The Solidarity of the Universe:
An Introduction to the Process Relational Ontology of Alfred North Whitehead
(The following was written for a class titled Towards a Physics of the World-Soul: The Process Relational Cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead, taught by Matthew T. Segall, CIIS, 2019.)
Alfred North Whitehead, the early 20th century British-American mathematician turned philosopher, attempts to refute the Cartesian-Newtonian bifurcation of mind from matter that has consequently rent the human from Nature, the sacred from the mundane, indeed God from the World. Instead he offers a broadly applicable ontology of a dynamically processual, qualitatively experiential, ineluctably relational, and vitally immanent cosmos that re-ensouls manifest reality with the numinous divine. Inspired by the recent discoveries of quantum science, and writing on the heels of nineteenth century Romanticism, itself a reaction to the disenchantment of Enlightenment mechanistic materialism which had, perhaps inadvertently, given way to a pervasive disaffected nihilism, Whitehead sought to re-insert meaning, value, and conscious intentionality into what was presumed to be an indifferent universe. His process-relational ontology brings God back to the World, elucidating a panentheistic philosophy of God inextricably related in and immanently necessary to the material universe.
Whitehead begins this ambitious project by refuting what he terms the “fallacies” of a Cartesian-Newtonian worldview, namely those of simple location and misplaced concreteness—the belief that the material world is solid and impenetrable—and, perhaps most significantly, of the bifurcation of nature—that there is a distinct difference and separation between matter and mind or consciousness. The doctrine of simple location presupposes that the material world is made up of particles of matter that exist independently “in a definite finite region of space, and throughout a definite finite duration of time, apart from any essential reference of the relations of that bit of matter to other regions of space and to other durations of time.”[1] In other words, individual particles of matter exist separately from all other particles of matter throughout space and time. The experience of substance, that is of material reality, is thus created by the sense-perception of aggregates of particulate matter constellating to create the impression of solid objects, which themselves exist independently at a definitive location within time and space.
The doctrine of the bifurcation of nature, concurrently, presumes that these separate particles of matter, though independent from their relations to other particles of matter, have no agentic capacity in and for themselves. They are merely dead, inert stuff floating through the universe. What makes them constellate into certain forms or functions, therefore, must be some outside force (according to the Newtonian conception) or some internal vital force which must apply only to certain aggregates of matter which express a teleological function (i.e. living, growing things), but not to aggregates of inanimate matter. Whitehead calls this a “compromise” which fails to account for the existence of both animate and inanimate entities in nature. “The gap between living and dead matter is too vague and problematical to bear the weight of such an arbitrary assumption, which involves an essential dualism somewhere.”[2] It is this dualism, this essential separation or bifurcation of nature, that Whitehead argues against, and which his ontology seeks to resolve. “Neither physical nature nor life can be understood unless we fuse them together as essential factors in the composition of ‘really real’ things whose interconnections and individual characters constitute the universe.”[3]
In order to resolve this inconsistency he posits that existence is organismic, made up of events of actual occasions which arise from the eternal beingness of qualitative experience, and which are processually related to each and every other actual occasion throughout space and time.[4] According to this ontology everything in the universe (including, therefore, the Universe itself) is made up of moments of physical expression, which Whitehead calls “actual occasions” or “events.” “Actual occasions, as the final realities of which the universe is composed, are self-creating buds of experience, each one uniquely itself even while it remains internally related to every other occasion in the creative community of cosmogenesis.”[5] These actual occasions or events are what render the natural world substantial. As Whitehead writes, “If we are to look for substance anywhere, I should find it in events which are in some sense the ultimate substance of nature.”[6]
The relational interconnection of an event does not begin or end with its own concrescence, however. Each event is “prehended” by all those which came before it and whose own concrescences helped to shape, by way of their relations in form, function, and environment, the substantial existence and subjective telos of any and all future events.
