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Updated: August 5, 2024
The duration which is the immediate disclosure of our sense-awareness is discriminated into parts. There is the part which is the life of all nature within a room, and there is the part which is the life of all nature within a table in the room. These parts are limited events. They have the endurance of the present duration, and they are parts of it.
The word 'duration' is perhaps unfortunate in so far as it suggests a mere abstract stretch of time. This is not what I mean. A duration is a concrete slab of nature limited by simultaneity which is an essential factor disclosed in sense-awareness. Nature is a process. As in the case of everything directly exhibited in sense-awareness, there can be no explanation of this characteristic of nature.
Sense-awareness posits durations as factors in nature but does not clearly enable thought to use it as distinguishing the separate individualities of the entities of an allied group of slightly differing durations. This is one instance of the indeterminateness of sense-awareness. Exactness is an ideal of thought, and is only realised in experience by the selection of a route of approximation.
Russell in effect pointed out that apart from minor inexactitudes a determinate congruence relation is among the factors in nature which our sense-awareness posits for us. Poincaré asks for information as to the factor in nature which might lead any particular congruence relation to play a preeminent rôle among the factors posited in sense-awareness.
But in general it is inferred by a process of measurement depending on our direct sense-awareness of selected cases and a logical inference from the transitive character of congruence. Congruence depends on motion, and thereby is generated the connexion between spatial congruence and temporal congruence. Motion along a straight line has a symmetry round that line.
We cannot even know that the series of immediate durations posited by the sense-awareness of one individual mind all necessarily belong to the same family of durations. There is not the slightest reason to believe that this is so. Indeed if my theory of nature be correct, it will not be the case.
Sounds and subtler factors disclosed in sense-awareness float in from the outside. Every type of sense has its own set of discriminated entities which are known to be relata in relation with entities not discriminated by that sense.
I am concerned exclusively with the generalisations of widest scope which can be effected respecting that which is known to us as the direct deliverance of sense-awareness. I have said that nature is disclosed in sense-perception as a complex of entities. It is worth considering what we mean by an entity in this connexion.
In passage we reach a connexion of nature with the ultimate metaphysical reality. The quality of passage in durations is a particular exhibition in nature of a quality which extends beyond nature. For example passage is a quality not only of nature, which is the thing known, but also of sense-awareness which is the procedure of knowing.
It means that in sense-perception nature is disclosed as a complex of entities whose mutual relations are expressible in thought without reference to mind, that is, without reference either to sense-awareness or to thought. Furthermore, I do not wish to be understood as implying that sense-awareness and thought are the only activities which are to be ascribed to mind.
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