Nature’s Bonfire, Million-fueled: The Poetic Cosmologies of

G. M. Hopkins and A. N. Whitehead

Robert E. Doud

Pasadena City College

The purpose of this article is to provide suggestions

to aid in the critical interpretation of Gerard Manley

Hopkins’ poetry and vision of reality by comparing some of

his focal ideas with those of Alfred North Whitehead. More

is at stake in Hopkins than the writing of poetry and the

invention of a Christian poetics. Perceiving inscapes and

feeling instresses1 lies at the heart of the human vocation

of giving glory to God. They are part of a discernment

process that deepens and extends the work of St. Ignatius

Loyola. They are part of the poet’s personal project of

finding God in all things.

This article is not so much about the poetry of

Hopkins, as it is about his poetic ideas, his Christological

1

cosmology, his vision of reality, his underlying influences

and convictions. This article is a fusion of horizons

between Hopkins and Whitehead. It intends to improve the

understanding of each by comparison to and correlation with

the other. This leads inevitably to a better understanding

of Hopkins’ poems, but it is not on the whole an analysis of

or commentary on particular poems. It terminates, however,

in an appreciative consideration of “The Windhover,” by way

of correlation with Whitehead’s notion of concrescence.

Hopkins does not write with the accuracy or consistency

of a philosopher or theologian, but his unique and

idiosyncratic terminology and conceptuality tempt the

philosopher and theologian to probe his works for an

underlying systematic unity. Some of the colorful and

engaging terms familiar to readers of Hopkins are: dappled,

inscape, instress, stress, outstress, selftaste, rhyming, chiming, selving, pitch,

sake, scape, interest, catch, and several others. These terms all

seem to have to do with the variety of things in nature,

their inner energy, the unique inner pattern each thing has,

2

and the patterned impression they bestow upon the mind when

communicating with it. Humans, with sensation,

consciousness, and the ability to appreciate beauty, are

present in the world to receive the impressions given off by

natural objects and by scenes composed of several objects in

conjunction.

For Hopkins, the accumulation of poetic perceptions,

fused with the attendant sufferings and sacrifices required

in a particular vocation, is the task of the Christian. In

Hopkins’ view, God’s goodness overflows into the abundance

of creation, mysteriously requiring suffering, but promising

reward beyond this life. The neo-Platonic, Romantic, and

Franciscan principle of plentitude is important as background

behind Hopkins’ delight in the fecund abundance,

differences, variety, and uniqueness in a world whose

deepest structures are imprinted with the face of Christ.

The word dappled2 is the symbol in the poem “Pied Beauty” for

3

the profusion and diversity of entities in creation,

suggesting the myriad of actual entities or actual occasions3

present in the universe at any instant in Whitehead’s

cosmology.

Glory be to God for dappled

things --

For skies of couple-color as

a brindled cow;

For rose-moles in all stipple upon

trout that swim . . .

Some of the Whiteheadian or process ideas used here

are: creativity, actual entity, concrescence, prehension, subjective form, initial

aim, subjective aim, the reformed subjectivist principle, the four phases of

concrescence, transmutation, and the two natures of God (primordial

and consequent). Some of the comparisons or correlations

worked out in this article include: creativity in Whitehead

with instress in Hopkins, concrescence in Whitehead with inscape

in Hopkins, style in Whitehead with inscape and selving in

4

Hopkins, selftaste4 with satisfaction, and transmutation in Whitehead

with rhyming in Hopkins.

Selving corresponds with the process by which the initial

aim becomes the subjective aim in Whitehead; it is also closely

related to his reformed subjectivist principle. Sake,5 as used by

Hopkins, corresponds to the anticipation an actual entity

entertains or experiences as to its inclusion and relevance

in future concrescences. The term interest6 as used by Hopkins

is a function of the way in which worldly occasions become

everlasting, or objectively immortal. They are preserved and

enhanced in God’s consequent nature. Rhyming,7 a term also used

idiosyncratically by Hopkins, approximates to Whitehead’s

category of transmutation.8 Rhyming also suggests the

harmonizing of the very many subjective forms or affective tones

within each actual entity.

Influences on the work of Hopkins include St. Ignatius

Loyola, St. Francis of Assisi, Duns Scotus, Parmenides,

Heraclitus, and the New Testament. We refer to Arthur O.

5

Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being for understandings of Plato’s

theology, Neo-Platonism, the principle of plentitude, and

Romanticism. Lovejoy points to the principle of plentitude9

in Romanticism, and this shows up strongly in Hopkins’

appreciation of the variety of species and individuals, all

of which have inscapes that are also Christscapes.10 For

Lovejoy, there are notions of fecundity, variety and

diversity that connect Platonism and Romanticism, and play

important parts in the definition of Romanticism.

i. Ignatius, Scotus, and Inscape

The Ignatian influence in Hopkins is central and

pervasive. It has to do with giving back to God an

appreciation for all that God has given to us.11 It also has

to do with “making it worth God’s while to have created

us.”12 Hearing the phrase “worth God’s while” might make a

Whiteheadian think of “the consequent nature of God,”13 that

is, the preserving aspect of God to which we make our

constant and unique contributions. It is a metaphysical

condition in Whitehead that all finite achievement rushes

6

back into God for everlasting preservation. There is also an

idea of spiritual poverty in Ignatius, by which devotees

should give everything they possess back to God. “Give

beauty back . . . back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s

giver.”14

Beauty and glory are virtually the same for Hopkins;

both are placed in nature and destined for return to God,

and it is the duty of humanity to achieve the latter. Boyle

treats of both as Shekinah, the overshadowing presence of

God that hovers over the ark of the covenant and over Mary

in St. Luke’s gospel.15 Among other places, Shekinah was in

the smoke from the censer of the high priest which hung over

the mercy seat in the temple in Jerusalem. In the Kabbala,

this Shekinah is associated with the revelatory and

redemptive descent of God into humanity as it is created.16

People who bear this Shekinah within them are called

“embers” in the Kaballah. Embers also serve as an important

image in the poetry of Hopkins.

7

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes

plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my

dear,

Fall, gall themselves, and gash

gold-vermillion.17

In discussing the experiential mysticism of St.

