Page:The Function of Reason.pdf/37

 we must conceive each actuality as attaining an end for itself. Its very existence is the presentation of its many components to itself, for the sake of its own ends. In other words, an actuality is a complex unity, which can be analysed as a process of feeling its own components. This is the doctrine that each actuality is an occasion of experience, the outcome of its own purposes.

Now I am pursuing the ordinary scientific method of searching for an explanation. Having found one example of a fundamental duality in the universe, namely the physical tendency towards degradation and the counter-tendency upwards, I am enumerating the other basic dualities, with the hope of tying them up into one coherent concept in which they explain each other. We have now to ask how we can interpret the upward and the downward trends, and body and mind, as two coordinate dualities essential in the nature of experience.

Bodily experience is sheer physical experience. Such experience is the sheer final enjoyment of being definitely something. It is self-definition as constituting one sheer fact among other things, namely among other actualities and selected forms of definiteness. Physical experience is the matter-of-fact enjoyment of just those items which are given to that occasion. Every component in physical experience is playing its part in sheer matter-of-fact.

But every occasion of experience is dipolar. It is mental experience integrated with physical experience. Mental experience is the converse of