SOURCE: “The Ramifications of Whitehead's Theory of Experience,” in The Monist, Vol. 68, No. 4, October, 1985, pp. 439-50.

Whitehead's philosophy is thought by many to be a modern-day rationalism, yet the rationalistic criteria of logical consistency and coherence are balanced by the empirical criteria of applicability and adequacy. He understands metaphysics to be “the endeavour to frame a … necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. … Here ‘applicable’ means that some items of experience are thus interpretable, and ‘adequate’ means that there are no items incapable of such interpretation” (PR 4).¹ Experience is fundamental. Without the appeal to experience we could not determine whether our metaphysical proposals pertained to the actual world or merely to its possible alternatives.²

Although there is a wealth of phenomenological insight describing the salient features of human experience in Whitehead's writings, such as in Symbolism (1927), part II of Process and Reality (1929), and Modes of Thought (1938), which bear considerable affinity with William James's radical empiricism, I shall not examine them here, preferring to focus on the more fundamental question as to the nature of experience. The phenomenological method makes two assumptions at odds with Whitehead's approach. It assumes that experience presupposes consciousness, and not vice versa, and that there is much to be gained by the recovery of “pure” experience unencumbered by philosophical interpretation. Whitehead conceives of experience as including a depth of unconscious feeling. Consciousness pertains to mere surface phenomena made possible by the fortunate mating of causal influences ultimately derived from the external world with relevant contrasting conceptions. Thus in every conscious feeling some conceptual element is ineluctably present. There can be no hope of achieving a completely neutral account of experience, for interpretation must be present in some sense for us to be aware of its contents. On the level of metaphysical generality we cannot eliminate this conceptual dimension, which makes it all the more imperative that we replace faulty presuppositions with sounder ones.

Whitehead fully endorses the Cartesian turn in philosophy, which he understands as the systematic replacing of objective statements by experiential reports as that which is most fundamental. Thus for the statement, “This desk is brown,” a more basic account is given by the report, “I experience this desk as brown.” Here experience is given the primary role it lacked among the ancients. Unfortunately, Whitehead argued, Descartes retained some philosophical habits which ill-suited the new situation he discovered. The objective statement, “This desk is brown,” accurately expresses the subject/predicate pattern which can be metaphysically translated in terms of substance and quality. The experiential report, on the other hand, must be forced into the mold by treating everything except the initial word “I” as part of the predicate. Correspondingly, the character of this experience becomes the property ascribed to the experiencing subject as a quality inhering in its substance.

According to common sense, we directly experience such external realities as desks and trees. In some sense (to be determined below) desks and trees and not replicas thereof are part of our experience. Yet many accounts of experience continue to be basically representational. For instance, for Kant the knowable object is an organized structure of representations, with the thing-in-itself strictly unknowable. Representational thinking has its root in the persistence of substance/quality modes of analyzing experience. Instead of conceiving experience relationally, as really connecting the experiencing subject with the external reality experienced, experience as a quality had to be reserved exclusively for the substantival self. This in turn required a reduplication of the tree out there and the tree-image (or representation) in here. This reduplication can explain all sorts of errors and delusions in perception, but can it guard against the skepticism ultimately resulting in the solopsism of the present moment?

Leibniz's commitment to the substance/quality mode of thinking was sufficient for him to deny all real relatedness among his monads, whether of causation or perception. His monads are related to no other monads (except possibly God), whereas Whitehead's actualities are related to all others. A monad is windowless, yet it perceives all others by means of representations. This claim is only made plausible by the doctrine of pre-established harmony, itself made possible only by God's determining every detail of a monad's experience in terms of its inner principle. This notion of unilateral divine creation, with its attendant determinism, is also rejected by Whitehead. Despite some superficial similarities (tiny actualities composed wholly of perceptions), these two differences show how far apart our two thinkers really are. From Whitehead's perspective, Leibniz's philosophy shows the poverty of the substance/quality approach in describing the character of experience. It's time to replace that model with another.