“It must be remembered that just as the relations modify the natures of the relata, so the relata modify the nature of the relation . . . The notion of immanence of the cause in the effect illustrates this truth. We have to discover a doctrine of nature which expresses the concrete relatedness of physical functionings and mental functionings, of the past with the present, and also expresses the concrete composition of physical realities which are individually diverse.”[7]
Here Whitehead elicits an almost holographic panentheistic perspective of reality in which naught is mutually exclusive, in which mind and matter, time and space are inextricably interrelated, and yet which acknowledges the subjective existence of material diversity—the parts within the whole which are also wholes (in their own right) within the parts. “We are in the world and the world is in us.”[8] Thus all actual occasions are inextricably intertwined with all others throughout space and time. This is Whitehead’s process-relational ontology of organism. Though each event informs the processual unfolding of the substantial future, none is separate from any other. “Every actual occasion exhibits itself as a process: it is a becomingness. In so disclosing itself, it places itself as one among a multiplicity of other occasions, without which it could not be itself.”[9]
Moreover, these actual occasions in infinite processual relation are the embodiment, the becoming, of the substrate of eternal beingness which Whitehead calls “God.” In other words, God and the manifest world are not separate, but rather God has two poles of expression or experience, one being that of primordial creative potency, which Whitehead terms “mentality,” and the other consequent/conditioned actuality. Such actual occasions arise from the infinite potential of pure Being ordered by what Whitehead calls “eternal objects,” which “determine and express how actual [occasions] relate to one another,” thus forming “the solidarity of the universe.”[10] The solidarity of the substantial universe—that is, what lends coherence rather than complete chaos to the universe—is the eternal objects which “‘interpret [occasions], each to the other,’ such that they come to find themselves related to one another in an extended space-time manifold”.[11] Each event is an organism of interrelations whose concrescence exists within the context, not only of more complex organisms (e.g. a liver cell within a liver organ within an animal body within a social structure within an ecosystem…), but of all organisms throughout space and time. Thus we have a philosophic interpretation of the holographic interrelation of the one and the many—from the primordial fundament of pure being the eternal objects prehend the myriad concrescent actual occasions, all of which is God.
According to this intelligent ordering, actual occasions concresce into an existence of manifest becoming in order to fulfill a myriad of diversely individual teleological functions while nevertheless in indissoluble relation to all other existent actual occasions. Thus,
“God, as well as being primordial, is also consequent. [God] is the beginning and the end . . . God’s conceptual nature is unchanged, by reason of its final completeness. But [God’s] derivative nature is consequent upon the creative advance of the world.
Thus, analogously to all actual entities, the nature of God is dipolar. [God] has a primordial nature and a consequent nature. The consequent nature of God is conscious; and it is the realization of the actual world in the unity of [God’s] nature, and through the transformation of [God’s] wisdom. The primordial nature is conceptual, the consequent nature is the weaving of God’s physical feeling upon [God’s] primordial concepts.”[12]
Nature is immanent with God, or the divine; the two are not separate.
Each occasion of God fulfills its individual telos according to the teleological requirements of the whole, be that an atom within a molecule, a molecule within a cell, a cell within an organ, an organ within a body, a body within a society, a society within a species, a species within an ecosystem, an ecosystem within a planetary biosphere, a planet within a galaxy, and so on and so forth. “The perfection of God’s subjective aim, derived from the completeness of [God’s] primordial nature, issues into the character of [God’s] consequent nature.”[13] And according to a process-relational philosophy of organism, that atom within the molecule within the cell within the organ is beholden to the teleological process of that organ, but so is it beholden to the telos of the animal whose body the organ belongs, the society and species to which the animal belongs, the ecosystem to which the species of animal belongs, the planetary system to which that ecosystem belongs, and even the galactic structure to which the planet belongs. Likewise, each of these organismic components of the whole organismic system are beholden to one another. An atom within a molecule within a cell within a blade of grass is beholden to the grass land within the ecosystem in which it resides, as well as to the animal which eats it for nourishment of its bodily organism, as well as to the animal which eats that animal, as well as to that animal’s telos within the encompassing ecosystem and galactic structure.
