64.91 Thus the permanence of the individual rhythm within nature is not absolutely associated with one definite set of material objects. But the connection for subtler rhythms is very close. So far as direct observation is concerned all that we know of the essential relations of life in nature is stated in two short poetic phrases. The obvious aspect by Tennyson,
"Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying."
Namely, Bergson's élan vital and its relapse into matter.
And Wordsworth with more depth,
"The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more."
[NOTES]
Note I. The whole of [Part II], i.e. [Chapters V] to [VII], suffers from a vagueness of expression due to the fact that the implications of my ideas had not shaped themselves with sufficient emphasis in my mind. In the first place every entity is an abstraction and presupposes certain systematic types of relatedness to other things. There is no such thing as an entity which could be real on its own, though it happens to be related to other things. Again the development of these chapters presupposes that philosophy, even modern philosophy, has been unduly influenced by the Aristotelian categories, in particular those of substance, quantity, quality, despite the criticism to which these categories have been subjected. A detailed analysis of the complex notions which are concealed in the terms quantity and quality is required, but it cannot be given in a note. It was for this reason that I avoided terms such as 'Universal' which presuppose an outlook which is here repudiated. But in many respects the statement that an object is a universal does explain what I mean. Particularity attaches to events and to historical routes among events. But there is a flux of things transcending that of nature—in the narrow sense in which nature is here construed. Accordingly particularity cannot be confined to natural events. The whole subject requires fuller and more systematic treatment which I hope in the immediate future to undertake. The main point hinges onto the ingression[10] of objects into social entities, and onto the analysis of the process of the realisation of social entities.
In the list of objects in [§ 13.2], I was distinguishing the percipient object, which roughly speaking is an individual, as mental, from a percipient event which is the flux of experience of a living organism. But the percipient object is shadowy in this book and is clearly outside 'nature.'
[10]Cf. my Concept of Nature for a short introduction to the meaning of this term.
Note II. The book is dominated by the idea [cf. [§ 14.1]] that the relation of extension has a unique preeminence and that everything can be got out of it. During the development of the theme, it gradually became evident that this is not the case, and cogredience [cf. [§ 16.4]] had to be introduced. But the true doctrine, that 'process' is the fundamental idea, was not in my mind with sufficient emphasis. Extension is derivative from process, and is required by it.