sublime structures and purposes driving nature and man. - re slater

PART III - DISCUSSIONS AND APPLICATIONS 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter I. Fact and Form 39

• I. Appeal to Facts, European Tradition; Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant; Intrinsic Reasonableness; Footnotes to Plato; This Cosmology Platonic; Participating Forms; Divine Ordering; Ontological Principle; Facts the only Reasons; Facts are Process; Prehension, Satisfaction. 
• II. Rationalism a Faith, Adventure of Hope; Limits of Theory, Givenness, Professor A. E. Taylor on Plato; Decision, the Ontological Principle; Entities and Process, Actual Entities and Decision; Stubborn Fact. 
• III. Platonic Form, Idea, Essence, Eternal Object; Potentiality and Givenness; Exclusiveness of the Given; Subject-Superject, Becoming and Being; Evaporation of Indeterrnination in Concrescence, Satisfaction Determinate and Exclusive; Concrescence Dipolar; Potentiality, Givenness, Impossibility; Subsistence. 
• IV. Actual Occasions Internally Determined, Externally Free; Course of History not Necessary, No Perfection; Efficient Causation and Final Reaction; God's Primordial Freedom; Each Concrescence between Definite Free Initiation and Definite Free Conclusion, the Former Macrocosmic, the Latter Microcosmic. 
• V. Universals and Particulars, Unsuitable Terms with False Implication; Illustration from Descartes, also Hume; Descartes' Alternative Doctrine, Realitas Objective, Inspectio, Intuitio, Judicium; World not Describable in Terms of Subject and Predicate. Substance and Quality, Particular and Universal; Universal Relativity. 
• VI. Locke's Essay, Agreement of Organic Philosophy with It; Substitute 'Experience for Understanding'; Ideas and Prehensions; Locke's Two Doctrines of Ideas, Ideas of Particular Things; Representative Theory of Perception; Logical Simplicity and Genetic Priority not to be Identified; Substance, Exterior Things, Societies; Solidarity of the Universe. 
• VII. Locke's Doctrine of Power, Power and Substance; Causal Objectification and Presentational Objectification; Change Means Adventures of Eternal Objects; Real Essence, Abstract Essence; Doctrine of Organism and Generation of Actual Entities. 

Chapter II. The Extensive Continuum 61

• I. Continuum and Real Potentiality, Atomized by Actual Occasions; How the Continuum is Experienced, Presentational Immediacy, Sensa; Real Chair and Chair-Image; Complex Ingression of Sensa. 
• II. General Potentiality and Real Potentiality; Standpoints of Actual Occasions, Determined by Initial Phase of Subjective Aim; Extensive Relationships; The Epochal Theory of Time, Zeno, William James. 
• III. Newton's Scholium.
• IV. Newton's Scholium, Comparison with Philosophy of Organism and with Descartes; 'Withness of the Body,' Status of the Body in the Actual World; Ontological Status of Space for Newton, Descartes and the Organic Philosophy.
• V. Undifferentiated Endurance and the Passivity of Substance, Source of Errors. 
• VI. Summary.

STUDIES WITH JOHN B. COBB

Alfred North Whitehead, Process & Reality

Notes from Session 3

*Disclaimer. These are my notes from reading and listening to

John Cobb which may not truly reflect his learned positions or sentiments

built over a lifetime of study and interaction with historic material.


CHAPTER III - SOME DERIVATIVE NOTIONS

God & Eternal Objects

pg 31 ff

Observation by John Cobb:

Everything has to be somewhere. The whole realm of

pure potentials must include all creation somewhere.

Thus begins a brief discuss of God & Eternal Objects.

Eternal objects are ordered for the sake of influencing creation to make possible an increase of value in creation.

We tend to think of the world as a static thing without novelty. But this type of thinking would be incorrect. There does exists real novelty in the world. And it is by this observation the "process of organism" or "process of philosophy" begins its trajectory towards metaphysics and ontology.

Observation by John Cobb:

To exclude God from the world is to exclude novelty.

Atheism has a very difficult time affirming novelty.

Let's go further. God is like all other actualities. But God is also unlike all actualities. In one sense God is a "creature" or "organism." But in another sense God is neither creaturely nor organic. What we're driving at here is that God has real connectivity to the world.

Further, God is the only Actual Entity which is NOT an Actual Occasion unless it be in Himself. Though all creatures and aspects of creation "come-and-go," that is, they are perishable, it is God who is the everlasting Entity and Occasion. There is no other Entity or Occasion before Him.

There are three categories of "The Ultimate":

1 - Temporal ~ Creation
2 - Eternal Objects ~ Not real entities but a "category"
3 - Everlasting ~ an Entity or Process which is not momentary

The notion of the "Ultimate" usually is understood as something, or some ideal, which is inert, inactive, (im)passive, or distinct from the cosmos/creation/world. This would be the Aristotelian sense of the word.

In Process Philosophy the notion of the "Ultimate" speaks to something which is active - not inert nor (im)passive. Something which is integrally connected to the world. Something which moves towards novelty and creativity:

God / Being ----> Creativity / the Act of Being

Creativity implies activity vs. Inert, passive objects of inactivity

Process Philosophy vs. Aristotelian Philosophy

In the Whiteheadian sense of the Ultimate, God cannot be divorced neither from Himself nor from His creation nor from His act of creativity. He is the ultimate explanation of physical phenomena as He participates in all of it at every moment everlastingly.

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NOTHING EVENTS

pg 82, last Paragraph

This conception of an actual entity in the fluent world is little more than an expansion of a sentence in the Timaeus: "But that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is." Bergson, in his protest against "spatialization," is only echoing Plato's phrase "and never really is."

John Cobb - Opinion without Reason is always something that "never really is." This latter phrase indicates the characteristics of something whether it is ever really "spiritual, liberating, despairing, or distressing." If the reality of an Actual Event (AE) or Actual Occasion (AO) ever really is then there will be valuative outcomes by its concrescence. If not, "it never really was, is, or ever will be" anything but a potential prehension.

Process Philosophy (and by congruence, Process Theology) share a lot in common with the Asian Culture in its nominative verb structure of the language, thought processes, and lingual agreements. As example, in Buddhism, the idea of "NOTHINGNESS" is not something reality will cling to. As such, neither should we (even though existentially we never could, if something is nothing).

