The Concept of Nature | Page 9

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 impresses a certain character on each material entity in itself. By reason of its occupation of space matter has extension. By reason of its extension each bit of matter is divisible into parts, and each part is a numerically distinct entity from every other such part. Accordingly it would seem that every material entity is not really one entity. It is an essential multiplicity of entities. There seems to be no stopping this dissociation of matter into multiplicities short of finding each ultimate entity occupying one individual point. This essential multiplicity of material entities is certainly not what is meant by science, nor does it correspond to anything disclosed in sense-awareness. It is absolutely necessary that at a certain stage in this dissociation of matter a halt should