Note on A.N. Whitehead's 'Science and the Modern World'.

When you are on a topic everything seems to feed into it. A journalist that reports on the government’s ‘most substantive meeting’ gets you pondering whether there can be a superlative of ‘substantive’. A substance is a free standing thing of which things are said. The expression noun substantive preserves this meaning but I will not bore you with a discussion of the Aristotelian implications of what H.W. Fowler calls a genteelism:

By genteelism is here to be understood the rejecting of the ordinary natural word that first suggests itself to the mind, and the substitution of a synonym that is thought to be less soiled by the lips of the common herd, less familiar, less plebeian, less vulgar, less improper, less apt to come unhandsomely betwixt the wind and our nobility. (Modern English Usage - 1966 ed.)

A. N. Whitehead avoided words that were polluted by a history of discussion that tended to draw the mind down dead ends:

“These transcendent entities have been termed ‘universals.' I prefer to use the term ‘eternal objects’ in order to disengage myself from presuppositions which cling to the former term owing to a prolonged philosophical history. Eternal objects are thus, in their nature, abstract.”

What Whitehead is at here is moving away from that solid thing substance to the realm of the possible which may or may not issue as an entity that is manifest. When they do the eternal objects are evident as ‘actual occasions’. His emphasis is on the nature of the universe as a monistic holistic pattern of interactions which can themselves be ‘eternal objects’. His breaks down mind/body dualism into a dyad of dual aspect:

“Thus the mental cognition is seen as the reflective experience of a totality, reporting for itself what it is in itself as one unit occurrence. This unit is the integration of the sum of its partial happenings, but it is not their numerical aggregate. It has its own unity as an event. This total unity, considered as an entity for its own sake, is the prehension into unity of the patterned aspects of the universe of events.” (from Science and the Modern World)

It is as though we then graft on to that totalising moving through events an ontology of subject and objects.

“The private psychological field is merely the event considered from its own standpoint. The unity of this field is the unity of the event. But it is the event as one entity, and not the event as a sum of parts. The relations of the parts, to each other and to the whole, are their aspects, each in the other.”

How this relates to my understanding of the theory of superimposition in Advaitic Vedanta is a topic for another occasion. �