Nothingness, used in the perishing sense, says that neither you, nor I, are things we may cling to. That we are always in the process of transition, of becoming, and then perishing, and then becoming, and then perishing, eternally while we live. In this sense, this idea of becoming ever more than we are might free us from the stress and anxiety of never amounting to much, or having lost out in earlier stages of life of missed opportunities. It actually releases us to the idea of freedom and compassion to others as well as to ourselves that we may elect to become even as we have been becoming all our lives in one sense or another. That we might release our being into the hands of the God of process to be used in reflective ways which has congruency to our being-of-becoming seeking remission and efficacy in relationships and personal/societal/ecological valuation.

---

As God is, who was the Primordial God of eternity past, and is the God of the Present, the God of the Now, who is the God of the Becoming Past, and the God of the Becoming Future, so God is the Prehending Ultimate. These statements then are multiple sides of the same coin, or orb, or whatever shape a multiple prehending Ultimate might be described as. But in process terms, the immediate present is so slim a thing and so transitory a momentary event that is is nearly always eclipsed by the preceding past and incoming/becoming future meshing and molding together with its present state.

Stepping out of time as a process one might imagine that the only process state we have to live in is the state of the present, the ever living now, the becoming moment where we receive our past, meditate on it, and release it into the future without allow our present to be lost in the flows of our many lives. Our value is in the now, which is never static. In our acts of the moment which determine who we are, where we are going, what we're about, and how we might think and act. What process gives to the present is the gift of connection, wholeness, relationship to the All which surrounds us, encompasses us, enmeshes, enfolds us, holds us, influences us, and abides with us. - res

Our present is perpetually perishing as it presses forward from eventful occasions of our past pushing us onwards towards an enmeshing future which I once spoke of in one of my poems as a "membrane" or "BRAN" (in the quantum mathematical expression of the concept) of becoming (cf. poem, School Days). Succinctly, all our past, all our perishable moments of our reflective being, are scooped up and accumulated into the everlasting Presence-and-Being of the God of our unforgettable moments of ourselves. In God we never really perish but are an "everlasting are" of many moments held in one everlasting essence of God. The God of process then is the God who is our timeless Keeper.

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Descartes describes man's reality by the static statement of "I think, therefore I am." Whereas Whitehead describes man as an always actuating "Am" who never perishes but always moves forward moment by moment as an "everlasting becoming." (sic, "I am, therefore I become").

Contra Plato re his thoughts on the perishable object, Whitehead describes a creation in which everything perishes with continuing influence upon a future filled with existential consequentiality.

If nothing endures then what's the point of life? Of living? But in God all is PRESERVED.

THE NATURE OF A STONE

AND CHAOS

pg 78 ff

We may describe a stone by its whole or by its parts. If by its parts we might describe it by color, weight, shape, appearance, relationship to the terrain and topology, its geography, or its regional location on this planet or another; or by its crystalline molecules, or its molecular structure, or by its quantum states, or even by its dimension quantum string states epitomized by its dimensional vibratory structure (sic, how it "sings" or "sounds" to the quantum universe around it).

One part of the process of description might grow from the stone itself upwards to include an ever-expanding universe of inclusion. That is, how it might relate from itself to the universe. Another way of describing the stone was within itself in a cascading sequence of ever-descending worlds of the small. And finally, we might describe the stone in all its parts and its wholeness as a thing in flux, movement, and chaos with the rest of creation. That even in its seeming structure of eternality there are interior and exterior forces without, and within, which will affect its balance and harmony of the now, the present, the moment. Who knew there was so much going on with that stone!

So much so then with living things, a living cosmos, or transitioning inorganic matter! All of creation "sings, claps its hands, shouts for joy, or roars its thunder" throughout its rhythms and motions. This is its nature. It is a nature in process with itself. It is the restless nature of God given to creation to order its chaos into new chaoses of being and becoming through event and occasion.

Chaos in itself is not evil if structured with an evolving, valuative process of concrescence. But chaos can and does become evil dependent upon how it disrupts the valuative concrescing processes of living things. Rains may become floods; fires destructive; breezes become gales; fresh water too briny; and so forth. Chaos is how creation runs. It is part of creation's evolving structure. Without it there can be "normative" growth. No "novelty, wonder, or creativity."

Chaos is a good thing which ever orders itself as a quality which is shared with its Creator. A Creator who orders chaos to become move than it is. It involves both life and death. Chaos has its cycles. But, being indeterminate, it may also create bad disrupts instead of good disruptions. The nature of God is not bad but the freewill agency He has granted to creation may devolve as well as evolve. With non-living, inorganic matter, it goes where it pleases.

But if left alone, as exampled by nature in its evolving stages, it always moves towards wholeness, balance, harmony, and rhythm. It can settle out and be mitigated by sources of life spring up everywhere underneath its forces (biblically, "wings"?) which lend stability to its times of fury and fickleness. Green landscapes have the power within itself for such mitigation. The winds die down, the water is tamed and made healthy, the light of the sun finds fields to feed and trees which offer shade. Rhythm and harmony. These are valuative consequences of concrescing processes.

LANGUAGE: OBJECT (noun)
or EVENT (verb)?

HOW WE THINK IN A LANGUAGE DEFINES

OUR UNIVERSE, BELIEFS, AND METAPHYSICS

pg 79

The simple sentence consists of a noun or pronoun, a verb, and an actionable event:

Noun/Pronoun + Verb --> Event

If the language of a society is highly visual, then its "world" or "metaphysics" or "beliefs" are prejudiced towards objectifying what it sees. If a language of a society is shaped towards actions, events, hearing, or narrative, then that language is prejudiced towards actionable events or occasions. This latter is where process philosophy/theology lives. Actual Entities (or Occasions) which are always transitioning towards something.

In English, and the Indo-European languages, both have roots in the Latin and Greek languages of the ancient world where nature and life were objectified. We see all around us in a material sense and wish to then reduce its components into orderly consequences of finally states. This is the science of empiricism. It is the basis of modern science.

It grows out of a visual world of many types of enduring objects and actions. It is what drives Western philosophy; and it has also been produced in parts of Continental Philosophy as it breaks metaphysics down into worlds of idealism, phenomena, existentialism, dialectic, etc. Such societies inform themselves of their universe by predominantly their visual experiences hidden within the sublime sensory organ of vision over all other sensory organs and conceptualized perceptions.

In Hebrew, Japanese and Chinese these languages differ. They concentrate on the "VERB" of the responding event where all is in motion with itself. Such motion-based languages "hear" the wind, the trees, the mountains and valleys. They write of its narratives in a flowing majesty of resplendent living life bounding across a universe of joy and gladness. Its stories are stories of harmony, flow, rhythm, and balance. There is no object, no substance, in its attitudes as all have become one and the one the many. Its language informs its speakers of another kind of world which non-Semitic and non-Oriental worlds cannot "hear" very well.

