The coherence, which the system seeks to preserve, is the discovery that the process, or concrescence, of any one actual entity involves the other actual entities among its components. In this way the obvious solidarity of the world receives its explanation.
There are no brute, self-contained matters of fact, capable of being understood apart from interpretation as an element in a system. Whenever we attempt to express the matter of immediate experience, we find that its understanding leads us beyond itself, to its contemporaries, to its past, to its future, and to the universals in terms of which its definiteness is exhibited.
Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography. Every scientific memoir in its record of the ‘facts’ is shot through and through with interpretation. The methodology of rational interpretation is the product of the fitful vagueness of consciousness.
Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies.
‘Creativity’ is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.
The many become one, and are increased by one. In their natures, entities are disjunctively ‘many’ in process of passage into conjunctive unity.
The actual world is a process, and that process is the becoming of actual entities.
In the becoming of an actual entity, the potential unity of many entities in disjunctive diversity—actual and non-actual—acquires the real unity of the one actual entity; so that the actual entity is the real concrescence of many potentials.
In the becoming of an actual entity, novel prehensions, nexūs, subjective forms, propositions, multiplicities, and contrast, also become; but there are no novel eternal objects.
It belongs to the nature of a ‘being’ that it is a potential for every ‘becoming.’
An eternal object can be described only in terms of its potentiality for ‘ingression’ into the becoming of actual entities; and its analysis only discloses other eternal objects. It is a pure potential. The term ‘ingression’ refers to the particular mode in which the potentiality of an eternal object is realized in a particular actual entity, contributing to the definiteness of that actual entity.
Nature is never complete. It is always passing beyond itself. This is the creative advance of nature.
An actual entity is a process, and is not describable in terms of the morphology of a ‘stuff.’
Creativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively.
God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification.
The notion of ‘simple location’ ... is a fallacy according to which an actual entity is thought of as passive, as a bare location in a region of space, or in a duration of time, as we devoid of any essential reference to any other actual entity.
Each moment of realized experience is an event with its own unique character. It is a novel creation of the universe.