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Updated: June 5, 2025
That influence has issued in one long misconception of the metaphysical status of natural entities. The entity has been separated from the factor which is the terminus of sense-awareness. It has become the substratum for that factor, and the factor has been degraded into an attribute of the entity. In this way a distinction has been imported into nature which is in truth no distinction at all.
An entity merely known as spatially related to some discerned entity is what we mean by the bare idea of 'place. The concept of place marks the disclosure in sense-awareness of entities in nature known merely by their spatial relations to discerned entities. It is the disclosure of the discernible by means of its relations to the discerned.
Furthermore this concurrence in the situations of sense-objects has led to the body i.e. the percipient event so adapting itself that the perception of one sense-object in a certain situation leads to a subconscious sense-awareness of other sense-objects in the same situation. This interplay is especially the case between touch and sight.
Until theory arose to vitiate immediate intuition, that is to say to vitiate the uncriticised judgments which immediately arise from sense-awareness, no one doubted that in motion you leave behind that which is at rest. Abraham in his wanderings left his birthplace where it had ever been.
On the materialistic theory the instantaneous present is the only field for the creative activity of nature. The past is gone and the future is not yet. But we deny this immediately given instantaneous present. There is no such thing to be found in nature. As an ultimate fact it is a nonentity. What is immediate for sense-awareness is a duration.
There has been a passage of nature from the 'here' of perception within the past duration to the different 'here' of perception within the present duration. But the two 'heres' of sense-awareness within neighbouring durations may be indistinguishable.
For example, a complete event is never disclosed in sense-awareness, and thus the object which is the sum total of objects situated in an event as thus inter-related is a mere abstract concept. Again a right-angle is a perceived object which can be situated in many events; but, though rectangularity is posited by sense-awareness, the majority of geometrical relations are not so posited.
Hence the fact of sense-perception has an ingredient or factor which is not thought. I call this ingredient sense-awareness. It is indifferent to my argument whether sense-perception has or has not thought as another ingredient. If sense-perception does not involve thought, then sense-awareness and sense-perception are identical.
The difficulty is to express our meaning in terms of the immediate deliverances of sense-awareness, and I offer the above explanation as a complete solution of the problem. In this explanation a moment is the set of natural properties reached by a route of approximation. An abstractive series is a route of approximation.
Accordingly nature as disclosed in sense-perception is self-contained as against sense-awareness, in addition to being self-contained as against thought. I will also express this self-containedness of nature by saying that nature is closed to mind. This closure of nature does not carry with it any metaphysical doctrine of the disjunction of nature and mind.
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