‘CATEGOREAL’ SCHEME
Whitehead believes that philosophy serves to explain the abstractions that we develop from our interaction with the concrete world. These abstractions originate from a framework of “generic notions inevitably presupposed in our reflective experience,”5 specifically actual entities, prehensions (cogitation or ideas), ‘nexūs’ (plural of nexus – involvement of actual entities with each other through prehension), and ontological principles.6 This intuitive base leads to his second major philosophical principle: we bring the abstract and the concrete together using a ‘categoreal’ scheme comprised of four categories: (1) Categories of the Ultimate (creativity), (2) Categories of Existence (eight items), (3) Categorical Explanations (twenty-seven items), and (4) Categorical Obligations (nine items).7
The foundations of reality are the categories of existence: (1) actual entities (particular substances), (2) prehensions, (3) nexūs, (4) subjective forms, (5) external objects, (6) propositions, (7) multiplicities, and (8) contrasts (opposites). Of these, most important are actual entities which include living and nonliving things, humans and God. 
Actual entities, also termed ‘actual occasions’ (exclusive of God – more on this to follow), are the building blocks of the organic universe making them the ultimate facts. They are in a continuous process of becoming and perishing, but taken up in the creative advance. Because actual entities also pass into other actual entities through prehension, a kind of immortality is realized by all actual entities.8
A set of actual occasions in a unity of relatedness constituted by reciprocal prehensions leads to a nexus. Nexūs are thus societies of actual occasions that grow together through a process of integration of prehensions or feelings to a final phase he calls “satisfaction” or “concrescence.” Throughout this process is reflected two key doctrines: (1) the doctrine of self-constituting identity wherein each actual entity identifies itself as an individual constituent, and (2) the doctrine of cosmic order wherein all prehensions contribute to a pre-established universal harmony.9
GOD
There is one exceptional actual entity, God, which (who?) alone is not occasioned by something else – i.e. God is an actual entity but not an actual occasion, but a (the) primordial fact lacking temporality. However, God has two natures, first as the primordial entity, the actual entity which envisages all eternal objects and the appertition for their actualization.10 Eternal objects are pure potentials and neutral within the temporal order. They are permanent, immutable, principles of determination fixed in the primordial vision of God. They are the structure of the organismic process in which process and structure are interdependent.
God’s second nature, consequent nature, wherein is God transmutes eternal potentials into each and every concrete actual entity or occasion through divine wisdom. God shares in the fullness of the physical feelings of the world as a conscious entity and God’s relation to the world, according to Whitehead, is one of love and care tending to the preservation of all. In part then God is “the great companion, the fellow sufferer who understands.” Nonetheless, Whitehead is clear, God is a part of the system and thus subordinate to the category of the ultimate.11
(further continued next post)
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5Alfred North Whitehead in Process and Reality. The Free Press, New York, 1978. ISBN 0-02-934570-7, page 18.
6Ibid.
7 Magill, Frank N. and McGreal, Ian P. (editors), Masterpieces of World Philosophy in Summary Form. Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, 1961. Page 923.
8Ibid., pages 923-924.
9Ibid., page 924.
10Ibid.
11Ibid.