Language then may express a succession of event without a need for an objectifying that event as a substance. When one listens to a symphony one does not easily hear the entirety of the notes or the musical phrases which for the sections of that symphony. It is very hard to do. Like ourselves, a symphony of sound washes our us, our feelings, our being. It is very difficult to try to remember a symphony's collection of tonalities and phrases while hearing the symphony itself. It is very hard to take a fluid, liquid language of succession and objectify it.

If we focus on its moments we cannot hear the score. If we hear the score we cannot focus on the notes. This kind of processional language involves not seeing but feeling. Even processional language has a hard time describing poetically what it hears, feels, senses in its being. Consequently, if we are to "tune in" to a process universe than we will need another kind of language even beyond that dominated by verb structures. We'll need a language which cannot be spoken, written down, perhaps even scored. One may call it the language of the trees or the universe, but I suspect even those languages will not be enough to hear the many tonal forms of a process creation.

---

Of note, when Alfred North Whitehead wrote his process philosophy he did not consider any other language than his own, English. Hence, his philosophical "empirical breakdown" of its conceptual components is very Continental-like. It has its good insights and its problems or restrictions. Perhaps a new endeavor might take Continental Philosophy's process-based parts, mix it up in a verb-based societal language, and try re-writing it in the new world of quantum science. But to do that will require a cross-discipline between a competently versed quantum theoretical physicist, a thorough-going abstract Continental philosopher, and contemporary processed-based orthodox theologian. As such, there are very, very few of these types around. So, I will expect many different forms of process philosophy/theology to result over the years to come as searches are made to better express the kind of metaphysical cosmology we live in.

---

We see the world through ourselves. The ever dominant "I". In Whitehead, the I is different in every moment of its being while affecting a new future which hadn't existed before the I had entered into it. In a process world, the I is called into being the best it can be as a valuative component moving from one future to the next towards best possible outcomes.

(As an aside, I personally wonder if a disruptive form of bad chaos might be helpful here in the sinful world of men. But then again, bad may seem good though it never seems to engender good through bad means. Thus, if we change the disruptive form of bad chaos to good chaos, here we might better obtain a formative sequencing where good may birth good. However, other freewill agents might just as will resist such positive choices to continue and perhaps enhance bad outcomes. The point is, it is still the onus placed upon the individual to move towards a future of every hour and every day with greater resolve against a persisting state of disruptive processes resulting from non-valuative choices.)

CAUSAL EFFICACY &

PRESENTATIONAL IMMEDIACY

With the terms of causal efficacy (CE) and presentational immediacy (PI) we must now ask the question as to how the past shapes the present with effect and causality. According to Whitehead, the past is represented in the present as the present's initial phase. The diagram of light helps to demonstrate light's journey from past to immediate past to present to immediate future to future futures.

Again, Whitehead thinks that a causal past is how we might prehend our contemporary world before either we or the world enter into a relationship of presentational efficacy. But once we do than at that moment the prehended past becomes a concrescing present pressing forward even as it quickly perishes. Therefore, any discussion of immediacy will also show how dependent it is on the past. 

Too, presentational efficacy involves both sensory and non-sensory organs. Not only the eyes et al but the mind which conjectures, rationalizes, reasons, and speculates. The wall in a room presents itself with color to our eyes and a solid surface to our touch but to our mind it projects itself as a barrier we shelter behind or must go around to get pass.

As causal efficacy occurs and presentational immediacy takes place, by extension, time and distance projects the causal efficacy into the past so that presentation immediacy may create its own causal efficacy on a future occasion.

---

Whitehead's categories organized in Peircean triads The physical categories on the left represent what Whitehead (1929) called "the ultimate facts of immediate actual experience." The three categories Whitehead defined for actual entities, prehensions, and (societal) nexûs make up a triad of physical categories characterized by the Kantian triad under Relation: Inherence, Causality, and Community.

AE/AO ---> derivations / extensions ---> AE / AO

There are three or four kinds of prehensions:

1 - Physical
2 - Conceptual
3 - The Intermixture of both 1 with 2 and 2 with 1
4 - The Strain of Experience and Extension

As time and displacement take place as a continuum from the experience moment a new process begins. The process world of reality is thereby "extended" beyond what it was into another world of becoming. But not as independent realities but as collective realities joined together, though perhaps not affecting one another because of displacement between its remote organs in relation to nearer organs (e.g., process philosophy is also a philosophy of "organism").

For example, a star is born, lives, and dies and yet we may see or not see its light because of its remoteness, time and distance between us, and the brevity of life we bear. This discussion then might enter into discussions of spacetime and how objects move in relationship to one another:

A moves through ST ---> In respect to B's causality

B moves through ST ---> In respect to A's causality

And yet, time and space are never fixed. They are fluid and move relatively to one another. Things that move within this world or spacetime such as light or radiation contort with its gravitational effects among other factors creating a unique kind of "extensive continuum".

Newton's Substance Reality (Materialism) ---> Is replaced by Einstein's Motion / Event

In Relativity Theory anything can be used as a spacetime reference point where each "organic event" moves relative to another "organic event".

I --> Others

Others --> I

Earth --> Stars

Stars --> Earth

The Sun's Solar System --> Milky Way

The Milky Way --> The Sun's Solar System

The Milky Way --> Nearby Galaxies

Nearby Galaxies --> The Milky Way

etc

As example, current quantum theory states that the Big Bang resulted from a compressed chaotic state of one-dimensional plasmic space we might think of as a "spatial void." A void where time and infinity are lost within this spatial state of timeless dimension consisting in a "liquid" plasmic state where there is no time as there are no reference points. Only energetic radiation bound to itself through intense gravitational forces forming an "unobservable" spatial void.

When birthed, this spatial void began an everlasting birthing process which changes with the varying spacetime dimensions it has created. Now weather the Big Bang was borne from the collision of one uniquely separate universe with one or more uniquely separate universes; or whether in itself, it began the very process of everlastingly bubbling multi-verses we may never know. What we do know is that cosmic evolution tells of a process-based evolution allowing for all parts of process formature as underlying themes to our present cosmic context.

HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

Plato's Naturalistic Realism evolved in the 17th Century as British Empiricism forming the basis of modern science. Descartes, Hume, and Locke spoke of final and efficient causes where our observations tell us what the world is like. Hume said that causality is fundamental to science. That is,

cause A-->led to cause B-->led to C--> led to D.

Then one day he asked an unthought question... "What is Cause?" If it is not visible, or able to be empirically testable, then what is cause in the metaphysical sense? With this observation Hume effectively ends British Empiricism.

