The Concept of Nature Part 5

It is necessary however to make a distinction. In some sense time extends beyond nature. It is not true that a timeless sense-awareness and a timeless thought combine to contemplate a timeful nature.

Sense-awareness and thought are themselves processes as well as their termini in nature. In other words there is a pa.s.sage of sense-awareness and a pa.s.sage of thought. Thus the reign of the quality of pa.s.sage extends beyond nature. But now the distinction arises between pa.s.sage which is fundamental and the temporal series which is a logical abstraction representing some of the properties of nature. A temporal series, as we have defined it, represents merely certain properties of a family of durations--properties indeed which durations only possess because of their partaking of the character of pa.s.sage, but on the other hand properties which only durations do possess. Accordingly time in the sense of a measurable temporal series is a character of nature only, and does not extend to the processes of thought and of sense-awareness except by a correlation of these processes with the temporal series implicated in their procedures.

So far the pa.s.sage of nature has been considered in connexion with the pa.s.sage of durations; and in this connexion it is peculiarly a.s.sociated with temporal series. We must remember however that the character of pa.s.sage is peculiarly a.s.sociated with the extension of events, and that from this extension spatial transition arises just as much as temporal transition. The discussion of this point is reserved for a later lecture but it is necessary to remember it now that we are proceeding to discuss the application of the concept of pa.s.sage beyond nature, otherwise we shall have too narrow an idea of the essence of pa.s.sage.

It is necessary to dwell on the subject of sense-awareness in this connexion as an example of the way in which time concerns mind, although measurable time is a mere abstract from nature and nature is closed to mind.

Consider sense-awareness--not its terminus which is nature, but sense-awareness in itself as a procedure of mind. Sense-awareness is a relation of mind to nature. Accordingly we are now considering mind as a relatum in sense-awareness. For mind there is the immediate sense-awareness and there is memory. The distinction between memory and the present immediacy has a double bearing. On the one hand it discloses that mind is not impartially aware of all those natural durations to which it is related by awareness. Its awareness shares in the pa.s.sage of nature. We can imagine a being whose awareness, conceived as his private possession, suffers no transition, although the terminus of his awareness is our own transient nature. There is no essential reason why memory should not be raised to the vividness of the present fact; and then from the side of mind, What is the difference between the present and the past? Yet with this hypothesis we can also suppose that the vivid remembrance and the present fact are posited in awareness as in their temporal serial order. Accordingly we must admit that though we can imagine that mind in the operation of sense-awareness might be free from any character of pa.s.sage, yet in point of fact our experience of sense-awareness exhibits our minds as partaking in this character.

On the other hand the mere fact of memory is an escape from transience.

In memory the past is present. It is not present as overleaping the temporal succession of nature, but it is present as an immediate fact for the mind. Accordingly memory is a disengagement of the mind from the mere pa.s.sage of nature; for what has pa.s.sed for nature has not pa.s.sed for mind.

Furthermore the distinction between memory and the immediate present is not so clear as it is conventional to suppose. There is an intellectual theory of time as a moving knife-edge, exhibiting a present fact without temporal extension. This theory arises from the concept of an ideal exact.i.tude of observation. Astronomical observations are successively refined to be exact to tenths, to hundredths, and to thousandths of seconds. But the final refinements are arrived at by a system of averaging, and even then present us with a stretch of time as a margin of error. Here error is merely a conventional term to express the fact that the character of experience does not accord with the ideal of thought. I have already explained how the concept of a moment conciliates the observed fact with this ideal; namely, there is a limiting simplicity in the quant.i.tative expression of the properties of durations, which is arrived at by considering any one of the abstractive sets included in the moment. In other words the extrinsic character of the moment as an aggregate of durations has a.s.sociated with it the intrinsic character of the moment which is the limiting expression of natural properties.