The model Whitehead finally adopted, after many vicissitudes,³ envisages the many perceived actualities as really present within the subject's experience. This seems to run counter to the ancient dictum that two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time, as well as our common intuition that the external reality is not as such present in my mind. The ancient dictum presupposes what Whitehead calls the fallacy of simple location. Two things simply located cannot occupy the same spatiotemporal locus, but perception may involve multiple location.⁴ Since the vehicle for perception is atemporal form, whose essential nature is unaffected by its relatedness to space or time, the same actuality (considered solely in terms of its form) can be in two places at once without undermining its actuality. As for our common intuition, Whitehead notes that according to relativity physics, whatever we experience must lie in our past as it takes time for the experience to take place. So we have present experiencings of past actualities, those actualities themselves constituting our experience. Since those actualities are objects of my experience, itself subjective in its present immediacy, we may use this temporal modality to demarcate objectivity and subjectivity: objective if past, subjective if present.

According to a common model of representative perception, A causes what results in an image-of-A, which is to be perceived by B. Causation and perception are then kept strictly apart. In Whitehead's model, not only is the image-of-A eliminated as an essential element in perception, but there is no role for causation in addition to perception. The past external actuality A is really present within the experiencing present subject B as (partly) constituting B's experience, even B itself. This is causation. If B perceives A, then A is a causal condition of B.

To be sure, according to one famous analysis of the issue, we cannot perceive causation at all. Hume argued we perceive only isolated momentary impressions, to whose regular sequences we are accustomed to impute causality. In this sense of clear, sharp data consciously felt with a near-total ignoring of the sensory body, as in the paradigm case of vision, which Whitehead terms “perception in the mode of presentational immediacy,” there is no perception of causality. Nor is there any perception of custom, on which Hume's account depends. In the contrasting perceptual “mode of causal efficacy,” however, which attends more directly to the vague, pervasive feelings of the sensory body as it feels the perceived object, causation may be felt. Here “the light made me blink” with its experience of “made” indicates this mode: successive impressions of “light” and “blinking” are not sufficient.⁵ In the evolution of pure vision, the role of the sensory medium with its sense of causal connectedness has been suppressed into the unconscious to make room for the sharp awareness of external threats and opportunities. While vision is thus our most sophisticated mode of perception, it is philosophically the least informative. Hume draws the correct conclusions from perception in the mode of presentational immediacy, but mistakenly supposes that this is the whole story with regard to perception.

Following Kant's synthesis of the manifold of intuition (or, as another translator puts it, “unity of the field of awareness”), Whitehead holds the subject's experience to be one. Yet it is constituted out of the many perceived past actualities it inherits. Thus in order for an experience to come into being, it is essential that this many become one. It must be a process of unification which Whitehead calls a “concresence,” a growing together of the many into concrete result. Moreover, this process must take time. No instantaneous display can capture both the initial multiplicity and the final unity, a unity which temporally and not merely logically supervenes upon that multiplicity. This unification may be analyzed in terms of intermediate phases of concrescence, but it is atomic in the sense that it must terminate in its final unity in order to be a unification, just as it must have an initial multiplicity in order to be able to unify anything, to be a unification. Any halt or division prior to that final unity would yield only some intermediate multiplicity, and the unification would be killed, were that possible. Whatever reasons from Zeno or elsewhere may have induced Whitehead to introduce the atomicity of becoming, it is the requirements of concrescence as unificatory becoming that kept this atomicity in force.⁶

Our sense of subjective endurance may be understood in terms of the succession of such momentary, unificatory acts of experience. Since there is no substantival enduring self underlying these experiences as its subject, there is nothing but the experiencing, and the momentary selves these acts result in. For the self is simply the unity of all its experiences. In place of Descartes' cogito ergo sum Whitehead proposes concresco ergo sum: the many experiences grow together to become the one emergent subject. In growing together I come into being. This view of momentary selfhood has important affinities with the Buddhist analysis of experience, as John B. Cobb, Jr. has recently pointed out.⁷ These are all the more striking for having arisen in an alien culture seeking to analyze experience on non-substantialist presuppositions.

These are the salient general features of Whitehead's concept of experience as I have sought to present them in summary form. An act of experience is a unification of many past actualities bringing the new present subject into existence. If so, the outstanding question concerns the scope of this concept: What has experience?

In answering this question of scope, we must bear in mind a cardinal rule of Whitehead's: “There is no justification for checking generalization at any particular stage.” Each phase of generalization exhibits its own peculiar simplicities which become obscured if we limit our concern to subordinate peculiarities. “In the same way, there are certain general [metaphysical] truths, about the actual things in the common world of activity, which will be obscured when attention is confined to some particular detailed mode of considering them” (PR 25).

