Charles Hartshorne
“The ‘matter’ of materialists and the ‘spirit’ of idealists is a creature similar to the constitution of the United States in the minds of unimaginative persons. Obviously the real constitution is certain basic relationships among the activities of the citizens. . . . Similarly what we call matter is that character of natural events which is so tied up with changes that are sufficiently rapid to be perceptible as to give the latter a characteristic rhythmic order, the causal sequence. . . . It is no . . . principle of explanation; no substance behind or underlying changes. . . . The name designates a character in operation, not an entity. . . .” — John Dewey, in Experience and Nature, p. 73.
“The intellectual destiny of the West has been to interpret the inert and material as pure dynamism, and in place of what appears as immovable, fixed, underlying ‘thing,’ to put forces, movements, functions.” — Jose Ortega Y Gasset, in Obras Completas (Revista de Occidente, Madrid, 1950-52), Tomo iv.
Philosophers and natural scientists are, in our universities, two rather distinct sorts of human creatures. They occupy, during working hours, quite different buildings, often consult different libraries, and meet only casually, perhaps at faculty meetings or at lunchtime. Members of one group are likely to be either afraid or aggressively disinclined to communicate intellectually with those of the other. This mutual isolation (intensified, though not created, by “security” measures) has its disadvantages. Certain recent developments in science, especially in microphysics and biology, are strikingly paralleled by some tendencies in philosophy — having in part different origins and motives — and the full intellectual and practical meaning of the scientific changes can, I believe, be appreciated only when their philosophic counterparts (not merely echoes!) are also attended to.
That there is less agreement in philosophy than in science must be admitted. Consequently, I can at best speak only for certain philosophers, at worst for myself alone. Fortunately, some scientists inclined to indulge in reflections of the philosophic degree of generality offer a certain amount of support to my contentions. I shall now try to indicate in advance something of the nature of these contentions. I shall hold that “mind” and “matter” are not two ultimately different sorts of entity but, rather, two ways of describing a reality that has many levels of organization. The “mind” way I take to be more final and inclusive, so that my position is the opposite of materialism. However, I recognize that the material mode of description is that part of the complete mode which is capable of scientific precision and that, accordingly, “methodological materialism,” or the restriction of attention to this mode, is a natural bias among scientists. Much depends on seeing that what I have called the complete mode — that is, an ultimate idealism or psychicalism — does not exclude any scientific procedure, but merely opens our eyes to the beyond that tends to escape any save a vague, intuitive apprehension. No exact analysis or observation in physical or spatio-temporal terms is forbidden, but rather we are enabled consciously to experience the world both with all possible accuracy and with the dim background (which, consciously or not, is always there anyway) of invincibly indefinite feeling for the “life of things” (Wordsworth). In the end, this consciousness may actually increase the extent of our accurate knowledge, and it is sure to increase our enjoyment of the world, peace of mind, and understanding of ourselves.
Preliminary to discussing mind and matter, we must consider two notions common to both, those of individual and of event. We tend to conceive the latter as a function of the former; events are the adventures of “things” or “persons.” However, science now considers nature as most fundamentally a complex of events related together in a space-time system. The everyday notion that happenings must happen to something which (or to someone who) moves about seems for current physics at best only a convenient way of talking. Atomic events do not literally occur to a moving entity called an atom; rather, by an atom we simply mean a sequence of events having a certain persistent atomic character, the same atomic number, say, and a certain continuity, or near continuity, through space-time. On the lowest or simplest level, that of electronic or protonic events, it is, according to some authorities, impossible and in violation of well-attested laws to interpret such elementary events as the motions of self-identical entities. The laws allow no possible paths for such movements and no meaning for such self-identity. There are, then, if this interpretation is correct (and not all scientists accept it), no such things as particles; there are only particle-like events. Each successive observation discloses a new entity, not the same entity in a new location. A simple account of this revolutionary conclusion is found in Schroedinger’s little book, Science and Humanism.