Thus the character of a moment and the ideal of exactness which it enshrines do not in any way weaken the position that the ultimate terminus of awareness is a duration with temporal thickness. This immediate duration is not clearly marked out for our apprehension. Its earlier boundary is blurred by a fading into memory, and its later boundary is blurred by an emergence from antic.i.p.ation. There is no sharp distinction either between memory and the present immediacy or between the present immediacy and antic.i.p.ation. The present is a wavering breadth of boundary between the two extremes. Thus our own sense-awareness with its extended present has some of the character of the sense-awareness of the imaginary being whose mind was free from pa.s.sage and who contemplated all nature as an immediate fact. Our own present has its antecedents and its consequents, and for the imaginary being all nature has its antecedent and its consequent durations. Thus the only difference in this respect between us and the imaginary being is that for him all nature shares in the immediacy of our present duration.

The conclusion of this discussion is that so far as sense-awareness is concerned there is a pa.s.sage of mind which is distinguishable from the pa.s.sage of nature though closely allied with it. We may speculate, if we like, that this alliance of the pa.s.sage of mind with the pa.s.sage of nature arises from their both sharing in some ultimate character of pa.s.sage which dominates all being. But this is a speculation in which we have no concern. The immediate deduction which is sufficient for us is that--so far as sense-awareness is concerned--mind is not in time or in s.p.a.ce in the same sense in which the events of nature are in time, but that it is derivatively in time and in s.p.a.ce by reason of the peculiar alliance of its pa.s.sage with the pa.s.sage of nature. Thus mind is in time and in s.p.a.ce in a sense peculiar to itself. This has been a long discussion to arrive at a very simple and obvious conclusion. We all feel that in some sense our minds are here in this room and at this time. But it is not quite in the same sense as that in which the events of nature which are the existences of our brains have their spatial and temporal positions. The fundamental distinction to remember is that immediacy for sense-awareness is not the same as instantaneousness for nature. This last conclusion bears on the next discussion with which I will terminate this lecture. This question can be formulated thus, Can alternative temporal series be found in nature?

A few years ago such a suggestion would have been put aside as being fantastically impossible. It would have had no bearing on the science then current, and was akin to no ideas which had ever entered into the dreams of philosophy. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries accepted as their natural philosophy a certain circle of concepts which were as rigid and definite as those of the philosophy of the middle ages, and were accepted with as little critical research. I will call this natural philosophy 'materialism.' Not only were men of science materialists, but also adherents of all schools of philosophy. The idealists only differed from the philosophic materialists on question of the alignment of nature in reference to mind. But no one had any doubt that the philosophy of nature considered in itself was of the type which I have called materialism. It is the philosophy which I have already examined in my two lectures of this course preceding the present one. It can be summarised as the belief that nature is an aggregate of material and that this material exists in some sense _at_ each successive member of a one-dimensional series of extensionless instants of time. Furthermore the mutual relations of the material ent.i.ties at each instant formed these ent.i.ties into a spatial configuration in an unbounded s.p.a.ce. It would seem that s.p.a.ce--on this theory--would be as instantaneous as the instants, and that some explanation is required of the relations between the successive instantaneous s.p.a.ces. The materialistic theory is however silent on this point; and the succession of instantaneous s.p.a.ces is tacitly combined into one persistent s.p.a.ce. This theory is a purely intellectual rendering of experience which has had the luck to get itself formulated at the dawn of scientific thought. It has dominated the language and the imagination of science since science flourished in Alexandria, with the result that it is now hardly possible to speak without appearing to a.s.sume its immediate obviousness.

But when it is distinctly formulated in the abstract terms in which I have just stated it, the theory is very far from obvious. The pa.s.sing complex of factors which compose the fact which is the terminus of sense-awareness places before us nothing corresponding to the trinity of this natural materialism. This trinity is composed (i) of the temporal series of extensionless instants, (ii) of the aggregate of material ent.i.ties, and (iii) of s.p.a.ce which is the outcome of relations of matter.

There is a wide gap between these presuppositions of the intellectual theory of materialism and the immediate deliverances of sense-awareness.

I do not question that this materialistic trinity embodies important characters of nature. But it is necessary to express these characters in terms of the facts of experience. This is exactly what in this lecture I have been endeavouring to do so far as time is concerned; and we have now come up against the question, Is there only one temporal series? The uniqueness of the temporal series is presupposed in the materialist philosophy of nature. But that philosophy is merely a theory, like the Aristotelian scientific theories so firmly believed in the middle ages.

