PART IITHE DATA OF SCIENCECHAPTER VTHE NATURAL ELEMENTS13. The Diversification of Nature.13.1Our perceptual knowledge of nature consists in the breaking up of a whole which is the subject matter of perceptual experience, or is the given presentation which is experience—or however else we prefer to describe the ultimate experienced fact. This whole is discriminated as being a complex of related entities, each entity having determinate qualities and relations and being a subject concerning which our perceptions, either directly of indirectly, afford definite information. This process of breaking up the subject matter of experience into a complex of entities will be called the 'diversification of nature.'13.2This diversification of nature is performed in different ways, according to different procedures which yield different analyses of nature into component entities. It is not merely that one mode of diversification of nature is incomplete and leaves out some entities which another mode supplies. The entities which are yielded by different modes of diversification are radically different; and it is the neglect of this distinction between the entities of complexes produced by different modes of diversification which has produced so much confusion in the principles of natural knowledge.There are an indefinite number of types of entity disclosed in this diversification. An attempt in this enquiry to trace the subtlety of nature would only blur the main argument. Accordingly we confine attention to five modes of diversification which are chiefly important in scientific theory. These types of entities are: (i) events, (ii) percipient objects, (iii) sense-objects, (iv) perceptual objects, (v) scientific objects. These are five radically distinct types of entities yielded by five distinct procedures; and their only common quality as entities is that they are all alike subjects yielded for our knowledge by our perceptions of nature.13.3The entities which are the product of any one mode of diversification of nature will be called elements, or aspects, of nature; each such entity is one natural element. Thus each mode of diversification produces natural elements of a type peculiar to itself.One mode of diversification is not necessarily more abstract than another. Objects can be looked on as qualities of events, and events as relations between objects, or—more usefully—we can drop the metaphysical and difficult notion of inherent qualities and consider the elements of different types as bearing to each other relations.There are accordingly two main genera of relations to be distinguished, namely 'homogeneous' relations which relate among themselves natural elements of the same type, and 'heterogeneous' relations which relate natural elements of different types.13.4Another way of considering the diversification of nature is to emphasise primarily the relations between natural elements. Thus those elements are what is perceived in nature as thus related. In other words the relations are treated as fundamental and the natural elements are introduced as in their capacity of relata. But of course this is merely another mode of expression, since relations and relata imply each other.14. Events.14.1Events are the relata of the fundamental homogeneous relation of 'extension.' Every event extends over other events which are parts of itself, and every event is extended over by other events of which it is part. The externality of nature is the outcome of this relation of extension. Two events are mutually external, or are 'separate,' if there is no event which is part of both. Time and space both spring from the relation of extension. Their derivation will be considered in detail in subsequent parts of this enquiry. It follows that time and space express relations between events. Other natural elements which are not events are only in time and space derivatively, namely, by reason of their relations to events. Great confusion has been caused to the philosophy of science by this neglect of the derivative nature of the spatial and temporal relations of objects of various types.14.2The relation of extension exhibits events as actual—as matters of fact—by means of its properties which issue in spatial relations; and it exhibits events as involving the becomingness of nature—its passage or creative advance—by means of its properties which issue in temporal relations. Thus events are essentially elements of actuality and elements of becomingness. An actual event is thus divested of all possibility. It is what does become in nature. It can never happen again; for essentially it is just itself, there and then. An event is just what it is, and is just how it is related and it is nothing else. Any event, however similar, with different relations is another event. There is no element of hypothesis in any actual event. There are imaginary events—or, rather, imaginations of events—but there is nothing actual about such events, except so far as imagination is actual. Time and space, which are entirely actual and devoid of any tincture of possibility, are to be sought for among the relations of events.14.3Events never change. Nature develops, in the sense that an eventbecomes part of an event′ which includes (i.e. extends over)and also extends into the futurity beyond. Thus in a sense the eventdoes change, namely, in its relations to the events which were not and which become actual in the creative advance of nature. The change of an event, in this meaning of the term 'change,' will be called the 'passage' of; and the word 'change' will not be used in this sense. Thus we say that events pass but do not change. The passage of an event is its passing into some other event which