Chapter 15

'Continuation' —
The action of the sentient principle and the origin of its transient acts

1262. The case is different with the sentient principle, which has its own activity and is the cause of its acts. However, no cause of transient acts is a full cause. If it were, it would produce acts as immanent as itself. We must, therefore, investigate how the sentient principle can posit its transient acts.
We have already said that the activity of the sentient principle is aroused by its terms. Once aroused, however, the activity is proper to itself and directed in its operation by its own laws. The activity of the sentient principle, therefore, has two parts, and transient acts can arise in it from two causes:

1st cause. Change of its term, that is, of its corporeal felt element. This change does not come from the sentient principle but from foreign causes. Here we must remember the opinion previously mentioned that every particle of matter has some feeling joined to it. This helps us to understand how the term of a sentient principle can grow as one feeling unites with another, granted the law that the sentient principle is single where the felt element is continuous (rather like two mathematical points which merge to form a single point, neither more nor less).

Diminution of the felt term is explained in the same way: the extended elements break off from one another and lose their continuity. This enables us to understand how the sentient principle, although properly speaking remaining the same, seems to go out to a new transient act. It is only the term of the sentient principle that increases or decreases. Note, however, that we can observe only two changes as one extended felt element joins with another: 1. the subjective change when two felt elements are united through apposition (this is explained as a result of what has been said); and 2. the extrasubjective change of movement in the two extended elements which have separated or come close in apposition. We explained the cause of this movement previously. Every change, therefore, that is recognisable in the fact under observation must be explained by us in this way.

2nd cause. By the change produced in its term by the activity of the sentient principle. Explaining this change, we have to consider that the sentient principle placed in being has an act determined by its nature. Sometimes, however, this act is partly impeded by foreign causes. When these blocking causes are removed, the sentient principle carries out its act completely. This explanation of its natural act is taken as its transient act and is thought to be a change in it. But, properly speaking, it is the first act itself. It is its own nature which was previously discomforted through constraint by adverse agents but now is placed in its own convenient, natural attitude. Thus, the whole transient act in the sentient principle is not reduced properly speaking to some new activity, but to the primal activity. What is new is the removal of impediments. This enables it to be what it is, what it must be by nature. Let us clarify this concept of the transient act in the sentient principle.

1263. First, we have supposed that the sentient principle is placed in its first immanent act which constitutes it the ens which it is. We explained how this came about: it depends upon its term and the conditions of the term. The second transient acts have no part at all in this term. They follow later because they are acts of the already ennatured principle. But the principle itself is placed in being in different ways: 1. according to the degree of extension in its felt term; 2. according to the intestine, stimulating movements of feeling.
If the principle is placed in being solely through continuous extension without stimulating movements, its activity is restricted to feeling the extended element given it as a term.

But if it is placed in being through stimulating movements also, it has another act. The stimulated feeling is an act which, like every act, endures. In other words, it has a force of self- conservation and of development according to its own nature. This depends upon the principle already stated that 'every activity, every first act, has a natural state in which it is in the most perfect and complete mode that it can be.' The stimulated feeling, however, can be held back from its full, perfect naturation and development. I pointed this out previously (Ch. 1, Article 6) when I said that 'between a principle's being given a term and being denied it, there is a middle state which consists in the imperfect donation of the term and the consequent incomplete self-actuation of the principle itself. In this case, the bad state of the principle itself is manifested together with its struggle'.

1264. 1. If an intestine, stimulating movement compatible with perfect stimulation begins in the term of feeling, the sentient principle acts to conserve and continue the movement.(136) This activity which perpetuates the movement (when it finds no obstacles) is not something new, but the same activity present prior to the stimulated feeling and possessing the power to conserve itself and endure as it is.

1265. 2. But not every intestine movement in the extended felt element is sufficient for explaining the natural act of the stimulated sensible principle.

This act requires
a) a harmonious, single movement;
b) a kind of movement which circles back on itself (otherwise it could not perpetuate itself);
c) a movement which is as frequent as possible, granted the first two conditions;
d) the preservation of the contact and gravitation of one molecule towards another, but in a way which does not impede the three conditions explained previously.

1266. The first act of the stimulated feeling is a power whose energy is limited. It has to be adjusted in the most pleasing, perfect and natural way. Despite its limitation, it exercises its influence to ensure that the stimulating movement of the felt element has the four conditions set out above.

1267. But sometimes as a result of contrasting force and opposing powers it cannot attain this aim.

For example 1. imagine that contact is made between one extended felt element and another. The second, let us say, is extremely small and as such capable of coming sufficiently close to the first to form some continuation with it. This second extended element has its own organisation and is dominated by another stimulated sentient principle. It is stimulated, therefore, by intestine movements which are in harmony with its own sentient element. These movements, however, are out of harmony with the intestine movements of the first extended element to which the second has been joined. The inevitable consequence is war to the death between the two sentient principles, both of which endeavour to draw within the maelstrom of their own activity the corporeal atoms which they share. This is perhaps what happens in the case of poisons and the chemical changes they produce in the living body;

1268. 2. Let us imagine that an extended element, as small as necessary but without movements or vincible movements, draws near to a felt element in which the stimulating movements of the sentient principle are perpetuated. The stimulated sentient principle must, in order to assimilate the small extended element to its own felt element, cause in it suitable stimulating movements. It does this by drawing it within its own ceaseless vortex of activity, by dividing it into its smallest parts and arranging it as necessary to suit the organisation of its own felt principle. This organisation, the source of the movements, is itself formed by the movements themselves. During the whole of this period, the sentient principle only carries forward its first act. It adjusts the first act to the state it should occupy by nature, and does this with an immanent, continuous act which constitutes it in being, but which until now has been impeded and withdrawn solely because of a lack of opportunity to extend itself, or through some impediment dependent on the condition of the term to which it is bound and by which it is conditioned.

This theory explains all instinctive movements which, in the last analysis, are only movements of the fundamental feeling as it endeavours to constitute itself in its most natural, comfortable and pleasant disposition.(137)

Notes

(136) AMS , 419-429.

(137) AMS , 367-369.