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1. Significantly, Hartshorne himself allows not only that relativity, or relatedness, like "absoluteness or neutrality to relational alternatives," permits degrees as well as an eminent case, but also that "relatedness admits intensive, and not just numerical or extensive, gradations" (DR: 122). He immediately goes on to say, to be sure, "Thus the relation of knowing has gradations of clearness as well as of scope." But whatever connection Hartshorne's psychicalism may lead him to assert between relatedness and knowledge, or knowing, he explicitly acknowledges at least in this passage that "relatedness" is one thing, "knowing," something else.

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3. Clearly, if relatedness can and must be distinguished from knowing, it also can and must be distinguished from awareness. In that event, it is false to say, as Hartshorne does (DR:141) that "only an adequate awareness can fully measure and contain the being and value of everything." An adequate, or eminent, relatedness can also fully measure and contain the being and value of everything.

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Hartshorne argues that "only an ideally perfect memory could constitute such conservation \ [_sc_. of experience, in its full vividness and value\]" ("The Buddhist-Whiteheadian View of the Self and the Religious Traditions" \ [#207\]: 301).

But if "memory" here means "conscious awareness," as beyond any serious question it does, "an ideally perfect memory" can be, at most, a symbolic, not an analogical, much less a literal, way of speaking. For memory, in this sense, is not a "cosmic," but a "local," variable; and only "cosmic variables" can be either analogical or literal.

What Hartshorne should argue, then, is that only an ideally all-inclusive concrete reality could constitute the conservation of experience in its full vividness and value; and that this reality may be conceived and symbolized symbolically as "an ideally perfect memory," or "an imperishable and wholly clear and distinct retrospective awareness, which we may call the memory of God" (ibid.).

October 1988