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In other words, perception is always 'here, and a duration can only be posited as present for sense-awareness on condition that it affords one unbroken meaning of 'here' in its relation to the percipient event. It is only in the past that you can have been 'there' with a standpoint distinct from your present 'here.
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 . Cf. Enquiry, preface. In other words, the ground taken is this: sense-awareness is an awareness of something.
I hope that the words are judiciously chosen; but it really does not matter so long as I succeed in explaining my meaning. Simultaneity is the property of a group of natural elements which in some sense are components of a duration. A duration can be all nature present as the immediate fact posited by sense-awareness. A duration retains within itself the passage of nature.
Namely, amid the alternative time-systems which nature offers there will be one with a duration giving the best average of cogredience for all the subordinate parts of the percipient event. This duration will be the whole of nature which is the terminus posited by sense-awareness. Thus the character of the percipient event determines the time-system immediately evident in nature.
In looking to nature for evidence of absolute position it is of no use to recur to the four-dimensional manifold of event-particles. This manifold has been obtained by the extension of thought beyond the immediacy of observation. We shall find nothing in it except what we have put there to represent the ideas in thought which arise from our direct sense-awareness of nature.
The immediate deduction which is sufficient for us is that so far as sense-awareness is concerned mind is not in time or in space in the same sense in which the events of nature are in time, but that it is derivatively in time and in space by reason of the peculiar alliance of its passage with the passage of nature. Thus mind is in time and in space in a sense peculiar to itself.
There is the discrimination of fact into parts, and the discrimination of any part of fact as exhibiting relations to entities 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 passing. There is no holding nature still and looking at it.
Accordingly we must admit that though we can imagine that mind in the operation of sense-awareness might be free from any character of passage, 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.
So long as we confine ourselves to the factors posited in the sense-awareness of nature, it seems to me that there certainly are instances of multiple relations between these factors, and that the relation of situation for sense-objects is one example of such multiple relations. Consider a blue coat, a flannel coat of Cambridge blue belonging to some athlete.
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 analysis that intellectually we tend to ignore the true unity of the factor really exhibited in sense-awareness.
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