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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 passage of sense-awareness and a passage of thought. Thus the reign of the quality of passage extends beyond nature.
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.
On the other hand an event-particle is defined so as to exhibit this character of being a route of approximation marked out by entities posited in sense-awareness.
I will use the term 'moment' to mean 'all nature at an instant. A moment, in the sense in which the term is here used, has no temporal extension, and is in this respect to be contrasted with a duration which has such extension. What is directly yielded to our knowledge by sense-awareness is a duration.
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.
The disclosure in sense-awareness of the structure of events classifies events into those which are discerned in respect to some further individual character and those which are not otherwise disclosed except as elements of the structure. These signified events must include events in the remote past as well as events in the future. We are aware of these as the far off periods of unbounded time.
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?
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.
Anticipatory judgments affect the perceptual object perceived by focussing and diverting attention. The perceptual object is the outcome of the habit of experience. Anything which conflicts with this habit hinders the sense-awareness of such an object.
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.
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