Ignatius, Karl Rahner18 finds a balance between the themes

of fuga saeculi and the cross, and a spirituality of joy in the

goodness of this world. This latter piety or spirituality is

based on the notion of finding God experientially in all

things; everything then becomes transparent in relation to

God, so that everything is found in God and God in

everything.19 Ignatian piety involves the sifting of

individual experience, a process in which God’s will is

sought in one’s particular situation. The piety of St.

Ignatius is not a formula applicable to all in the same way,

but is a spiritual discernment by which one finds one’s

particular calling in concrete circumstances.20 This

8

discernment or discovery of God’s will in concrete

particular cases makes pervasive use of divine consolation

as a spiritual compass. This God-given joy in the world is

also related to a certain holy indifference, or spiritual

liberty, as regards the particular circumstances in which

one is called to serve.

Fused with the Ignatian spirituality of glory and

sacrifice, which is converted into a poetic sensibility by

Hopkins, is the Franciscan21 spirituality of greeting the

image or vestige of God in all created things, the nearness

of God and the gentleness of God’s loving will. It is thus

that Hopkins resonates with the keen sense of the

individuality of the particular, as based in the Scotist

notion of haecceitas.22 This particularity of each creature in

each novel circumstance is appreciated in Scotus’ haecceitas

and in Ignatius’ discernment of spirits.

On the question of particularity, a Whiteheadian might

refer to The Aims of Education,23 where Whitehead writes of style

9

as the “fashioning of power, (and) the restraining of

power.” In Whitehead, style combines the aesthetic sense

with the foreseeing of ends to be attained. Style implies an

exquisite fit between means of expression and content

expressed. Style has to do with the appropriate use of

creative power, without waste, stinting, or trivial

application. In Whitehead, power is directed, restrained,

and shaped, as it is brought under the principle of

limitation by the process of concrescence. So, style is not

the power or energy itself, but the fashioning of power as

in concrescence. Style is nothing if not combined with self-

determination, giving to the individual its uniqueness in

function and production. Style would then involve discretion

and discernment in the Ignatian sense. Whitehead’s style has

to do with the internal structure and organization of a

thing, the particularity of a thing’s self-patterning, and

thus corresponds to Hopkins inscape or selving.

Inscape can thus be characterized as style, structure,

design, or pattern. Inscape as structure reveals instress as

10

the energy of the thing itself and as the energy of God in

the act of creating. The myriad forms of nature are unique,

both self-inscaped and individually inscaped by God. Each

thing, from the lowest piece of inanimate matter to the most

“highly pitched, selved and distinctive” thing in creation,

the human mind, has its own inscape, which gives it its own

self or identity.

When Hopkins speaks of a landscape, seascape, or even a

lovescape,24 he is speaking of the exterior or outer

manifestation of something, of which the interior,

organizing reality is the inscape. The outer scape shows

itself to the poet in such a way as to reveal the inscape

and the instress of what is beheld. Furthermore, this

manifestation stirs or excites the poet’s awareness of his

or her personal instress. In a moment of poetic insight,

this contemplation stirs the resonating awareness of several

attuned instances of instress into intense harmony, called

rhyme.

11

ii.

Instress as Creativity

Instress in Hopkins is the underlying energy that

organizes nature into pattern and unity. Instress also runs

through the human mind (which is part of nature), enabling

it to make sense of the world. It underlies all particular

inscapes of natural structures, just as the total life and

personality of the artist lies behind any particular work of

art he or she may produce. Ultimately, this being or

creative power must be a divine energy: “creation is not

altogether a separation, but that God remains in things by

his essence, presence, and power, as the inmost being of

things.”25 For Hopkins, instress is the creative energy and

activity of God within things.

By contemplation of simple objects – flowers, trees,

streams, and landscapes – Hopkins was at times raised to

ecstasy, because he realized that the hidden energy

(instress) molding things into shapes, colors, and patterns

(inscapes) was the very energy of God. This outward and

12

visible beauty was to him the reflection of the energy and

invisible beauty of God. So, in this sense all of nature was

sacramental to him – the visible sign of an invisible,

intelligent, and creative energy.

Instress is the undercurrent of creative energy that

supports and binds together the whole of the created world,

giving things shape and form, and giving joy and meaning to

the beholder. Instress comes closest of all of Hopkins terms

to an equation with Whitehead’s term creativity. Without this

current of instress which runs through the outside world and

through the perceiving mind, there would be no bridge

between the two, and the world would be unintelligible.

There would be no

bridge, no stem of stress

between us and things

to bear us out and

carry the mind over.26

13

Instress or creativity, the universal energy of

creation, aims at fierce intensity and idiosyncratic

haecceity. Inscape then refers to the patterns and

perspectives in nature, to the inner “law of shapes” and

designs in all things. Hopkins looks at a handful of

bluebells, a chestnut tree, a dead tree, a fine sunset, or

the breakers on the shore, and tries to find a unique

perspective which joins together all the elements of the

scene in the ecstasy of the moment. In each of these

experiences a great deal of detail is fused into a novel

blend of instantaneous enjoyment. In such an ecstasy the

inscape of the whole is perceived and the instress giving it

its inner energy it is appreciated.

All creatures have an inner and an outer aspect,

according to which they express themselves in order to

become themselves: “they necessarily express themselves in

order to attain their own nature.”27 There is an invisible

reality in things which manifests itself through a visible

outer reality. Walter Ong28 writes of Hopkins’ own personal

14

inscape. In Whitehead, the objective reality of an actual

occasion is preceded by phases of inner self-generation and

subjective satisfaction. For Whitehead, this inner aspect of

reality defeats the thesis of mechanism, and makes his a

philosophy of organism. The stages of concrescence,

especially the inner stages of process and satisfaction, as

described by Whitehead, correspond to the inscape of natural

realities in Hopkins.

Inscape, that is, free internal self-constitution, is

“the very soul of art,” according to Hopkins. Art is not the

reproduction of a surface reality. What matters is the

internal self-shaping of the work of art, not its

correspondence to anything outside itself. For Hopkins, the

work of art exercises its own inner, organic, even self-

generating reality. The sympathetic experience of this

process as it happens in the self-constituting work of art

is our knowledge of inscape. The work of art, the poem, is

both organic and symbolic, expressing itself in order to

become itself.

15

The appreciation of real particulars in nature, with

their inscapes and instresses, makes us and them glow with

intensity and the fire of ecstasy. Each poem is also a real

particular or consrescence, and has its own inscape that is

ready to communicate itself to the attentive listener.