Bold generalization in metaphysics is the antidote to incoherence, which is the arbitrary disconnection of first principles (PR 9). Incoherence is the difficulty with all sorts of dualisms in which no reason exists (other than adequacy or applicability to experience) why one realm (Descartes' mind, or Plato's being) should not exist independently of the other (extension or becoming). Coherence requires a necessary connection between first principles. These principles must be generalized just as far as they possibly can. Rationalistic faith gives us the confidence that principles so generalized will either turn out to be subordinate principles of those having wider generality, or will show its intrinsic connection with other metaphysical principles.

If we apply this generalized notion of experience, we find no justification for checking its scope short of extending it to all actualities. Does this mean that all actualities enjoy subjectivity? Yes. All are temporal events, which are, or were once, present activities. Subjectivity, in the final analysis, signifies present immediacy, an immediacy we subjectively enjoy in experience, an immediacy which every occasion has at one time or another.

The empirical objection to this very generous ascription of subjectivity to all actualities may be simply put: we do not experience all this subjectivity around us. But then just what subjectivity do we experience? That of other persons? Is this just on the basis on analogy with ourselves, extended to all members of the human species, or to other species as well? How far down the evolutionary ladder are we prepared to ascribe subjectivity, if not to all: to mammals, birds, insects, clams, sea anemones, bacteria, plants? Here the analogies are difficult, and the answers highly varied. On Whitehead's principles, we directly experience the subjectivity of no other actuality, simply because whatever we experience lies in our past and is therefore objectified for us. We experience only our own present immediacy, no other. Therefore only those properties necessary for our present experiencing belong to our subjectivity. Since every event has its own moment of present immediacy, each should be ascribed this very generalized notion of subjectivity.

Ordinary things, however, largely lack subjectivity, because they lack actuality. Actuality must be sufficiently individuated to have its own inner activity, as do natural unities such as cells, molecules, atoms, elementary particles. Most things are aggregates of natural unities, such as rocks or tables or trees. These have no more subjectivity of their own than do corporations or bureaucracies, even though they may be composed of many individual subjectivities.

Nor does subjectivity extend to other types of entities, such as forms. Neoplatonism may speculate that these forms are really pure intelligences with their own inner life, but for Whitehead they are purely objective. They are atemporal, and subjectivity necessarily requires the temporality of the process of unification. Moreover, by the ontological principle all such entities have a derivative existence dependent upon actuality. They are merely facets of the full actuality, which alone enjoys subjectivity.

Does this generalization of experience amount to panpsychism? Not if panpsychism means something like Leibniz's doctrine that the world consists in individual monads, which are more or less confused minds, whose aggregate phenomenal effect appears as matter. Whitehead and Leibniz share a common theory of aggregation, to be sure, but Leibniz holds to a form of pluralistic idealism. All forms of reductive idealism or materialism are rejected by Whitehead, as well as Cartesian dualism. In terms of a general classification we might term his a theory of “neutral monism,” although it is very different from that of William James. An actuality is neither purely mental nor physical; in its present immediacy it is subjectively active in “thinking” (i.e., prehending), while in its past objectivity it is “extended.” Rather than constituting two different types of substance, as in Descartes' philosophy, “thinking” and “extendedness” are simply different temporal aspects of the same actuality.

Leibniz's panpsychism also differs in claiming that there are degrees of awareness or consciousness. Those monads with the highest degree of clarity are most conscious, as in human experience, while other monads are more or less confused. All, however, possess some degree of awareness. Some thinkers, such as Teilhard de Chardin, and Charles Hartshorne, hold that whatever is emergent in the course of evolution must somehow be latent in that from which it emerged. If higher degrees of awareness can only emerge from that which has awareness in some degree or other, there must have been some sort of awareness all the way down. Again, if there is a continuity in the apparent emergence of consciousness, we cannot altogether exclude some form of awareness from those more primitive states. Where do we draw the line?

