Abstract

Chapter III exhibits Whitehead's intensive analysis of immediate experience, which has as its main purpose the description of how the actualities of nature are internally related. It concerns the showing of how actualities come to be constituent parts of other actualities. There is no such thing as "vacuous actualities;" all exhibit activity in a causa-sui sense. Actualities "experience" one another; and Whitehead calls this a "prehensive activity" by which actualities are constituted, or come into being. Thus all the factors of process involved in an actuality's coming into being, and contributing to the being of others, are exhibited. Also the activity of God is shown to be essential to temporal process. ;Chapter IV displays Whitehead's view that "fact" and "value" cannot be separated in the final interpretation. Value and valuation are shown as being necessary conditions of all natural occurrences, therefore of there being process. Valuation is the essential nature of prehensive activity, without which nothing would come to be. Whitehead's theory of value includes features of every other theory of value, ethics, religion, and aesthetics, but he reinterprets and combines them in a special way relevant to metaphysical interpretation. ;Chapter I considers Whitehead's defense to metaphysics as a conceptual system general enough to give a unity of understanding to the more particular bits of knowledge supplied by the special sciences. Each science abstracts from the concrete fact which we experience with our relations with the world, and thus does not give a total view. Only a metaphysician can give us a comprehensive understanding of the universe, and exhibit the various sciences as special or incomplete interpretations of what is really one and the same world for each. Thus metaphysics seeks the ultimate characterizations of reality. Accordingly, metaphysics is both critical of abstractions when taken as describing the complete character of concrete fact, and constructive as presenting a world-view on the basis of which particular abstractions can find their relevance to each other and to the total comprehensive interpretation. ;Chapter II exhibits method as of basic importance for metaphysical construction. The first business of method is to find a working-hypothesis which will tell us where to look for the evidence from which the universal principles descriptive of reality can be derived. The hypothesis must also, in its application, show us how such evidence can supply us with valid universal principles. On the basis of conceiving human experience as an occurrence in nature, and as evolving from more primitive natural occurrences, such that the same general principles will be exhibited throughout nature from the simplest to the most complex functionings, Whitehead adopts an hypothesis which identifies all natural occurrences with occasions of human experience, so far as their metaphysical nature is concerned. ;This essay is an attempt to relate Whitehead's purpose in constructing a metaphysical system, his conception of the method for its accomplishment, his notions of the content and structure of the actual world conceived as in perpetual process, and the function of value in this process. Thus it includes an explanation of why Whitehead feels that metaphysical construction is both possible and necessary, as adding to our knowledge of reality; his conception of method as including more than has usually been considered the case by previous metaphysicians; his novel interpretation of reality strictly in terms of immediate human experience; and his reasons for holding that fact and value are inseparable in the final interpretation of that which is "really real."