1215. We may directly answer . . .

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We may directly answer the question of the day as follows:

The real, as distinct from the merely verbal, issues between Whitehead and "the great tradition of philosophical speculation" either are or are entailed by two basic and interrelated issues. (Indeed, these issues are so closely related that one might well say, instead, "one basic twofold issue.") On the one hand, and most basically, there is the epistemological issue whether sense perception—or perception in the mode of presentational immediacy—is or is not fundamental. On the other hand, and deriving from the first issue, there is the metaphysical (or ontological) issue whether an actual entity is or is not a substance characterized by both essential and accidental properties and enduring through time as numerically one.

Whitehead defends the negative side on both issues over against more or less consistent advocacy of the positive side in the philosophical tradition. Thus he argues, first, that "perception in its primary form is consciousness of the causal efficacy of the external world by reason of which the percipient is a concrescence from a definitely constituted datum" (PRc: 120 [184]; S: 100). And he argues, second, "The philosophies of substance presuppose a subject which then encounters a datum, and then reacts to the datum. The philosophy of organism presupposes a datum which is met with feelings, and progressively attains the unity of a subject. But with this doctrine, 'superject' would be a better term than 'subject''' (155; cf. 150 f. [234; cf. 228 f.]; S: 140).

These issues are clearly real and not merely verbal. For the mistake of the tradition is not in its mere use of the term "substance," but in what it understands that term to mean (cf. 79 [122]; S: 167). Likewise, there is nothing to prevent one from using Santayana's term "animal faith," provided one allows it "to describe a kind of perception which has been neglected by the philosophical tradition" (142 [215]).

n.d.; rev. 28 August 2002