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In discussing Peirce's "logic of relatives," Hartshorne says that its point is "[n]ot that there are no entities with properties that logically correspond to subjects with predicates," but rather "that what describes an entity is not simply its predicates. . . . We must divide predicates into those which seem complete in themselves and those requiring one or more particular entities beside the one being described. The essential predicates are relative ones and imply dependence or relativity. There are relations because there are relative or dependent things. An elementary proposition of the most important kind refers to more than one subject, if that means concrete entity; it is the predicate that is single" (ClAP: 82). He goes on: "Yet normally there is in a sense but one primary subject, the one being described; the other entities that the proposition refers to are not being described but are merely used in the description of the primary subject. In medieval logic the entities forming part of the description (e.g., the entities that a perceiving subject perceives) are termed objects, in contrast to the subject, of the relation. . . . [Peirce] certainly was aware of the distinction [this] expresses. It means that the Aristotelian ideal of a subject that requires no other comparably concrete entities for its description but only repeatable forms, predicates, is not an ideal at all but a basic mistake. There can be no such subjects or substances. Predicates ostensibly complete in themselves as descriptive of the primary objects are pure Firsts, monadic predicates. They are mere possibilities, as Peirce says, abstractions from the actual properties of things, which are always (with respect to previous events) relativities, examples of Secondness, or (with respect to future events) of Firstness and Thirdness" (82 f.).

So far as I can see, the point that Hartshorne makes in all this is, again, the same as Whitehead's in characterizing "the defect of the Greek analysis of generation," i.e., that it conceived generation as "the bare incoming of novel abstract form" (AI: 242). I say "again" because of other statements Hartshorne makes in similar contexts – such as, e.g., "Subjects are what they are not through mere private predicates or properties, but through the references which it is their natures to make to certain other subjects" ("Religion in Process Philosophy": 247); also along the same lines, I take it, is what he says about Firstness not being an "actual feeling," which is "relative to a given which, by sympathetic suggestion, imparts quality to it. Only the quality itself, in abstraction from what imparts it or receives it, is self-sufficient or