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God's mental pole is that by which he exerts a supreme influence upon all "actual entities," setting the limits of their creativity and their "subjective aims" with which each is supplied at its moment of creation. God's "mental pole" is also that in which he envisions all "eternal objects" and their values as they relate to the world. God's mental pole belongs with his transcendental "primordial nature."
"Eternal objects" are the abstract possibilities of the universe. "Actual entities" utilize the available abstract possibilities to become "real" during their moment of being. In that moment, they feel or "prehend" the reality of other "actual entities" and, in so doing, become internally related to them. "Prehension" or "feeling" is associated with the "physical pole." It is not a conscious or intelligent act except with the higher forms of life.
The "mental pole" of an actual entity is that by which it senses the "subjective aim" given it by God at its moment of creation.
All things can be explained as processes of "actual occasions," interrelated and varying in degree of complexity, with each occasion being partially self-created and partially influenced by other actual occasions.
For Whitehead, God is the supreme, single, eternal actual entity who perfectly exhibits all the functions of all actual entities. By prehending and being prehended, God interacts with every being in the world during all those momentary events, the succession of occasions that constitute the "life" of any particular being.
God is never coercive, always leading through sympathetic persuasion. In this way, God is radically immanent in the world, leading it on toward greater value and aesthetic intensity.
In his primordial nature, God transcends the world. But as primary actual entity, the source and creator of all things, God includes the world within himself, experiencing with it, suffering with it, and growing with it through the creativity that he and the world possess.
Hartshorne and Whitehead
From the times of the Greeks until half way through the twentieth century, the notion persisted that if only man could hone the tools of logic sufficiently sharply then, through rational thought alone, all problems could be solved and man could know all things.
From 1929 onwards, the work of mathematicians and logicians such as Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church, Paul Cohen and men like them has since shown us that about the only thing we can know with absolute certainty is that there is nothing we can know with absolute certainty.
At least some of Hartshorne's deviations from Whitehead appear to have come about because of his desire to avoid or solve mistakes or difficulties generated in classical theism that may never have come about if mankind had meekly accepted that there are things that are simply unknowable or unprovable.
For example, is it not extraordinary that the creature should presume to define what its creator can be, know, or do?
There are things we can know only through revelation, but even then we have the impossibility of maintaining revelation free from the polluting clasp of men.
However, relative to views on deity expressed in the Urantia Papers, particularly the role of the Supreme Being, Hartshorne has come much closer than did Whitehead to separating the transcendent God of infinity and eternity from a God who is fully operative in the finite world.
For Hartshorne's God we have a new term, "panentheism" which means "all-in-God-ism." Hartshorne's God is more than the world in its totality, having his own transcendent self-identity, yet is a God who includes the world within himself by his knowledge and his love.
Along with his "panentheistic" view of God, Hartshorne also became one of the chief protagonists in a twentieth century reassertion of the ontological argument in which, according to Hartshorne, Anselm really discovered something which was fundamental to the theistic "proofs." Unfortunately, it appears Hartshorne had not caught up with Gödel and the newer notions of what constitutes rigorous proof.
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