At which point Immanuel Kant awakens from his dogmatic slumbers and proposes a philosophical Transcendentalism. Having assumed experience gave us reality he noticed immediately upon Hume's observation that with the inability to perceive cause one cannot know from the study of Science its causal relationships. These are hidden from us as observers empirically. Therefore, it is the Mind! Reason! Which is the ultimate causality. Which give necessary ordering to the multiplicity of observed data.

Data --> Mind ---> Organizes Data

In effect, Kant says to forget the empiricism of data to concentrate on the empiricism of the mind. Pure reason. Thus, was birthed the Age of German Idealism into which Hegel next responded. And with Hegel began the course Continental Philosophy in its many directions to contemplate the unseen, the untestable, the unthought. An Age of Critical Thinking. And it was into this era which A.N. Whitehead, being American, and living in a Western tradition, responded. But because he wasn't considered to be a "critical thinker" the worthies of German Idealism were not impressed by his metaphysical theories on cosmogony while they were concentrating on the metaphysical suborders within cosmogony. Here then was an impasse. The parts of the whole were the subjects of study rather than the whole itself, which Whitehead deigned to discuss, and conjecture, as a superseding whole to all other suborder discussions.

This is not to throw Continental Philosophy under the bus. In many ways it has enlivened philosophy for contemporary undertakings of the universe and how things work. But in another sense, Process Philosophy is becoming the conceptual bridge over which both Western Philosophy and Continental Philosophy might find agreement with one another as each concentrates on an aspect of a reality deemed important to their discipline.

Beginning then with Kant, we move from Kantian Dualism (sic, noumenal worlds of reality we cannot understand) to Descartes' Cartesian Dualism (sic, Mind v Body Dualism) which states that mental phenomena are non-physical, and that metaphysical/ontological matter exists independently of the mind (which can or cannot be known). In all of this, what Whitehead wished to do was to restore to nature its mystery by incorporating its causality into the experiential world of processes which are no longer mechanistic, material-based objects that could be measured or determined.

To rely on mystery as an explanation is not sufficient for a coherent theology of God, nature or man. Conversely, one may never state with absolute certainty a surmise in an ever-evolving cosmogony between God and creation. The best we can do is to approximate reality that it sufficiently explains pain and loss, joy and passion. In this might a theology be described as coherent but never static as a dynamically evolving system. - re slater

Alfred North Whitehead "Process and Reality," Corrected Edition, Complete Book Outline

PROCESS AND REALITY: AN ESSAY IN COSMOLOGY 

by ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

Presented at the Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh

During the Session 1927-28

F.R.S., ScD. (Cambridge), Hon. D.Sc. (Manchester), 

Hon. LL.D. (St. Andrews), Hon. D.Sc. (Wisconsin), 

Hon. Sc.D. (Harvard and Yale) 

CORRECTED EDITION 

Edited by DAVID RAY GRIFFIN

& DONALD W. SHERBURNE

THE FREE PRESS - 

A Division of Macmillan Publishing Co,, Inc., New York 

Copyright © 1978 by The Free Press 

A Division of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. 

Copyright, 1929, by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. 

Copyright renewed 1957 by Evelyn Whitehead. 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Editors' Preface v
Preface xi

PART I - THE SPECULATIVE SCHEME 

Chapter I. Speculative Philosophy

• I. Speculative Philosophy; Coherent, Logical, Necessary System of Ideas; Interpretation of Experience.
• II. Defects of Insight and of Language; Conditions for Observation; Rigid Empiricism, Imagination, Generalization; Coherence and Incoherence; Creativity, the Ultimate. 
• III. Rationalism and Dogmatism; Scheme as a Matrix, False and True Propositions, Use of the Matrix; Experimental Adventure. 
• IV. Philosophy and Science, Grades of Generality; Dogmatic Influence of Mathematics; Progress of Philosophy.
• V. Defects of Language; Propositions and Their Background; Metaphysical Presupposition; xxcessive Trust in Language; Metaphysics and Practice; Metaphysics and Linguistic Expression.
• VI. Speculative Philosophy and Overambition; Overambition, Dogmatism and Progress; Interpretation and Metaphysics; The Higher Elements of Experience, Subjectivity and the Metaphysical Correction; Morality, Religion, Science, Connected by Philosophy; Contrast between + Religion and Science; Conclusion.

Chapter II. The Categoreal Scheme 18

• I. Four Notions, namely, Actual Entity, Prehension, Nexus, the Ontological Principle; Descartes and Locke; Philosophy Explanatory of Abstraction, Not of Concreteness. 
• II. The Four Sets of Categories; The Category of the Ultimate; Conjunction and Disjunction; Creativity, the Principle of Novelty, Creative Advance; Togetherness, Concrescence; Eight Categories of Existence; Twenty-Seven Categories of Explanation. 
• III. Nine Categoreal Obligations. 
• IV. Preliminary Notes; Complete Abstraction Self-Contradictory; Principles of Unrest and of Relativity; Actual Entities never Change; Perishing of Occasions and Their Objective Immortality; Final Causation and Efficient Causation; Multiplicities; Substance. 

Chapter III. Some Derivative Notions 31

• I. Primordial Nature of God; Relevance, the Divine Ordering; Consequent Nature of God; Creativity and Its Acquirement of Character; Creatures, Objective Immortality, Appetition, Novelty, Relevance; Appetition and Mentality, Conceptual Prehensions, Pure and Impure Prehensions; Synonyms and Analogies, namely, Conceptual Prehension, Appetition, Intuition, Physical Purpose, Vision, Envisagement. 
• II. Social Order, Defining Characteristic, Substantial Form; Personal Order, Serial Inheritance, Enduring Object; Corpuscular Societies. 
• III. Classic Notion of Time, Unique Seriality; Continuity of Becoming, Becoming of Continuity, Zeno; Atomism and Continuity; Corpuscular and Wave Theories of Light. 
• IV. Consciousness, Thought, Sense-Perception are Unessential Elements in an Instance of Experience. 

