Abstract

As against the analysis of the structure of the actual entities we find a different kind of analysis in Whitehead: that of the constitutive elements of the entities. "Such formative elements are not themselves actual and passing... They constitute the formative character of the actual and temporal world." This kind of analysis, being an analysis of elements, destroys the integral essence of the actual entities. The Platonic attitude of Whitehead's theory becomes manifest in the fact that the formative elements which are discovered through removing life and temporality from the actual entities are not just abstract concepts. They are entities of a particular ontological status of their own. With those formative elements Whitehead lists: creativity, that is to say, that feature of the actual entities which provides for the temporal passage; the ideal entities or forms which characterize the actual entities and provide the potentialities which lie ahead of them; God, the entity whereby the indetermination of mere creativity is transmuted into a determinate freedom, the entity which directs the shift from mere creativity to a specific conjunction of eternal objects and actual occasions.