The second stage in the process of feeling is the supplemental stage. In this stage, “the many feelings, derivatively felt as alien, are transformed into a unity of aesthetic appreciation immediately felt as private.” [323] This transformation is the unification of the multiplicity of objective data into a unity of subjective experience. Here there is an influx of conceptual feelings; as a result of this influx, what were formerly purely receptive feelings take on an emotional character. The feelings of this stage no longer have the vector character “from outside, to inside” but receive a scalar quality which has the sense of “immediately felt as inside.”
The second stage of the process of feeling itself divides into two phases. According to Whitehead, both sub-phases may be trivial, in which case “the process passes passively to its satisfaction” [325] and “the actual entity is then the mere vehicle for the transference of inherited constitutions of feelings.” [325] If both phases of this segment of the formal constitution of an occasion have no relevance, the occasion is a mere vehicle (shell) for the future’s inheritance of the objective datum of the past, deficient of both aesthetic appreciation and “intellectuality.”
An example of an occasion in which both sub-phases of the supplemental stage in the process of feeling are trivial, is a rock which is sitting in one place. The rock does not have any aesthetic appreciation for its surrounding world, nor does it posses any conscious activity. It is a mere vehicle for the passage of time, its only novel introduction to the world is the reenaction of itself in the past, being what it was, where it was. Nevertheless, as some complex organisms do exhibit both aesthetic appreciation and conscious “intellectuality,” one or both sub-phases may have significant relevance to the formal constitution of a given particular actual occasion.
The first of these sub-phases is that of aesthetic supplement. This is the phase in which an occasion gains intensified prehension of the being of another occasion through “an emotional appreciation of the contrasts and rhythms inherent in the unification of the objective content in the concrescence of one actual occasion.” [325] During the process of aesthetic supplementation, the influx of conceptual feelings such as pain and pleasure, beauty and distaste heightens the intensity of the prehension of particular occasions. The conceptual feelings introduced in this phase become involved in operations which result in the inhibition and intensification of various qualities of other particular occasions, making them more or less relevant to the self-formation of the occasion in question. This is the phase in which “blue becomes more intense by reason of its contrasts, and shape acquires dominance by reason of its loveliness.” [325]
“If [however] some eternal objects in their abstract capacity are relevant to actual fact, there is an actual occasion with intellectual operations.” [326] In instances where these intellectual operations are present, it is possible for the second sub-phase, that of intellectual supplementation, to occur. This phase is “the eliciting, into feeling, [of] the full contrast between mere propositional potentiality and realized fact.” [326] In intellectual supplementation an actual occasion comes to feel, more intensely, the existence of another occasion as the occasion that it is, in the condition that it is in, by way of a conscious intellectual activity, the comparison of “propositional potentiality” with realized fact.
Realized fact is what is given. It is what is received by an actual occasion in the first, purely receptive stage of its formal development. Propositional potentiality, on the other hand, is not at all given but is novel content, constructed by the consciousness of the actual occasion.
Take, for example, a pen in a room. The pen and its location in the room are realized fact; they are given by mere receptivity. However, if a consciousness should conceive the same pen sitting in another room or in another location which it is not actually in, it will have constructed, from itself, an unreal proposition regarding the pen. Intellectual supplementation is the enhanced awareness of the being of the pen through a feeling of the contrast between the actuality of the pen sitting where it is and the lack of actuality of the propositional potentiality of the pen to be in another location.
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