Repository | Book | Chapter

Certainly one of the more widely quoted and therefore influential articles written by Charles Hartshorne in the course of his illustrious career has been "The Compound Individual," originally composed for a Festschrift in honor of Alfred North Whitehead in 1936.¹ Therein Hartshorne reviewed the history of Western metaphysics on the key issue of substance or individuality and concluded that Whitehead alone had found a way to explain how organisms can be composed of much smaller entities (e.g., cells or, smaller yet, atoms) and still exist as functioning individuals in their own right. Organisms are colonies or societies of actual occasions "interlocked with other such individuals into societies of societies" so as to constitute the macroscopic realities of common sense experience.² Some of these structured societies, to be sure, do not possess a dominant subsociety which coordinates the activities of all the other subsocieties. But all higher-order animal species with central nervous system and brain clearly do give evidence of the presence and activity of a dominant subsociety of actual occasions to unify and coordinate bodily functions. Moreover, says Hartshorne at the end of the article, the God-world relationship may be explained in similar fashion. That is, God and the world are a compound individual, with God acting as the mind or soul of the world, and the world as the body of God. Thus, just as cells within the human body are substantial entities in their own right and yet under the direction of the soul make up a single macroscopic individual, so human beings and all other finite entities under God's unifying activity make up a single cosmic organism at any given moment.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-1014-5_6

Full citation: