Alexander's Nisus

Alexander generally treats the relation between an Emergent and its underlying constellation of processes as fortuitous inter-level compresence. However, occasionally, primarily in the context of his discussion of Deity, he cites a 'nisus' as the motivation of a rise of a higher level quality from a lower. Now, if, as he implies, the entire extant universe is striving towards Deity, then the latter is the ultimate telos of all motion in that universe, including that of human activity. However, his elaborate analysis of the Mind-Object relation only very briefly acknowledges that cognition is a special case of practical conation. In other words, conspicuously lacking in his system is any detailed consideration of how human interaction with the world is implicated in the general nisus towards Deity. So, it is perhaps Alexander's relative neglect of Psychology that has, despite its innovations and ambitions, diminished, in comparison with its rivals from Spinoza and Whitehead, the influence of his system.