Many philosophic systems cannot readily accept the notion of happenings that are not happenings to concrete things, but are themselves the concrete things in the case. But, even before quantum mechanics, certain philosophers had proposed to dispense with the notion of enduring individuals or substances to which events occur and to take the events themselves as the concrete units of reality. I am thinking, for example, of Mahayana Buddhists, and then, in the West, Hume, Peirce, and James. Simultaneously with the rise of quantum mechanics, Whitehead developed an elaborate metaphysical system completely free from substance, in any sense that could conflict with the theory of electronic events.
By metaphysical system, I mean one in which the attempt is made to generalize all ideas to the fullest possible extent. Whereas, in science, ideas are generalized only so far as the predictive control of some class of currently known facts requires, the metaphysician, as I conceive him, is trying to provide for all possible classes of facts rather than to predict which will be actualized. He wants to forbid no scientific hypotheses except those which, unaware, cross the line between the use and the misuse of categories — that is, terms of most basic or ultimate meaning, such as the meaning of fact itself. According to White-head, any possible fact must represent an aspect of events or happenings, actual or potential. Things or persons can then be only certain stabilities or coherences in the flux of events. The stabilities are in the events, not the events in the stabilities. You, for example (as something always the same through the years), are in your experiences, but there is no ever-identical you which, from the time you were born onward, has contained all your experiences. The very idea seems dubious, for with each new experience must there not be a slightly different or new self? Each new experience possesses relationships to the old experiences, in the form of memory, conscious or unconscious; hence, if the self is what includes or really “has” experiences, there is at each moment a new self, partly inclusive of old experiences, not an old self with partly new experiences. The latter may also be said, provided that one means by the “old” self a certain kernel of personality traits and bundle of memories, and provided also that one admits that this kernel is contained in each new experience, not each new experience in the kernel. For whatever has both old and new constituents is itself necessarily new, since the old, say X, and the new, say Y, make up a new totality, XY, which cannot be real until Y is real. Furthermore, there is nothing in the mere idea of an event, or even of an experience, that requires it to belong to a sequence repeating the same personality or character in successive members. Accordingly, the physicist’s denial of persistent self-identity to electrons need be no puzzle for philosophy. To be sure, electronic events cannot enjoy certain privileges that personal memory, anticipation, and the sense of harmony between previous purpose and present fulfillment alone can furnish. Personal identity does enable events to enrich later events in a manner otherwise impossible. (Really, it is this enrichment.) But events lacking such persistent identity may nevertheless occur.
The absence of continuity in electronic events — that is, the spatial gaps between their successive occurrences — is also not especially paradoxical. We seem to have a partial analogy for it in everyday life. Consider a man in deepest sleep being carried through space. The man’s body is moving along, apparently continuously. But let us set this aside for the moment and think about what is sometimes called the man’s soul or the man as a conscious individual. Between the time when he falls into dreamless sleep and the time he awakes — or, at least, begins to dream — no conscious individual is there. Of course, we may say, yes, such an individual is there but is sleeping, meaning that a certain potentially conscious individual is without actual consciousness. But so far as by a soul we mean an actually conscious individual or “stream of consciousness,” a sequence of experiences related by memory and personality traits in the manner described, should we not say, “No soul is there but only a sleeping body”? An observer would behold nothing else, and the man’s memory, when he awakes, refers to an earlier time, before he fell into dreamless sleep.
