The variables can then become ideal objects as parts of forms, which themselves may become objects in more general systems. (religion-online.org)
There Collingwood defines philosophy as a thought systematically fighting against its own abstractions (NTMe 58), describing the development of metaphysics as appealing «to a world of ideal objects towards which the world of experience has an asymptotic nisus, «44 a metaphor Whitehead also makes use of in The Function of Reason (FR 53). (religion-online.org)
Whitehead always accepted experience as more fundamental than ideal objects abstracted from it.3 (religion-online.org)