United States or Lithuania ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
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.
In the present lecture I propose to enter upon a survey of the kinds of entities which are posited for knowledge in sense-awareness. My purpose is to investigate the sorts of relations which these entities of various kinds can bear to each other. A classification of natural entities is the beginning of natural philosophy. To-day we commence with the consideration of Time.
Any one member of a level has a certain quality arising from its character as also belonging to a certain set of moments, but the level as a whole is a mere logical notion without any route of approximation along entities posited in sense-awareness.
Language in this statement suppresses all reference to any factors other than the percipient mind and the green leaf and the relation of sense-awareness. It discards the obvious inevitable factors which are essential elements in the perception.
The coat itself is a perceptual object and its situation is not what I am talking about. We are talking of someone's definite sense-awareness of Cambridge blue as situated in some event of nature. He may be looking at the coat directly. He then sees Cambridge blue as situated practically in the same event as the coat at that instant.
It is our business to analyse this conception and in the course of the analysis space and time should appear. Evidently the relations holding between natural entities are themselves natural entities, namely they are also factors of fact, there for sense-awareness.
The comparison may be between two events in the present, or it may be between two events of which one is posited by memory-awareness and the other by immediate sense-awareness. But it is not the events which are compared. For each event is essentially unique and incomparable. What are compared are the objects and relations of objects situated in events.
Thus not only is the passage of nature an essential character of nature in its rôle of the terminus of sense-awareness, but it is also essential for sense-awareness in itself. It is this truth which makes time appear to extend beyond nature.
For example we conceive of the distribution of matter in space at an instant. This is a very useful concept in science especially in applied mathematics; but it is a very complex idea so far as concerns its connexions with the immediate facts of sense-awareness. There is no such thing as nature at an instant posited by sense-awareness.
But there is another classification of events which is also inherent in sense-awareness. These are the events which share the immediacy of the immediately present discerned events. These are the events whose characters together with those of the discerned events comprise all nature present for discernment.
Word Of The Day