What is an Ultimate Principle?

Whitehead writes that ‘[i]n all philosophic theory there is an ultimate’ (PR, 4). It would be difficult to find a case study in Process and Reality, a description of the functioning of a philosophy's ultimate principle. The only example that can be found is a succession of terms: ‘In monistic philosophies, Spinoza's or absolute idealism, this ultimate is God, who is also equivalently termed “The Absolute”’ (PR, 7). Whitehead says no more of it. But how does this ultimate work? Why has he been able to identify it with the ‘absolute’ or with ‘God’? These questions remain unanswered. It is possible, however, to reconstruct a discourse of the absolute by taking a detour to connect a few separate elements.

Bergson poses a similar question in The Creative Mind. Departing from Berkeley's proposition ‘esse est percipi’, he attempts to identify the function and highly distinct status that it occupies in A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. It is possible, according to Bergson, to connect the four principles of Berkeley's system to pre-existing propositions by retracing his heritage across the history of philosophy. There would be, then, an idealist thesis defined by the proposition that ‘matter is a cluster of ideas’, a nominalist thesis according to which abstract ideas are reduced to words, a ‘spiritualist’ or ‘voluntarist’ thesis characterised by the will and that affirms the ‘reality of minds’, and finally a ‘theist’ thesis. Bergson writes: ‘[n]ow, nothing would be easier than to find these four theses, formulated in practically the same terms, among the contemporaries or predecessors of Berkeley’. The first is close to Malebranche's occasionalism, the second to Hobbes and Ockham, the third to Duns Scotus and, on certain points, to Descartes, and the last to certain theologians.