Abstract

Alfred North Whitehead's theory of creative process can resolve the conflict between the deductive-law and narrative models of historical understanding. Process theory defines events as actions, extended in time, developing genetically, analyzable according to empirical rules. This testing involves the "mode of presentational immediacy,"' which measures spatial and temporal connections between events. Beneath this operates the "mode of causal efficacy," recording reactions sensed below the level of consciousness. Creative process incorporates these two modes, defining all occasions as patterns of relationships with other occasions, not substances but creative processes. Every phase of process has both subjective and objective elements. The objective action collects data from new occasions, but each datum has the subjective intensity of aiming at its own satisfaction