is not it.An event in passing becomes part of larger events; and thus the passage of events is extension in the making. The terms 'the past,' 'the present,' and 'the future' refer to events. The irrevocableness of the past is the unchangeability of events. An event is what it is, when it is, and where it is. Externality and extension are the marks of events; an event is there and not here [or, here and not there], it is then and not now [or, now and not then], it is part of certain wholes and is a whole extending over certain parts.15. Objects.15.1Objects enter into experience by recognition and without recognition experience would divulge no objects. Objects convey the permanences recognised in events, and are recognised as self-identical amid different circumstances; that is to say, the same object is recognised as related to diverse events. Thus the self-identical object maintains itself amid the flux of events: it is there and then, and it is here and now; and the 'it' which has its being there and here, then and now, is without equivocation the same subject for thought in the various judgments which are made upon it.15.2The change of an object is the diverse relationships of the same object to diverse events. The object is permanent, because (strictly speaking) it is without time and space; and its change is merely the variety of its relations to the various events which are passing in time and in space. This passage of events in time and space is merely the exhibition of the relations of extension which events bear to each other, combined with the directional factor in time which expresses that ultimate becomingness which is the creative advance of nature. These extensional relations of events are analysed in later parts of this enquiry. But here we merely make clear that change in objects is no derogation from their permanence, and expresses their relation to the passage of events; whereas events are neither permanent nor do they change. Events (in a sense) are space and time, namely, space and time are abstractions from events. But objects are only derivatively in space and time by reason of their relations to events.15.3The ways in which events and objects enter into experience are distinct. Events are lived through, they extend around us. They are the medium within which our physical experience develops, or, rather, they are themselves the development of that experience. The facts of life are the events of life.Objects enter into experience by way of the intellectuality of recognition. This does not mean that every object must have been known before; for in that case there never could have been a first knowledge. We must rid our imagination of the fallacious concept of the present as instantaneous. It is a duration, or stretch of time; and the primary recognition of an object consists of the recognition of its permanence amid the partial events of the duration which is present. Its recognition is carried beyond the present by means of recollection and memory.Rational thought which is the comparison of event with event would be intrinsically impossible without objects.15.4Objects and events are only waveringly discriminated in common thought. Whatever is purely matter of fact is an event. Whenever the concept of possibility can apply to a natural element, that element is an object. Namely, objects have the possibility of recurrence in experience: we can conceive imaginary circumstances in which a real object might occur. The essence of an object does not depend on its relations, which are external to its being. It has in fact certain relations to other natural elements; but it might (being the same object) have had other relations. In other words, its self-identity is not wholly dependent on its relations. But an event is just what it is, and is just how it is related; and it is nothing else.Thus objects lack the fixedness of relations which events possess, and thus time and space could never be a direct expression of their essential relations. Two objects have (by the mediation of events) all the mutual space relations which they do have throughout their existence, and might have many which they do not have. Thus two objects, being what they are, have no necessary temporal and spatial relations which are essential to their individualities.15.5The chief confusion between objects and events is conveyed in the prejudice that an object can only be in one place at a time. That is a fundamental property of events; and whenever that property appears axiomatic as holding of some physical entity, that entity is an event. It must be remembered however that ordinary thought wavers confusedly between events and objects. It is the misplacement of this axiom from events to objects which has wrecked the theory of natural objects.15.6It is an error to ascribe parts to objects, where 'part' here means spatial or temporal part. The erroneousness of such ascription immediately follows from the premiss that primarily an object is not in space or in time. The absence of temporal parts of objects is a commonplace of thought. No one thinks that part of a stone is at one time and another part of the stone is at another time. The same stone is at both times, in the sense in which the stone is existing at those times (if it be existing). But spatial parts are in a different category, and it is natural to think of various parts of a stone, simultaneously existing. Such a conception confuses the stone as an object with the event which exhibits the actual relations of the stone within nature. It is indeed very natural to ascribe spatial parts to a stone, for the reason that a stone is an instance of a perceptual object. These objects are the objects of