Page:Science and the Modern World.djvu/261

 within which the actual is a unique categorical determination.

Every actual occasion exhibits itself as a process: it is a becomingness. In so disclosing itself, it places itself as one among a multiplicity of other occasions, without which it could not be itself. It also defines itself as a particular individual achievement, focussing in its limited way an unbounded realm of eternal objects.

Any one occasion α issues from other occasions which collectively form its past. It displays for itself other occasions which collectively form its present. It is in respect to its associated hierarchy, as displayed in this immediate present, that an occasion finds its own originality. It is that display which is its own contribution to the output of actuality. It may be conditioned, and even completely determined by the past from which it issues. But its display in the present under those conditions is what directly emerges from its prehensive activity. The occasion α also holds within itself an indetermination in the form of a future, which has partial determination by reason of its inclusion in a and also has determinate spatio-temporal relatedness to α and to actual occasions of the past from α and of the present for α.

This future is a synthesis in α of eternal objects as not-being and as requiring the passage from α to other individualisations (with determinate spatio-temporal relations to α) in which not-being becomes being.

There is also in α what, in the previous chapter, I have termed the ‘abrupt’ realisation of finite eternal objects. This abrupt realisation requires either a