Whitehead could endorse none of these panpsychistic arguments, for they assume a continuity in the growth of consciousness, while for him consciousness is the mode of experiencing the synthesis of simpler feelings. If consciousness is thus a complex contrast, its simpler components cannot be conscious at all, even to a slight degree. Since conscious feelings emerge from a sea of unconscious feeling, and most occasions of experience are devoid of any consciousness, it was necessary for Whitehead to devise a term for the experiential relationship which was subjective yet not necessarily conscious. Leibniz used “perception” for a subjective relation that was not highly conscious, reserving “apperception” for conscious perception. Following Leibniz's example, yet in reverse fashion, Whitehead coined the technical term “prehension” for any “taking account of,” modeled after conscious “apprehension”. An act of experience is then the concrescence of many initial prehensions into one final prehension constituting the subject of that experience, which in turn is objectified for subsequent prehendings.

This generalization of experience is a bold move, leading to unexpected ramifications. If we consider the truly general aspects of experience, omitting those features which are peculiarly human, or conscious, or appropriate only to the more complex actualities, there is no reason why it cannot have truly metaphysical scope. At bottom it concerns the contrast between subjectivity and objectivity, which can be analyzed in terms of temporality: the contrast between present immediacy and pastness. If all actualities can be considered as acts of experience, containing nothing besides these elements of experience (as in Buddhism), then everything can be seen as constituted by experience.

When we survey the history of Western philosophy, “experience” takes on increasing scope relative to “reality.” In ancient and medieval philosophy it was undervalued, if not ignored. With the Cartesian turn experience was introduced; here the camel got his nose into the tent. For much of modern philosophy experience and reality occupied two independent spheres whose interaction became increasing problematic, as in Kant. For Whitehead and for others (e.g., Dewey) the camel, experience, has now taken over the whole tent, i.e., the whole of what used to be “reality.” “Reality” can now be kept by Whitehead as a contrast term (to “appearance”) referring to subset within experience, namely, its past, objectified constituents.⁸ By making experience the more inclusive term, Whitehead is spared all the difficulties resulting from the assumption that reality is somehow outside of experience.

Earlier we indicated how perception could be analyzed in terms of causation. If B perceives A, then A is a causal condition of B. This analysis of causation is limited to those instances involved in perception. Yet there are a great many other kinds of causation affecting actualities not enjoying conscious perception. The generalization of experience in terms of prehension, however, enables us to establish a strict identity between prehension and causation. In general, if any A is a causal condition of B, then B prehends A, and vice versa. For prehension is any taking account of, which is be affected by some causal condition. This generalization enables us to integrate phenomenology, which is based on intentionality (in our terms, prehensionality) and science, based on causality.

Perhaps the most surprising result from this generalization of experience is a revised theory of creation. Modern philosophers, such as Leibniz, have exploited the traditional theory. (His pre-established harmony could only be established by the fiat of an omnipotent creator.) Alternatively, the theory of creation has been more or less silently neglected, or rejected by agnostic or atheistic philosophers. But rarely has the experiment been tried of conceiving God who was not the unilateral creator of the world, or of considering how the traditional notion of creation ex nihilo might be revised. Whitehead did so, and the generalization of experience is essential to that achievement.⁹

Every act of experience is a creation in the sense that that subjective unity of experience first comes into being through that experiencing. The unity achieved by that act of unification is itself new, even though its components are old and the pattern it exemplifies has been used before. This is not creation ex nihilo in the traditional sense, to be sure, but here the new comes into being gradually, incrementally, instead of all at once at the beginning. Since every creative act requires a prior many to be unified, there cannot be any beginning, before which there was no many.

Besides a past many to unify in concrescence, every creative act requires a form in terms of which the many are unified. It is the form of that unity, and guides the unification in achieving precisely that outcome. Formally considered, the possibility and the actuality are identical. The form of the possible actuality is the same as its actualized result, but the enacted form unifies the past matter it inherits, since the past actualities can be regarded as its proximate matter. These material components embed possible forms in a web of actuality.

Material actualization also individualizes form in that it separates the form actualized from its near alternatives which were not so realized. Ordinarily possible forms come in clusters of alternatives, and the creative act in actualizing one rather than the others makes a decision. Here decision is used in its root sense as cutting off alternatives, and need not be conscious. All, or at least most, occasions are decisive, but only a very few are conscious of such decisions. As Sartre has argued, our conscious decision-making presupposes preconscious value choices. The generic decisional activity ingredient in both kinds “constitutes the very meaning of actuality. An actuality entity arises from decisions for it, and by its very existence provides decisions for other actual entities which supersede it. … Just as ‘potentiality for process’ is the meaning of the more general term ‘entity,’ or ‘thing’; so ‘decision’ is the additional meaning imported by the word ‘actual’ into the phrase ‘actual entity’ ” (PR 68). Traditionally actuality has been understood as acting, or as that which is concretely determinate. A creative act of unifying which results in a determinate outcome is both at once. As a decision, it is both the deciding and that which is decided upon.

