Eternal Objects

Eternal objects are Whitehead's modernization of Platonic forms, stripped of their transcendent mystique and reintegrated into a processual metaphysics. They are not things that exist on their own; they are pure potentials — forms that can be realized in actual occasions but have no being apart from such realization or from the divine mind that holds them as possibilities. A shade of blue, a musical interval, a logical relation, a geometrical pattern: each is an eternal object. When an occasion realizes it — when the color ingresses into a particular painting, the interval into a particular chord — the eternal object contributes to the occasion's determinate character.