It may be said that sleep is never for a moment without dreams; but is not this assertion rather arbitrary? If souls can be born in all embryos, they can be reborn every morning. The difficulty, if any, is no greater. What now, I ask, is the difference between a body whence, as we say, “the soul has fled,” and a body “whose soul is in dreamless sleep”? Only this: the soulless body lacks certain physical activities, such as breathing and heartbeats, and can never awaken, while the still-besouled body has these activities and can and probably will awaken. If you say, “At least God might observe the soul as something present in the sleeping man,” one must ask, what is the sense of this, if we have no idea what sort of thing God would be observing. I find in my own mind no such notion, if “soul” means anything more than the probability or potentiality of certain modes of action and experience, embodying the man’s personality traits and memories. However, a probability is not a concrete thing, all by itself. The actual thing “moving” along is, then, the sleeping body, which not merely can produce certain events but consists, at each moment, of events actually taking place. If, now, we learn from physics that the body itself is only relatively continuous through space-time, so far as it consists of discrete particle-like events separated by minute space-time intervals, why should we be astonished? The soul, too — or at any rate the sequence of experiences — goes into and out of actuality, and the only reason we can speak of a self-identical person is that, with each awakening, certain modes of action, experience, memory, reappear. However, in very abnormal cases of multiple personality or psychic degeneration, this is much less true. The persistence of individual traits through a single linear sequence of events being thus a matter of degree, why may there not be events that do not belong to any such sequence, that is, do not constitute any individual history, even a discontinuous one?
Our analogy between soul-discontinuity and electronic discontinuity might be questioned on the ground that, taken as a “potentiality for certain types of action” the soul in a mans moving body does follow a continuous (or virtually continuous) path through space, the path of positions at which he could wake up, while there is, perhaps, not even for the potentiality of electronic events any such continuous track of points. However, since the path of positions of the sleeping soul is derivative from the positions of successive clusters of particle events composing a human body at different times and places, its continuity is in any case a construct, not a primary datum for our thought about this problem.
It is interesting to consider the ancient Aristotelian doctrine of “substance” as owing its self-identity through time and space to its being made up of the same “matter” with the same “essential” form, though with inessential differences from moment to moment. Since the sameness of form (for example, the gene structure of a human individual) is admitted by our doctrine, the difference lies in the notion of “matter.” Here we point to the scientific facts showing that the matter of a macroscopically perceptible substance owes its identity through time to the persistence of certain forms (statistically, rather than absolutely, persistent) exhibited by microscopic events. Anything beyond this formal identity seems absolutely unknowable and unimaginable when we get to the ultramicroscopic or particle level, which contains the whole of the material of the physical world. Thus, events and their forms and relationships (such as similarity, causal influence, or memory), are all the “substance” we can give any positive meaning to. The explanation of sameness as both formal and material was in reality an explanation in terms of many levels of event-forms, including relational forms. The “same matter” meant the same microscopic forms! Unless there be an endless regress, there is a bottom level where it no longer has a meaning to contrast persistence of form with that of matter, and where there are merely interrelated events with a certain partial repetitiveness of form. The only “stuff” of change is finally just process itself and its unit is an event, not a bit of persisting substance. (In what sense there are least quanta of process, unit-processes, we shall not here attempt to discuss.)
Let us now turn to the question of freedom. I give this term a common-sense meaning. A man, in a given situation and with a given past history, can, really can, do either this or that. But many older systems of metaphysics, and also Newtonian science (at least in its most obvious interpretation), viewed causal laws as uniquely determining the outcome of every situation. Given adequate understanding of the conditions, the result would be wholly a foregone conclusion — for those with adequate understanding of the laws and the situation. Both science and speculative philosophy (I am not speaking of all that is sometimes called philosophy) have grown increasingly critical of this assumption during the past 75 years. Today quantum mechanics strongly suggests, if it does not actually prove, that on the basic level causality is something essentially different from this classical conception. Individual events are at least as if genuinely random or fortuitous, within certain limits, and causality consists in the limits to the randomness. Only when large numbers of similar events are dealt with can we have highly exact predictability.
