How charming it is that the Tibetans anticipated Whitehead in this important point in the theory of perception, presumably long before European thinkers came to it. Perception and memory are the two basic forms of experiencing the past, and all concrete data are past. Perception is what memory becomes if its past data are not previous experiences in the same individual or personal sequence, but rather events, experiences in some other sequence, or possibly

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in no definite sequence of similar events. Perception is "impersonal memory," memory is personal perception. (Introspection -- there is a suutra which says this -- is really retrospection.) Awareness of the already happened is the basic form of our direct intuitions of reality. If this is not a famous discovery it is because in philosophy, unlike physics, discipline is so weak, subjectivity of procedure so pronounced, that there are no generally accepted criteria of intellectual success or significant originality. By my criteria the Tibetans and Whitehead made a discovery of great value when they integrated memory and perception under a single concept, the givenness of the past -- from which givenness all we need by way of knowledge of the present and future can be derived, in large part by instinct, or unconscious habits formed in early childhood.

　　 Reading Griffin's essay on a similar subject after my essay had been written leads me to a few further remarks. I find Griffin admirably clear and illuminating. I had not realized the extent to which strict determinism was a factor in early Buddhism. No wonder they could see no consistent sense in a pluralistic view of reality. How penetrating the reasoning that if antecedent and subsequent results strictly imply each other causally then each event is equivalent to the entire series, past and future; and thus, since equivalence is a transitive as well as symmetrical relation, each event is equivalent to every other. Therewith any significant plurality is lost. How characteristic of Naagaarjuna! But it confirms the charge I have been making against that thinker, that he reasons splendidly, but from arbitrary premises. The symmetry he arrives at is assumed in those premises. Thus he claims to exhaust the possible causal doctrines as follows: earlier and later events or situations may be mutually independent, mutually interdependent, neither dependent nor independent, both dependent and independent. Each of the four cases, as stated, is symmetrical. True enough, one might introduce further divisions -- for instance, according to the way in which the earlier depends on the later differs from the way in which the later depends upon the earlier. But, in the reasoning used to discredit each of the four cases, no use whatever is made of this possibility, and it is precisely this neglect of the asymmetrical case that gives the reasoning its apparent cogency.

　　 The same is true when the four possibilities are stated as: cause and effect are alike, different, alike and different, neither alike nor different. If they are merely alike there is no distinction and no real change from cause to effect, if merely different than anything could cause anything. But suppose they are alike in both being instances of subjectivity, but different in that while the effect is a single subject the cause is a group of antecedent subjects objectified in the new subject, whereby "the many become one and are increased by one." Moreover, the subjective forms of the prehending subject must be such as to achieve aesthetic integrity in spite of the diversity among the prehended subjects. Thus by no means anything could cause anything. So long as the symmetry of likeness and difference, taken in their pure abstractness, is alone considered, no

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light can be shed upon the intuitively asymmetrical relation of causing and being caused. The later subject contains and is constituted by its contrasts, its differences, from earlier subjects, but these differences did not enter into the constitutions of the earlier subjects. It ought to be obvious that the level of abstract symmetry on which the dialectic moves is bound to conceal the meaning of causal conditioning. You might as well try to explain conditioning by starting with equivalence, biconditioning. Obviously the basic idea is simple conditioning.

　　 (A contemporary example of the same mistake is found in Archie Bahm's doctrine that "interdependence" is the universal principle. This is merely the special case in which dependence holds both ways. Dewey's emphasis upon "transaction" as the primary epistemic relation is open to a similar criticism, though here more of value would survive the criticism.)

　　 As I have repeatedly pointed out, a neglect of asymmetry closely similar to Naagaarjuna's is found many centuries later in Bradley's dialectic about relations, as well as in Russell's and Hume's defenses of external relations (reiterated by Ayer and Von Wright). All these parties ignore the doctrine that events depend upon, are partly constituted by their relations to, preceding events, but not vice versa. Yet memory and perception, as Whitehead argues, indicate that experience consists in such one-way dependence, experience depending upon the temporally prior experienced events which were and remain independent of the experience. The "prejudice of symmetry" is one of the most widespread of all intellectual biases and while it sometimes leads to intellectual discoveries it also leads to fundamental errors, as I have argued elsewhere. [2] The basic relations that bind the world together are both internal and external, internal at one "end" or with respect to one term, external at the other end or with respect to the other term. But few are the philosophers who realize this, and even Whitehead, whose system largely conforms to it, never, so far as I know, stated the principle itself in its abstract clarity, as I have just done.