THERE ARE TWO MODES OF PROCESS operative in the universe: concrescence and transition, micro-process and macro-process. In concrescence, the many elements in the universe given for an occasion achieve the private, subjective unity of a perspective, transforming the efficient causality of the past into the final causality of an emerging viewpoint functioning with respect to its own determinateness. Transition, on the other hand, represents the functioning of an actual entity in the future—its pragmatic afterlife as causally objectified in subsequent occasions. Since both modes of process are different translations of the same entity (concrescence—in terms of its genesis from the world; transition—in terms of its efficacy as a stubborn fact for the future), they cannot be torn apart. But they can be analyzed in isolation from each other, provided each analysis is viewed as an abstraction from the twofold functioning of a concrete entity. Thus, each analysis will yield quite different sorts of information about an actual occasion. In genetic analysis, the self-creative process of the subject is traced as it grows from phase to phase. Coordinate analysis, focusing on the fully determinate satisfaction achieved in concrescence, takes as its object the spatio-temporal standpoint in the extensive continuum which the entity has actualized. The former mode divides an occasion into prehensions, underscoring its final causality; the latter mode yields space–time regions through which chains of efficient causality are propagated.

• Fordham University Press