Does this new concept of causality suffice to explain human freedom? The view we take of this question depends upon our answer to another: do particles (shorthand for electronic-pro-tonic events) in inorganic systems, where there is nothing at all closely comparable to human thoughts and feelings, act according to the same laws, precisely, as particles in systems that do involve human experiences? Or again, do we define a “human body” as simply a very special, complex system of particles, or as such a system somehow woven together with human thoughts and feelings? Only the latter view corresponds to the known facts. We do not know ourselves as just a set of interacting particles; we do know ourselves as consisting, in part at least, of a stream of experiences—broken, to be sure, by sleep. What right then has anyone to assume that there are events in nature that make no difference to certain events intimately associated with them? Only by making this assumption (as Schroedinger, for example, apparently does) can one infer that our human freedom is no more than that which the laws of quantum mechanics allow. Particles under the influence of human consciousness are not necessarily just ordinary particles. Seemingly there must be a difference, although it may be slight; and in this difference lies our freedom, so far as it is expressible in bodily behavior. Moreover, as Nils (sic) Bohr suggests, one may reason by analogy: if individual events on the particle level are not rigidly determined by causal laws, then we should expect that on higher levels, where there is greater depth of individuality and conscious alternatives of action, individual events will be less fully determined by their causal antecedents. A human experience is a unitary individual event, not a mere mosaic of events on the electronic level. Indeed, if our experiences did not have unity, should we know what “unity” meant? Thus the physics of inorganic particles and their statistical regularities cannot be the whole truth about human behavior. True, we should assume that quantum physics has approximate validity in application to higher organisms, for only in this way will be [sic “be” for “we”] be likely to find out the limits of this validity. But absolute validity is not lightly to be assumed in science. The ultimate laws, if we can ever find them, must allow for the difference which the presence of human experiences makes in certain bodies in nature, and this no physical law as now stated even attempts to do.1
But how, you may ask, could a physical law allow for the influence of thought upon mere material bodies or events? Can mind be conceived to act upon matter? When (for better or for worse) the whole face of the earth is being modified as the result of human thought, it is strange to deny that mind acts upon matter. But we must be careful in using highly abstract words.
Science does not reveal two things in nature, “mind” and “body.” It reveals rather many levels of process, from nuclear particles to man. Each type can be described with respect to physical properties — size, shape, motion, vibration rate, and the like. (On the lowest levels there are certain difficulties, or qualifications.)
But the higher levels, at least, can also be described in terms of psychical aspects — emotion, perception, memory, desire, as known to us in ourselves through more or less ‘‘immediate” memory. It has been said that if ordinary people had watched one-celled animals in action as often as they have dogs and horses, it would be as good common sense to attribute feeling and sensation to microscopic creatures as to the higher animals. Thus, far below the limits of direct vision we find the apparent scale of “mind” extending downward as our knowledge increases. Who can set a limit to this extension? And if “feelings of an electron” seems odd, remember that “size, shape, motion” also assume odd forms on the particle level! I think we have good reason to take seriously those philosophers and scientists who believe that there is no such thing as “mere matter,” upon which mind must act, or be unable to act. The ultimate understanding of nature, such thinkers hold, would be a generalized comparative psychology that would absorb all physics. Physics would be the behavioristic psychology of particle-events, atoms, and molecules, showing how they “respond” to their neighbors as “stimuli.” Psychology, as more than merely behavioristic (if such a thing be possible), would tell us how things feel as they thus respond, what their (perhaps rudimentary) memories, perceptions, desires, and so on, are like.
This may very well be far beyond our human powers. But if the idea makes any sense at all—and to me and to others2 it does make sense — then all talk about how human thoughts might influence, or be unable to influence, mere bits of insentient matter is beside the point. And then the question, what difference it could make to an atom that it is in the presence of human thought or emotion is really the question, how the presence of high-level experiences can make a difference to low-level experiences. Now it is, if I may so speak, an upside-down world if the trivial and low types of reality are simply immune to guidance by higher-level types. It would be as if stupid people never paid attention to the suggestions of brighter minds, and children none to those of their more experienced parents. There would be nothing at all like hero worship. Superiority would have no fascination or charm whatsoever. The religious idea that the world as a whole is swayed by a supreme level of consciousness simply would be wrong in principle. And, on a humbler level, the fact that everything is as if the cells of my brain and, hence, those of my muscles were constantly being influenced by my human thought and feeling would be a sheer illusion. I suggest that the contrary supposition makes better sense, that superiority in principle tends to have influence, to exert guidance. Even rascally tyrants have something, a certain intensity, or boldness; not everything about them is inferior! And besides, the direct power of the tyrant need not be very great. If a few subordinates obey him, and these have considerable power, owing to historical accidents of social development, then he may for a time sway a great society. But the basic power relationships in nature, like the power of vertebrate minds (that is, their thoughts and feelings) over their bodies, cannot rest upon such accidental and artificial arrangements.