If in this lecture I have in any way succeeded in getting behind the theory to the immediate facts, the answer is not nearly so certain. The question can be transformed into this alternative form, Is there only one family of durations? In this question the meaning of a 'family of durations' has been defined earlier in this lecture. The answer is now not at all obvious. On the materialistic theory the instantaneous present is the only field for the creative activity of nature. The past is gone and the future is not yet. Thus (on this theory) the immediacy of perception is of an instantaneous present, and this unique present is the outcome of the past and the promise of the future. But we deny this immediately given instantaneous present. There is no such thing to be found in nature. As an ultimate fact it is a nonent.i.ty. What is immediate for sense-awareness is a duration. Now a duration has within itself a past and a future; and the temporal breadths of the immediate durations of sense-awareness are very indeterminate and dependent on the individual percipient. Accordingly there is no unique factor in nature which for every percipient is pre-eminently and necessarily the present.

The pa.s.sage of nature leaves nothing between the past and the future.

What we perceive as present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with antic.i.p.ation. This vividness lights up the discriminated field within a duration. But no a.s.surance can thereby be given that the happenings of nature cannot be a.s.sorted into other durations of alternative families.

We cannot even know that the series of immediate durations posited by the sense-awareness of one individual mind all necessarily belong to the same family of durations. There is not the slightest reason to believe that this is so. Indeed if my theory of nature be correct, it will not be the case.

The materialistic theory has all the completeness of the thought of the middle ages, which had a complete answer to everything, be it in heaven or in h.e.l.l or in nature. There is a trimness about it, with its instantaneous present, its vanished past, its non-existent future, and its inert matter. This trimness is very medieval and ill accords with brute fact.

The theory which I am urging admits a greater ultimate mystery and a deeper ignorance. The past and the future meet and mingle in the ill-defined present. The pa.s.sage of nature which is only another name for the creative force of existence has no narrow ledge of definite instantaneous present within which to operate. Its operative presence which is now urging nature forward must be sought for throughout the whole, in the remotest past as well as in the narrowest breadth of any present duration. Perhaps also in the unrealised future. Perhaps also in the future which might be as well as the actual future which will be. It is impossible to meditate on time and the mystery of the creative pa.s.sage of nature without an overwhelming emotion at the limitations of human intelligence.

CHAPTER IV

THE METHOD OF EXTENSIVE ABSTRACTION

To-day's lecture must commence with the consideration of limited events.

We shall then be in a position to enter upon an investigation of the factors in nature which are represented by our conception of s.p.a.ce.

The duration which is the immediate disclosure of our sense-awareness is discriminated into parts. There is the part which is the life of all nature within a room, and there is the part which is the life of all nature within a table in the room. These parts are limited events. They have the endurance of the present duration, and they are parts of it.

But whereas a duration is an unlimited whole and in a certain limited sense is all that there is, a limited event possesses a completely defined limitation of extent which is expressed for us in spatio-temporal terms.

We are accustomed to a.s.sociate an event with a certain melodramatic quality. If a man is run over, that is an event comprised within certain spatio-temporal limits. We are not accustomed to consider the endurance of the Great Pyramid throughout any definite day as an event. But the natural fact which is the Great Pyramid throughout a day, meaning thereby all nature within it, is an event of the same character as the man's accident, meaning thereby all nature with spatio-temporal limitations so as to include the man and the motor during the period when they were in contact.

We are accustomed to a.n.a.lyse these events into three factors, time, s.p.a.ce, and material. In fact, we at once apply to them the concepts of the materialistic theory of nature. I do not deny the utility of this a.n.a.lysis for the purpose of expressing important laws of nature. What I am denying is that anyone of these factors is posited for us in sense-awareness in concrete independence. We perceive one unit factor in nature; and this factor is that something is going on then--there. For example, we perceive the going-on of the Great Pyramid in its relations to the goings-on of the surrounding Egyptian events. We are so trained, both by language and by formal teaching and by the resulting convenience, to express our thoughts in terms of this materialistic a.n.a.lysis that intellectually we tend to ignore the true unity of the factor really exhibited in sense-awareness. It is this unit factor, retaining in itself the pa.s.sage of nature, which is the primary concrete element discriminated in nature. These primary factors are what I mean by events.