As Whitehead writes, “There is the vague sense of many which are one; and of one which includes the many. Also there are two senses of the one—namely, the sense of the one which is all, and the sense of the one among the many . . . We are, each of us, one among others; and all of us are embraced in the unity of the whole.”[14] The one which is all permeates and enfolds each of the ones in the many. This is the distinction between Being and becoming, both of which are inherent expressions of the substance of nature. There is a qualitative experience of simultaneously being a one and a many, and a one within the One, that subverts any sense of bifurcation or separateness. Thus, “The concept of the order of nature is bound up with the concept of nature as the locus of organisms in process of development.”[15]
But how is a momentary, potentially infinitesimal organism within one planetary ecosystem, for example an atom or an animal or a blade of grass, beholden to the swirling eonic telos of a galaxy or beyond? Whitehead argues for an ontology of consciousness immanent within all actual occasions such that each actual occasion, which together make up the myriad parts and whole of the organismic universe, experiences a quality of its existence, which he terms “experience,” endemic to it. Recall that “the consequent nature of God is conscious” and so accordingly, indeed, Nature and the Universe in its entirety is a living, conscious organism. It is this doctrine of mutual immanence that so radically defies the Cartesian-Newtonian bifurcation of nature into separate capacities of mind and matter, animate life and inanimate substance, and, consequently, God and the World. He writes, “This sharp division between mentality and nature has no ground in our fundamental observation . . . we should conceive mental operations as among the factors which make up the constitution of nature.”[16] All entities have a capacity for mentation, for consciousness, no matter how large or complex or how small or simple.
This, Whitehead argues, is the only plausible explanation for the existence of consciousness in the Universe. It cannot be surmised or explained that consciousness arises suddenly from nowhere in certain animate organisms but not all organisms. “The only intelligible doctrine of causation is founded on the doctrine of immanence. Each occasion presupposes the antecedent world as active in its own nature.”[17] In other words, because this is a process relational organismic universe in which all entities are necessarily implied in one another, if there is consciousness somewhere in the universe then there must be consciousness everywhere. Furthermore, if we cannot accept either a doctrine of external cause or divine interference to explain the existence and processual development of the universe, then some modicum of conscious agency must be implied in nature in order for anything to exist at all. “To explain any emergence at all, Nature must be conceived as an agent of its own evolution and not just a collection of inert stuff.”[18] Nature is alive; it is immanent with its own subjective qualitative experience.
As such Whitehead suggests an ontology of Nature that includes both mental and physical “poles” of experience, rejoining mind and matter as endemic to every level of experience within the universe.[19] He “avoids the modern bifurcation of Nature . . . by recognizing that every organic occasion or ecosystem of occasions—whether it be an electron, a bacterial colony, a sequoia, a bottle-nosed dolphin, a human civilization, a star, or stellar society (galaxy)—is constituted by both a physical pole inheriting the feelings of realized actual facts and a mental pole anticipatory of realizable eternal possibilities. Nature is thus a hybrid process inclusive of both physical and mental activities.”[20] However, in order to also avoid a monist substantialism in which all of Nature is presumed to be merely one conscious substance, he distinguishes the diversity of actual occasions within Nature as manifesting different telic experiences. “There is the dim qualification enjoyed by the lowest types of actuality. There are the clear, distinct qualities enjoyed by human experience. There is every stage in between, and there are numberless stages which human experience has never touched.”[21] Again there is the necessary acknowledgement of the diversity of things, of the many and the one.