You may be asking: how is influence transmitted from one level of experience to another? When parental ideas act on child-minds, there is a mechanism of this action: speech, sound waves, gestures, hearing, and sight. But what mechanism operates between my thoughts or decisions and my brain cells? No mechanism. Not all action can be indirect. This does not mean that explanation is impossible in this case, for not all explanation needs to be mechanical.
We have only to consider what experience is in order to find a clue to the mutual influence between the body and experience. Experience has to have a content; it is experience of something. Philosophers have argued about the proposition, “Perhaps all we directly experience is our own mental state at the time.” But mental states are just experiences over again, so that the proposition means, “Perhaps our experiences are of nothing except themselves.” We must reject the absurd idea that any experience can thus furnish its own sole datum. A mere awareness of that same awareness is nonsense. Discarding this nonsense, let us see what the data of experience can be. In memory, the datum of present experience seems to be furnished, in part at least, by some past experience. Now this amounts to saying that past experience influences present experience. To be aware of something is ipso facto to be influenced by it. For example, remembering past pleasure is a different sort of experience from remembering past pain; remembering a past subtle thought is still to possess its subtlety. Thus, to explain how something influences an experience, we have only to explain how this something comes to be an object or content of the experience. The answer is simple: the objects come to be experienced just by being there, by being actual, and by having a character suitable for objects of the given sort of experience; the experience takes advantage of this suitability and actuality, and that is all there is to it. No mechanism is required for experience to be enabled to lay hold of its appropriate objects (not too complex or disordered). It simply is the experience of these objects, by virtue of their natures and its nature, and nothing else whatever. Thus, in memory, past experiences, since, they have actually occurred, are available for experiencing, and present experience enjoys them as its objects.
But, you ask, does not the brain somehow preserve the past experiences and make memory of them possible? The brain has an essential influence upon human memory, this I grant, but how? Is there any way for a thing to influence an experience save by becoming one of its objects or contents? But suppose that the situation is this: past human experiences are not sufficient contents for present human experience; they must be supplemented by something new. Suppose, also, that the function of the brain is to furnish at each moment the required additional content. This new content must be harmonious with the experiences that are to be remembered from the past. If, for example, I am seeing green grass, this will inhibit some memories and favor others, partly for reasons of esthetic harmony and discord. But where is the greenness coming from? There is no scientific evidence that it is coming directly from the grass. I might have on green glasses and be looking at straw-colored grass. It is even possible to have vivid sensations of color with closed eyes in darkness. It seems then that color comes to us directly from brain or nerve cells. Moreover, connections have been formed between these and other cells, so that the latter are also at least slightly activated, and only such past experiences as can fit with all this new material coming to me as data from the brain can be remembered consciously. (Fit means, roughly, to help form a tolerably coherent pattern.)
We have said that qualities, such as colors, come into experience from cells. How can cells cause me to experience a certain quality, save by themselves having this quality, which becomes mine as they become immediate content of my experience? (If anyone asks, why then do we need science to tell us about cells, I remind him that grass too consists of cells, so that, if it is said to be the direct object of experience, we have the same problem; the solution is that experience may be direct without being distinct regarding details.)