common life, and it is very difficult precisely to discern such an object in the events with which it has its most obvious relations. The struggle to make precise the concept of these objects either forces us back to the sense-objects or forward to the scientific objects. The difficulty is chiefly one of making thought clear. That there is a perception of an object with self-identity, is shown by the common usage of mankind. Indeed these perceptual objects forced upon mankind—and seemingly also on animals, unless it be those of the lowest type—their knowledge of the objectified character of nature. But the confusion of the object, which is a unity, with the events, which have parts, is always imminent. In biological organisms the character of the organism as an object is more clear.15.7The fundamental rule is that events have parts and that—except in a derivative sense, from their relations to events—objects have no parts. On the other hand the same object can be found in different parts of space and time, and this cannot hold for events. Thus the identity of an object may be an important physical fact, while the identity of an event is essentially a trivial logical necessity. Thus the prisoner in the dock may be the man who did the deed. But the deed lies in the irrevocable past; only the allegation of it is before the court and perhaps (in some countries) a reconstitution of the crime. Essentially the very deed itself is never there.15.8The continuity of nature is to be found in events, the atomic properties of nature reside in objects. The continuous ether is the whole complex of events; and the atoms and molecules are scientific objects, which are entities of essentially different type to the events forming the ether.15.9This contrast in the ways we perceive events and objects deserves a distinction in nomenclature. Accordingly, for want of better terms, we shall say that we 'apprehend' an event and 'recognise' an object. To apprehend an event is to be aware of its passage as happening in that nature, which we each of us know as though it were common to all percipients. It is unnecessary for the purposes of science to consider the difficult metaphysical question of this community of nature to all. It is sufficient that, for the awareness of each, it is as though it were common to all, and that science is a body of doctrine true for this quasi-common nature which is the subject for the experience of each percipient; namely, science is true for each percipient.To recognise an object is to be aware of it in its specific relations to definite events in nature. Thus we refer the object to some events as its 'situations,' we connect it with other events as the locus from which it is being perceived, and we connect it with other events as conditions for such perception of it as in such situations from such a locus of percipience.Accordingly in these (arbitrary) senses of the words we apprehend nature as continuous and we recognise it as atomic.
13. The Diversification of Nature.13.1Our perceptual knowledge of nature consists in the breaking up of a whole which is the subject matter of perceptual experience, or is the given presentation which is experience—or however else we prefer to describe the ultimate experienced fact. This whole is discriminated as being a complex of related entities, each entity having determinate qualities and relations and being a subject concerning which our perceptions, either directly of indirectly, afford definite information. This process of breaking up the subject matter of experience into a complex of entities will be called the 'diversification of nature.'
13.2This diversification of nature is performed in different ways, according to different procedures which yield different analyses of nature into component entities. It is not merely that one mode of diversification of nature is incomplete and leaves out some entities which another mode supplies. The entities which are yielded by different modes of diversification are radically different; and it is the neglect of this distinction between the entities of complexes produced by different modes of diversification which has produced so much confusion in the principles of natural knowledge.
There are an indefinite number of types of entity disclosed in this diversification. An attempt in this enquiry to trace the subtlety of nature would only blur the main argument. Accordingly we confine attention to five modes of diversification which are chiefly important in scientific theory. These types of entities are: (i) events, (ii) percipient objects, (iii) sense-objects, (iv) perceptual objects, (v) scientific objects. These are five radically distinct types of entities yielded by five distinct procedures; and their only common quality as entities is that they are all alike subjects yielded for our knowledge by our perceptions of nature.
13.3The entities which are the product of any one mode of diversification of nature will be called elements, or aspects, of nature; each such entity is one natural element. Thus each mode of diversification produces natural elements of a type peculiar to itself.
One mode of diversification is not necessarily more abstract than another. Objects can be looked on as qualities of events, and events as relations between objects, or—more usefully—we can drop the metaphysical and difficult notion of inherent qualities and consider the elements of different types as bearing to each other relations.
There are accordingly two main genera of relations to be distinguished, namely 'homogeneous' relations which relate among themselves natural elements of the same type, and 'heterogeneous' relations which relate natural elements of different types.