Everything in the whole scale of creation strives, in its

own way, to realize what Duns Scotus called haecceitas – its

own self-crafted, God-created, and Christ-filled identity,

uniqueness, particularity, and selfhood. In doing this each

thing gives glory to God. Hopkins wrote of all things being

charged (in virtue of their instress) with love and with

God; “if we know how to touch them, they give off sparks and

take fire . . .”29

iii. Particulars and Plentitude

29 Hopkins, The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins,

ed. Christopher Devlin, S.J. (London: Oxford University

Press, 1959), 195.

16

Each thing in inanimate nature broadcasts its own inner

identity, but does not consciously give glory to God. It

needs to be completed by contemplation in human

consciousness. The human reality alone is conscious, has

freedom of choice, and can therefore choose to return glory

to God. We experience ourselves to be “more highly pitched,

selved and distinctive than anything in the world.”30

Each mortal thing does one thing

and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each

one dwells;

Selves – goes itself; myself it

speaks and spells,

Crying What I do is me: for that I came.31

31 Hopkins, “As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw

flame,” Prose and Poems, 51, and xxv. See also, Milward,

“Hopkins on Man and Being,” The Fine Delight, 130; “Above all,

the emphasis of Hopkins moves from the ‘thisness’ which is

in all things to the selfhood that is most marked in man.”

17

Selving in Hopkins is the key function of each being or

nature, thereby becoming complete, genuine, or authentic. To

a Whiteheadian, becoming something like a self would suggest

the transformative process whereby the God-given initial aim

becomes the subjective aim32 during concrescence. The

subjectivist principle provides that all entities whatsoever

are inchoately subjects.33 This means that, for the

Whiteheadian, as for Hopkins, all creatures, even inanimate

ones, are capable of at least primitive mental functions,

that is, selving.34

Kingfishers and dragonflies give glory to God, but

they are not aware of their function or contribution.

Embodied human consciousness perceives and enhances the

glory, and offers it back to God. The basis of this

incarnational reality is the cosmic Christ; that is, the

Body of Christ made manifest in and through the bodies of

those who do God’s will, who choose God’s glory. It is

important to Hopkins that this be the bodily reality of the

18

human Christ, and not simply the eternal Logos, the Holy

Spirit, or God functioning in any way lacking the full

humanity demanded by the mystery of the incarnation.

In the spirit of Duns Scotus, Hopkins shares the

empirical temper that is the mark of British thought and

sensibililty. In the thought of Scotus, the importance of

the bodily humanity of Christ, and its permanent

significance for our redemption, is based on the

significance of matter. Matter has an essence of its own,

independent of all form, according to Scotus. Matter is for

him a constituent of every created being, even the angels,

in whom spiritual matter is present. For Scotus, matter is

by itself a positive entity, not a pure potency, and can

exist even in a condition of formlessness. At its initial

creation, matter is proleptically charged with the reality

of the incarnation.

On the Scotist view, in creating primordial matter God

already had in view the divine incarnation of the eternal

19

Logos in Jesus Christ. The redemption of the world is thus a

secondary reason for the incarnation, and the incarnation

itself is the primary reason for creation. Boyle points out

that, for Hopkins, “God’s first intention and his first

1 Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins,

ed. W. H. Gardner (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), xx-xxii.

“As a name for that ‘individually distinctive form’ (made up

of various sense data) which constitutes the rich and

revealing oneness of the natural object, he coined the word

inscape: and for that energy of being by which all things are

upheld . . . he coined the term instress.” I will put the

technical or idiosyncratic terms of Hopkins in italics the

first time I use them and when referring to them as terms.

2 Peter Milward, S.J., “Hopkins on Man and Being,” The Fine

Delight, ed. Francis L. Fennell (Chicago, Loyola Press,

1989), 130; “For it is in his eyes the dappledness in form

that constitutes the uniqueness and originality of things in

nature, where no two objects are precisely alike.” See also,

Denis Donaghue, The Ordinary Universe (New York, Macmillan,

20

creative product is the humanity of Christ.”35 Everything

else was created in, through, and for the human Christ.

That is Christ playing at

me playing at

1968), 84-5, and Walter Ong, S.J., Hopkins, the Self, and God

(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 3.

3 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, ed. David Ray

Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: The Free Press,

1978), 18. “‘Actual entities’ – also termed ‘actual

occasions’ -- are the final real things of which the world

is made up.” Microscopic building blocks of the universe,

they perish as soon as they are realized, and so, in every

instant the world is made up of a novel set of occasions.

Nevertheless, complex patterns of inheritance provide for

endurance. See Process and Reality, 18-20; Sherburne, A Key to

Whitehead’s Process and Reality (Bloomington, IN: Indiana

University Press, 1966), 247. I will put the technical terms

of Whitehead in italics the first time I use them and when

referring to them as terms.

21

Christ, only that it is

no play but truth; That is

Christ being me and me

being Christ.36

If matter is a primordial and essential element in

God’s plan for Scotus, then there is something more required

to account for the unique individuality of every particular

4 Hopkins, Poems and Prose, 140; “. . . that selftaste which

nothing in the world can match. The universal cannot taste

this taste of self as I taste it.”

5 Milward, S.J., A Commentary on the Sonnets of G.M. Hopkins, 79;

Milward quotes Hopkins’ Journal thus: “I mean by it (sake)

the being a thing has outside itself . . . and also that

in the thing by virtue of which especially it has this being

abroad . . .” Hopkins also takes sake to mean “distinctive

quality in genius.”

6 Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and Prose, ed. W. H. Gardner

(New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 28-9. In his poem, “The

Lantern out of Doors,” Hopkins writes:

22

creature. For him, neither form nor matter can account for

the particularity of individual beings.37 Scotus supplied

this further element in his notion of haecceitas or thisness.

What finally makes a form real, as God creates a particular

thing, is not the form’s unity with matter, but a further

Christ minds: Christ’s interest, what to avow

or amend

There, eyes them, heart wants, care haunts,

foot follows kind.

Their ransom, their rescue, and first, fast,

last friend.

7 Phillip A. Ballinger, The Poem as Sacrament: The Theological

Aesthetic of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters Press,

2000), 144. For Hopkins, “. . . through the Incarnation

everything ‘rhymes in Christ’.”

8 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 251; “(Transmutation) arises by

reason of the analogies between the various members of the

prehended nexus (group of data), and eliminates their

differences. Apart from transmutation our feeble

intellectual operations would fail to penetrate into the

23

principle which completes the individual form and is

ultimately responsible for the actuality of each particular

being. It is this haecceity that Hopkins intends his inscape

to be. A Whiteheadian would think that the transformation of

the initial aim into the subjective aim is also at work

dominant characteristics of things.” In virtue of the

category of transmutation many data are felt as one in a

single prehension and are assigned a single subjective form.

9 Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1973), 52. According to the

principle of plentitude, “the universe is a plenum formarum

in which the range of conceivable diversity of kinds of

living things is exhaustively exemplified . . .” Applied

to Hopkins, the principle of plentitude means the profuse

variety of individuals and species, but not the necessary

and exhaustive appearance of all possible beings and kinds

of beings.

10 For Hopkins, the universe itself is a Christscape. The image

of the incarnate Christ is impressed upon the universe and

everything in it, indeed by every scene or scape perceived

24

here. It is God’s aim or intention for each thing or scene

in nature that it show itself forth in its own particular

beauty. It is the appreciation of this inscape and this

transformation of initial aim into subjective aim that gives

glory to God in poetry.

by the human eye.

11 Milward, S.J., “Hopkins on Man and Being,” “The Fine Delight,

141. “. . . . his (Hopkins’) readiness to ‘give beauty

back . . . to God’ as ‘beauty’s self and beauty’s giver’

brings him a renewal of hope and a reaffirmation of being.”

12 Hopkins, “The Principle or Foundation,” Poems and Prose,

143. “. . . we make it worth God’s while to have created

us. . . . This is a thing to live for.”

13 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 343-51.

14 Hopkins, “The Golden Echo,” Poems and Prose, 54. Or,

Hopkins, Selected Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press,

1998), 139.

15 Robert R. Boyle, Metaphor in Hopkins (Chapel Hill: The

University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 48. For the

connection between glory and Shekinah, see Walter J. Ong, S.

25

The importance of the knowledge of concrete singular

beings in Scotus anticipates the empirical interest in later

British philosophy. It also anticipates the celebration of

nature in all of its variety and particularity in Romantic

J., Hopkins, the Self, and God (Toronto: University of Toronto

Press, 1986), 78-81.

16 Leo Schaya, The Universal Meaning of the Kabbala (Baltimore:

Penguin Books, Inc., 1974), 154-6. The Shekinah is a term

used to mean the mystical body of Israel. It rests upon the

community in dispersion, and continues to radiate only in

weak reflections. Nevertheless, Kabbalists as “embers have

continued to flare up with an increased light, and,

sporadically, its (the Shekinah’s) true ‘grandeur’ has been

recaptured among the elect.”

17 Hopkins, “The Windhover,” Poems and Prose, 30.

18 Karl Rahner, “Theological Thinking and Religious

Experience,” Karl Rahner in Dialogue: Conversations and Interviews, 1965-

1982, ed. Paul Imhof and Hubert Biallowons (New York:

Crossroad, 1986), 328; “In my theology the givenness of a

26

poetry. Arthur O. Lovejoy38 finds in Romanticism an

inheritance of the Platonic principle of plentitude, “that

diversity itself is of the essence of excellence,” and “that

the best of all possible worlds is the most variegated.” In

this neo-Platonic perspective, the overflowing fecundity and

genuine, original experience of God and his spirit is of

fundamental importance. . . .”

19 Egan, Harvey, The Spiritual Exercises and The Ignatian Mystical Horizon

(St, Louis, MO: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1976), 98;

“. . . Ignatius’ phrase, ‘finding God in all things,’ must

often be understood christocentrically. . . . The phrase,

therefore, often means ‘finding Jesus Christ in all

things.’” See also, Walter J. Burghardt, Long Have I Loved You: A

Theologian Reflects on His Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books,

2002), 194; “Ignatius asks me to consider how God (i.e.,

Christ) works and labors for me in all creatures upon the

face of the earth . . .”

20 Rahner, The Dynamic Element in the Church, 115. “They (The Spiritual

Exercises of St. Ignatius) are rather an attempt, to provide

and give practice in a formal, systematical method of

27

generativity of the divine essence produces the myriad of

species and individuals in nature. The human imagination and

the human faculty for language and expression extend this

plentitude with creativity and generativity of their own.

discovering this individual will of God.”

21 Ballinger, The Poem as Sacrament, 100; “I claim Hopkins was

more ‘Franciscan’ than ‘Jesuit.’” What is more likely the

case is that Ignatius and Jesuit spirituality had inherited

some of its particularism from earlier Franciscan and

Scotist influences. Hopkins draws upon the richness of both

of these sources, as parts of a single continuous tradtion.

22 Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, trans. Hugh Bredin

(New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1986), 87. “Rather,

it (haecceitas) is a principle which completes a thing in its

concreteness: ‘the ultimate specific difference is simply to

be different from everything else’.” Thus Eco quotes Scotus.

23 Whitehead, The Aims of Education, 12; “It (style) is an

aesthetic sense, based on admiration for the direct

attainment of a foreseen end, simply and without waste.”

28

According to Lovejoy,39 Scotus accepted the divine

fecundity, the principle of plentitude, and the great chain

of being. Gardner says: “individual substances, according to

the metaphysical richness of their being, make up one vast

hierarchy (or chain) with God as their summit.”40 What

24 Hopkins pictures Christ dying on the cross as “Lovescape

crucified” in his poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” See

Milward, S.J. and Raymond Schoder, S.J., eds., Readings of the

Wreck: Essays in Commemoration of G.M. Hopkins’ “The Wreck of the

Deutschland” (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1976), 28. See

also, Todd Bender, “Scope, Scape, and Word Formation in the

Lexicon of Hopkins,” The Fine Delight, 122, and W. A. M. Peters,

S.J., Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Critical Essay towards the Understanding of

His Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 2.

25 Rahner, “Panentheism,” Theological Dictionary, trans. (New

York: Herder and Herder, 1965), 333-4. Panentheism “does not

simply identify the world with God in pantheistic fashion .

. . but sees the ‘All’ of the world ‘within’ God as an

interior modification and manifestation of God, although God

is not absorbed into the world.”

29

Hopkins did not accept was a necessitarian interpretation of

plentitude; God freely created all things out of an

overflowing abundance and personal love. It was freely given

love and not necessity that motivated the divine creative

will.