PART II - DISCUSSIONS AND APPLICATIONS 

Chapter I. Fact and Form 39

• I. Appeal to Facts, European Tradition; Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant; Intrinsic Reasonableness; Footnotes to Plato; This Cosmology Platonic; Participating Forms; Divine Ordering; Ontological Principle; Facts the only Reasons; Facts are Process; Prehension, Satisfaction. 
• II. Rationalism a Faith, Adventure of Hope; Limits of Theory, Givenness,t Professor A. E. Taylor on Plato; Decision, the Ontological Principle; Entities and Process, Actual Entities and Decision; Stubborn Fact. 
• III. Platonic Form, Idea, Essence, Eternal Object; Potentiality and Givenness; Exclusiveness of the Given; Subject-Superject, Becoming and Being; Evaporation of Indeterrnination in Concrescence, Satisfaction Determinate and Exclusive; Concrescence Dipolar; Potentiality, Givenness, Impossibility; Subsistence. 
• IV. Actual Occasions Internally Determined, Externally Free; Course of History not Necessary, No Perfection; Efficient Causation and Final Reaction; God's Primordial Freedom; Each Concrescence between Definite Free Initiation and Definite Free Conclusion, the Former Macrocosmic, the Latter Microcosmic. 
• V. Universals and Particulars, Unsuitable Terms with False Implication; Illustration from Descartes, also Hume; Descartes' Alternative Doctrine, Realitas Objective, Inspectio, Intuitio, Judicium; World not Describable in Terms of Subject and Predicate. Substance and Quality, Particular and Universal; Universal Relativity. 
• VI. Locke's Essay, Agreement of Organic Philosophy with It; Substitute 'Experience for Understanding'; Ideas and Prehensions; Locke's Two Doctrines of Ideas, Ideas of Particular Things; Representative Theory of Perception; Logical Simplicity and Genetic Priority not to be Identified; Substance, Exterior Things, Societies; Solidarity of the Universe. 
• VII. Locke's Doctrine of Power, Power and Substance; Causal Objectification and Presentational Objectification; Change Means Adventures of Eternal Objects; Real Essence, Abstract Essence; Doctrine of Organism and Generation of Actual Entities. 

Chapter II. The Extensive Continuum 61

• I. Continuum and Real Potentiality, Atomized by Actual Occasions; How the Continuum is Experienced, Presentational Immediacy, Sensa; Real Chair and Chair-Image; Complex Ingression of Sensa. 
• II. General Potentiality and Real Potentiality; Standpoints of Actual Occasions, Determined by Initial Phase of Subjective Aim; Extensive Relationships; The Epochal Theory of Time, Zeno, William James. 
• III. Newton's Scholium.
• IV. Newton's Scholium, Comparison with Philosophy of Organism and with Descartes; 'Withness of the Body,' Status of the Body in the Actual World; Ontological Status of Space for Newton, Descartes and the Organic Philosophy.
• V. Undifferentiated Endurance and the Passivity of Substance, Source of Errors. 
• VI. Summary. 

Chapter III. The Order of Nature 83

• I. Order and Givenness Contrasted; The Four Characteristics of Order; Attainment of End, Lure of** Feeling; Causa Sui. 
• II. 'Society' Defined, Defining Characteristic and Genetic Inheritance; Environment, Social and Permissive; Cosmic Epoch, Social Hierarchy. 
• III. Evolution of Societies, Decay, Chaos, the Timaeus, the Scholium, Milton. 
• IV. Societies in this Cosmic Epoch; The Extensive Society, the Geometric Society. Electromagnetic Society; Waves. Electrons, Protons. 
• V. Enduring Objects, Corpuscular Societies, Structured Societies. 
• VI. Stability, Specialization. 
• VII. Problem of Stabilization, Exclusion of Detail, Conceptual Initiative, Life. 
• VIII. Inorganic Apparatus for Life. 
• IX. Life a Reaction against Society, Originality. 
• X. Life and Food, Life in Empty Space, Catalytic Agent. 
• XL Living Persons, Canalization of Life, Dominant Personality only Partial. 

Chapter IV. Organisms and Environment 110

• I. Reaction of Environment on Actual Occasions; Narrowness and Width, Dependent on Societies, Orderly Element; Chaos, Triviality, Orderliness, Depth; Triviality, Vagueness, Narrowness, Width; Incompatibility, Contrast; Triviality, Excess of Differentiation; Vagueness, Excess of Identification; Nexus as One, Vagueness, Narrowness, Depth; Coordination % of Chaos, Vagueness, Narrowness, Width. 
• II. Intensity, Narrowness; Philosophy of Organism, Kant, Locke. 
• III. Sensa, Lowest Category of Eternal Objects, Definition; Sensa, Contrasts of, Intensity; Contrasts in High and Low Categories, Patterns; Eternal Objects, Simplicity, Complexity; Sensa Experienced Emotionally. 
• IV. Transmission, Diverse Routes, Inhibitions, Intensification; Vector Character, Form of Energy; Physical Science. 
• V. Environmental Data as in Perception; Visual Perception, Most Sophisticated Form; Originated by Antecedent State of Animal Body, Hume; Animal Body and External Environment, Amplifier.
• VI. Perception and Animal Body, Causal Efficacy. 
• VII. Causal Efficacy, Viscera; Presentational Immediacy, Delusive Perceptions, Secondary Qualities, Extension, Withness of Body; Hume, Kant. 
• VIII. Loci Disclosed by Perception; Contemporary Regions, Causal Past, Causal Future; Immediate Present, Unison of Becoming, Concrescent Unison, Duration; Differentiation between Immediate Present and Presented Duration; Presented Locus. 
• IX. Presented Locus and Unison of Becoming; Presented Locus, Systematic Relation to Animal Body, Strains, Independence of External Contemporary Happenings, Straight Lines, Measurement; Unison of Becoming, Duration. 
• X. Summary.

Chapter V. Locke and Hume 130

• I. Hume, Perceptions, Substance, Principle of Union; Ideas, Copies of Impressions, Imaginative Freedom. 
• II. Hume and 'Repetition/ Cause and Effect; Memory, Force and Vivacity. 
• III. Time, Hume, Descartes, Independence of Successive Occasions; Objective Immortality. 
• IV. Influence of Subject-Predicate Notion; Hume, Descartes, Locke, Particular Existence. 
• V. Hume and Locke, Process and Morphology; False Derivation of Emotional Feelings; Sensationalist Doctrine; Santayana.

Chapter VI. From Descartes to Kant 144

• I. Descartes, Three Kinds of Substance: Extended, Mental, God's; Three Kinds of Change, of Accidents, Origination, Cessation; Accidental Relations, Representative Ideas; Unessential Experience of External World. 
• II. Locke, Empiricism, Adequacy, Inconsistency; Particular Existent, Substance, Power; Relativity, Perpetually Perishing. 
• III. Analogy and Contrast with Philosophy of Organism. 
• IV. Hume and Process, Kant, Santayana. 
• V. Contrasted Procedures of Philosophy of Organism and Kant. 