Insofar as an actuality is affected by past actualities, it prehends physically; insofar as it is affected by forms serving as its possibilities of unity, it premends mentally. All actualities are dipolar, having both a physical and a mental pole. But the dimensions of that mental pole can vary considerably; how much is a matter of debate. The physical pole is relatively constant, for all prehend their past more or less completely. Mentality is a matter of degree, which Whitehead associated with the capacity for originality. Novelty is first really noticeable in living cells, and increases in animal minds and in consciousness. The mind's “sole use to the body is its vivid originality: it is the organ of novelty” (PR 516).

Donald W. Sherburne and others think Whitehead made a strategic mistake in claiming that every actual entity, all the way down the line, has a mental pole. The mentality of the highly complex actualities, with their originality of response, is not in question, but how far down does this extend? Molecules, let alone atoms and more elementary particles, exhibit little novelty, especially if organized in rigid structures like crystals. If every actuality were to have a degree of mentality, then this would be a form of panpsychism, even if not in the earlier scene in which every actuality was nothing but psyche. Sherburne denies this degree of mentality to the lower organisms; arguing that the physics of vectors may require the dynamic metaphysics of “feeling” and “subjectivity,” but not the language of mentality and panpsychism.

I submit that Whitehead was correct in asserting a degree of mentality for every actuality, even though it is very difficult to show any novelty of response among the lower actualities. Perhaps the exercise of novelty ought not be the measure of mentality in these instances. Certain primitive actualities, such as rock crystals, can repeat their predecessors unchanged until the crack of doom. The measure of mentality might be an actuality's receptivity to form. All must at least be receptive to the form of their unity, since it must guide their process of actualization. According to the common conceptuality, whereby prior causes actively produce the effect, no such form is needed, but if the event itself actively unifies these causal influences (via prehensions), it must have some way of bringing all these influences together.

At the very least, each actuality needs to be receptive to at least one possible form whereby it could unify its past. Such an occasion could be completely determined by its past, if this one form were given apart from any alternative. Such an occasion would merely repeat its past, with no independent initiative. But it may be questioned whether such a minimal state is really possible. It seems physically doubtful in the light of Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty. According to that principle the simultaneous position and velocity of a particle cannot be precisely determined. Another way of looking at this uncertainty is to say that given all the relevant physical antecedents, we cannot predict the outcome precisely. We may interpret this uncertainty by claiming for any past multiplicity, there would be many alternative ways that that particular past could have been unified in actualization. If so, each concrescing event would have to be receptive to many possible forms.

From the standpoint of possibility alone it may also be questioned whether just one form could be communicated to an actuality. For this would mean individualizing form, separating it from its close alternatives. But as we have seen form is first individualized in concrete actualization, when a possible form becomes the actual form uniting the many past objectified actualities, which as matter realize the form. If all this is so, then even the most primitive actuality may well have more mentality than that required by a completely determined actuality. If it is responsive to alternatives, then it must be capable of making some sort of decision among them.

Yet any degree of panpsychism would be rejected by Karl Popper, who proceeds from the standpoint of a radical evolutionist. If we really recognize the full scope of evolution, he urges, why should we stop short from admitting that mentality also evolved? Panpsychists deny this radical novelty. “Their motto could well be: ‘There really is no new thing under the sun,’ which indicates an intellectually comfortable way of living—though not an intellectually very exciting one.”¹⁰ Whitehead's qualified panpsychism allows for the development of every degree of mentality desired, but not for the evolutionary emergence of either mentality or subjectivity. In that sense it cannot allow for the sort of radical novelty that Popper urges. His position, moreover, allows us to reserve the concept of mentality for instances that are most familiar to us, such as animal or human mind.

Yet we have seen the advantage of a metaphysically general notion of experience; similar advantage accrues to a general notion of mentality. On one level the issue between Popper and Whitehead could be stated: Should mentality be conceived generally as applying to all actualities, or is it a specialized notion pertaining to only one kind of actuality? If we keep it a special notion, then that kind of specialized actuality could emerge in time, thus allowing us to affirm radical novelty. If mentality applies to all actualities without exception, then there could not be any temporal emergence of mentality per se. It would then have to be existent at all times in the history of actualities.