26 Ballinger, The Poem as Sacrament, 192; “The ‘stem of stress’

between human beings and nature is the word itself . . .”

Again, Ballinger quotes Hopkins thus: “. . . ‘stress’

means ‘the making a thing more, or making it markedly, what

it already is: it is the bringing out of its nature (83).’”

See also, Hopkins, “Parmenides,” The Journals and Papers of Gerard

Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphrey House and Graham Storey (London:

Oxford University Press, 1959), 127.

27 Rahner, “The Theology of Symbol,” Theological Investigations,

vol. IV, trans. Kevin Smith (Baltimore: Helicon Press,

1966), 224. Thus Hopkins’ idea of inscape has much in

common with Rahner’s theology of the symbol.

28 Walter J. Ong, S. J., Hopkins, the Self, and God (Toronto:

University of Toronto Press, 1986), 154-9. Ong describes

“Hopkins Own Inscape” as “his unique sensitivity to

30

Denis Donaghue41 agrees with the placement of Hopkins

within Romanticism in “constantly renewed delight in the

plentitude of the world.” Lovejoy adds to this idea the

dictum of William Blake as archromantic: “Exuberance is

differentiation or particularity in the external world . .

. and his equally exquisite sensitivity to the

differentiation or particularity that constitutes the

internal world (of the self).”

30 Hopkins, “Comments on the Spiritual Exercises of St.

Ignatius of Loyola,” Prose and Poems, 145-6. “Nothing else in

nature comes near this unspeakable stress of pitch,

distinctiveness, and selving, this self being of my own.”

32 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 25; “The ‘subjective aim,’

which controls the becoming of a subject, is that subject

feeling a proposition with the subject form of purpose to

realize it in that process of self-creation.”

33 Ibid, 166. “The Subjectivist principle is that the whole

universe consists of elements disclosed in the analysis of

subjects. Process is the becoming of experience.”

31

beauty.” Plentitude, diversity, and exuberance, and the

constant novel arising of these make up the Romantic

sensibility. These also constitute the dominant thematic and

tonality of Whitehead’s cosmology.

34 William A. M. Peters, S.J., Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Critical Essay

towards the Understanding of His Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1970), 7. “There is evidence in his writing that

Hopkins was acutely aware of the fact that, in spite of

profound generic and specific differences, man and beast and

inanimate nature were all alike ‘selves’,”

35 Boyle, Metaphor in Hopkins, 304. See also, Ballinger, The Poem

as Sacrament, 120; “. . . for Scotus, creation was

dependent on the decree of the Incarnation.”

36 Hopkins, The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins,

154.

37 Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy, vol. 2, part

I (New York: Doubleday Image Books, 1962), 236.

38 Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1973), 304.

32

For Whitehead, the essence of Romanticism lies in its

organic rather than mechanical way of modeling reality.42 It

lies in the intuition of the solidarity or interrelatedness

in nature. All things are internally related for Whitehead,

and each modicum of reality contains at its center something

like the sensitivity and subjectivity enjoyed by humans.

Hopkins meets and matches Whitehead’s reformed subjectivist

principle with his notion of selving, which applies to subhuman

species and inanimate entities as well. Selving adds

something to the idea of inscape, continuing the theme of

haecceity, by placing a seed of subjectivity within each and

every being.

39 Ibid, 81-85; “The other God (in Neoplatonism) was the

source and informing energy of that descending process by

which being flows through all the levels of possibility down

to the very lowest (83).”

40 Gardner, Gerard Manley Hopkins, vol. I, 27.

41 Dennis Donoghue, The Ordinary Universe, 84-5. “This (poetry)

was his (Hopkins’) way of certifying his imagination, giving

it a crucial part in the worship of God.”

33

Donoghue credits Hopkins for his intimacy of contact

with the world, seeking his knowledge of the world “by

attending to its fullness and individuality.”43 Hopkins

feels the organic bond between God, wider nature, and

humanity, and thinks at times “of the natural world as a

great body mediating between himself and God.”44 The

reticular or interwoven relationship between God, world, and

humanity tends at times to melt into near identity, as in

other Romantic poetry. Yet, Hopkins’ stronger devotion, like

Blake’s, is given at length to “minute particulars rather

than to general truths.”45

iv. Parmenides and Heraclitus

Milward finds in Hopkins’ ecstatic experiences of

inscape a kind of perceiving in which inscape holds many

parts together as one.46 To a Whiteheadian, this suggests

the confluence and locking together of data or prehensa in

the process stage of concrescence. Hopkins experienced being

34

ecstatically, intuiting being as vital force and creative

energy. As the instress behind all inscapes, being brings

everything together and is one with itself throughout. Being

is felt as having gathering power, and exercises an active

triumph over nonbeing. The “is” which gathers all things in

nature is the same “is” that instresses the poetic

consciousness. Language mediates this awareness: it “carries

the mind over into things and things over into the mind.”47

All language is expression of this ubiquitous being. There

is a stress of being in the mind that answers to the stress

of being in nature. Being within and being without are felt

together epistemologically as they arise from the same

source, being itself.

Being comes out of itself, comes to expression in and

as language. This is the basis in the universe for

incarnation, sacrament, and symbol. Here too is evidence for

plentitude. Being is one, but its expressions are lavishly,

almost inexhaustibly, multiple. Being overflows, almost

compulsively, but ultimately with the prodigal gratuity of

35

love. Nature is the garment, or rather, the prodigious

wardrobe of being. To the poet, being in language is an

experience of intimate self-possession, unique

particularity, and munificent exuberance.

Balancing the Parmenidean perception of being

everywhere in Hopkins, Milward discerns as well the

Heraclitean flux, the river of passing time, which swells

into the paradoxical images of both water and fire.

Comparing “The Wreck of the Deutschland” with “Heraclitean

Fire,” Milward finds images of time flowing away and the

world burning away.

Million-fueled,

nature’s bonfire burns on.48

The Whiteheadian is not without categories for

understanding the Hopkinsian extremes of both flux and

permanence. Hopkins’ poem on “Heraclitean Fire” could serve

as a hymn to proclaim Whitehead’s doctrine of perpetual

perishing. The perishing49 of actual occasions, especially

36

when these actual occasions are keenly felt as one’s own,

can also be felt with the subjective form of terror. One can

feel terribly isolated, abandoned and forlorn, as does

Hopkins in the terrible sonnets. Especially, the one-time

enraptured mystic can feel utterly separated from God, long

after one’s connection with God has become the supremely

important and defining value in the spiritual life.