Chapter VII. The Subjectivist Principle 157

• I. The Subjectivist Principle and the Sensationalist Principle; The Sensationalist Doctrine Combines Both; Locke, Hume, Kant; Statement of the Principles; The Three Premises for the Subjectivist Principle; Philosophy of Organism Denies the Two Principles and the Three Premises; Descartes; 'That Stone as Grey/ Substance and Quality, Organs of Sensation; Descartes' Subjectivist Modification; 'Perception of that Stone as Grey'; Failure to Provide Revised Categories; Hume. 
• II. Knowledge, Its Variations, Vaguenesses; Negative Perception the General Case, Consciousness is the Feeling of Negation, Novelty; Consciousness a Subjective Form, Only Present in Late Derivative Phases of Complex Integrations; Consciousness only Illuminates the Derivative Types of Objective Data, Philosophy Misled by Clearness and Distinctness. 
• III. Primitive Type of Physical Experience is Emotional; Vector Transmission of Feeling, Pulses of Emotion, Wave-Length; Human Emotion is Interpreted Emotion, Not Bare Emotional Feeling. 
• IV. Decision Regulating Ingression of Eternal Objects, Old Meeting New; The Three Phases of Feeling:! Conformal, Conceptual, Comparative; Eternal Objects and Subjective Forms; Continuity of the Phases; Category of Objective Unity. 
• V. Reformed Subjectivist Principle is Another Statement of Principle of Relativity; Process is the Becoming of Experience; Hume's Principle Accepted, This Method only Errs in Detail; 'Law' for 'Causation' no Help; Modern Philosophy Uses Wrong Categories; Two Misconceptions:! (i) Vacuous Actuality, (ii) Inherence of Quality in Substance. 

Chapter VIII. Symbolic Reference 168

• I. Two Pure Modes of Perception, Symbolic Reference; Common Ground, Integration, Originative Freedom, Error; Common Ground, Presented Locus, Geometrical Indistinctness in Mode of Causal Efficacy; Exceptions, Animal Body, Withness of Body. 
• II. Common Ground, Common Sensa; Modern Empiricism, Make-Believe, Hume; Sensa Derived from Efficacy of Body; Projection. 
• III. Mistaken Primacy of Presentational Immediacy, Discussion, Causal Efficacy Primitive. 
• IV, Further Discussion; Causation and Sense-Perception.
• V. Comparison of Modes; Integration in Symbolic Reference.
• VI. Principles of Symbolism, Language. 

Chapter IX. The Propositions 184

• I. Impure Prehensions by Integration of Pure Conceptual and Pure Physical Prehensions; Physical Purposes and Propositions Discriminated; Theory, Not Primarily for Judgment, Lures for Feeling; Objective Lure; Final Cause; General and Singular Propositions; Logical Subjects, Complex Predicate; Propositions True or False; Lure to Novelty; Felt 'Contrary' is Consciousness in Germ; Judgment and Entertainment; Graded Envisagement. 
• II. Truth and Falsehood, Experiential Togetherness of Propositions and Fact; Correspondence and Coherence Theory; Propositions True or False, Judgments Correct or Incorrect or Suspended; Intuitive and Derivative Judgments; Logic Concerned with Derivative Judgments; Error. 
• III. Systematic Background Presupposed by Each Proposition; Relations, Indicative Systems of Relations; Propositions and Indicative Systems; Illustration, Inadequacy of Words. 
• IV, Metaphysical Propositions; One and One Make Two.
• V. Induction, Probability, Statistical Theory, Ground, Sampling, Finite Numbers. 
• VI. Suppressed Premises in Induction, Presupposition of Definite Type of Actuality Requiring Definite Type of Environment; Wider Inductions Invalid; Statistical Probability within Relevant Environment. 
• VII. Objectification Samples Environment.
• VIII. Alternative Non-Statistical Ground; Graduated Appetitions, Primordial Nature of God; Secularization of Concept of God's Functions. 

Chapter X. Process 208

• I. Fluency and Permanence; Generation and Substance; Spatialization; Two Kinds of Fluency: Macroscopic and Microscopic, from Occasion to Occasion and within Each Occasion. 
• II. Concrescence, Novelty, Actuality; Microscopic Concrescence. 
• III. Three Stages of Microscopic Concrescence; Vector Characters Indicate Macroscopic Transition; Emotion, and Subjective Form Generally, is Scalar in Microscopic Origination and is the Datum for Macroscopic Transition.
• IV. Higher Phases of Microscopic Concrescence.
• V. Summary. 

PART III - THE THEORY OF PREHENSIONS 

Chapter I. The Theory of Feelings 219

• I. Genetic and Morphological Analysis; Genetic Consideration is Analysis of the Concrescence, the Actual Entity Formaliter; Morphological Analysis is Analysis of the Actual Entity as Concrete, Spatialized, Objective.
• II. Finite Truth, Division into Prehensions; Succession of Phases, Integral Prehensions in Formation; Five Factors: Subject, Initial Data, Elimination, Objective Datum, Subjective Form; Feeling is Determinate. 
• III. Feeling Cannot be Abstracted from Its Subject; Subject, Aim at the Feeler, Final Cause, Causa Sui.
• IV. Categories of Subjective Unity, of Objective Identity, of Objective Diversity. 
• V. Category of Subjective Unity; The One Subject is the Final End Conditioning Each Feeling, Episode in Self-Production; Pre-established Harmony, Self-Consistency of a Proposition, Subjective Aim; Category of Objective Identity, One Thing has one R61e, No Duplicity, One Ground of Incompatibility; Category of Objective Diversity, No Diverse Elements with Identity of Function, Another Ground of Incompatibility. 
• VI. World as a Transmitting Medium; Explanation; Negative Prehensions, with Subjective Forms. 
• VII. Application of the Categories.
• VIII. Application (continued).
• IX. Nexus. 
• X. Subjective Forms; Classification of Feelings According to Data; Simple Physical Feelings, Conceptual Feelings, Transmuted Feelings; Subjective Forms not Determined by Data, Conditioned by Them. 
• XL Subjective Form, Qualitative Pattern, Quantitative Pattern; Intensity; Audition of Sound. 
• XII. Prehensions not Atomic, Mutual Sensitivity; Indefinite Number of Prehensions; Prehensions as Components in the Satisfaction and Their Genetic Growth; Justification of the Analysis of the Satisfaction, Eighth and Ninth Categories of Explanation. 

