The Concept of Nature | Page 9

search for the ultimate entities which are the factors of
the fact disclosed in sense-awareness. This search is the origin of
science.
The succession of ideas starting from the crude guesses of the early
Ionian thinkers and ending in the nineteenth century ether reminds us
that the scientific doctrine of matter is really a hybrid through which
philosophy passed on its way to the refined Aristotelian concept of
substance and to which science returned as it reacted against
philosophic abstractions. Earth, fire, and water in the Ionic philosophy
and the shaped elements in the Timaeus are comparable to the matter
and ether of modern scientific doctrine. But substance represents the
final philosophic concept of the substratum which underlies any
attribute. Matter (in the scientific sense) is already in space and time.
Thus matter represents the refusal to think away spatial and temporal
characteristics and to arrive at the bare concept of an individual entity.
It is this refusal which has caused the muddle of importing the mere
procedure of thought into the fact of nature. The entity, bared of all
characteristics except those of space and time, has acquired a physical
status as the ultimate texture of nature; so that the course of nature is
conceived as being merely the fortunes of matter in its adventure
through space.
Thus the origin of the doctrine of matter is the outcome of uncritical
acceptance of space and time as external conditions for natural

existence. By this I do not mean that any doubt should be thrown on
facts of space and time as ingredients in nature. What I do mean is 'the
unconscious presupposition of space and time as being that within
which nature is set.' This is exactly the sort of presupposition which
tinges thought in any reaction against the subtlety of philosophical
criticism. My theory of the formation of the scientific doctrine of
matter is that first philosophy illegitimately transformed the bare entity,
which is simply an abstraction necessary for the method of thought,
into the metaphysical substratum of these factors in nature which in
various senses are assigned to entities as their attributes; and that, as a
second step, scientists (including philosophers who were scientists) in
conscious or unconscious ignoration of philosophy presupposed this
substratum, qua substratum for attributes, as nevertheless in time and
space.
This is surely a muddle. The whole being of substance is as a
substratum for attributes. Thus time and space should be attributes of
the substance. This they palpably are not, if the matter be the substance
of nature, since it is impossible to express spatio-temporal truths
without having recourse to relations involving relata other than bits of
matter. I waive this point however, and come to another. It is not the
substance which is in space, but the attributes. What we find in space
are the red of the rose and the smell of the jasmine and the noise of
cannon. We have all told our dentists where our toothache is. Thus
space is not a relation between substances, but between attributes.
Thus even if you admit that the adherents of substance can be allowed
to conceive substance as matter, it is a fraud to slip substance into space
on the plea that space expresses relations between substances. On the
face of it space has nothing to do with substances, but only with their
attributes. What I mean is, that if you choose--as I think wrongly--to
construe our experience of nature as an awareness of the attributes of
substances, we are by this theory precluded from finding any analogous
direct relations between substances as disclosed in our experience.
What we do find are relations between the attributes of substances.
Thus if matter is looked on as substance in space, the space in which it
finds itself has very little to do with the space of our experience.

The above argument has been expressed in terms of the relational
theory of space. But if space be absolute--namely, if it have a being
independent of things in it--the course of the argument is hardly
changed. For things in space must have a certain fundamental relation
to space which we will call occupation. Thus the objection that it is the
attributes which are observed as related to space, still holds.
The scientific doctrine of matter is held in conjunction with an absolute
theory of time. The same arguments apply to the relations between
matter and time as apply to the relations between space and matter.
There is however (in the current philosophy) a difference in the
connexions of space with matter from those of time with matter, which
I will proceed to explain.
Space is not merely an ordering of material entities so that any one
entity bears certain relations to other material entities. The occupation
of space