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A volume however has not yet been defined. This definition will be given in the next lecture. Evidently levels, rects, and puncts in their capacity as infinite aggregates cannot be the termini of sense-awareness, nor can they be limits which are approximated to in sense-awareness.
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.
The transition from the 'red' of awareness to the 'red' of thought is accompanied by a definite loss of content, namely by the transition from the factor 'red' to the entity 'red. This loss in the transition to thought is compensated by the fact that thought is communicable whereas sense-awareness is incommunicable.
By 'convention' I understand Poincaré to mean that there is nothing inherent in nature itself giving any peculiar rôle to one of these congruence relations, and that the choice of one particular relation is guided by the volitions of the mind at the other end of the sense-awareness. The principle of guidance is intellectual convenience and not natural fact.
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 passage of nature.
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.
Here we are touching on that character of the passage nature which issues in the spatial relations of simultaneous bodies. This possible identity of the durations in the case of the sense-awareness of distinct minds is what binds into one nature the private experiences of sentient beings. We are here considering the spatial side of the passage of nature.
This is in fact the problem of the determination of the very meaning of the timeless spaces of physical science. In reviewing the factors of nature as immediately disclosed in sense-awareness, we should note the fundamental character of the percept of 'being here. We discern an event merely as a factor in a determinate complex in which each factor has its own peculiar share.
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 passage of nature leaves nothing between the past and the future.
It is unique for the sense-awareness of an individual mind and it is unique for the sense-awareness of all minds which are operating under natural conditions. There is an important distinction between the two cases. This is an exhibition of the temporal passage of nature; namely, one duration has passed into the other.
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