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In one and the same essay, Hartshorne can take two contradictory positions on the scope of our immediate experience of, or direct acquaintance with, reality. Thus he can say in one sentence, "Memory in the generalized sense, common to personal and impersonal memory, is the whole of our direct acquaintance with reality." In another sentence, however, he can say, "In experience it is memory [sc. personal memory], perception [sc. impersonal memory], and goal seeking that tie events together" ("The Organism according to Process Philosophy": 143, 151 cf. CIAP: 201). Clearly, if the first sentence were correct, the second could only be false -- and false—and vice versa. Since Hartshorne is elsewhere clear that we have a direct acquaintance with, or experience of, the future no less than the past, it is evidently the second sentence that more adequately expresses what he means to say. The interesting question, then, is why he is led to say what he says in the first.

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As for the question of why Hartshorne says what he says in the first formulation, the following statement may be indicative: "all awareness of actualities is mnemonic" ("The Individual Is a Society": 76), . I.e., the suppressed assumption of Hartshorne's statement is that what is experienced, or is the object of awareness, is "actualities." Taking this assumption into account, one can say that he is indeed correct, since the only actualities there are to experience belong to the past.

Hartshorne says: "The latest self does not make itself object, but it will be object for subsequent selves" ("Mind as Memory and Creative Love": 444). But, then, in other places he can speak of "the ultimate sociality" as the fact that "the present, which enjoys contributions from past experience, feels or regards itself [sic] as a contribution offered to the future as such" (ClAP: 153). The contradiction seems clear, unless, again, the present's "feeling" [sic], or "regarding" itself is to be distinguished as in principle different from making itself object in the sense in which it will be object for future selves.

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