13.4Another way of considering the diversification of nature is to emphasise primarily the relations between natural elements. Thus those elements are what is perceived in nature as thus related. In other words the relations are treated as fundamental and the natural elements are introduced as in their capacity of relata. But of course this is merely another mode of expression, since relations and relata imply each other.
14. Events.14.1Events are the relata of the fundamental homogeneous relation of 'extension.' Every event extends over other events which are parts of itself, and every event is extended over by other events of which it is part. The externality of nature is the outcome of this relation of extension. Two events are mutually external, or are 'separate,' if there is no event which is part of both. Time and space both spring from the relation of extension. Their derivation will be considered in detail in subsequent parts of this enquiry. It follows that time and space express relations between events. Other natural elements which are not events are only in time and space derivatively, namely, by reason of their relations to events. Great confusion has been caused to the philosophy of science by this neglect of the derivative nature of the spatial and temporal relations of objects of various types.
14.2The relation of extension exhibits events as actual—as matters of fact—by means of its properties which issue in spatial relations; and it exhibits events as involving the becomingness of nature—its passage or creative advance—by means of its properties which issue in temporal relations. Thus events are essentially elements of actuality and elements of becomingness. An actual event is thus divested of all possibility. It is what does become in nature. It can never happen again; for essentially it is just itself, there and then. An event is just what it is, and is just how it is related and it is nothing else. Any event, however similar, with different relations is another event. There is no element of hypothesis in any actual event. There are imaginary events—or, rather, imaginations of events—but there is nothing actual about such events, except so far as imagination is actual. Time and space, which are entirely actual and devoid of any tincture of possibility, are to be sought for among the relations of events.
14.3Events never change. Nature develops, in the sense that an eventbecomes part of an event′ which includes (i.e. extends over)and also extends into the futurity beyond. Thus in a sense the eventdoes change, namely, in its relations to the events which were not and which become actual in the creative advance of nature. The change of an event, in this meaning of the term 'change,' will be called the 'passage' of; and the word 'change' will not be used in this sense. Thus we say that events pass but do not change. The passage of an event is its passing into some other event which is not it.
An event in passing becomes part of larger events; and thus the passage of events is extension in the making. The terms 'the past,' 'the present,' and 'the future' refer to events. The irrevocableness of the past is the unchangeability of events. An event is what it is, when it is, and where it is. Externality and extension are the marks of events; an event is there and not here [or, here and not there], it is then and not now [or, now and not then], it is part of certain wholes and is a whole extending over certain parts.
15. Objects.15.1Objects enter into experience by recognition and without recognition experience would divulge no objects. Objects convey the permanences recognised in events, and are recognised as self-identical amid different circumstances; that is to say, the same object is recognised as related to diverse events. Thus the self-identical object maintains itself amid the flux of events: it is there and then, and it is here and now; and the 'it' which has its being there and here, then and now, is without equivocation the same subject for thought in the various judgments which are made upon it.
15.2The change of an object is the diverse relationships of the same object to diverse events. The object is permanent, because (strictly speaking) it is without time and space; and its change is merely the variety of its relations to the various events which are passing in time and in space. This passage of events in time and space is merely the exhibition of the relations of extension which events bear to each other, combined with the directional factor in time which expresses that ultimate becomingness which is the creative advance of nature. These extensional relations of events are analysed in later parts of this enquiry. But here we merely make clear that change in objects is no derogation from their permanence, and expresses their relation to the passage of events; whereas events are neither permanent nor do they change. Events (in a sense) are space and time, namely, space and time are abstractions from events. But objects are only derivatively in space and time by reason of their relations to events.
15.3The ways in which events and objects enter into experience are distinct. Events are lived through, they extend around us. They are the medium within which our physical experience develops, or, rather, they are themselves the development of that experience. The facts of life are the events of life.
Objects enter into experience by way of the intellectuality of recognition. This does not mean that every object must have been known before; for in that case there never could have been a first knowledge. We must rid our imagination of the fallacious concept of the present as instantaneous. It is a duration, or stretch of time; and the primary recognition of an object consists of the recognition of its permanence amid the partial events of the duration which is present. Its recognition is carried beyond the present by means of recollection and memory.