This issue cannot be satisfactorily decided in terms of preference, but calls for an investigation of the conditions of evolutionary emergence. These conditions, since required for the emergence of anything, cannot themselves evolve; they must be inherent in the nature of all actuality. Now if mentality is emergent, as Popper claims, there must have been a time when only purely physical actualities existed. How then did subjectivity as the responsiveness to possibility ever come about? The general answer to this is: by chance. That is what the standard formula, random mutation and natural selection, reduces to in this instance. This may be the only satisfactory way of describing the situation according to the customary conceptuality, which excludes all subjective novelty from influencing the process. The novelty is first manifest in the actuality, which comes about purely accidentally. If this were so, such accidental happenings should tend toward increasing disorder, yet we find in the evolutionary advance, while extremely erratic, a tendency towards greater order.

Emergent actualization, Whitehead argues, requires internal as well as external novelty. This internal novelty exists in the form of novel possibilities for realization. These possibilities would be powerless without actualities having the subjective capacity of responding to them. Emergence not only requires this minimum receptivity to form, but also the spontaneous actualization of novelty. The lowest organisms must have at least some potential receptivity to novelty, for otherwise none of them could in fact respond to novelty, without which no emergence would ever be possible.

Looking back over this essay, we have seen how Whitehead's theory of experience depends upon a metaphysical generalization allowing it to be applicable to all actualities. This basic general notion is the experient unification of past objectified events (actualities) by a present subjective immediacy. This is not panpsychism as ordinarily understood, but it is a theory of pansubjectivity. It resolves the mind/matter dualism by assigning these properties to the present and past aspects, respectively, of events, themselves conceived as the final actualities of the universe. The theory affirms a qualified sense of panpsychism (which is equally well, if not more so, a “panphysism”) in that each actuality has a degree of mentality, which is necessary for actualization and particularly for evolutionary emergence. Other values could be ours by limiting the notion of experience primarily to that which appears in human consciousness, but for Whitehead's undertaking it is quite necessary that we so generalize experience, and see what that entails.

Notes

1. References to Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1929), will be included in parentheses in the body of the text with the abbreviation PR.

2. For three perceptive accounts of experience in Whitehead's thought, see Victor Lowe, “The Concept of Experience in Whitehead's Metaphysics,” pp. 124-33 in Alfred North Whitehead: Essays on His Philosophy, ed. George L. Kline (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963); Reto Luzius Fetz, Whitehead: Prozessdenken und Substanzmetaphysik (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 1981), ch. 1.5, pp. 97-109, “Für eine neue Auslegung der Erfahrung”; and Stephen David Ross, Perspective in Whitehead's Metaphysics (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1983), ch. 4, pp. 85-115. Ross would replace Whitehead's ascription of subjectivity and mentality to lower organisms with the simpler notion of perspectivity.

3. For a history of Whitehead's development, see my study, The Emergence of Whitehead's Metaphysics (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984).

4. This point is very nicely made another way by Paul G. Kuntz, Alfred North Whitehead (Boston: Twayne, 1984), pp. 46f.

5. For the contrast between the various modes of perception, see Process and Reality, Part II, ch. 4, secs. 5-8, and ch. 8 of that part. These studies may have originally formed an independent treatise on perception, possibly as a preliminary study for Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect (New York: Macmillan, 1927).

6. The atomicity of actuality does not by itself require that Whitehead's actual occasions be so microscopic. The most basic ones are so small in order to account for change, which is the difference between successive occasions (PR 119). There are no larger occasions, for the theory lacks any obvious means whereby temporally smaller occasions could be included within any larger.

7. Beyond Dialogue: Toward a Mutual Transformation of Christianity and Buddhism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), especially pp. 104-10.

8. “Appearance and Reality” are contrasted by Whitehead in ch. 14 of Adventures of Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1933).

9. For further reflections on this theme, see my essay, “An Alternative to Creatio Ex Nihilo,” Religious Studies 19/2 (June, 1983), 205-13.

10. Karl R. Popper and John C. Eccles, The Self and Its Brain (New York: Springer International, 1978), p. 53.