Science and the modern worldWhitehead, Alfred North
Religion
Science and the modern world
Whitehead, Alfred North
Science
We conceive actuality as in essential relation to an unfathomable
possibility. Eternal objects inform actual occasions with hierarchic
patterns, included and excluded in every variety of discrimination.
Another view of the same truth is that every actual occasion is a
limitation imposed on possibility, and that by virtue of this
limitation the particular value of that shaped togetherness of things
emerges. In this way we express how a single occasion is to be viewed
in terms of possibility, and how possibility is to be viewed in terms
of a single actual occasion. But there are no single occasions, in the
sense of isolated occasions. Actuality is through and through
togetherness—togetherness of otherwise isolated eternal objects, and
togetherness of all actual occasions. It is my task in this chapter to
describe the unity of actual occasions. The previous chapter centered
its interest in the abstract: the present chapter deals with the
concrete, _i.e._, that which has grown together.
Consider an occasion α:—we have to enumerate how other actual occasions
are in α, in the sense that their relationships with α are constitutive
of the essence of α. What α is in itself, is that it is a unit of
realised experience; accordingly we ask how other occasions are in the
experience which is α. Also for the present I am excluding cognitive
experience. The complete answer to this question is, that the
relationships among actual occasions are as unfathomable in their
variety of type as are those among eternal objects in the realm of
abstraction. But there are fundamental types of such relationships in
terms of which the whole complex variety can find its description.
A preliminary for the understanding of these types of entry (of one
occasion into the essence of another) is to note that they are involved
in the modes of realisation of abstractive hierarchies, discussed in the
previous chapter. The spatio-temporal relationships, involved in those
hierarchies as realised in α, have all a definition in terms of α and of
the occasions entrant in α. Thus the entrant occasions lend their
aspects to the hierarchies, and thereby convert spatio-temporal
modalities into categorical determinations; and the hierarchies lend
their forms to the occasions and thereby limit the entrant occasions to
being entrant only under those forms. Thus in the same way (as seen in
the previous chapter) that every occasion is a synthesis of all eternal
objects under the limitation of gradations of actuality, so every
occasion is a synthesis of all occasions under the limitation of
gradations of types of entry. Each occasion synthesises the totality of
content under its own limitations of mode.
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