adjustment of the chemical composition of the parts to the preservation of the whole organism is detected. Thus the mental cognition is seen as the reflective experience of a totality, reporting for itself what it is in itself as one unit of occurrence. This unit is the integration of the sum of its partial happenings, but it is not their numerical aggregates. It has its own unity as an event. This total unity, considered as an entity for its own sake, is the prehension into unity of the patterned aspects of the universe of events. Its knowledge of itself arises from its own relevance to the things of which it prehends the aspects. It knows the world as the system of mutual relevance, and thus sees itself as a mirrored in other things. These other things include more especially the various parts of its own body.
It is important to discriminate the bodily pattern, which endures, from the bodily event, which is pervaded by the enduring pattern, and from the parts of the bodily event. The parts of the bodily event are themselves pervaded by their own enduring patterns, which form elements in the bodily pattern. 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 patterns of either. This arises from the intimate character of the relation of whole to part. Thus 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 modifications of the other. The sensitiveness is so arranged that a part adjusts itself to preserve the stability of the pattern of the body. It is a particular example of the favourable environment shielding the organism. The relation of part to whole has the special reciprocity associated with the notion of organism, in which the part is for the whole; but this relation reigns throughout nature and does not start with a special case of the higher organisms …
We can now see the relation of psychology to physiology and to physics. The private psychological field is merely the event, considered from its own standpoint. The unity of this field is the unity of the event. But it is the event as one entity and not the event as a sum of parts. The relations of the parts, to each other and to the whole, are their aspects, each in the other. A body for an external observer is the aggregate of the aspects for him of the body as a whole, and also of the body as a sum of parts. For the external observer the aspects of shape and sense objects are dominant, at least for cognition. But we must also allow for the possibility that we can detect in ourselves direct aspects of the mentalities of higher organisms. The claim that the cognition of alien mentalities must necessarily be by means of indirect inferences from aspects of shape and of sense objects is wholly unwarranted by this philosophy of organism. The fundamental principle is that whatever merges into actuality implants its aspects into every individual event.
Further, even for self-cognition, the aspects of the parts of our own bodies partly take the form of aspects of shape and of sense-objects. But that part of the bodily event in respect to which the cognitive mentality is associated is for itself the unit psychological field. Its ingredients are not referent to the event itself; they are aspects of what lies beyond that event. Thus the self-knowledge inherent in the bodily event is the knowledge of itself as a complex unity, whose ingredients involve all reality beyond itself, restricted under the limitation of its pattern of aspects. Thus we know ourselves as a function of unification of a plurality of things which are other than ourselves. Cognition discloses an event as being an activity, organizing a real togetherness of alien things …
Accordingly consciousness will be the function of knowing. But what is known is already a prehension of aspects of the one real universe. These aspects are aspects of other events as mutually modifying, each the others. In the pattern of aspects they stand in their pattern of mutual relatedness.
The aboriginal data in terms of which the pattern weaves itself are the aspects of shapes, of sense-objects, and of other eternal objects whose self-identity is not dependent on the flux of things. Wherever such objects have ingression into the general flux, they interpret events, each to the other, They are here in the perceiver; but as perceived by him, they convey for him something of the total flux which is beyond himself. The subject-object relation takes its origin in the double role of the these eternal objects. They are modifications of the subject, but only in their character of conveying aspects of other subjects in the community of the universe. Thus no individual subject can have independent reality, since it is a prehension of limited aspects of subjects other than itself.
The technical phrase ‘subject-object’ is a bad term for the fundamental situation disclosed in experience. It is really reminiscent of the Aristotelian ‘subject-predicate’. It already presupposes the metaphysical doctrine of diverse subjects qualified by their private predicates. This is the doctrine of subjects with private worlds of experience. If this be granted, there is no escape from solipsism. The point is that the phrase ‘subject-object’ indicates a fundamental entity underlying the objects. Thus the ‘objects’, as thus conceived are merely the ghosts of Aristotelian predicates …
The point to be made for the purpose of the present discussion is that a philosophy of nature as organic must start at the opposite end to that requisite for a materialistic philosophy. The materialistic starting point is from independently existing substances, matter and mind. The matter suffers modifications of its external relations of locomotion and the mind suffers modification is of its contemplated objects. There are, in this materialistic theory, two sorts of independent substances, each qualified by their appropriate passions. The organic starting point is from the analysis of process as the realisation of events disposed in an interlocked community. The event is the unit of things real. The emergent enduring pattern is the stabilisation of the emergent achievement so as to become a fact which retains its identity throughout the process. It will be noted that endurance is not primarily the property of enduring beyond itself but of enduring within itself. I mean that endurance is the property of finding its patterns reproduced in the temporal parts of the total event. It is in this sense that a total event carries an enduring pattern. There is an intrinsic value identical for the whole and for its succession of parts. Cognition is the emergence, into some measure of individualised reality, of the general substratum of activity, poising before itself possibility, actuality, and purpose.
It is equally possible to arrive at this organic conception of the world if we start from the fundamental notions of modern physics, instead of, as above, from psychology and physiology. In fact by reason of my own studies in mathematics and mathematical physics, I did in fact arrive at my convictions in this way. Mathematical physics presumes in the first place an electromagnetic field of activity pervading space and time. The laws which condition this field are nothing else than the conditions observed by the general activity of the flux of the world, as it individualises itself in the events.
In physics, there is an abstraction. The science ignores what anything is in itself. Its entities are merely considered in relation to their extrinsic reality, that is to say in respect to their aspects in other things. But the abstraction reaches even further than that; for it is only the aspects of other things as modifying this spatiotemporal specifications of the life histories of those other things that count. The intrinsic reality of the observer comes in: I mean what the observer is for himself is appealed to. For example, the fact that he will see red or blue enters into scientific statements. But the red which the observer sees does not in truth enter into the science. What is relevant is merely the bare diversity of the observer’s red experiences from all his other experiences. Accordingly, the intrinsic character of the observer is merely relevant in order to fix the self-identical individuality of the physical entities. These entities are only considered as agencies in fixing the roots in space and in time of the life histories of enduring entities. The phraseology of physics is derived from the materialistic ideas on the seventeenth century. But we find that, even in its extreme abstraction, what it is really presupposing is the organic theory of aspects as explained above …
Specimen Questions
1 What does Whitehead object to in the traditional ‘metaphysics of substance’, and why does he wish to substitute a ‘metaphysics of flux’?
2 What