Events are the field of a two-termed relation, namely the relation of extension which was considered in the last lecture. Events are the things related by the relation of extension. If an event A extends over an event B, then B is 'part of' A, and A is a 'whole' of which B is a part. Whole and part are invariably used in these lectures in this definite sense. It follows that in reference to this relation any two events A and B may have any one of four relations to each other, namely (i) A may extend over B, or (ii) B may extend over A, or (iii) A and B may both extend over some third event C, but neither over the other, or (iv) A and B may be entirely separate. These alternatives can obviously be ill.u.s.trated by Euler's diagrams as they appear in logical textbooks.

The continuity of nature is the continuity of events. This continuity is merely the name for the aggregate of a variety of properties of events in connexion with the relation of extension.

In the first place, this relation is transitive; secondly, every event contains other events as parts of itself; thirdly every event is a part of other events; fourthly given any two finite events there are events each of which contains both of them as parts; and fifthly there is a special relation between events which I term 'junction.'

Two events have junction when there is a third event of which both events are parts, and which is such that no part of it is separated from both of the two given events. Thus two events with junction make up exactly one event which is in a sense their sum.

Only certain pairs of events have this property. In general any event containing two events also contains parts which are separated from both events.

There is an alternative definition of the junction of two events which I have adopted in my recent book[7]. Two events have junction when there is a third event such that (i) it overlaps both events and (ii) it has no part which is separated from both the given events. If either of these alternative definitions is adopted as the definition of junction, the other definition appears as an axiom respecting the character of junction as we know it in nature. But we are not thinking of logical definition so much as the formulation of the results of direct observation. There is a certain continuity inherent in the observed unity of an event, and these two definitions of junction are really axioms based on observation respecting the character of this continuity.

[7] Cf. _Enquiry_.

The relations of whole and part and of overlapping are particular cases of the junction of events. But it is possible for events to have junction when they are separate from each other; for example, the upper and the lower part of the Great Pyramid are divided by some imaginary horizontal plane.

The continuity which nature derives from events has been obscured by the ill.u.s.trations which I have been obliged to give. For example I have taken the existence of the Great Pyramid as a fairly well-known fact to which I could safely appeal as an ill.u.s.tration. This is a type of event which exhibits itself to us as the situation of a recognisable object; and in the example chosen the object is so widely recognised that it has received a name. An object is an ent.i.ty of a different type from an event. For example, the event which is the life of nature within the Great Pyramid yesterday and to-day is divisible into two parts, namely the Great Pyramid yesterday and the Great Pyramid to-day. But the recognisable object which is also called the Great Pyramid is the same object to-day as it was yesterday. I shall have to consider the theory of objects in another lecture.

The whole subject is invested with an unmerited air of subtlety by the fact that when the event is the situation of a well-marked object, we have no language to distinguish the event from the object. In the case of the Great Pyramid, the object is the perceived unit ent.i.ty which as perceived remains self-identical throughout the ages; while the whole dance of molecules and the s.h.i.+fting play of the electromagnetic field are ingredients of the event. An object is in a sense out of time. It is only derivatively in time by reason of its having the relation to events which I term 'situation.' This relation of situation will require discussion in a subsequent lecture.

The point which I want to make now is that being the situation of a well-marked object is not an inherent necessity for an event. Wherever and whenever something is going on, there is an event. Furthermore 'wherever and whenever' in themselves presuppose an event, for s.p.a.ce and time in themselves are abstractions from events. It is therefore a consequence of this doctrine that something is always going on everywhere, even in so-called empty s.p.a.ce. This conclusion is in accord with modern physical science which presupposes the play of an electromagnetic field throughout s.p.a.ce and time. This doctrine of science has been thrown into the materialistic form of an all-pervading ether. But the ether is evidently a mere idle concept--in the phraseology which Bacon applied to the doctrine of final causes, it is a barren virgin. Nothing is deduced from it; and the ether merely subserves the purpose of satisfying the demands of the materialistic theory. The important concept is that of the s.h.i.+fting facts of the fields of force. This is the concept of an ether of events which should be subst.i.tuted for that of a material ether.

