5 This
is a
remarkable anticipation of Whitehead's view in Process and Reality that God's primordial ordering of the world's possibilities (the
eternal objects)
is the ultimate source of novelty in an emergent universe, except that Thornton understands these possibilities to
be everlasting rather than timeless.6 This reification of what for Whitehead
is purely possible, needing concrete embodiment in the actual world, leads Thornton to conceive of the
eternal order as absolutely actual in its unchangeableness, identical with God.
He added: «It would not
be right to turn the
remarkable and necessary period of catch - up in public service provision over which Labour has presided into some kind of
eternal doctrine: that social democracy
is about high growth in public spending for its own sake, against which everything else we do
is secondary.