Consider the case of pain. The usual view seems to be that the object of the experience is just the pain itself. One feels simply one’s own feeling or sensation. But this is the view we have rejected, that a state of awareness can have itself as sole datum. True, our direct experience seems in certain cases to disclose only an ache or pain as object; but is this pain simply our feeling of suffering? If, as we have argued, it cannot be just our feeling, then what could it be but certain aching bodily cells? And why not? Cells are living, individual organisms; and if living, why not sentient? When intense heat reaches them they undergo injury. They can hardly enjoy this. If they suffer, then our sense of physical pain is our experience of their experience of injury. They are feeling the heat as unduly agitating their molecules and, thus, disrupting them. We are feeling their feeling of disruption. (I cannot stop to discuss the possible role of pain nerves in this connection.)
The point we have reached is that cells can influence our human experiences because they have feelings that we can feel. To deal with the influences of human experiences upon cells, one turns this around. We have feelings that cells can feel. Since a human experience is vastly more important and complex than any we can sensibly attribute to a cell, its feeling of our human feeling must be very inadequate indeed, a faint, almost infinitely simplified echo. But no more is required. For since the body thrives during deep sleep, it is plain that the cells are largely independent of us, receiving only slight influences from our thoughts and feelings. It is like the touch of a button that alters the operation of heavy machinery. The nervous system is that kind of trigger mechanism.
The foregoing theory, largely due to Whitehead,3 in principle solves the mind-body problem that Du Bois-Reymond thought insoluble. The rest is detail. That a blow on the head may abolish consciousness is just what might be expected from the theory. Consider this: experience cannot go on without suitable data; accordingly, the material that nerve cells furnish for our human experience must be properly coordinated, to the extent that a coherent awareness requires a coherent object of awareness; the healthy waking brain furnishes as datum for experience a coordinated, integrated pattern of activity; the sleeping brain, or the bruised brain, no longer presents the required integration. There is nothing to experience of a humanly manageable sort.
This is a revolutionary theory of power or influence. It says that nothing influences experience except the things that are experienced. There are not two grounds of possibility for an experience, the total datum to be experienced and something else. There is only the datum. The body itself is simply the main thing experienced. But because the sense organs echo the environment, it comes about that, in experiencing the bodily states, we gain knowledge of the world outside the body. So, in watching a television screen, we gain knowledge of what is happening miles away. The experience of the body is the same sort of thing, except that we do not primarily experience the body indirectly, with our eyes, as we do the screen, but rather we directly feel the feelings of bodily cells. Yet, since the spatial and temporal and qualitative patterns tend to duplicate patterns outside the body — as those on the screen do those on the stage where the play is being enacted — in both cases we feel that we are grasping an action not, in the first instance, on the screen, or in the body, but elsewhere. And so, in a sense, we are!
The foregoing theory of experience implies the reality of freedom. For, while experience is certainly influenced by its data (which are its only conditions), it seems evident that it can never be wholly determined by them. A “creative synthesis” is required, without which the experience would merely be the given data over again. It follows that nothing and no power, even God, decides for us exactly how we are to put the data together into our experiential reactions to them. In influencing us, God himself could only be the supreme datum! Hence, freedom in some degree is inevitable, no matter by what rulers, human or super-human, we may be governed. To rule is to sway all by a common influence; but something must, in each individual case, be freely added to constitute the response to the influence. Ruling or governing is always the imparting of certain common characters or limits to the self-determining of the the [sic] ruled or governed. The citizens decide for themselves within the limits set by the ruler. If the latter decided everything, there would be no citizens and no rule. The ideal rule sets those limits outside of which freedom would involve greater risks than opportunities. Risks cannot be banished, for opportunity would go with them, both having the same root in freedom or self-determination. But too much freedom would extend risks more than opportunities, and too little would restrict opportunities more than risks.
Freedom is an indetermination in the potentialities for present action which are constituted by all the influences and stimuli, all “heredity and environment,” all past experiences, an indetermination removed only by the actuality (event, experience, act) itself, and always in such fashion that other acts of determination would have been possible in view of the given total conditions up to the moment of the act. A free act is the resolution of an uncertainty inherent in the totality of the influences to which the act is subject. The conditions decide what can be done and cannot; but what is done is always more determinate than merely what can be done. The latter is a range of possibilities for action, not a particular act.
