Science and the modern worldWhitehead, Alfred North
Religion
Science and the modern world
Whitehead, Alfred North
Science
So far I have merely been considering an actual occasion on the side of
its full concreteness. It is this side of the occasion in virtue of
which it is an event in nature. But a natural event, in this sense of
the term, is only an abstraction from a complete actual occasion. A
complete occasion includes that which in cognitive experience takes the
form of memory, anticipation, imagination, and thought. These elements
in an experient occasion are also modes of inclusion of complex eternal
objects in the synthetic prehension, as elements in the emergent value.
They differ from the concreteness of full inclusion. In a sense this
difference is inexplicable; for each mode of inclusion is of its own
kind, not to be explained in terms of anything else. But there is a
common difference which discriminates these modes of inclusion from the
full concrete ingression which has been discussed. This _differentia_ is
_abruptness_. By ‘abruptness’ I mean that what is remembered, or
anticipated, or imagined, or thought, is exhausted by a finite complex
concept. In each case there is one finite eternal object prehended
within the occasion as the vertex of a finite hierarchy. This breaking
off from an actual illimitability is what in any occasion marks off that
which is termed mental from that which belongs to the physical event to
which the mental functioning is referred.
In general there seems to be some loss of vividness in the apprehension
of the eternal objects concerned: for example, Hume speaks of ‘faint
copies.’ But this faintness seems to be a very unsafe ground for
differentiation. Often things realised in thought are more vivid than
the same things in inattentive physical experience. But the things
apprehended as mental are always subject to the condition that we come
to a stop when we attempt to explore ever higher grades of complexity in
their realised relationships. We always find that we have thought of
just this—whatever it may be—and of no more. There is a limitation which
breaks off the finite concept from the higher grades of illimitable
complexity.
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