Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures, 1929) — Alfred North Whitehead

The merit of Locke’s Essay concerning Human Under- standing is its adequacy, and not its consistency. He gives the most dispassionate descriptions of those various elements in experience which common sense never lets slip. Unfortunately he is hampered by inappropriate metaphysical categories which he never criticized. He should have widened the title of his book into ‘An Essay Concerning Experience.’ His true topic is the analysis of the types of experience enjoyed by an actual entity. But this complete experience is nothing other than what the actual entity is in itself, for itself. I will adopt the pre-Kantian phraseology, and say that the experience enjoyed by an actual entity is that entity formaliter. By this I mean that the entity, when considered ‘formally,’ is being described in respect to those forms of its constitution whereby it is that individual entity with its own measure of absolute self-realization. Its ‘ideas of things’ are what other things are for it. In the phrase- ology of these lectures, they are its ‘feelings.’ The actual entity is composite and analysable; and its ‘ideas’ express how, and in what sense, other things are com- ponents in its own constitution. Thus the form of its constitution is to be found by an analysis of the Lockian ideas. Locke talks of ‘understanding’ and ‘perception.’ He should have started with a more general neutral term to express the synthetic concrescence whereby the many things of the universe become the one actual entity. Accordingly I have adopted the term ‘prehension,’ to express the activity whereby an actual entity effects its own concretion of other things.

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The ‘prehension’ of one actual entity by another actual entity is the complete transaction, analysable into the objectification of the former entity as one of the data for the latter, and into the fully clothed feeling whereby the datum is absorbed into the subjective satisfaction— ‘clothed’ with the various elements of its ‘subjective form.’ But this definition can be stated more generally so as to include the case of the prehension of an eternal object by an actual entity; namely, The ‘positive prehen- sion’ of an entity by an actual entity is the complete transaction analysable into the ingression, or objectifica- tion, of that entity as a datum for feeling, and into the feeling whereby this datum is absorbed into the subjec- tive satisfaction. I also discard Locke’s term ‘idea.’ Instead of that term, the other things, in their limited roles as elements for the actual entity in question, are called ‘objects’ for that thing. There are four main types of objects, namely, ‘eternal objects,’ ‘propositions,’ ‘objectified’ actual entities and nexus. These ‘eternal objects’ are Locke’s ideas as explained in his Essay (I, I, 1), where he writes: “Jdea is the object of thinking. Every man being conscious to himself that he thinks, and that which his mind is applied about, whilst thinking, being the ideas that are there, it is past doubt that men have in their mind several ideas, such as those expressed by the words, ‘whiteness, hardness, sweetness, thinking, motion, man, elephant, army, drunkenness,’ and others.” But later, (III, III, 2), when discussing general terms (and subconsciously, earlier in his discussion of ‘sub- stance’ in II, XXIII), he adds parenthetically another type of ideas which are practically what I term ‘objecti- fied actual entities’ and ‘nexiis.’ He calls them ‘ideas of particular things’; and he explains why, in general, such ideas cannot have their separate names. The reason is simple and undeniable: there are too many actual entities. He writes: “But it is beyond the power of human capacity to frame and retain distinct ideas of all the particular things we meet with: every bird and beast men saw,

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every tree and plant that affected the senses, could not find a place in the most capacious understanding.” The context shows that it is not the impossibility of an ‘idea’ of any particular thing which is the seat of the difficulty; it is solely their number. This notion of a direct, ‘idea’ (or ‘feeling’) of an actual entity is a presupposition of all common sense; Santayana ascribes it to ‘animal faith.’ But it accords very ill with the sensationalist theory of knowledge which can be derived from other parts of Locke’s writings. Both Locke and Descartes wrestle with exactly the same difficulty.

The principle that I am adopting is that consciousness presupposes experience, and not experience consciousness. It is a special element in the subjective forms of some feelings. Thus an actual entity may, or may not, be conscious of some part of its experience. Its experience is its complete formal constitution, including its con- sciousness, if any. Thus, in Locke’s phraseology, its ‘ideas of particular things’ are those other things exercis- ing their function as felt components of its constitution. Locke would only term them ‘ideas’ when these objectifi- cations belong to that region of experience lit up by con- sciousness. In Section 3 of the same chapter, he definitely makes all knowledge to be “founded in particular things.” He writes: “. . . yet a distinct name for every particu- lar thing would not be of any great use for the improve- ment of knowledge: which, though founded in particular things,’ enlarges itself by general views; to which things reduced into parts under general names, are properly subservient.” ‘Thus for Locke, in this passage, there are not first the qualities and then the conjectural particular things; but conversely, Also he illustrates his meaning of a ‘particular thing’ by a ‘leaf,’ a ‘crow,’ a ‘sheep,’ a ‘srain of sand.’ So he is not thinking of a particular patch of colour, or other sense-datum.*’ For example,

1° My italics 17 As he is in I, II, 15, where he writes, “The senses at first let in particular ideas, and furnish the yet empty cabinet; ” Note the

distinction between ‘particular ideas’ and ‘ideas of particular things.’