It is not only in relation to other “individuals” that there needs to be some self-determination with respect to issues not prejudged by these others. In relation to one’s own past, also, present experience must freely achieve its unique synthesis of influences. For the final units of actuality are not, as we have seen, things or persons but “experient-events,” new total acts of response to events already actualized. The final “self” having “self-determination” is the present unity of experience. Slavery to one s character as it was in infancy or has been up to now is not freedom. If there is any free acting it is ultimately in and by the present, and the whole past world is the set of conditions or data for the act, with one s own past being included essentially in the same way as other conditions, except for its greater relevance, in most respects and cases.
It is really analytic to say that experience is incompletely determined by its stimuli, its conditions. For an experience has a unity not in the stimuli, and this must be created; it can be only an emergent synthesis, however trivial in its novelty. Thus, nothing can prevent persons, while they exist, from having some degree of freedom. Nevertheless, human laws and actions can either favor or hamper the optimal development of freedom, can influence the extent to which the majority of men may achieve the fullness of their human privilege. Although self-determination, in at least some slight degree, must (if our view is sound) be a property of all events, yet only where there is consciousness of ideas and ideals does such power of decision have the radical importance for good or evil that we feel it to have in our own species.
With respect to this power, underestimation and delusive exaggeration are alike harmful.4 There is indeed an open horizon, and each of us adds to the world something that no wisdom could have wholly foreseen. This creating, this deciding of the otherwise undecided, this forming of the previously inchoate, is our dignity, by which, as Bergson beautifully says, each of us is an artist whose product is life or experience itself. Yet the causal momentum is great; and to make very much of our freedom calls for skillful strategy and tactics. It is vain to say, “Go to, I will now be a different person, brave where I was cowardly, kind and patient where I was harsh and irritable,” or even, “I will now be good or excellent in a new direction, manner, or degree.” One must employ every suitable indirect means: writing down a new schedule (not too ambitious at first), beginning to read a new sort of book, seeking out new and better friends, discussing plans with trusted intimates, trying to secure a new and more suitable job, in extreme cases consulting a psychiatrist or other counselor. In the foregoing list, some would include prayer, as not the least item.
Man’s very fate depends in part upon his adequate recognition of his lowly status as only a little more than an unconscious (although complicated) bit of causal driftwood, but also of the preciousness and glory of that slight surplus. The causal drift itself is merely the mass of data formed by acts of freedom already enacted on various levels, human, subhuman, and perhaps superhuman. Causality is crystallized freedom, freedom is causality in the making. There is always freedom, for there is always novelty. There is always causality, for always freedom has already been exercised, and a decision once made can only be accepted, it cannot be remade. Past decisions made with at least minimal freedom furnish the only content of new acts of emergent synthesis. Reality is sheer creation, but present creation adds only its Little mite to the organic totality of data already accumulated.
Notes
1. See W. Heisenberg, Philosophic Problems of Nuclear Science (New York: Pantheon, 1952), last two pages. Heisenberg speaks of the “limited applicability” of the mathematical laws of atomic physics, which will have to be “broadened” if they are to apply to living processes and to thought, and which we may have to “limit in range by attaching specific new conditions to them.” See also Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), p. 199.
2. See Sewall Wright, “Gene and Organism,” The American Naturalist, LXXXVII, 5 (1953); or R. W. Gerard, “The Scope of Science,” The Scientific Monthly, LXIV (1947), 500; and W. K. Clifford, Lectures and Essays, II (London: Macmillan and Co., 1886), 321.
3. Modes of Thought (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1938), p. 29.
4. On the abuses of the idea of freedom, see Walter Coutu, Emergent Human Nature (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1949). In conversation, Professor Coutu conceded that there is a case for freedom as a “continuous variable,” present in varying but, in general, small degree.
Source:
Charles Hartshorne, The Logic of Perfection, pp. 216-234.
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