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"(O]ne-way independence or Firstness is unqualifiedly so only with respect to future details. Although there are no particular successors that an event must have, it does have to have successors, and some general features of these are settled in advance. The independence of events from their successors does not mean that any sort of event could follow a given events any more than we count totally classified entities. A world in which the future was completely unforeseeable and without even probabilistic or approximate laws is not . . . more than verbally conceivable. Its existence would be entirely 'unknowable.'. . . It follows that there are three forms of dependence: (1) the positive form strict dependence; (2) the negative form strict independence (both holding asymmetrically among definite particulars) [;] and (3) dependence that leaves the final particularity open and can be stated only in more or less general terms" (81). 

"(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 understanding 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 arrow, _the the contrast between the already settled decided past, and the not yet decided, needing-to-be-decided—yet not merely indeterminate—future. The past is 'the sum of accomplished facts'; the future is the set of real or limited possibilities for future accomplishment, a determinable seeking further determination. The nominalistic error is not to see that futurity and generality are inseparableas inseparableas are pastness and particularity. Time is indeed 'objective modality'" (84)

[I]ndividuals can hardly be regarded as entirely definite. After all, each moment 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.

"I shall never forget what Bochenski once said to me, apropos the thesis that 'reality consists of events': 'Aristotle said so. He did not dot all the i's and cross all the t's, but. . . .' So when I encounter writers who defend Aristotelian substances against Whitehead, who did dot the i's and cross the t's, I am not immensely impressed. They all fail to see what Bochenski did see, that Whitehead's 'societies' are nicely tailored to do what 'substance' was primarily intended to do, and that is to furnioh identifiable features of reality sufficiently definite for ordinary purposes but not necessarily so for science or metaphysics. To suppose them entirely definite is to commit oneself implicitly to the paradoxes of Leibnizian laws of succession wuque to each individual and equally determinate for past and future.

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