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Taking readers on an entertaining journey through economic history, from the stone-age to themodern economy, Beinhocker explores how "complexity economics" provides provocativeinsights on issues ranging from creating adaptive organizations, to the evolutionary workings ofstock markets, to new perspectives on government policies. A landmark book that shattersconventional economic theory, The Origin of Wealth will rewire our thinking about how we cameto be hereand where we are going.

ifford Lectures delivered at the University of Edinburgh during the session 1927-28.Corrected Edition edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne.

1.`Actual entity' is the central concept in Whitehead's system. This system is atomistic- i.e., likeDemocritus, Whitehead conceives of the world as composed of a vast number of microcosmicentities. But while Democritus is a materialist and views atoms as bits of stuff, Whiteheadpresents an organic philosophy- each of his atoms, termed actual entities' or actual occasions',is an organism that grows, matures and perishes. The whole of Process and Reality is concernedwith the characteristics of, and the inter-relationships between, actual entities- their being andbecoming. They are the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behindactual entities to find something more real. They differ among themselves - God is an actualentity, and so is the most trivial staff of existence ie far-off empty space. In the philosophy oforganism, as developed by Whitehead, God's existence is not generically different of other actualentities, except that he is primordial.'

2. Concrescence' is the name for the process in which the universe of many things acquires anindividual unity. An actual .occasion is nothing but the unity to be ascribed to a particularinstance of concrescence. This concrescence is thus nothing else than the real internalconstitution of the actual occasion in question'. The process itself is the constitution of the actualentity. This is a theory of monads; but it differs from Leibnitz's in that Whitehead's monads

change. In the organic theory they merely become. Each monadic creature is a mode of theprocess of feeling' the world, of housing the world in one unit of complex `feeling', in every waydeterminate. Such a unit is an actual occasion'; it is the ultimate creature derivative from thecreative process. Each actual entity is conceived as an act of experience arising out of data. Theobjectification of other actual occasions form the given data from which an actual occasionoriginates. Each actual entity is a throb of experience including the actual world within its scope.It is a process of feeling' the many data, so as to absorb them into the unity of one individualsatisfaction.

3. Feeling' is a mere technical term, but it has been chosen to suggest that functioning throughwhich concrescent actuality appropriates the datum as to make it its own. A feeling appropriates

elements of the universe, which in themselves are other than the subject, and absorbs theseelements into the real internal constitution of its subject by synthesising them in the unity of anemotional pattern expressive of its own subjectivity. Feelings are vectors', for they feel what isthere and transform it into what is here. We could say that an actual occasion is a concrescenceeffected by a process of feeling.

4.'Prehension' The philosophy of organism is a cell- theory of actuality. The cell is exhibited asappropriating, for the foundation of its own existence, the various elements of the universe out ofwhich it arises. Each process of appropriation of a particular element is termed a prehension'.Whitehead adopted the term prehension to express the activity whereby an actual entity effectsits own concretion of other things. There are two species of prehensions, the positive species

and the negative species. A `feeling' belongs to the positive species of prehensions A negativeprehension is the definite exclusion of an item from positive contribution to the subjects internalconstitution. A positive prehension is the definite inclusion of an item into positive contribution tothe subject's own real internal constitution. This positive inclusion is called its feeling' of thatitem. All actual entities in the actual world relative to a given actual entity as `subject' are

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necessarily felt' by that subject. A feeling' cannot be abstracted from the actual entityentertaining it. This actual entity is termed the subject' of the feeling.

5. `The Ontological Principle' The importance of the concept of an actual entity is emphasised bywhat Whitehead terms the ontological principal. Every condition to which the process ofbecoming conforms in any particular instance, has its reason either in the character of someactual entity in the actual world of that concrescence, or in the character of the subject which is inthe process of

concrescence. This is the ontological principle. This ontological principle means that actualentities are the only reasons; so that the search for a reason is to search for one or more actualentities.

6. The Fallacy of Mis-placed Concreteness. It is possible to see two sides throughout allWhitehead's work: an interest in formal schemes of logical relations, built on the scheme ofmathematical postulates, and an interest in the concrete many sidedness of experience. Thesecond, made him a critic of the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness', of the tendency to reify anyscheme of abstract relations as it could replace the richness and variety of the concrete flow ofexperience. But what is the place of the formal scheme?

Formal schemes. If Whitehead's interest into the many sidedness of experience of actualexperience- what he calls its unfathomable complexity- made him attack The Fallacy of Mis-placed Concreteness', his interest in the formal schemes made him hold to the belief that suchschemes had more than a pragmatic significance (i.e. that they organise data), and that in theend it should be possible to show not only that certain types of event can be related under certaintypes of abstraction, but also that there can be a general scheme of formal relationships definingthe logical structure of all that exists. In other words, that there should be not only formal patternsrelevant to particular types of experience, but that there should be a general formal pattern,defining the logical structure of all possible experience and all possible worlds. This is one sideof his view of `uniform relatedness', which is part of his `justification of induction' and it is linkedwith what he holds to be a persistent religious intuition of `permanence amid change.'