Rational thought which is the comparison of event with event would be intrinsically impossible without objects.
15.4Objects and events are only waveringly discriminated in common thought. Whatever is purely matter of fact is an event. Whenever the concept of possibility can apply to a natural element, that element is an object. Namely, objects have the possibility of recurrence in experience: we can conceive imaginary circumstances in which a real object might occur. The essence of an object does not depend on its relations, which are external to its being. It has in fact certain relations to other natural elements; but it might (being the same object) have had other relations. In other words, its self-identity is not wholly dependent on its relations. But an event is just what it is, and is just how it is related; and it is nothing else.
Thus objects lack the fixedness of relations which events possess, and thus time and space could never be a direct expression of their essential relations. Two objects have (by the mediation of events) all the mutual space relations which they do have throughout their existence, and might have many which they do not have. Thus two objects, being what they are, have no necessary temporal and spatial relations which are essential to their individualities.
15.5The chief confusion between objects and events is conveyed in the prejudice that an object can only be in one place at a time. That is a fundamental property of events; and whenever that property appears axiomatic as holding of some physical entity, that entity is an event. It must be remembered however that ordinary thought wavers confusedly between events and objects. It is the misplacement of this axiom from events to objects which has wrecked the theory of natural objects.
15.6It is an error to ascribe parts to objects, where 'part' here means spatial or temporal part. The erroneousness of such ascription immediately follows from the premiss that primarily an object is not in space or in time. The absence of temporal parts of objects is a commonplace of thought. No one thinks that part of a stone is at one time and another part of the stone is at another time. The same stone is at both times, in the sense in which the stone is existing at those times (if it be existing). But spatial parts are in a different category, and it is natural to think of various parts of a stone, simultaneously existing. Such a conception confuses the stone as an object with the event which exhibits the actual relations of the stone within nature. It is indeed very natural to ascribe spatial parts to a stone, for the reason that a stone is an instance of a perceptual object. These objects are the objects of common life, and it is very difficult precisely to discern such an object in the events with which it has its most obvious relations. The struggle to make precise the concept of these objects either forces us back to the sense-objects or forward to the scientific objects. The difficulty is chiefly one of making thought clear. That there is a perception of an object with self-identity, is shown by the common usage of mankind. Indeed these perceptual objects forced upon mankind—and seemingly also on animals, unless it be those of the lowest type—their knowledge of the objectified character of nature. But the confusion of the object, which is a unity, with the events, which have parts, is always imminent. In biological organisms the character of the organism as an object is more clear.
15.7The fundamental rule is that events have parts and that—except in a derivative sense, from their relations to events—objects have no parts. On the other hand the same object can be found in different parts of space and time, and this cannot hold for events. Thus the identity of an object may be an important physical fact, while the identity of an event is essentially a trivial logical necessity. Thus the prisoner in the dock may be the man who did the deed. But the deed lies in the irrevocable past; only the allegation of it is before the court and perhaps (in some countries) a reconstitution of the crime. Essentially the very deed itself is never there.
15.8The continuity of nature is to be found in events, the atomic properties of nature reside in objects. The continuous ether is the whole complex of events; and the atoms and molecules are scientific objects, which are entities of essentially different type to the events forming the ether.
15.9This contrast in the ways we perceive events and objects deserves a distinction in nomenclature. Accordingly, for want of better terms, we shall say that we 'apprehend' an event and 'recognise' an object. To apprehend an event is to be aware of its passage as happening in that nature, which we each of us know as though it were common to all percipients. It is unnecessary for the purposes of science to consider the difficult metaphysical question of this community of nature to all. It is sufficient that, for the awareness of each, it is as though it were common to all, and that science is a body of doctrine true for this quasi-common nature which is the subject for the experience of each percipient; namely, science is true for each percipient.
To recognise an object is to be aware of it in its specific relations to definite events in nature. Thus we refer the object to some events as its 'situations,' we connect it with other events as the locus from which it is being perceived, and we connect it with other events as conditions for such perception of it as in such situations from such a locus of percipience.
Accordingly in these (arbitrary) senses of the words we apprehend nature as continuous and we recognise it as atomic.