The Concept of Nature | Page 7

the matter for thought, namely there are
thoughts which would not occur in any homogeneous thinking about
nature.
The question as to whether sense-perception involves thought is largely
verbal. If sense-perception involves a cognition of individuality
abstracted from the actual position of the entity as a factor in fact, then
it undoubtedly does involve thought. 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. Also occasionally our own sense-perception in
moments when thought-activity has been lulled to quiescence is not far
off the attainment of this ideal limit.
The process of discrimination in sense-awareness has two distinct sides.
There is the discrimination of fact into parts, and the discrimination of
any part of fact as exhibiting relations to entities which are not parts of
fact though they are ingredients in it. Namely the immediate fact for
awareness is the whole occurrence of nature. It is nature as an event
present for sense-awareness, and essentially passing. There is no
holding nature still and looking at it. 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. 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.
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.
Accordingly in addition to events, there are other factors in nature
directly disclosed to us in sense-awareness. The conception in thought
of all the factors in nature as distinct entities with definite natural
relations is what I have in another place[1] called the 'diversification of
nature.'
[1] Cf. Enquiry.
There is one general conclusion to be drawn from the foregoing
discussion. It is that the first task of a philosophy of science should be
some general classification of the entities disclosed to us in
sense-perception.
Among the examples of entities in addition to 'events' which we have
used for the purpose of illustration are the buildings of Bedford College,
Homer, and sky-blue. Evidently these are very different sorts of things;
and it is likely that statements which are made about one kind of entity
will not be true about other kinds. If human thought proceeded with the
orderly method which abstract logic would suggest to it, we might go
further and say that a classification of natural entities should be the first
step in science itself. Perhaps you will be inclined to reply that this
classification has already been effected, and that science is concerned
with the adventures of material entities in space and time.
The history of the doctrine of matter has yet to be written. It is the
history of the influence of Greek philosophy on science. 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. A natural entity is merely a factor of fact,
considered in itself. Its disconnexion from the complex of fact is a mere
abstraction. It is not the substratum of the factor, but the very factor
itself as bared in thought. Thus what is a mere procedure of mind in the
translation of sense-awareness into discursive knowledge has been
transmuted into a fundamental character of nature. In this way matter
has emerged as being the metaphysical substratum of its properties, and
the course of nature is interpreted as the history of matter.
Plato and Aristotle found Greek thought preoccupied with the quest for
the simple substances in terms of which the