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in Section 7 of the same chapter, in reference to children he writes: “The ideas of the nurse and the mother are well framed in their minds; and, like pictures of them there, represent only those individuals.” This doctrine of Locke’s must be compared with Descartes’ doctrine of ‘realitas objectiva.’ Locke inherited the dualistic separa- tion of mind from body. If he had started with the one fundamental notion of an actual entity, the complex of ideas disclosed in consciousness would have at once turned into the complex constitution of the actual entity disclosed in its own consciousness, so far as it is conscious —fitfully, partially, or not at all. Locke definitely states how ideas become general. In Section 6 of the chapter he writes: “. . . and ideas become general by separating from them the circumstances of time, and place, and any other ideas that may determine them to this or that par- ticular existence.” Thus for Locke the abstract idea is preceded by the ‘idea of a particular existent’; “(chil- dren) frame an idea which they find those many particu- lars do partake in.” This statement of Locke’s should be compared with the category of conceptual valuation, which is the fourth categoreal obligation.

Locke discusses the constitution of actual things under the term ‘real essences.’ He writes (Section 13, same chapter): “And thus the real internal (but generally in substances unknown) constitution of things, whereon their discoverable qualities depend, may be called their ‘essence.’”’? The point is that Locke entirely endorses the doctrine that an actual entity arises out of a complex constitution involving other entities. Though, by his un- fortunate use of such terms as ‘cabinet,’ he puts less emphasis on the notion of ‘process’ than does Hume.

Locke has in fact stated in his work one main problem
for the philosophy of organism. He discovers that the
mind is a unity arising out of the active prehension of
ideas into one concrete thing. Unfortunately, he presup-
poses both the Cartesian dualism whereby minds are one
kind of particulars, and natural entities are another kind

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of particulars, and also the subject-predicate dogma. He is thus, in company with Descartes, driven to a theory of representative perception. For example, in one of the quotations already cited he writes: “And like pictures of them there, represent only those individuals.” This doc- trine obviously creates an insoluble problem for epis- temology, only to be solved either by some sturdy make- believe of ‘animal faith,’ with Santayana, or by some doctrine of illusioriness—some doctrine of mere appear- ance, inconsistent if taken as real—with Bradley. Any- how ‘representative perception’ can never, within its own metaphysical doctrines, produce the title deeds to guar- antee the validity of the representation of fact by idea.

Locke and the philosophers of his epoch—the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries—are misled by one
fundamental misconception. It is the assumption, uncon-
scious and uncriticized, that logical simplicity can be
identified with priority in the process constituting an
experient occasion. Locke founded the first two books of
his Essay on this presupposition, with exception of his
early sections on ‘substance,’ which are quoted imme-
diately below. In the third and fourth books of the Essay
he abandons this presupposition, again unconsciously as
it seems.

This identification of priority in logic with priority in practice has vitiated thought and procedure from the first discovery of mathematics and logic by the Greeks. For example, some of the worst defects in educational procedure have been due to it. Locke’s nearest approach to the philosophy of organism, and—from the point of view of that doctrine—his main oversight, are best exemplified by the first section of his chapter, ‘Of our Complex Ideas of Substances’ (II, XXIII, 1). He writes: “The mind, being, as I have declared, furnished with a great number of the simple ideas conveyed in by the senses, as they are found in exterior things, or by reflec- tion on its own operations, takes notice, also, that a cer- tain number of these simple ideas go constantly together;

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which being presumed to belong to one thing, and words being suited to common apprehensions, and made use of for quick dispatch, are called, so united in one subject, by one name; which, by inadvertency, we are apt after- ward to talk of and consider as one simple idea, which indeed is a complication of many ideas together: because, as I have said, not imagining how these simple ideas can subsist by themselves, we accustom ourselves to suppose some substratum wherein they do subsist, and from which they do result; which therefore we call substance.”

In this section, Locke’s first statement, which is the basis of the remainder of the section, is exactly the pri- mary assumption of the philosophy of organism: “The mind, being furnished with a great number of the simple ideas conveyed in by the senses, as they are found in exterior things, ...”’ Here the last phrase, ‘as they are found in exterior things,’ asserted what later I shall call the vector character of the primary feelings. The uni- versals involved obtain that status by reason of the fact that ‘they are found in exterior things.’ This is Locke’s assertion and it is the assertion of the philosophy of organism. It can also be conceived as a development of Descartes’ doctrine of ‘realitas objectiva.’ The universals are the only elements in the data describable by concepts, because concepts are merely the analytic functioning of universals. But the ‘exterior things,’ although they are not expressible by concepts in respect to their individual particularity, are no less data for feeling; so that the con- crescent actuality arises from feeling their status of indi- vidual particularity; and thus that particularity is in- cluded as an element from which feelings originate, and which they concern.

The sentence later proceeds with, “a certain number
of these simple ideas go constantly together.” This can
only mean that in the immediate perception ‘a certain
number of these simple ideas’ are found together in an
exterior thing, and that the recollection of antecedent
moments of experience discloses that the same fact, of

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togetherness in an exterior thing, holds for the same set of simple ideas. Again, the philosophy of organism agrees that this description is true for moments of imme- diate experience. But Locke, owing to the fact that he veils his second premise under the phrase ‘go constantly together,’ omits to consider the question whether the ‘exterior things’ of the successive moments are to be identified.