David Daiches50 points to the financial meaning of the

word interests in The Lantern out of Doors. Christ is interested in us,

and he adds to the value of what we do. As redemption and

ransoming are financial terms, so is interest. Perhaps Hopkins

also intended the idea of inter (bury) to link with the word

mould in the following verse. We meet Christ in dying, and

he is between (in Latin: inter est) us and our reward. Christ

here is like Whitehead’s consequent nature of God,51

crediting us with an increase, while preserving our holdings

everlastingly.

37

v. Organicity and

Concrescence

Lovejoy52 begins his tracing of the path of the principle

of plentitude in Western thought with Plato’s theology.

Lovejoy sees two gods in Plato. As the Idea of the good, or

the form of the good, God for Plato was the apotheosis of

unity and the source of all other forms. The demiurge, by

contrast, an inferior deity or aspect of divinity, was the

part of the godhead that entrapped the forms or souls in

matter, thus initiating diversity, fecundity, and

particularity. Haecceity would have been, for Plato, due to

the unfortunate meddling of a lesser aspect of divinity. For

Hopkins, haecceity is the blessed acme of divine creativity.

Fecundity and particularity, for Hopkins, reveal the true

bounty and genius of the divine.

In Neo-platonism, the first God, like the God of later

Christian theology, was the goal of the ascent of souls as

they moved back to their true source. Accordingly, the

38

liberated soul turned from all finite and created things,

and ascended back to the immutable perfection in which it

then found rest and identity. The other or lesser god was

the source and energy of the descending process by which

being flows through all the levels of reality, ever more

diluted and derived, down to the very lowest. The first God

invited liberating flight from the many to the one, leading

to true delight. The second deity offered the false delight

of emanation into the many and away from the one.

This tension, or something related to it, shows up in

Whitehead, who also bases his theodicy in the Timaeus of

Plato. Whitehead produces in speculation a dipolar deity,

who has both a primordial nature53 and a consequent nature.

The primordial nature enjoys the classical attributes

associated with transcendence, while the consequent nature

absorbs back into itself the diversity of perfections

realized by the finite entities of the world. In Whitehead,

it is God, operating from the primordial nature, who

supplies in every instant a myriad of initial aims as seeds

39

initiating what God sees as the self-creation of all the

entities in the universe.

In Whitehead, each actual entity or actual occasion,

even the most trivial and inanimate, enjoys a modicum of

feeling and satisfaction. Just as God is dipolar,54 each

entity is dipolar,55 with mental as well as physical

aspects. Each entity constitutes itself in virtue of a

decision56 by which it brings itself to full determination.

This resonates perfectly with selving in Hopkins, and with

the haecceity of Scotus. Not only does each occasion have a

unique thisness, but the occasion itself is subjectively

responsible for achieving self-enactment. The supreme

achievement of the divine creativity is the evocation of

self-production on the part of creatures.

Whitehead’s creativity57 is a principle of novelty which is

realized only in the myriad actual occasions that constitute

the universe at any instant. In virtue of creativity,

constantly new entities are at once self-creating and then

40

perishing in the universe. For Whitehead, God, as the

principle of limitation, is the chief supplier of order or

discipline in the universe. For him, creativity is a

principle independent of God, with it own initiative,

energy, and ability to construct itself into

concrescences.58 A Christian philosopher with Whiteheadian

sympathies must critically recognize discrepancies between

the Whiteheadian cosmology and a Christian metaphysics in

which God is sole creator.

To the extent that God supplies the order or discipline

of the universe, creativity is that which is disciplined.

For Whitehead, God supplies discipline and direction in the

universe and functions as the principle of limitation.59 For

Whitehead, creativity is infinite fecundity, and is the

principle of plentitude. Fecundity is a synonym for

plentitude. Fecundity here may not be unlimited; it may be

simply lavish, generous, and profuse, and still be limited.

God, for Whitehead, is a creature and supreme instantiation

of this fecundity or creativity; whereas, for traditional

41

Christianity, God is the creator of creativity and director

of its proliferation. Whitehead eschews the term matter,

but, to the Christian, his creativity seems to function as a

material principle, not as pure potency or passive

receptivity, but as an active energy60 that follows the

discipline of concrescence in urging the relative self-

production of every new occasion. Whitehead’s creativity,

with the accommodations suggested here, closely approximates

Hopkins’ instress, as the active energy vitalizing the self-

particularizing of each created entity.

vi. Initial Aim, Selving, and Prehension

In Whitehead, every self-creating actual entity enjoys

at least a modicum of subjectivity. It also exercises

freedom or self-determination, and has a stage of decision

as part of its concrescence. God supplies to every actual

entity an initial aim61 or ideal aim, which constitutes a

package of ideal possibilities for its realization. The

ideal aim serves as a seed of origination for each novel

occasion. It instigates a purpose for the new entity, but in

42

appropriating this aim, the occasion transforms it. The

ideal aim is really only the beginning phase of the

subjective aim, which latter aim is an inner purpose

generated by the entity itself.

Hopkins’ selving is to be correlated with the process

by which the initial aim is transformed into the subjective

aim. Here the individual entity comes into possession of

itself, and shows God’s glory by achieving its own self-

enactment in determining its own purpose. God sets the range

of possibility for the entity, and the entity determines

itself within that range. On the human level, we can think

of this as a covenantal bargaining between obedience to

divine direction and authentic self-determination,

remembering that this bargaining is instigated and intended

by God as supplier of the ideal aims. It is God’s intention

that the entity freely self-enact, at times inspiring the

entity to give special attention to God as the source of its

ideal aim, and to discern God’s preference for it within the

range of its own freedom.

43

The process by which each new occasion of experience

arises in Whitehead is that of concrescence.62 Variously

described, concrescence has four phases: datum, process,

satisfaction, and decision63 (also called anticipation). In

the datum phase, all the occasions of the past flow in upon

a newly concrescing occasion to take their places in its

internal constitution. In the process phase, each of the

occasions included in the new occasion or entity are

assigned a place and a value. In the decision phase, the new

occasion, no longer new, becomes an object for inclusion in

successor occasions, anticipating the influence it will have

as an ingredient. In the satisfaction phase, the

satisfaction is identified with the completed actual entity,

and is superject,64 not subject. The actual entity as such

is the subject of its own immediacy;”65 this would include

and entail all four phases of concrescence Because

concrescence is the intimate inner self-structuring of the

actual occasion, it correlates with the term inscape in

Hopkins.

