The Concept of Nature Part 2

is fact as an ent.i.ty for thought, to whose bare individuality is ascribed the property of embracing in its complexity the natural ent.i.ties. It is our business to a.n.a.lyse this conception and in the course of the a.n.a.lysis s.p.a.ce and time should appear. Evidently the relations holding between natural ent.i.ties are themselves natural ent.i.ties, namely they are also factors of fact, there for sense-awareness. Accordingly the structure of the natural complex can never be completed in thought, just as the factors of fact can never be exhausted in sense-awareness. Unexhaustiveness is an essential character of our knowledge of nature. Also nature does not exhaust the matter for thought, namely there are thoughts which would not occur in any h.o.m.ogeneous thinking about nature.

The question as to whether sense-perception involves thought is largely verbal. If sense-perception involves a cognition of individuality abstracted from the actual position of the ent.i.ty as a factor in fact, then it undoubtedly does involve thought. But if it is conceived as sense-awareness of a factor in fact competent to evoke emotion and purposeful action without further cognition, then it does not involve thought. In such a case the terminus of the sense-awareness is something for mind, but nothing for thought. The sense-perception of some lower forms of life may be conjectured to approximate to this character habitually. Also occasionally our own sense-perception in moments when thought-activity has been lulled to quiescence is not far off the attainment of this ideal limit.

The process of discrimination in sense-awareness has two distinct sides.

There is the discrimination of fact into parts, and the discrimination of any part of fact as exhibiting relations to ent.i.ties which are not parts of fact though they are ingredients in it. Namely the immediate fact for awareness is the whole occurrence of nature. It is nature as an event present for sense-awareness, and essentially pa.s.sing. There is no holding nature still and looking at it. We cannot redouble our efforts to improve our knowledge of the terminus of our present sense-awareness; it is our subsequent opportunity in subsequent sense-awareness which gains the benefit of our good resolution. Thus the ultimate fact for sense-awareness is an event. This whole event is discriminated by us into partial events. We are aware of an event which is our bodily life, of an event which is the course of nature within this room, and of a vaguely perceived aggregate of other partial events. This is the discrimination in sense-awareness of fact into parts.

I shall use the term 'part' in the arbitrarily limited sense of an event which is part of the whole fact disclosed in awareness.

Sense-awareness also yields to us other factors in nature which are not events. For example, sky-blue is seen as situated in a certain event.

This relation of situation requires further discussion which is postponed to a later lecture. My present point is that sky-blue is found in nature with a definite implication in events, but is not an event itself. Accordingly in addition to events, there are other factors in nature directly disclosed to us in sense-awareness. The conception in thought of all the factors in nature as distinct ent.i.ties with definite natural relations is what I have in another place[1] called the 'diversification of nature.'

[1] Cf. _Enquiry_.

There is one general conclusion to be drawn from the foregoing discussion. It is that the first task of a philosophy of science should be some general cla.s.sification of the ent.i.ties disclosed to us in sense-perception.

Among the examples of ent.i.ties in addition to 'events' which we have used for the purpose of ill.u.s.tration are the buildings of Bedford College, Homer, and sky-blue. Evidently these are very different sorts of things; and it is likely that statements which are made about one kind of ent.i.ty will not be true about other kinds. If human thought proceeded with the orderly method which abstract logic would suggest to it, we might go further and say that a cla.s.sification of natural ent.i.ties should be the first step in science itself. Perhaps you will be inclined to reply that this cla.s.sification has already been effected, and that science is concerned with the adventures of material ent.i.ties in s.p.a.ce and time.

The history of the doctrine of matter has yet to be written. It is the history of the influence of Greek philosophy on science. That influence has issued in one long misconception of the metaphysical status of natural ent.i.ties. The ent.i.ty has been separated from the factor which is the terminus of sense-awareness. It has become the substratum for that factor, and the factor has been degraded into an attribute of the ent.i.ty. In this way a distinction has been imported into nature which is in truth no distinction at all. A natural ent.i.ty is merely a factor of fact, considered in itself. Its disconnexion from the complex of fact is a mere abstraction. It is not the substratum of the factor, but the very factor itself as bared in thought. Thus what is a mere procedure of mind in the translation of sense-awareness into discursive knowledge has been trans.m.u.ted into a fundamental character of nature. In this way matter has emerged as being the metaphysical substratum of its properties, and the course of nature is interpreted as the history of matter.

