The Concept of Nature — the Tarner Lectures, 1920

Other schools of philosophy admit relations but obstinately refuse to contemplate relations with more^ than two relata. I do not think that this limitation is based on any set purpose or theory. It merely arises from the fact that more complicated relations are a bother to people without adequate mathematical training, when they are admitted into the reasoning.

I must repeat that we have nothing to do in theseVII] OBJECTSp. 151 lectures with the ultimate character of reality. It is quite possible that in the true philosophy of reality there are only individual substances with attributes, or that there are only relations with pairs of relata. I do not believe that such is the case ; but I am not concerned to argue about it now. Our theme is Nature. So long as we confine ourselves to the factors posited in the sense-awareness of nature, it seems to me that there certainly are instances of multiple relations between these factors, and that the relation of situation for senseobjects is one example of such multiple relations.

Consider a blue coat, a flannel coat of Cambridge blue belonging to some athlete. The coat itself is a perceptual object and its situation is not what I am talking about. We are talking of someone's definite sense-awareness of Cambridge blue as situated in some event of nature. He may be looking at the coat directly. He then sees Cambridge blue as situated practically in the same event as the coat at that instant. It is true that the blue which he sees is due to light which left the coat some inconceivably small fraction of a second before. This difference would be important if he were looking at a starwhosecolourwas Cambridge blue. The star might have ceased to exist days ago, or even years ago. The situation of the blue will not then be very intimately connected with the situation (in another sense of ' situation ') of any perceptual object. This disconnexion of the situation of the blue and the situation of some associated perceptual object does not require a star for its exemphfication. Any looking glass will suffice. Look at the coat through a looking glass. Then blue is seen as situated behind the mirror. The event which is its situation depends upon the position of the observer.

p. 152

The sense-awareness of the blue as situated in a certain event which I call the situation, is thus exhibited as the sense-awareness of a relation between the blue, the percipient event of the observer, the situation, and intervening events. All nature is in fact required, though only certain intervening events require their characters to be of certain definite sorts. The ingression of blue into the events of nature is thus exhibited as systematically correlated. The awareness of the observer depends on the position of the percipient event in this systematic correlation. I will use the term 'ingression into nature ' for this systematic correlation of the blue with nature. Thus the ingression of blue into any definite event is a part statement of the fact of the ingression of blue into nature.

1 In respect to the ingression of blue into nature events may be roughly put into four classes which overlap and are not very clearly separated. These classes are (i) the percipient events, (ii) the situations, (iii) the active conditioning events, (iv) the passive conditioning events. To understand this classification of events in the general fact of the ingression of blue into nature, let us confine attention to one situation for one percipient event and to the consequent rSles of the conditioning events for the ingression as thus limited. The percipient event is the relevant bodily state of the observer. The situation is where he sees the blue, say, behind the mirror. The active conditioning events are the events whose characters are particularly relevant for the event (which is the situation) to be the situation for that percipient event, namely the coat, the mirror, and the state of the room as to light and atmosphere. The passive conditioning events are the events of the rest of nature.

p. 153

In general the situation is an active conditioning event; namely the coat itself, when there is no mirror or other such contrivance to produce abnormal effects. But the example of the mirror shows us that the situation may be one of the passive conditioning events. We are then apt to say that our senses have been cheated, because we demand as a right that the situation should be an active condition in the ingression.

This demand is not so baseless as it may seem when presented as I have put it. All we know of the characters of the events of nature is based on the analysis of the relations of situations to percipient events. If situations were not in general active conditions, this analysis would tell us nothing. Nature would be an unfathomable enigma to us and there could be no science. Accordingly the incipient discontent when a situation is found to be a passive condition is in a sense justifiable ; because if that sort of thing went on too often, the rSle of the intellect would be ended.

Furthermore the mirror is itself the situation of other sense-objects either for the same observer with the same percipient event, or for other observers with other percipient events. Thus the fact that an event is a situation in the ingression of one set of sense-objects into nature is presumptive evidence that that event is an active condition in the ingression of other senseobjects into nature which may have other situations.

This is a fundamental principle of science which it has derived from common sense.

I now turn to perceptual objects. When we look at the coat, we do not in general say, There is a patch of Cambridge blue; what naturally occurs to us is. There is a coat. Also the judgment that what we have seen isp. 154 a garment of man's attire is a detail. What we perceive is an object other than a mere sense-object. It is not a mere patch of colour, but something more; and it is that something more which we judge to be a coat. I will use the word 'coat' as the name for that crude object which is more than a patch of colour, and without any allusion to the judgments as to its usefulness as an article of attire either in the past or the future. The coat which is perceived — in this sense of the word * coat ' — is what I call a perceptual object. We have to investigate the general character of these perceptual objects.