Page:Science and the Modern World.djvu/242

 determinate how this relationship is an unfulfilled alternative, not contributing any aesthetic value, except as forming an element in the systematic substratum of unfulfilled content. In a higher grade, it may remain unfulfilled, but be aesthetically relevant.

Thus A, conceived merely in respect to its relationships to other eternal objects, is ‘A conceived as not-being’; where ‘not-being’ means ‘abstracted from the determinate fact of inclusions in, and exclusions from, actual events.’ Also ‘A as not-being in respect to a definite occasion α’ means that A in all its determinate relationships is excluded from a. Again ‘A as being in respect to α’ means that A in some of its determinate relationships is included in α. But there can be no occasion which includes A in all its determinate relationships; for some of these relationships are contraries. Thus, in regard to excluded relationships, A will be not-being in α, even when in regard to other relationships A will be being in α. In this sense, every occasion is a synthesis of being and not-being. Furthermore, though some eternal objects are synthesised in an occasion α merely quâ not-being, each eternal object which is synthesised quâ being is also synthesised quâ not-being. ‘Being’ here means ‘individually effective in the aesthetic synthesis.’ Also the ‘aesthetic synthesis’ is the ‘experient synthesis’ viewed as self-creative, under the limitations laid upon it by its internal relatedness to all other actual occasions. We thus conclude — what has already been stated above — that the general fact of the synthetic prehension of all eternal objects into every occasion wears the double aspect of the indeterminate relatedness of each eternal object to