Primordial Entity. The general scheme describes the logic of a primordial entity- God- whichunites it with an aim towards the intensification of experience in the general conditions which thelogical framework allows. The process of the world is then described as the supplying ofempirical values to the general scheme. In Process and Reality, God makes the realm ofpossibil ity coherent with that of actuality, and therefore is the reason as to why certain things existrather than others. Whitehead endeavours to assimilate the formal characterisation of God withevery other actual entity and calls God non-temporal' in contrast to the temporal world.

Values are then empirically discoverable fillings supplied to the variables of the scheme in the

actual process of events (on analogy with the supplying of values to a propositional function).Value, according to Whitehead, is the word I use for the intrinsic reality of an event. On the otherhand, there is ambiguity here, since there is the suggestion that the process itself should aim at`Value', in the senseof working toward some intensification of the importance of experience'. Perhaps the latter isValue with capital V..

Objective immortality. Whitehead says that he's got the notion of objective immortality' from thephysical notions of the transference of energy with its vector property. The quantum of energy istransferred from one process to another. Then, since he holds that energy is the name for thephysical manifestation, of what known from the inside- in organic life - as emotional intensity, he

is able to say that what is transferred from one actuality to another is a `throb of emotion' -with acertain qualitative tone. This means that energy to Whitehead is a real constituent of nature,rather then a term meaning work done. It is dependent of his attempt to bring man, life and nature,by making psycho-physiological concepts universal. But, however much he is telling us not toread `consciousness' into such `feelings', is it possible to think of sentient experience purely

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divorced from consciousness? In other words, does the arising of sentient experience in naturemake more of a break- a bifurcation- then Whitehead allows? Whitehead was led to his view ofobjective immortality by three genuine considerations: First, the denial of simple location'- theview that nature is made up of entities each of which has the whole of nature as its field. He isthen interested in the structures formed by the overlapping of these fields. Whitehead is trying toexpress a view of nature in which we are all ubiquitous, and all on top of each other, but wecreate focal regions of disturbance which where generally speaking we are held to be. But theboundaries of these regions are never fixed. He then goes to describe the superposition of these

fields in terms of his theory of prehensions- the patterning of one thing in others. Owing to theway he tries to find unifying experiences by using terms from physiology and from psychologicalexperience, this supperposition of fields becomes the mutual immanence' whereby the feelingsof one thing are re-enacted in others. Second, his interest in history, and the way in which thepast is said to be inherited in the present. In this he holds a similar view with Croce: "all history iscontemporary history". Third, the desire to find some basis for a theory of laws of nature and forinductive inquiry. He describes the laws of nature as statistical generalisations from dominantlarge scale characteristic of events in a wide enough epoch or region. The characteristics whichdescribe laws of nature are then relatively dominant and permanent ones for that epoch. There ishere, the suggestion of the rise of different cosmic epochs, described in terms of differentdominant characteristics, and so of different laws of nature. According to Whitehead "A system of

`laws' determining reproduction in some portion of the universe gradually rises to dominance, ithas its stageof endurance, and passes out of existence with the decay of the society from which it emanates.Maxwell's equations of the electro-magnetic field hold sway by reason of throngs of electrons andprotons. Also each electron is a society of electronic occasions, and each proton is a society ofprotonic occasions. These occasions are the reasons for the electromagnetic laws, but theircapacity for reproduction, whereby each electron and each proton has a long life, and therebynew electrons and new protons come into being, is itself due to the same laws. But there isdisorder in the sense that the laws are not perfectly obeyed, and that the reproduction is mingledwith instances of failure. There is accordingly a transition to new types of order." From thispassage one sees that Whitehead regards the fundamental laws of physics as a product ofevolution, but it is an evolution that takes place in an infinitely vast theatre of potentiality, atheatre governed by general principles which are applicable without exception. The proto-mentality of all actual entities, their prehension of predecessors, their innovations, the integrationof innumerable ingredients of their experience, their objective immortality' as ingredients in theexperience of subsequent entities- such principles are general but are not the results ofevolution. The suggestion of the possibility of evolution of cosmological systems and theevolution of the laws of nature, which was not in the mainstream at the time, held more promisethan the quest for a uniform logical framework. The concept of evolution of natural laws, andtherefore the concept of an arena where this evolution could take place is being taken on boardby some cosmologists today.

Aesthetics. One important consideration in Process and Reality is Whitehead's view of aestheticexperience according to which appreciation of formal pattern can be a vehicle of emotion.