Plato and Aristotle found Greek thought preoccupied with the quest for the simple substances in terms of which the course of events could be expressed. We may formulate this state of mind in the question, What is nature made of? The answers which their genius gave to this question, and more particularly the concepts which underlay the terms in which they framed their answers, have determined the unquestioned presuppositions as to time, s.p.a.ce and matter which have reigned in science.

In Plato the forms of thought are more fluid than in Aristotle, and therefore, as I venture to think, the more valuable. Their importance consists in the evidence they yield of cultivated thought about nature before it had been forced into a uniform mould by the long tradition of scientific philosophy. For example in the _Timaeus_ there is a presupposition, somewhat vaguely expressed, of a distinction between the general becoming of nature and the measurable time of nature. In a later lecture I have to distinguish between what I call the pa.s.sage of nature and particular time-systems which exhibit certain characteristics of that pa.s.sage. I will not go so far as to claim Plato in direct support of this doctrine, but I do think that the sections of the _Timaeus_ which deal with time become clearer if my distinction is admitted.

This is however a digression. I am now concerned with the origin of the scientific doctrine of matter in Greek thought. In the _Timaeus_ Plato a.s.serts that nature is made of fire and earth with air and water as intermediate between them, so that 'as fire is to air so is air to water, and as air is to water so is water to earth.' He also suggests a molecular hypothesis for these four elements. In this hypothesis everything depends on the shape of the atoms; for earth it is cubical and for fire it is pyramidal. To-day physicists are again discussing the structure of the atom, and its shape is no slight factor in that structure. Plato's guesses read much more fantastically than does Aristotle's systematic a.n.a.lysis; but in some ways they are more valuable. The main outline of his ideas is comparable with that of modern science. It embodies concepts which any theory of natural philosophy must retain and in some sense must explain. Aristotle asked the fundamental question, What do we mean by 'substance'? Here the reaction between his philosophy and his logic worked very unfortunately.

In his logic, the fundamental type of affirmative proposition is the attribution of a predicate to a subject. Accordingly, amid the many current uses of the term 'substance' which he a.n.a.lyses, he emphasises its meaning as 'the ultimate substratum which is no longer predicated of anything else.'

The unquestioned acceptance of the Aristotelian logic has led to an ingrained tendency to postulate a substratum for whatever is disclosed in sense-awareness, namely, to look below what we are aware of for the substance in the sense of the 'concrete thing.' This is the origin of the modern scientific concept of matter and of ether, namely they are the outcome of this insistent habit of postulation.

Accordingly ether has been invented by modern science as the substratum of the events which are spread through s.p.a.ce and time beyond the reach of ordinary ponderable matter. Personally, I think that predication is a muddled notion confusing many different relations under a convenient common form of speech. For example, I hold that the relation of green to a blade of gra.s.s is entirely different from the relation of green to the event which is the life history of that blade for some short period, and is different from the relation of the blade to that event. In a sense I call the event the situation of the green, and in another sense it is the situation of the blade. Thus in one sense the blade is a character or property which can be predicated of the situation, and in another sense the green is a character or property of the same event which is also its situation. In this way the predication of properties veils radically different relations between ent.i.ties.

Accordingly 'substance,' which is a correlative term to 'predication,'

shares in the ambiguity. If we are to look for substance anywhere, I should find it in events which are in some sense the ultimate substance of nature.

Matter, in its modern scientific sense, is a return to the Ionian effort to find in s.p.a.ce and time some stuff which composes nature. It has a more refined signification than the early guesses at earth and water by reason of a certain vague a.s.sociation with the Aristotelian idea of substance.

Earth, water, air, fire, and matter, and finally ether are related in direct succession so far as concerns their postulated characters of ultimate substrata of nature. They bear witness to the undying vitality of Greek philosophy in its search for the ultimate ent.i.ties which are the factors of the fact disclosed in sense-awareness. This search is the origin of science.

The succession of ideas starting from the crude guesses of the early Ionian thinkers and ending in the nineteenth century ether reminds us that the scientific doctrine of matter is really a hybrid through which philosophy pa.s.sed on its way to the refined Aristotelian concept of substance and to which science returned as it reacted against philosophic abstractions. Earth, fire, and water in the Ionic philosophy and the shaped elements in the _Timaeus_ are comparable to the matter and ether of modern scientific doctrine. But substance represents the final philosophic concept of the substratum which underlies any attribute. Matter (in the scientific sense) is already in s.p.a.ce and time. Thus matter represents the refusal to think away spatial and temporal characteristics and to arrive at the bare concept of an individual ent.i.ty. It is this refusal which has caused the muddle of importing the mere procedure of thought into the fact of nature. The ent.i.ty, bared of all characteristics except those of s.p.a.ce and time, has acquired a physical status as the ultimate texture of nature; so that the course of nature is conceived as being merely the fortunes of matter in its adventure through s.p.a.ce.