This term “mentality,” therefore, is not meant to suggest a particularly anthropocentric cognitive capacity. Human beings, or even animate life, Whitehead argues, are not the only proprietors of mentation or consciousness. Rather, what has been presumed over centuries as human or animal mentation is simply reaction to sense-perceptions given by the physical body. Responding to Locke’s sensationalism, he posits that “the primary qualities are the essential qualities of substances whose spatio-temporal relationships constitute nature,” while those experiences apprehended by the senses are secondary, regardless of any capacity for self-reflexivity.[22] In other words, sense-perception is not the essential consciousness-eliciting force in the universe; rather it is a means and a byproduct of that consciousness. Likewise it is a mistake to qualify our humanness by our capacity for mental cognition, as has been the case for centuries under Cartesian dualism. “Clear, conscious discrimination is an accident of human existence. It makes us human. But it does not make us exist. It is of the essence of our humanity. But it is an accident of our existence.”[23]
The qualification for our existence, and that of all things in Nature, must, then, be predicated on something other than the capacity for sense-perception or human mental cognition. Descartes’ “Cogito, ergo sum” may have seemed captivatingly persuasive within the context of a liberatory 17th century idealism, but from the 20th century perspective accounting for the ecological, social, and spiritual desolation wrought by such a dualism, Whitehead thus proposes instead an ontology of experiential value as the basis of existence. “At the base of our existence is the sense of ‘worth’ . . . of existence for its own sake, of existence which is its own justification.”[24] It is this aesthetic, felt experience of value, which Whitehead terms “enjoyment,” that is the immortal Beingness at the foundation of all actual occasions. It is the “birth right” of all “things,” and indeed of the universe itself. “Each individual act of immediate self-enjoyment . . . these occasions of experience, are the really real things which in their collective unity compose the evolving universe”[25]. . . “Value is in its nature timeless and immortal. Its essence is not rooted in any passing circumstance . . .”[26] In other words, it is not in any subsequent detail of the secondary qualities, such as physical capacity or mental cognition, of any actual occasion or organism that existence is qualified. Rather, it is the bare fact of existence in the telic fullness of experiential “absolute self-enjoyment, creative activity, [and] aim”[27] which qualifies the existence of everything in the universe. Whitehead poetically proclaims that,
“It is the essence of life that it exists for its own sake, as the intrinsic reaping of value”[28] . . . “Our enjoyment of actuality is a realization of worth, good or bad. It is a value-experience. Its basic expression is—Have a care, here is something that matters! Yes—that is the best phrase—the primary glimmering of consciousness reveals, Something that matters.”[29]
To become re-acquainted with this sense of intrinsic worth within all things is urgently needed to bring healing and a sense of coherence, wholeness, and integrity back to our human relation with Nature, which necessarily also implies that with ourselves and one another. This is perhaps particularly true at a time in human history characterized by i) environmental desecration and the specter of species extinction due to the materialistic reduction of nature to dead matter and its subsequent exploitation for human interests under capitalism; ii) paralyzing social alienation, inequality, and rampant violence due to a doctrine of rugged individualism exacerbated by arbitrary divisions between people based on hierarchies of class, race, gender, sexuality, and belief; and iii) a deep spiritual malaise due to the desacralization of nature, life, and the relational interdependence of all things. On all levels of existence we feel ourselves torn asunder, fragmented from what is of true value, the “something that matters” that is our foundation and our telos, our being and our becoming.
It is this emergency that makes Whitehead’s ontology of aesthetic experience within a process-relational organismic universe so imminently necessary. As Segall writes, Whitehead elucidates a profound intuition “that the ontological bifurcation separating the physical from the psychical can be healed only through an aesthetic act of creative imagination, an act that allows us not only to think but to feel the world in a new way.”[30] Through feeling the world in this new way—immanently divine, inextricably interconnected, developmentally interdependent, and aesthetically vital—perhaps we can begin to halt the destructive machinations of four centuries of bifurcated existence. For if we do feel the world in this way then we cannot continue to extract natural resources or desecrate habitats with impunity without acknowledging the violence we are doing not only to others and the whole collective, but to our own selves as well.
“The key to the mechanism of evolution is the necessity of the evolution of a favourable [sic] environment, conjointly with the evolution of any specific type of enduring organisms of great permanence. Any physical object which by its influence deteriorates its environment, commits suicide.”[31]
All things arise relationally with their environment, therefore to destroy ones environs is to destroy oneself. As long as we remain ignorant of our interdependence on the collective cosmos of which we are a part, we will only further our collective demise. Once we feel this inherent, intuitive tug of unity with our environment then we become aware of the violence we do when we deny it. Furthermore, we can no longer accept the illusion of separation between humanity and nature, or between any element of the living cosmos.
