Form: This is, as said above, the principle
of actuality in existing things.
These possibilities are capable of abstraction from any particular instance
of actuality with its emotional freight and can be felt in a variety of ways, depending upon the freedom of the individual.
In one sense, every occasion of experience enjoys some freedom in forming itself into whatever it becomes in its
moment of actuality.
The initial aim guiding each act of becoming to fruition is a pervasive
feature of all actuality, yet only humankind, to our knowledge, is consciously aware of it.
When events are taken as the ultimate
units of actuality, the difficulty of relating «mind» to «matter» is reduced.
But to suppose that temporal advance is wholly predictable is to deny that the future brings genuine
increase of actuality.
No longer is it the latest
verge of actuality, since there is now a richer reality, including the latest one.
Everything that is actual participates in the same kind of existence, what might be called the essence or
nature of actuality.
And this is not necessarily in conflict with Cobb's emphasis on «persuasive power» which respects desires and wants of individuals (humans and other
forms of actuality in his complex pan-psychistic universe).
Both the «principle of relativity» (PR 22) and the «reformed subjectivist principle» (PR 167) indicate that any
conception of an actuality apart from its interrelations with other actualities, or apart from its satisfaction of subjective aim, would be high abstraction.
We can define what we mean by things going on without reference to the idea of stuff, but we do require the
notion of an actuality which emerges from a potentiality.
The process theory of sequential
societies of actualities, each of which is created and then persists thereafter as an objectified datum of prehension in later actualities, seems calculated to take the complexities into account more definitely and naturally than any talk about a rigorous continuity of action defining a single, identical, yet changing individual.
Faith, then, can be understood as a total valuational response to the qualitative
structure of another actuality prior to any clear specification about what is in fact good or bad, trustworthy or untrustworthy about the other actuality.
Is this doctrine grounded in a religious apprehension of the togetherness of the universe, leading to an
understanding of actuality as complete togetherness — «togetherness of otherwise isolated eternal objects, and togetherness of all actual occasions» (SMW 251)?
Many believe that this divine knowledge of evil, pain, and degradation is not possible apart from the actual physical
prehension of the actualities of the world as they happen.
I need to emphasize the actuality of the superject (or, what is the same, the superjective
existence of the actuality) because the misinterpretation of the principle of process has often gone hand in hand with the mistaken belief that «actuality» can be properly predicated of an occasion only while it is in the process of becoming.3 This widespread and deeply rooted mistake deserves more attention than I can give it here without digressing extensively from my main thesis.
The category of perceptivity that we apply to all
occasions of actuality allows us to envision them as actively synthesizing the past into themselves.
It is obvious that if the
definiteness of an actuality preexists the actuality as a possibility, the actuality preexists itself, granting that definiteness is actuality.
But there could not then have been these modes, for each mode represents a synthesis
of actualities which are limited to conform to a standard.
It may be said now that Cobb's emphasis on persuasive control represents a sensitivity to the multiple
levels of actuality of the «raw material.»
God's uniqueness is explained in terms of God's fullness, the most complete
degree of actuality that is possible.
«The consequent nature of God is the fulfillment of his experience by his reception of the multiple freedom
of actuality into the harmony of his own actualization» (PR 530).
«We perceive other things which are in the
world of actualities in the same sense as we are» (PR 240, cf. 78f.
But thc function of universals to explain the Platonist's problem of formal possibility precludes their being conceived as proceeding from actuality; they are necessarily the antecedent
condition of actuality.
Insofar as the several occasions are mutually supportive of one another, they also contribute, but should they clash, or be individually trivial, they detract from this final
unity of all actuality within God.