948. Hartshorne holds—as he says . . .

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Hartshorne holds—as he says, "with Peirce, Royce and others"—"that neither 'reality' nor 'truth' can be defined except in relation to knowledge and that our always partial and fallible kind of knowledge presupposes a higher kind as its measure" ("Mysticism and Rationalistic Metaphysics": 467).

I can only reject Hartshorne's contention as it stands. But I certainly would contend that neither "reality" nor "truth" can be defined except in relation to real internal relatedness and that our always partial and fragmentary kind of internal relatedness presupposes a higher, integral and nonfragmentary, kind as its measure.

Thus I hold that what it is to be real in the most general sense of "reality" is "to be real for somethIng else that either has become or is in the process of becoming real in the same general sense," or, in other words, to be the object for some subject internally related to it. And, making the same change in formulation, I could hold, along the lines of Whitehead's well-known statement, that "the truth itself" is nothing else than how things are adequately included, or "objectified," in the divine nature. In other words, there can be no determinate truth, correlating impartially the partial inclusiveness of many concretes, apart from one concrete—the universal individual—to whose integral inclusiveness it can be referred (cf. PRc: 12 f.).

3 December 2003