Likewise we cannot allow others to suffer needlessly from poverty, lack, or wanton violence, and we cannot continue to other those who exhibit difference from us on account of culture, nationality, beliefs, color, gender, sexuality, or any host of superficial idiosyncrasies of human experience. In other words, we cannot accept the fallacy of separation and difference within our own species or between individuals. We must instead recognize that “the whole question of how ‘one’ thing can know ‘another’ would cease to be a real one at all in a world where otherness itself was an illusion.”[32] In other words, the very concept of “other” is an illusion and an absurdity in a process-relational cosmology of organism. Any perceived difference is an abstraction of the consequent telic manifestations of actual occasions, and not substantially real at the heart of things. Our differences are merely the myriad masks that God wears in the concrescent process of becoming.
And finally, but perhaps most significantly, we cannot ignore or deny the immanent value-experience that is the ground of our own individual Being, nor accept the illusion of separation of the self from the all-encompassing oneness or wholeness that is God. “The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of ‘independent existence.’ There is no such mode of existence, every entity is only to be understood in terms of the way in which it is interwoven with the rest of the Universe.”[33] There is no separate self divorced from the embrace of and responsibility to the whole of Beingness, and yet there is an experience of individual “things” as well as, moreover, the existence of self-reflexive awareness in Nature. This would seem to be an insurmountable contradiction: that individuality may yet exist and not exist simultaneously. But things are not always as they seem, and yet perceptive experience is nevertheless meaningful. It is meaningful that we should perceive the earth as flat, though we now know that not to be true—otherwise we would have no way of understanding or effectively functioning within our immediate reality of the earth as a flat plain. So too, it is meaningful that we should experience a sense of individual selfhood as the temporal vehicle for the active engagement with Nature.
As Whitehead writes, “each single example of personal identity is a special mode of coordination of the ideal world into a limited role of effectiveness. This maintenance of character is the way in which the finitude of the actual world embraces the infinitude of possibility.”[34] The personal identity of the individual, including the physical body, skills and capacities, genetic lineage, relational connections, attractions and aversions, hopes and dreams, memories, emotions, thoughts or opinions, is just an amalgam of actual occasions concrescing over the course of a single span of existence; the personal identity is thus temporal, subject to change and flux, life and death, and not an element of the eternal ground of being. So too, the human life is a temporal actual occasion which concresces into existence before disintegrating back to that ground in death.
Though we may be swept up in the dream of separation, the dream of individuality, the dream of a self which acts upon the manifest world by virtue of possessing a capacity for choice and free will, that is not the be-all-end-all of our existence. In truth such a fragmented self-perception is profoundly limiting, as it mistakenly restricts our frame of experience to our consequent nature, our secondary qualities of personhood, rather than allowing us to fully enjoy the wholeness and infinitude of our universal Being. Rather, “personality is the extreme example of the sustained realization of a type of value” [emphasis added].[35] Each creature is God incarnate through the sustained realization of its own self-enjoyment, its own value-experience, which is its telic nature. It is the nature of Nature to enjoy its existence. In other words, joy is the fundamental, non-negotiable fact and function of the universe; it is the meaning of life.
“Everything has some value for itself, for others, and for the whole. This characterizes the meaning of actuality . . . We have no right to deface the value-experiences which is the very essence of the universe. Existence, in its own nature, is the upholding of value-intensity. Also, no unit can separate itself from the others, and from the whole. And yet each unit exists in its own right. It upholds the value-intensity for itself, and this involves sharing the value-intensity with the universe. Everything that in any sense exists has two sides, namely, its individual self and its signification in the universe.”[36]
Therefore, we can no longer deny or shy away from the call to know, or rather to remember, that wholeness that we embody but of which we are only a finite concrescent part. Again, “we are in the world and the world is in us.”[37] Though it would not be exactly correct to say that we are contained in the wholeness of the universe, since that would denote an inner and an outer existence—the universe as a kind of enveloping outer shell and us, the concrescent parts, as inner—nor can we exactly say that we “contain” the wholeness of the universe within our individual entities, because the individual entity is merely a consequent abstraction of the substrate of being. Rather, it would perhaps be more accurate to say simply that we are that wholeness of the cosmos in our inextricable, immanent, and processual relation to everything throughout space and time.
