9. Process and Reality, p. 4.
10. Ibid., p. 19.
11. Ibid., p. 6.
12. Ibid., p. 7.
13. Ibid., p. 6.
14. Speaking of the purpose of philosophy, he says:
"Its business is to explain the emergence of the
more abstract things from the more concrete
things.... The true philosophic question is, How
can concrete fact exhibit entities abstract from
itself and yet participated in by its own
nature?" Ibid., p. 30.
15. Ibid.
p.308
creteness as the relata."(16) This is his doctrine
of relatedness or mutual immanence, a doctrine which
prevents one from isolating or locating an actual
entity in any well-defined context. The actual
entities are the "final things of which the world is
made up, "(17) and are the basis of the relatedness.
Thus they cannot be empty or vacuous actualities.
They "involve each other by reason of their
prehensions of each other,"(18) or it is the nature
of each being to be a potential for every becoming.
Thus the togetherness or unity of these entities by
virtue of their prehensions is the fact of a nexuus.
According to Whitehead, a prehension involves a
"subject," the datum, and the subjective form which
refers to the "affective" aspect of the "subject." As
prehensions are the order of becoming in nature from
the smallest entity to the largest, the gradation or