 Hegel assumed that the process of reality follows certain principles that can be fathomed by philosophical inquiry. This thesis is the hallmark of speculative process metaphysics, which has a number of adherents also among later process philosophers but has been championed most explicitly by Alfred N.  Whitehead  in his “philosophy of organism,” worked out during the early decades of the 20th century. The basic unit of reality in Whitehead’s system is an event-like entity called “actual occasion,” which is the procedural integration or “concrescence” of processes of data transfer (“prehensions”) into unities that become new data. Each actual occasion is the growing together of the total available information of the universe at that time, according to certain principles, repeating and reinforcing certain patterns (“eternal objects”) and thereby creating new ones. Whitehead’s process metaphysics is arguably the most comprehensive descriptive metaphysical framework we have to date—as Whitehead’s followers, past and present, have shown, not only can it be used for the interpretation of familiar domains of philosophical concern, but it can also provide illuminating descriptions for scientific domains where other metaphysical theories have little to offer, such as discourse pragmatics in linguistic typology, the neuro-psychological foundations of value judgments, quantum physics, or measurements in  astrophysics.[2]  By refurbishing Plotinus’s idea of divinity coming about in the world’s becoming, Whitehead’s philosophy also provided a new impetus to the philosophy of religion.  Charles Hartshorne,  perhaps the most eminent American philosopher of religion of the Twentieth century, adopted and expanded Whitehead’s ideas for a process view of God and developed the position of  process theism  in the style of rational speculative process thought. It is important to note, however, that while the early followers of Whitehead such as Hartshorne and Paul Weiss embraced the speculative principles of his philosophy, many present-day Whiteheadians are content to put the system’s ontological concepts to descriptive use.