Thus the origin of the doctrine of matter is the outcome of uncritical acceptance of s.p.a.ce and time as external conditions for natural existence. By this I do not mean that any doubt should be thrown on facts of s.p.a.ce and time as ingredients in nature. What I do mean is 'the unconscious presupposition of s.p.a.ce and time as being that within which nature is set.' This is exactly the sort of presupposition which tinges thought in any reaction against the subtlety of philosophical criticism.

My theory of the formation of the scientific doctrine of matter is that first philosophy illegitimately transformed the bare ent.i.ty, which is simply an abstraction necessary for the method of thought, into the metaphysical substratum of these factors in nature which in various senses are a.s.signed to ent.i.ties as their attributes; and that, as a second step, scientists (including philosophers who were scientists) in conscious or unconscious ignoration of philosophy presupposed this substratum, _qua_ substratum for attributes, as nevertheless in time and s.p.a.ce.

This is surely a muddle. The whole being of substance is as a substratum for attributes. Thus time and s.p.a.ce should be attributes of the substance. This they palpably are not, if the matter be the substance of nature, since it is impossible to express spatio-temporal truths without having recourse to relations involving relata other than bits of matter.

I waive this point however, and come to another. It is not the substance which is in s.p.a.ce, but the attributes. What we find in s.p.a.ce are the red of the rose and the smell of the jasmine and the noise of cannon. We have all told our dentists where our toothache is. Thus s.p.a.ce is not a relation between substances, but between attributes.

Thus even if you admit that the adherents of substance can be allowed to conceive substance as matter, it is a fraud to slip substance into s.p.a.ce on the plea that s.p.a.ce expresses relations between substances. On the face of it s.p.a.ce has nothing to do with substances, but only with their attributes. What I mean is, that if you choose--as I think wrongly--to construe our experience of nature as an awareness of the attributes of substances, we are by this theory precluded from finding any a.n.a.logous direct relations between substances as disclosed in our experience. What we do find are relations between the attributes of substances. Thus if matter is looked on as substance in s.p.a.ce, the s.p.a.ce in which it finds itself has very little to do with the s.p.a.ce of our experience.

The above argument has been expressed in terms of the relational theory of s.p.a.ce. But if s.p.a.ce be absolute--namely, if it have a being independent of things in it--the course of the argument is hardly changed. For things in s.p.a.ce must have a certain fundamental relation to s.p.a.ce which we will call occupation. Thus the objection that it is the attributes which are observed as related to s.p.a.ce, still holds.

The scientific doctrine of matter is held in conjunction with an absolute theory of time. The same arguments apply to the relations between matter and time as apply to the relations between s.p.a.ce and matter. There is however (in the current philosophy) a difference in the connexions of s.p.a.ce with matter from those of time with matter, which I will proceed to explain.

s.p.a.ce is not merely an ordering of material ent.i.ties so that any one ent.i.ty bears certain relations to other material ent.i.ties. The occupation of s.p.a.ce impresses a certain character on each material ent.i.ty in itself. By reason of its occupation of s.p.a.ce matter has extension. By reason of its extension each bit of matter is divisible into parts, and each part is a numerically distinct ent.i.ty from every other such part. Accordingly it would seem that every material ent.i.ty is not really one ent.i.ty. It is an essential multiplicity of ent.i.ties.

There seems to be no stopping this dissociation of matter into multiplicities short of finding each ultimate ent.i.ty occupying one individual point. This essential multiplicity of material ent.i.ties is certainly not what is meant by science, nor does it correspond to anything disclosed in sense-awareness. It is absolutely necessary that at a certain stage in this dissociation of matter a halt should be called, and that the material ent.i.ties thus obtained should be treated as units. The stage of arrest may be arbitrary or may be set by the characteristics of nature; but all reasoning in science ultimately drops its s.p.a.ce-a.n.a.lysis and poses to itself the problem, 'Here is one material ent.i.ty, what is happening to it as a unit ent.i.ty?' Yet this material ent.i.ty is still retaining its extension, and as thus extended is a mere multiplicity. Thus there is an essential atomic property in nature which is independent of the dissociation of extension. There is something which in itself is one, and which is more than the logical aggregate of ent.i.ties occupying points within the volume which the unit occupies. Indeed we may well be sceptical as to these ultimate ent.i.ties at points, and doubt whether there are any such ent.i.ties at all. They have the suspicious character that we are driven to accept them by abstract logic and not by observed fact.

