What follows is an excerpt from H F Hallett. In this segment he is examining what precisely Whitehead meant by 'passage' in its respect to and alignment in 'time'. Is passage a part of space/time, of duration, of sempiternity, or of eternity, and in what way does it 'interact' with nature to produce, 'events'?. That is just offered as context. The answer to the OP's question, at least according to professor Hallett looks like this;
"Now, as I have said, Mr. Whitehead distinguishes, in the Real,
between the actual and the possible, the actual being the result of
the ‘ingression’ of the possible into actual occasions or events; thus
there are two main questions demanding clarification: (i)- granted
that the distinction of the possible and the actual is in itself valid
in general, to what extent is it possible for them to be separated
from each other in the Real and its various diversifications?
(ii)- what are the relations of the objects of various kinds to the
actual occasions or events in which they are ‘situated’ ?
The two questions are, of course, fundamentally related to each
other, though the first is metaphysical and the second phenomenological. I deal with the phenomenological question first.
A great part of Mr. Whitehead’s philosophy is occupied with the
question of the relations of objects and events. With the very
precise details I have no immediate concern, but in the general
principles I am vitally interested. For Mr. Whitehead, an object
is not a complex of events or a complex event simpliciter: it is
situated in and pertains to its actual complex event. Thus events,
for example, are divisible, while objects are essentially organic and
thus cannot be divided: not spatially, for they function as unities;
not temporally, for they require their ‘whole period in which to
manifest [themselves]’. The object is thus not a mere conventional fiction which, for some extrinsic purpose, we substitute
for the events on which it is patterned. Rather, as it seems to
me, if we can distinguish them from the objects, it is the events
that are the fiction; for the picture of nature as an event/framework, even when it is elevated above mere non-being by a
formal decking of sense-contents, is less adequate than that of a
world of objects characterized by unity and permanence rather than
by diversity and passage, and therefore not in themselves events,
but containing spatio-temporal relations, and bearing such relations
to each other; and this again is less adequate than that of a world
of nature as a total object, not itself in, but containing space-time.
For at each stage in the progressive synthesis the diversity gives
place to unity; the reputed organic character of events belongs to
the objects situated in them, or capable of being so situated, rather
than to the pure events. The fact is that the continuum of mere
events, or even space-time, is too flimsy to serve the purpose to
which phenomenologists are wont to put it.1 The merest object
already distorts it by substituting unity and permanence for
multiplicity and ‘passage’. Only so are objects constituted: their
creation or ‘ingression’ is founded upon the distortion or even
destruction of space-time or passage. At each stage in the ‘ingression’ of objects, the continuum of passage becomes more
distorted and contracted, until in the limit when totality is reached
it must disappear. It is, in fact, only the empty form of occurrence
without content, and therefore nothing real; it is a mere fictitious
lower limit of abstraction. Actual space-time is essentially occupied,
and thus more concretely called ‘enduring thing’ ; while real spacetime, carrying this correction to an ideal limit, is the eternal
Extension of Spinoza in which passage is wholly transformed into
quality."
from "Aeternitas", pp 244-245