Chapter II. The Primary Feelings 236

• I. Simple Physical Feeling, Initial Datum is one Actual Entity, Objective Datum is one Feeling Entertained by that one Actual Entity; Act of Causation, Objective Datum the Cause, Simple Physical Feeling the Effect; Synonymously 'Causal Feelings'; Primitive Act of Perception, Initial Datum is Actual Entity Perceived, Objective Datum is the Perspective, In General not Conscious Perception; Reason for 'Perspective'; Vector Transmission of Feeling, Re-enaction, Conformal; Irreversibility of Time; Locke; Eternal Objects Relational, Two- Way R61e, Vector-Transference, Reproduction, Permanence; Quanta of Feeling Transferred, Quantum-Theory in Physics, Physical Memory; Atomism, Continuity, Causation, Memory, Perception, Quality, Quantity, Extension. 
• II. Conceptual Feelings, Positive and Negative Prehensions; Creative Urge Dipolar; Datum is an Eternal Object; Exclusiveness of Eternal Objects as Determinants, Definiteness, Incompatibility. 
• III. Subjective Form of Conceptual Prehension is Valuation; Integration Introduces Valuation into Impure Feelings, Intensiveness; Three Characteristics of Valuation: (i) Mutual Sensitivity of Subjective Forms, (ii) Determinant of Procedure of Integration, (iii) Determinant of Intensive Emphasis. 
• IV. Consciousness is Subjective Form; Requires Its Peculiar Datum; Recollection, Plato, Hume; Conscious Feelings always Impure, Requires Integration of Physical and Conceptual Feelings; Affirmation and Negative Contrast; Not all Impure Feelings Conscious. 

Chapter III. The Transmission of Feelings 244

• I. Ontological Principle, Determination of Initiation of Feeling; Phases of Concrescence; God, Inexorable Valuation, Subjective Aim; Self-Determination Imaginative in Origin, Reenaction. 
• II. Pure Physical Feelings, Hybrid Physical Feelings; Hybrid Feelings Transmuted into Pure Physical Feelings; Disastrous Separation of Body and Mind Avoided; Hume's Principle, Hybrid Feelings with God as Datum. 
• III. Application of First Categoreal Obligation: Supplementary Phase Arising from Conceptual Origination; Application of Fourth and Fifth Categoreal Obligations; Conceptual Reversion; Ground of Identity, Aim at Contrast. 
• IV. Transmutation; Feeling a Nexus as One, Transmuted Physical Feeling; R61e of Impartial Conceptual Feeling in Transmutation, Category of Transmutation, Further Explanations; Conceptual Feelings Modifying Physical Feelings; Negative Prehensions Important. 
• V. Subjective Harmony, the Seventh Categoreal Obligation. 

Chapter IV. Propositions and Feelings 256

• I. Consciousness, Propositional Feelings, Not Necessarily Conscious; Propositional Feeling is Product of Integration of Physical Feeling with a Conceptual Feeling; Eternal Objects Tell no Tales of Actual Occasions, Propositions are Tales That Might be Told of Logical Subjects; Proposition, True or False, Tells no Tales about Itself, Awaits Reasons; Conceptual Feeling Provides Predicative Pattern, Physical Feeling Provides Logical Subjects, Integration; Indication of Logical Subjects, Element of Givenness Required for Truth and Falsehood. 
• II. Proposition not Necessarily Judged, Propositional Feelings not Necessarily Conscious; New Propositions Arise; Possible Percipient Subjects within the 'Scope of a Proposition.'
• III. Origination of Propositional Feeling, Four (or Five) Stages, Indicative Feeling, Physical Precognition, Predicative Pattern (Predicate), Predicative Feeling; Propositional Feeling Integral of Indicative and Predicative Feelings. 
• IV. Subjective Forms of Propositional Feelings, Dependent on Phases of Origination; Case of Identity of Indicative Feeling with the Physical Recognition, Perceptive Feelings; Case of Diversity, Imaginative Feelings; Distinction not Necessarily Sharp-Cut; The Species of Perceptive Feelings: Authentic, Direct Authentic, Indirect Authentic, Unauthentic; Tied Imagination.
• V. Imaginative Feelings, Indicative Feeling and Physical Recognition Diverse, Free Imagination; Subjective Form Depends on Origination, Valuation rather than Consciousness; Lure to Creative Emergence; Criticism of Physical Feelings, Truth, Critical Conditions. 
• VI. Language, Its Function; Origination of the Necessary Train of Feelings.

Chapter V. The Higher Phases of Experience 266

• I. Comparative Feelings, Conscious Perceptions, Physical Purposes; Physical Purposes More Primitive than Propositional Feelings. 
• II. Intellectual Feelings, Integration of Propositional Feeling with Physical Feeling of a Nexus Including the Logical Subjects; Category of Objective Identity, Affirmation-Negation Contrast; Consciousness is a Subjective Form.
• III. Belief, Certainty, Locke, Immediate Intuition. 
• IV. Conscious Perception, Recapitulation of Origin; Direct and Indirect Authentic Feelings, Unauthentic Feelings; Transmutation; Perceptive Error, Novelty; Tests, Force and Vivacity, Analysis of Origination; Tests Fallible. 
• V. Judgment, Yes-Form, No-Form, Suspense-Form; In Yes-Form Identity of Patterns, In No-Form Diversity and Incompatibility, In Suspense-Form Diversity and Compatibility; Intuitive Judgment, Conscious Perception. 
• VI. Affirmative Intuitive Judgment Analogous to Conscious Perception, Difference Explained; Inferential Judgment; Divergence from Locke's Nomenclature; Suspended Judgment.
• VII. Physical Purposes, Primitive Type of Physical Feeling; Retaining Valuation and Purpose, Eliminating Indeterminateness of Complex Eternal Object; Responsive Re-enaction; Decision. 
• VIII. Second Species of Physical Purposes, Reversion Involved; Eighth Categoreal Obligation, Subjective Intensity; Immediate Subject, Relevant Future; Balance, Conditions for Contrast; Reversion as Condition for Balanced Contrast; Rhythm, Vibration; Categoreal Conditions; Physical Purposes and Propositional Feelings Compared.

PART IV - THE THEORY OF EXTENSION 

Chapter I. Coordinate Division 283

• I. Genetic Division is Division of the Concrescence, Coordinate Division is Division of the Concrete; Physical Time Arises in the Coordinate Analysis of the Satisfaction; Genetic Process not the Temporal Succession; Spatial and Temporal Elements in the Extensive Quantum; The Quantum is the Extensive Region; Coordinate Divisibility; Subjective UnityIndivisible; Subjective Forms Arise from Subjective Aim; World as a Medium, Extensively Divisible; Indecision as to Selected Quantum. 
• II. Coordinate Divisions and Feelings; Mental Pole Incurably One; Subjective Forms of Coordinate Divisions Depend on Mental Pole, Inexplicable Otherwise; A Coordinate Division is a Contrast, a Proposition, False, but Useful Matrix.
• III. Coordinate Division, the World as an Indefinite Multiplicity; Extensive Order, Routes of Transmission; External Extensive Relationships, Internal Extensive Division, One Basic Scheme; Pseudo Sub-organisms, Pseudo Super-organisms, Professor de Laguna's 'Extensive Connection.'
• IV. Extensive Connection is the Systematic Scheme Underlying Transmission of Feelings and Perspective; Regulative Conditions; Descartes; Grades of Extensive Conditions, Dimensions. 
• V. Bifurcation of Nature; Publicity and Privacy. 
• VI. Classification of Eternal Objects; Mathematical Forms, Sensa. 
• VII. Elimination of the Experient Subject, Concrescent Immediacy. 