Time (in the current philosophy) does not exert the same disintegrating effect on matter which occupies it. If matter occupies a duration of time, the whole matter occupies every part of that duration. Thus the connexion between matter and time differs from the connexion between matter and s.p.a.ce as expressed in current scientific philosophy. There is obviously a greater difficulty in conceiving time as the outcome of relations between different bits of matter than there is in the a.n.a.logous conception of s.p.a.ce. At an instant distinct volumes of s.p.a.ce are occupied by distinct bits of matter. Accordingly there is so far no intrinsic difficulty in conceiving that s.p.a.ce is merely the resultant of relations between the bits of matter. But in the one-dimensional time the same bit of matter occupies different portions of time. Accordingly time would have to be expressible in terms of the relations of a bit of matter with itself. My own view is a belief in the relational theory both of s.p.a.ce and of time, and of disbelief in the current form of the relational theory of s.p.a.ce which exhibits bits of matter as the relata for spatial relations. The true relata are events. The distinction which I have just pointed out between time and s.p.a.ce in their connexion with matter makes it evident that any a.s.similation of time and s.p.a.ce cannot proceed along the traditional line of taking matter as a fundamental element in s.p.a.ce-formation.

The philosophy of nature took a wrong turn during its development by Greek thought. This erroneous presupposition is vague and fluid in Plato's _Timaeus_. The general groundwork of the thought is still uncommitted and can be construed as merely lacking due explanation and the guarding emphasis. But in Aristotle's exposition the current conceptions were hardened and made definite so as to produce a faulty a.n.a.lysis of the relation between the matter and the form of nature as disclosed in sense-awareness. In this phrase the term 'matter' is not used in its scientific sense.

I will conclude by guarding myself against a misapprehension. It is evident that the current doctrine of matter enshrines some fundamental law of nature. Any simple ill.u.s.tration will exemplify what I mean. For example, in a museum some specimen is locked securely in a gla.s.s case.

It stays there for years: it loses its colour, and perhaps falls to pieces. But it is the same specimen; and the same chemical elements and the same quant.i.ties of those elements are present within the case at the end as were present at the beginning. Again the engineer and the astronomer deal with the motions of real permanences in nature. Any theory of nature which for one moment loses sight of these great basic facts of experience is simply silly. But it is permissible to point out that the scientific expression of these facts has become entangled in a maze of doubtful metaphysics; and that, when we remove the metaphysics and start afresh on an unprejudiced survey of nature, a new light is thrown on many fundamental concepts which dominate science and guide the progress of research.

CHAPTER II

THEORIES OF THE BIFURCATION OF NATURE

In my previous lecture I criticised the concept of matter as the substance whose attributes we perceive. This way of thinking of matter is, I think, the historical reason for its introduction into science, and is still the vague view of it at the background of our thoughts which makes the current scientific doctrine appear so obvious. Namely we conceive ourselves as perceiving attributes of things, and bits of matter are the things whose attributes we perceive.

In the seventeenth century the sweet simplicity of this aspect of matter received a rude shock. The transmission doctrines of science were then in process of elaboration and by the end of the century were unquestioned, though their particular forms have since been modified.

The establishment of these transmission theories marks a turning point in the relation between science and philosophy. The doctrines to which I am especially alluding are the theories of light and sound. I have no doubt that the theories had been vaguely floating about before as obvious suggestions of common sense; for nothing in thought is ever completely new. But at that epoch they were systematised and made exact, and their complete consequences were ruthlessly deduced. It is the establishment of this procedure of taking the consequences seriously which marks the real discovery of a theory. Systematic doctrines of light and sound as being something proceeding from the emitting bodies were definitely established, and in particular the connexion of light with colour was laid bare by Newton.

The result completely destroyed the simplicity of the 'substance and attribute' theory of perception. What we see depends on the light entering the eye. Furthermore we do not even perceive what enters the eye. The things transmitted are waves or--as Newton thought--minute particles, and the things seen are colours. Locke met this difficulty by a theory of primary and secondary qualities. Namely, there are some attributes of the matter which we do perceive. These are the primary qualities, and there are other things which we perceive, such as colours, which are not attributes of matter, but are perceived by us as if they were such attributes. These are the secondary qualities of matter.