44

The final and public phase of concrescence, anticipation,

corresponds with Hopkins; sake, which is the outer

manifestation of the essential inscape. Sake is a seed of

hope and seed of shaping offered by a predecessor entity to

a successor entity. It is somewhat like the ideal aim that

is given to each actual occasion by God. It is a suggestion

regarding purpose.

No account of Whitehead’s philosophy of organism is

complete without the idea of prehension.66 A prehension is a

real, internal, and constitutive relationship between an

earlier actual occasion and a later actual occasion. By

prehension, the earlier occasion becomes immanent in and

part of the later occasion. The process by which a great

number of occasions become one in a single new occasion is

that of prehension. The dynamic by which each occasion is

included in the consequent nature of God is prehension.

45

A prehension is made up of an entity that is prehended

and the entity that is prehending that entity. Relating and

combining the two is a subjective form67 or affective mode,

which is the specific and individual way in which one

occasions prehends another. Subjective forms have to do with

moods and affections, such as love, fear, gratitude, joy,

terror. In “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” many extremes of

emotion are depicted. Many of the external circumstances are

prehended with terror, while in the midst of it all comes

Christ, who is prehended with joy. This poem embodies and

portrays a span of passing moments, from an acute awareness

of imminent perishing, to that of calming embrace in the

consequent nature of God.

Christ, in Hopkins’ “Wreck,” serves the function of

Whitehead’s consequent nature of God. Christ is there to

receive us. Christ is enduringly present in his physical,

material, bodily being to absorb and preserve us and the

beauty that we have achieved or added to nature. Redemption,

for Hopkins, is not mere absorption into God, “but union

46

with God that intensifies the uniqueness of each self.”

Christ confirms our selving, enhances it, and seals it into

everlastingness. Just as being, for Hopkins, is the origin,

fecundity, and source of unity, inclusion, and dispersion,

so Christ is the goal, collector, and finisher of reality,

achievement, and preservation. Whitehead refers to the

consequent nature as the Kingdom of God.68 In Hopkins,

Christ, as the perfect synthesis of all spirit and matter,

is cosmic in proportion, saving in efficacy, and all-

embracing in scope.

vii. The Windhover

Appreciated

“The Windhover”69 is a poem about consolation or

spiritual joy, and it is about a brief moment of unexpected

consolation in an otherwise arid time. The glory glimpsed

suggests perishing as well as exaltation, pouring out as

well as lifting up. This moment is like a sillion or row of

heaped up earth bordered by furrows, or the sighting of a

47

rare and reclusive bird of prey in a gray sky. In a time of

monotony or trouble, the promised meaning for enduring it

all unexpectedly reveals itself. With images of holy wimple,

folded wings, furrowed field – Hopkins records a corrugated

chiaroscuro of bittersweet transcendence, catching a glimpse

of the kestrel about to catch its prey, that is, catching

Christ.

The inscape of “The Windhover” coincides with the

actual occasion’s structure of concrescence. In this way,

“The Windhover” is taken here to typify all the poems of

Hopkins. The poem’s datum phase, or phase of converging and

merging data, is a phase of gathering in evidence, a phase

of receptiveness. Thus the dappled spots on the bird’s body

are gathered together, with all the other data they

represent, into the tense unity of the hovering kestrel. The

dappled sky is also gathered into this unity, and the

morning itself composes the place as it gathers all the

contributing elements for the dauphin or chevalier. All

elements flow together and lock suddenly into an instant of

48

gathered meaning from a welter of fortuitously confluent

prehensions.

There is a process or valuation phase, as all the

elements, with their myriads of distinct inscapes and

selves, settle into one common and novel inscape, with which

they are all now reconciled. All data, that is, prehensions

of actual entities, buckle together, and the novel set of

relations, the self-integrated composition of the novel

occasion of experience, is achieved. Here beauty is

manifested as a function of the relatedness of all

contributors. Furthermore, the subjective forms by which

each of the data are prehended are kindled at this point,

and they include affections of joy, ecstasy, rapture, or

consolation. In Hopkins’ poem, the impression of Christ,

latently present in each and every prehended datum, is now

manifested from within the concrescing modicum of novel

being. Christ is now the scape or inner constitution of the

emergent poem, and hovers intensely in the electrified air

49

as the value also distilled out of all the data and

prehensa.

In The Windhover, buckling most likely has to do with

the bird locking in upon its prey and immediately taking the

posture that begins its stoup. Here beauty is caught as a

glimpse of glinting sun against the bird and against the

background of a gray sky. In the same moment, Christ is

caught in a glimpse that suggests his redemptive descent to

catch souls in general, or to catch up the poet in ecstasy.

Christ is the one caught and the one who does the catching.

A Whiteheadian thinks of the buckling together of all the

data in the process phase of concrescence. The stoup or dive

of the falcon is the kinesis and kenosis that occurs as the

initial aim becomes the subjective aim in the heart of

concrescence.

The third phase is that of satisfaction. Here emerges

the poet’s heart in hiding. The poet’s joy is the satisfaction

recorded in the poem. Actually, a double satisfaction is

50

suggested here, as if the poet enjoys a self-feeling (. .

. my heart in hiding / Stirred for a bird . . .) in function of Christ’s

enjoyment, symbolized as the bird’s ecstasy. This suggests

two concrescences: one of the poet, and one of Christ. It

suggests as well a communion in which the poet prehends

Christ’s satisfaction or completed actual occasion with the

same sense of intimacy with which he enjoys his own actual

occasion. What is presented here are two satisfactions

being enjoyed simultaneously, the ecstasy of Christ and the

stirring heart of the poet, both recorded in the poem.

It is in the satisfaction phase that selving primarily

takes place. Here the initial aim, which is given to each

occasion in the universe by God as its instigation to become

and its package of possibilities for realization, is

appropriated and transformed by freedom into the subjective

aim, which is unique and freely developed by each occasion.

If satisfaction is selftaste, then the subjective aim makes

the occasion the chief participant in its own creation.

51

Furthermore, this reveals God’s will to have freedom as a

part of the self-enactment of every creature.

