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"Firstness is the same as abstractness, possibility, or essence: and no concrete or actual feeling, with its actual quality, is a pure First.

"However, there is another way of viewing the matter .... Granted that an actual feeling is always Second (because [r]elative to a stimulus), does it follow that the stimulating entity is, in its turn, relative to the feeling it elicits? ..

"The concretely, though relatively, First or nonrelative is ... simply the earlier in the causal-temporal series. What about the absolutely nonrelative, if there can be such a thing? Must it not be some primordial and eternal essence, or realm of essences, the pure possibility of existence in general, which is prior to any particular situation? Theologically this must somehow coincide with the 'primordial nature' of God, or with [God's] primordial creativity or power.... Pure Firstness must be completely abstract, for by definition it is independent of, and so abstractable from, all particular concrete cases" (460).

[I]n itself, say as an event, it need not be taken as relative to the feeling. Rather the feeling is Second to the thing felt, which in this context is First; and this relation is not reversible or symmetrical. ... Nevertheless, the First event to which the Second feeling is relative may itself, in another context, be relative. As an event it may be relative to a still earlier event. In.deed, it may itself be a prior responsive or reactive feeling, with its own stimulus.... Thus we have a chain of Seconds which, reversing the direction of analysis, is also a chain of Firsts. The Firstness or Absoluteness is, to be sure, relative only, but for all that, perfectly definite and genuine. The earlier experience was strictly independent of its successor, though not of its predecessor" ("Peirce's 'One Contribution''': 459).  

"[E]ven the relatively nonrelative is, in a sense, abstract.... [T]he relatively absolute is also relatively abstract. And moreover, we may also say ... that the relatively nonrelative is (in a similarly relative sense) possibility rather than actuality. Yesterday, to be sure, was no 'mere possibility,' it~was possibility, relatively speaking, for it furnished that possibility of which today is the actualization. It was the possibility of a certain kind of successor which otherwise would not have been possible. So absolutely speaking;. Firstness as such means the possibility and the essence, not the actual existence, of feeling. Only so far as the earlier feeling was itself a Second was it, too, actual" (460 f.) 

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"(W)ithout Secondness there can be no understanding of what it is distinctively to be a caused or conditioned phenomenon _{without Firstness there can be no w1.derstanding of what it is distinctively to be a cause or condition, and ... without a third and intermediate relation between sheer dependence and sheer independence there can be no understanding of time's arroWt the contrast between the already settledt decided past, and the not yet decided, needing-to-be-decided-yet not merely indeterminate-future. The past is 'the sum of accomplJished facts'; the future is the set of real or limitedpossibilities for future accomplishment, a determinable seeking further determination. The nominalistic error is not to see that futurity and generality are inseparableas are pastness and particularity. Time is indeed 'objective modality'" (84)}

_{U[I]ndividuals can hardly be regarded as entirely definite. After all, each n10ment they receive new determinations not prescribed by causal laws and initial conditions. The secret lesson of Leibnniz's theory of genetic identity, an open secret since Whitehead, is that only the past (not the future) careers of individuals are wholly definite. Aristotle knew this, Leibniz denied it and thereby burdened his doctrine with serious paradoxes .... Peirce agreed with Aristotle, not Leibniz, but like Aristotle he failed to clearly draw the conclusion, that each moment there is a new determinate actuality, the individual-now. It is a continuation of the individual career as it has previously been, but, since the less cannot contain the more, the indeterminate the determinate, if we are looking for concrete definite unitary wholes of reality, we should recognize that the individual-now is always a new such whole. The Buddhists, whom Peirce admired, saw this. But [Peirce's] assertion of the continuity of becoming makes it impossible to conceive definite single wholes in the succession of such wholes constituting an individual career.}

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"How right Bochenski was, in comparison to expreme qponents of Whitehead who yet appeal to Aristotle, may be seen by considering how Aristotle explained the identity of an individual through change as the actualization of potentialities inherent in the individual all along. Aristotle's point is translatable into process terms. Of course an individual eventsequence or career, once begun, has the potentiality for later prologations. But the actualization of a potency is not contained in the potency; rather the potency is contained in the actualization. The present is more than the past; there is a new whole of determinations. This is the creationist view of reality. Events are capable of being superseded by what is more than they are. An infant 'self' does not contain the adult phases of 'itself.' There is a numerically new concrete reality with each new determination.