Why should we perceive secondary qualities? It seems an extremely unfortunate arrangement that we should perceive a lot of things that are not there. Yet this is what the theory of secondary qualities in fact comes to. There is now reigning in philosophy and in science an apathetic acquiescence in the conclusion that no coherent account can be given of nature as it is disclosed to us in sense-awareness, without dragging in its relations to mind. The modern account of nature is not, as it should be, merely an account of what the mind knows of nature; but it is also confused with an account of what nature does to the mind. The result has been disastrous both to science and to philosophy, but chiefly to philosophy. It has transformed the grand question of the relations between nature and mind into the petty form of the interaction between the human body and mind.

Berkeley's polemic against matter was based on this confusion introduced by the transmission theory of light. He advocated, rightly as I think, the abandonment of the doctrine of matter in its present form. He had however nothing to put in its place except a theory of the relation of finite minds to the divine mind.

But we are endeavouring in these lectures to limit ourselves to nature itself and not to travel beyond ent.i.ties which are disclosed in sense-awareness.

Percipience in itself is taken for granted. We consider indeed conditions for percipience, but only so far as those conditions are among the disclosures of perception. We leave to metaphysics the synthesis of the knower and the known. Some further explanation and defence of this position is necessary, if the line of argument of these lectures is to be comprehensible.

The immediate thesis for discussion is that any metaphysical interpretation is an illegitimate importation into the philosophy of natural science. By a metaphysical interpretation I mean any discussion of the how (beyond nature) and of the why (beyond nature) of thought and sense-awareness. In the philosophy of science we seek the general notions which apply to nature, namely, to what we are aware of in perception. It is the philosophy of the thing perceived, and it should not be confused with the metaphysics of reality of which the scope embraces both perceiver and perceived. No perplexity concerning the object of knowledge can be solved by saying that there is a mind knowing it[2].

[2] Cf. _Enquiry_, preface.

In other words, the ground taken is this: sense-awareness is an awareness of something. What then is the general character of that something of which we are aware? We do not ask about the percipient or about the process, but about the perceived. I emphasise this point because discussions on the philosophy of science are usually extremely metaphysical--in my opinion, to the great detriment of the subject.

The recourse to metaphysics is like throwing a match into the powder magazine. It blows up the whole arena. This is exactly what scientific philosophers do when they are driven into a corner and convicted of incoherence. They at once drag in the mind and talk of ent.i.ties in the mind or out of the mind as the case may be. For natural philosophy everything perceived is in nature. We may not pick and choose. For us the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as are the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon. It is for natural philosophy to a.n.a.lyse how these various elements of nature are connected.

In making this demand I conceive myself as adopting our immediate instinctive att.i.tude towards perceptual knowledge which is only abandoned under the influence of theory. We are instinctively willing to believe that by due attention, more can be found in nature than that which is observed at first sight. But we will not be content with less.

What we ask from the philosophy of science is some account of the coherence of things perceptively known.

This means a refusal to countenance any theory of psychic additions to the object known in perception. For example, what is given in perception is the green gra.s.s. This is an object which we know as an ingredient in nature. The theory of psychic additions would treat the greenness as a psychic addition furnished by the perceiving mind, and would leave to nature merely the molecules and the radiant energy which influence the mind towards that perception. My argument is that this dragging in of the mind as making additions of its own to the thing posited for knowledge by sense-awareness is merely a way of shirking the problem of natural philosophy. That problem is to discuss the relations _inter se_ of things known, abstracted from the bare fact that they are known.

Natural philosophy should never ask, what is in the mind and what is in nature. To do so is a confession that it has failed to express relations between things perceptively known, namely to express those natural relations whose expression is natural philosophy. It may be that the task is too hard for us, that the relations are too complex and too various for our apprehension, or are too trivial to be worth the trouble of exposition. It is indeed true that we have gone but a very small way in the adequate formulation of such relations. But at least do not let us endeavour to conceal failure under a theory of the byplay of the perceiving mind.

What I am essentially protesting against is the bifurcation of nature into two systems of reality, which, in so far as they are real, are real in different senses. One reality would be the ent.i.ties such as electrons which are the study of speculative physics. This would be the reality which is there for knowledge; although on this theory it is never known.