The fourth phase is the one in which gold-vermillion

flame bursts out of blue-bleak embers. The objectified

entity now reaches its final phase, satisfaction or

anticipation, in which it offers itself as a new datum for

inclusion into the composition of successor occasions. Here

it gives itself back with all that is has achieved to God

and to the universe. This is the phase of sacrifice in which

what is returned registers everlastingly in the consequent

nature of God. We remind ourselves of the Shekinah or divine

presence, and, the Kabbalistic doctrine, in which embers

signify the radiant divine presence that hides and abides

within the Temple. From the embers, the smoke of the

sacrificial incense joins the cloud of presence hovering

over the sanctuary.

The success of comparing Hopkins and Whitehead lies in

reaching greater insight into the cosmological vision and

52

horizon of both for having compared them one to the other.

Each poem of Hopkins is a confluence of many influences –

Parmenidean, Heraclitean, Platonic, neo-Platonic, Scotist,

Franciscan, and Ignatian. But, like the genius of the poet,

each individual poem transcends all of its influences,

orchestrates and directs them from within to achieve its own

eminent particularity, its own haecceity. It is the

expression and appreciation of particularity and plentitude,

and of all the complex multiplicity becoming one, that gives

glory to God. It is the celebration of being, with its

unifying inscape of Christ and its instress or creativity

that returns to God the reflection of grandeur.

53

42 Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: The Free

Press), 1969, 75-94. “The concrete enduring entities are

organisms, so that the plan of the whole influences the very

characters of the various subordinate organisms which enter

into it (79).”

43 Donoghue, The Ordinary Universe, 81.

44 Ibid, 83.

45 Ibid, 85. Donoghue notes an entry in Hopkins’ Journal:

“All the world is full of inscape and, and chance left free

to act falls into an order as well as purpose . . .”

46 Milward, S.J., “Hopkins on Man and Being,” The Fine Delight,

136. “Here Hopkins rather associates the thought of

Parmenides with the perception of instress in things, as it

were a perception of the divine energy at work in the

world.” And further on, “ “Here he seems to see the

54

“inscape” of a thing as that which holds its many parts

together as one, arisng as it were from the depths of its

inmost being or ‘instress’.”

47 Joseph Hillis Miller, “The Univocal Chiming,” Hopkins: A

Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (Englewood Cliffs,

NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1966), 109.

48 MIlward, “Hopkins on Man and Being,” The Fine Delight, 143.

See also Hopkins, “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of

the Comfort of the Resurrection,” Poems and Prose, 66.

49 Whitehead, Process and Reality, xiv; “. . . the creative

advance of the world is the becoming, the perishing, and the

objective immortalites of those things which jointly

constitute stubborn fact.”

50 David Daiches, “Since 1890,” The Norton Anthology of English

Literature, vol. II, ed. Meyer Abrams (New York: W.W. Norton &

55

Company, 1962), 1238-41. See also, Daiches, God and the Poets

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 105-7.

51 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 349; “The consequent nature of

God is the fulfillment of his experience by his reception of

the multiple freedom of actuality into the harmony of his

own actualization.” God absorbs into himself all the

perfection achieved by the world as it perishes away.

52 Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, 82-4. Lovejoy notes the

transformation of Platonism into romanticism: “Thus, at

last, the Platonistic scheme of the universe is turned

upside down. Not only had the originally complete and

immutable Chain of Being been converted into a Becoming . .

.(325-6).”

53 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 344; “The primordial nature of

God is the acquirement by creativity of a primordial

56

character.”

54 Ibid, 345. “Thus analogously to all actual entities, the

nature of God is dipolar. He has a primordial nature and a

consequent nature. The consequent nature of God is conscious

. . . The primordial nature is conceptual . . .”

55 Ibid, 348; “In each actuality (actual entity) there are

two concrescent poles of realization – ‘enjoyment’ and

‘appetition,’ that is, the ‘physical,’ and the conceptual.”

56 Ibid, 60; “This concrete finality of the individual

(actual entity) is nothing else than a decision referent

beyond itself.”

57 Ibid, 21; “’Creativity’ is the principle of novelty.” And

also, “Creativity achieves its supreme task of transforming

disjointed multiplicity, with its diversities in opposition,

into concrescent unity . . . (348).”

57

58 Ibid, 149. “The four stages constitutive of an actual

entity (concrescence) . . . can be named, datum, process,

satisfaction, (and) decision.”

59 Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, 333. Lovejoy points out that

Whitehead “gives the name of God, not to the Infinite

Fecundity of emanationism, but to the ‘principle of

limitation.’” Lovejoy quotes Whitehead: “God is the ultimate

limitation, and his existence is the ultimate

irrationality.” On this, see Whitehead, Science and the Modern

World, 178.

60 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 31; “. . . it (creativity)

is the pure notion conditioned by the objective immortality

of the actual world . . .”

61 Ibid, 108; “. . . pure mental originality (the initial

aim) works by the canalization of relevance arising from the

58

primordial nature of God.”

62 Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: The Free Press,

1967), 179. For Whitehead, creativity is a “factor of

activity,” indeed, the ultimate principle of activity and

activation. “The creativity is the actualization of

potentiality, and the process of actualization is an

occasion of experiencing (actual entity).”

63 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 149-50. For discussion of the

satisfaction stage as superject and not subject, and as

following, not preceding, the decision stage, see Process and

Reality, 84-5.

64 Ibid, 289; “An actual entity in reference to the publicity

(in distinction from the internal immediacy) of things is a

‘superject’ . . . it adds itself to the publicity which it

transmits.”

59

65 Ibid, 25. “An actual entity is called the ‘subject’ of its

own immediacy.”

66 Ibid, 19; “The analysis of an actual entity into

‘prehensions’ is that mode of analysis which exhibits the

most concrete elements in the nature of actual entities.”

And also, “The actuality (actual entity) is the totality of

prehensions with subjective unity in process of concrescence

into concrete unity (235).”

67 Ibid, 23. “That every prehension consists of three

factors: (a) the ‘subject’ which is prehending, namely, the

actual entity in which that prehension is a concrete

element; (b) the ‘datum’ which is prehended; (c) the

‘subjective form’ which is how that subject prehends that

datum.”

68 Ibid, 351.

60

69 Hopkins, Poems and Prose, 30. Or, Hopkins, The Poems of Gerard

Manley Hopkins, 69.

61