Chapter II. Extensive Connection 294

• I. Extensive Connection, General Description. 
• II. Assumptions, i.e., Postulates, i.e., Axioms and Propositions for a Deductive System. 
• III. Extensive Abstraction. Geometrical Elements, Points, Segments.
• IV. Points, Regions, Loci; Irrelevance of Dimensions.

Chapter III. Flat Loci 302

• I. Euclid's Definition of 'Straight Line'
• II. Weakness of Euclidean Definition; Straight Line as Shortest Distance, Dependence on Measurement; New Definition of Straight Lines, Ovals. 
• III. Definition of Straight Lines, Flat Loci, Dimensions. 
• IV. Contiguity. 
• V. Recapitulation. 

Chapter IV. Strains 310

• I. Definition of a Strain, Feelings Involving Flat Loci among the Forms of Definiteness of Their Objective Data; 'Seat' of a Strain; Strains and Physical Behaviour; Electromagnetic Occasions Involve Strains.
• II. Presentational Immediacy Involves Strains; Withness of the Body, Projection, Focal Region; Transmission of Bodily Strains, Transmutation, Ultimate Percipient, Emphasis; Projection of the Sensa, Causal Efficacy Transmuted in Presentational Immediacy; Massive Simplification; Types of Energy; Hume; Symbolic Transference, Physical Purpose. 
• III. Elimination of Irrelevancies, Massive Attention to Systematic Order; Design of Contrasts; Importance of Contemporary Independence; Advantage to Enduring Objects. 
• IV. Structural Systems, Discarding Individual Variations; Physical Matter Involves Strain-Loci. 
• V. The Various Loci Involved: Causal Past, Causal Future, Contemporaries, Durations, Part of a Duration, Future of a Duration, Presented Duration, Strain-Locus.

Chapter V. Measurement 322

• I. Identification of Strain-Loci with Durations only Approximate; Definitions Compared; Seat of Strain, Projectors; Strain-Loci and Presentational Immediacy.
• II. Strain-Locus Wholly Determined by Experient; Seat and Projectors Determine Focal Region; Animal Body Sole Agent in the Determination; Vivid Display of Real Potentiality of Contemporary World; New Definition of Straight Lines Explains this Doctrine; Ways of Speech, Interpretation of Direct Observation; Descartes' Inspectio. Realitas Objective, Judicium. 
• III. Modern Doctrine of Private Psychological Fields; Secondary Qualities, Sensa; Abandons Descartes' Realitas Objectiva; Difficulties for Scientific Theory, All Observation in Private Psychological Fields; Illustration, Hume; Conclusion, Mathematical Form, Presentational Immediacy in one Sense Barren, in Another Sense has Overwhelming Significance. 
• IV. Measurement Depends on Counting and on Permanence; What Counted, What Permanent; Yard-Measure Permanent, Straight; Infinitesimals no Explanation; Approximation to Straightness, Thus Straightness Presupposed; Inches Counted, Non-Coincident; Modern Doctrine is Possibility of Coincidence, Doctrine Criticized; Coincidence is Test of Congruence, Not Meaning; Use of Instrument Presupposes Its Self-Congruence: Finally all Measurement Depends on Direct Intuition of Permanence of Untested Instrument; Theory of Private Psychological Fields Makes Scientific Measurement Nonsense.
• V. Meaning of Congruence in Terms of Geometry of Straight Lines; Systems of Geometry; Sets of Axioms: Equivalent Sets, Incompatible Sets; Three Important Geometries: Elliptic Geometry, Euclidean Geometry, Hyperbolic Geometry; Two Definitions of a Plane; Characteristic Distinction between the Three Geometries; Congruence Depends on Systematic Geometry. 
• VI. Physical Measurement, Least Action, Presupposes Geometrical Measurement; Disturbed by Individual Peculiarities; Physical Measurement Expressible in Terms of Differential Geometry; Summary of Whole Argument. 

PART V - FINAL INTERPRETATION

Chapter I. The Ideal Opposites 337

• I. Danger to Philosophy is Narrowness of Selection; Variety of Opposites: Puritan Self-Restraint and Aesthetic Joy, Sorrow and Joy; Religious Fervour and Sceptical Criticism, Intuition and Reason. 
• II. Permanence and Flux, Time and Eternity. 
• III. Order as Condition for Excellence, Order as Stifling Excellence; Tedium, Order Entering upon Novelty is Required; Dominant Living Occasion is Organ of Novelty for Animal Body. 
• IV. Paradox: Craving for Novelty, Terror at Loss; Final Religious Problem; Ultimate Evil is Time as 'Perpetually Perishing'; Final Opposites :t Joy and Sorrow, Good and Evil, Disjunction and Conjunction, Flux and Permanence, Greatness and Triviality, Freedom and Necessity, God and the World; These Pairs Given in Direct Intuition, except the Last Pair Which is Interpretive. 

Chapter II. God and the World 342

• I. Permanence and Flux, God as Unmoved Mover; Conceptions of God: Imperial Ruler, Moral Energy, Philosophical Principle. 
• II. Another Speaker to Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion; Primordial Nature Deficiently Actual, Neither Love nor Hatred for Actualities, Quotation from Aristotle. 
• III. God's Nature Dipolar, Conceptual and Physical; This Physical Nature Derived from the World; Two Natures Compared. 
• IV. God's Consequent Nature, Creative Advance Retaining Unison of Immediacy, Everlastingness; Further Analysis, Tenderness, Wisdom, Patience; Poet of the World, Vision of Truth, Beauty, Goodness. 
• V. Permanence and Flux, Relation of God to the World; Group of Antitheses: God and the World Each the Instrument of Novelty for the Other. 
• VI. Universe Attaining Self-Expression of Its Opposites. 
• VII. God as the Kingdom of Heaven; Objective Immortality Attaining Everlastingness, Reconciliation of Immediacy with Objective Immortality. 

Index 353

Editors Notes 389