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There is an eternal abstract ideal or purpose (Plato's "Form of the Good").

And there is an eternal continuum of qualitative possibilities (Peirce's "multitude beyond all multitude"), out of which fully definite single qualities emerge, or are created, in their appropriate cosmic epochs.

Wiki MarkupPeirce's view that "the eternal is a continuum of possibilities, a 'multitude beyond all multitude,' lacking, as eternal, in definiteness," implies both that "possibilities are determinables\[,\] not determinates" and that "determinables are not classes of determinates, but aspects of creativity relevant to such classes, so far as the latter are given." "Given a determinate how\[,\] we can relate it to the \ [_sc._ indeterminate but determinable\] somehow, but given only the somehow we cannot relate it to a determinate how."

The region of possibility to which a particular event can be related, or which we say it actualizes, never implies just this determinate mode of actualization. In fact, this determinate mode is not even one of the antecedent possibilities, which as such are determinables, not determinates or classes thereof, so that any determinate mode as such must be a creation out of them, or a further particularization of them.

Each antecedent phase of process involves various more or less well-defined alternatives for the next phase. And the particular emerging from the next phase is the actualization of one of these alternatives. But "actualization" is not a simple change from "merely possible" to "actual," whatever that could mean, but always connotes "some additional definiteness, or determinateness," not already contained in any of the antecedently obtaining alternatives. This is not to say (with Bergson and others) that there are no antecedent possibilities or that there is something absurd about the concept of such. What we mean by "the antecedent possibility of particular p" is simply that the antecedent phase of process defined itself as destined to be superseded somehow, within certain alternatives, by a next phase of process. This "somehow" is not a wholly undifferentiated question mark, but involves certain more or less well defined alternatives, none of which can coincide in character with the particular that emerges from the next phase of process, but some one of which, or some one region of the continuum of possible quality, will later be recognizable as the nearest alternative or region, the one that with the least further definition is equivalent to the particular once it has emerged and is given as such.

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