“Actuality is the self-enjoyment of importance. But this self-enjoyment has the character of the self-enjoyment of others melting into the enjoyment of the one self . . . The main point of this description is the concept of actuality as something that matters, by reason of its own self-enjoyment, which includes enjoyment of others and transitions towards the future.”[38]
Thus, at the deepest level I am not me, nor am I exactly you, or that tree over there, or my sleeping dog, or a hydrogen atom at the center of the sun, or any one of the multitudinous microbes in the soil beneath my house, since all those concrescent occasions are mere masks of the true reality. But at the deepest level, beneath the mask, we are one and the same. “Wither thou shalt goest I will go…”
Finally, Whitehead’s process-relational philosophy of an immanent organismic cosmos cannot merely be understood as an intellectual exercise in metaphysics; it must become a lived experience, an aesthetic practice of feeling the interweaving interdependence of Nature, society, self, and spirit in an ever-changing, ever-developing tapestry of holographic wholeness. As Segall writes, “Epistemologically, feeling . . . must be granted an enhanced status as our primary mode of relation to the life of the cosmos, such that a rational cosmology comes to mean the same thing as a relational one.”[39] Moreover, as the principle of the all-pervasive value-experience at the base of existence, God cannot be conceived as disconnected from or transcendent to the material world. Rather, God is immanent to the world, whose creative act and telos is the World, the Universe, Nature, God incarnate. Such an ontology utterly rejects any presumption of dualism, the bifurcation of existence, or the illusion of separateness. All is wholeness—intelligent, intentional, agentic, alive—ever concrescing in the eternal dance of the pleasure of existence that is our individual and collective birthright.
[1] Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925/1960, 58.
[2] Ibid, 80.
[3] Whitehead, Alfred North. Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press, 1938/1968, 205.
[4] Thus offering an explanation for the phenomenon of quantum entanglement.
[5] Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul: Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology, 3rd edition. Lulu Press, 2018, 42.
[6] Whitehead, Alfred North. The Concept of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920/1964, 13.
[7] Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas. New York: The Free Press, 1933/1961, 157.
[8] Whitehead, Alfred North. Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press, 1938/1968, 227.
[9] Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925/1960, 176.
[10] Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul: Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology, 3rd edition. Lulu Press, 2018, 42.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: The Free Press, 1929/1978, 345.
[13] Ibid, 345-346.
[14] Whitehead, Alfred North. Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press, 1938/1968, 150.
[15] Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925/1960, 75.
[16] Whitehead, Alfred North. Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press, 1938/1968, 214.
[17] Ibid, 226.
[18] Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul: Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology, 3rd edition. Lulu Press, 2018, 89.
[19] Comparable to the Tao of ancient Chinese wisdom, as symbolized by the yin-yang, or taijitu.
[20] Ibid, 40.
[21] Whitehead, Alfred North. Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press, 1938/1968, 161.
[22] Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925/1960, 55.
[23] Whitehead, Alfred North. Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press, 1938/1968, 158.
[24] Ibid, 149.
[25] Ibid, 206.
[26] Schlipp, Paul Arthur, ed. The Library of Living Philosophers: The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1951, 684.
[27] Whitehead, Alfred North. Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press, 1938/1968, 208.
[28] Ibid, 184.
[29] Ibid, 159.
[30] Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul: Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology, 3rd edition. Lulu Press, 2018, 13.
[31] Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925/1960, 109.
[32] James, William. The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1904, 541.
[33] Schlipp, Paul Arthur, ed. The Library of Living Philosophers: The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1951, 687.
[34] Schlipp, Paul Arthur, ed. The Library of Living Philosophers: The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1951, 691.
[35] Ibid, 689.
[36] Whitehead, Alfred North. Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press, 1938/1968, 151.
[37] Ibid, 227.
[38] Whitehead, Alfred North. Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press, 1938/1968, 161.
[39] Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul: Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology, 3rd edition. Lulu Press, 2018, 130.