It requires no ill.u.s.tration to a.s.sure you that an event is a complex fact, and the relations between two events form an almost impenetrable maze. The clue discovered by the common sense of mankind and systematically utilised in science is what I have elsewhere[8] called the law of convergence to simplicity by diminution of extent.

[8] Cf. _Organisation of Thought_, pp. 146 et seq. Williams and Norgate, 1917.

If A and B are two events, and A' is part of A and B' is part of B, then in many respects the relations between the parts A' and B' will be simpler than the relations between A and B. This is the principle which presides over all attempts at exact observation.

The first outcome of the systematic use of this law has been the formulation of the abstract concepts of Time and s.p.a.ce. In the previous lecture I sketched how the principle was applied to obtain the time-series. I now proceed to consider how the spatial ent.i.ties are obtained by the same method. The systematic procedure is identical in principle in both cases, and I have called the general type of procedure the 'method of extensive abstraction.'

You will remember that in my last lecture I defined the concept of an abstractive set of durations. This definition can be extended so as to apply to any events, limited events as well as durations. The only change that is required is the subst.i.tution of the word 'event' for the word 'duration.' Accordingly an abstractive set of events is any set of events which possesses the two properties, (i) of any two members of the set one contains the other as a part, and (ii) there is no event which is a common part of every member of the set. Such a set, as you will remember, has the properties of the Chinese toy which is a nest of boxes, one within the other, with the difference that the toy has a smallest box, while the abstractive cla.s.s has neither a smallest event nor does it converge to a limiting event which is not a member of the set.

Thus, so far as the abstractive sets of events are concerned, an abstractive set converges to nothing. There is the set with its members growing indefinitely smaller and smaller as we proceed in thought towards the smaller end of the series; but there is no absolute minimum of any sort which is finally reached. In fact the set is just itself and indicates nothing else in the way of events, except itself. But each event has an intrinsic character in the way of being a situation of objects and of having parts which are situations of objects and--to state the matter more generally--in the way of being a field of the life of nature. This character can be defined by quant.i.tative expressions expressing relations between various quant.i.ties intrinsic to the event or between such quant.i.ties and other quant.i.ties intrinsic to other events. In the case of events of considerable spatio-temporal extension this set of quant.i.tative expressions is of bewildering complexity. If e be an event, let us denote by q(e) the set of quant.i.tative expressions defining its character including its connexions with the rest of nature.

Let e1, e2, e3, etc. be an abstractive set, the members being so arranged that each member such as e_{n} extends over all the succeeding members such as e_{n+1}, e_{n+2} and so on. Then corresponding to the series

e1, e2, e3, ..., e_{n}, e_{n+1}, ...,

there is the series

q(e1), q(e2), q(e3), ..., q(e_{n}), q(e_{n+1}), ....

Call the series of events s and the series of quant.i.tative expressions q(s). The series s has no last term and no events which are contained in every member of the series. Accordingly the series of events converges to nothing. It is just itself. Also the series q(s) has no last term. But the sets of h.o.m.ologous quant.i.ties running through the various terms of the series do converge to definite limits. For example if Q1 be a quant.i.tative measurement found in q(e1), and Q2 the h.o.m.ologue to Q1 to be found in q(e2), and Q3 the h.o.m.ologue to Q1 and Q2 to be found in q(e3), and so on, then the series

Q1, Q2, Q3, ..., Q_{n}, Q_{n+1}, ...,

though it has no last term, does in general converge to a definite limit. Accordingly there is a cla.s.s of limits l(s) which is the cla.s.s of the limits of those members of q(e_{n}) which have h.o.m.ologues throughout the series q(s) as n indefinitely increases.

We can represent this statement diagrammatically by using an arrow (?) to mean 'converges to.' Then

e1, e2, e3, ..., e_{n}, e_{n+1}, ... ? nothing,