Saturday, 3 May 2025

 "This account makes it plain that the perceptive mode of presentational immediacy arises in the later, originative, integrative phases of the process of concrescence. The perceptive mode of causal efficacy is to be traced to the constitution of the datum by reason of which there is a concrete percipient entity. Thus we must assign the mode of causal efficacy to the fundamental constitution of an occasion so that in germ this mode belongs even to organisms of the lowest grade; while the mode of presentational immediacy requires the more sophistical activity of the later stages of process, so as to belong only to organisms of a relatively high grade. So far as we can judge, such high-grade organisms are relatively few, in comparison with the whole number of organisms in our immediate environment. Presentational immediacy is an outgrowth from the complex datum implanted by causal efficacy. But, by the originative power of the supplemental phase, what was vague, ill defined, and hardly relevant in causal efficacy, becomes distinct, well defined, and importantly relevant in presentational immediacy. In the responsive phase, the grey colour, and the geometrical relations between the efficacious, bodily routes and the contemporary occasions, were subjective sensations associated with barely relevant geometrical relations: they represented the vivid sensational qualities in the enjoyment of which the percipient subject barely distinguished vague indirect relationships to the external world. The supplemental phase lifts the presented duration into vivid distinctness, so that the vague efficacy of the indistinct external world in the immediate past is precipitated upon the representative regions in the contemporary present. In the usual language, the sensations are projected. This phraseology is unfortunate; for there never were sensations apart from these geometrical relations.

Presentational immediacy is the enhancement of the importance of relationships which were already in the datum, vaguely and with slight relevance. This fact, that ‘presentational immediacy’ deals with the same datum as does ‘causal efficacy,’ gives the ultimate reason why there is a common ‘ground’ for ‘symbolic reference."

ANW

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