Page:Science and the Modern World.djvu/254

 of complex eternal objects in the synthetic prehension, as elements in the emergent value. They differ from the concreteness of full inclusion. In a sense this difference is inexplicable; for each mode of inclusion is of its own kind, not to be explained in terms of anything else. But there is a common difference which discriminates these modes of inclusion from the full concrete ingression which has been discussed. This differentia is abruptness. By ‘abruptness’ I mean that what is remembered, or anticipated, or imagined, or thought, is exhausted by a finite complex concept. In each case there is one finite eternal object prehended within the occasion as the vertex of a finite hierarchy. This breaking off from an actual illimitability is what in any occasion marks off that which is termed mental from that which belongs to the physical event to which the mental functioning is referred.

In general there seems to be some loss of vividness in the apprehension of the eternal objects concerned: for example, Hume speaks of ‘faint copies.’ But this faintness seems to be a very unsafe ground for differentiation. Often things realised in thought are more vivid than the same things in inattentive physical experience. But the things apprehended as mental are always subject to the condition that we come to a stop when we attempt to explore ever higher grades of complexity in their realised relationships. We always find that we have thought of just this — whatever it may be — and of no more. There is a limitation which breaks off the finite concept from the higher grades of illimitable complexity.

Thus an actual occasion is a prehension of one infinite hierarchy (its associated hierarchy) together