The Concept of Nature — the Tarner Lectures, 1920

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 be called, and that the material entities thus obtainedp. 23 should be treated as units. The stage of arrest may be arbitrary or may be set by the characteristics of nature ; but all reasoning in science ultimately drops its spaceanalysis and poses to itself the problem, ' Here is one material entity, what is happening to it as a unit entity?' Yet this material entity is still retaining its extension, and as thus extended is a mere multiplicity. Thus there is an essential atomic property in nature which is independent of the dissociation of extension. There is something which in itself is one, and which is more than the logical aggregate of entities occupying points within the volume which the unit occupies. Indeed we may well be sceptical as to these ultimate entities at points, and doubt whether there are any such entities at all. They have the suspicious character that we are driven to accept them by abstract logic and not by observed fact.

Time (in the current philosophy) does not exert the same disintegrating effect on matter which occupies it. If matter occupies a duration of time, the whole matter occupies every part of that duration. Thus the connexion between matter and time differs from the connexion between matter and space as expressed in current scientific philosophy. There is obviously a greater difficulty in conceiving time as the outcome of relations between different bits of matter than there is in the analogous conception of space. At an instant distinct volumes of space are occupied by distinct bits of matter. Accordingly there is so far no intrinsic difficulty in conceiving that space is merely the resultant of relations between the bits of matter. But in the one-dimensional time the same bit of matter occupies different portions of time. Accordingly time would have to be expressiblep. 24 in terms of the relations of a bit of matter with itsel] My own view is a behef in the relational theory both c space and of time, and of disbelief in the current fori] of the relational theory of space which exhibits bit of matter as the relata for spatial relations. The tru relata are events. The distinction which I have jus pointed out between time and space in their cormexio) with matter makes it evident that any assimilation o time and space cannot proceed along the traditional lin of taking matter as a fundamental element in space formation.

The philosophy of nature took a wrong turn durinj its development by Greek thought. This erroneou presupposition is vague and fluid in Plato's Timaem The general groundwork of the thought is still un committed and can be construed as merely lacking du explanation and the guarding emphasis. But ii Aristotle's exposition the current conceptions wer hardened and made definite so as to produce a fault analysis of the relation between the matter and the forr of nature as disclosed in sense-awareness. In this phras the term ' matter ' is not used in its scientific sense.

I will conclude by guarding myself against a mis apprehension. It is evident that the current doctrine c matter enshrines some fundamental law of nature. An simple illustration will exemplify what I mean. Fo example, in a museum some specimen is locked securel in a glass case. It stays there for years : it loses its coloui and perhaps falls to pieces. But it is the same specimen and the same chemical elements and the same quantitie of those elements are present within the case at the en as were present at the beginning. Again the engines and the astronomer deal with the motions of real pei

p. 25

manences in nature. Any theory of nature which for one moment loses sight of these great basic facts of experience is simply silly. But it is permissible to point out that the scientific expression of these facts has become entangled in a maze of doubtful metaphysics; and that, when we remove the metaphysics and start afresh on an unprejudiced survey of nature, a new light is thrown on many fundamental concepts which dominate science and guide the progress of research.

CHAPTER II

THEORIES OF THE BIFURCATION
OF NATURE

In my previous lecture I criticised the concept of matter as the substance whose attributes we perceive. This way of thinking of matter is, I think, the historical reason for its introduction into science, and is still the vague view of it at the background of our thoughts which makes the current scientific doctrine appear so obvious. Namely we conceive ourselves as perceiving attributes of things, and bits of matter are the things whose attributes we perceive.

In the seventeenth century the sweet simplicity of this aspect of matter received a rude shock. The transmission doctrines of science were then in process of elaboration and by the end of the century were unquestioned, though their particular forms have since been modified. The establishment of these transmission theories marks a turning point in the relation between science and philosophy. The doctrines to which I am especially alluding are the theories of light and sound. I have no doubt that the theories had been vaguely floating about before as obvious suggestions of common sense; for nothing in thought is ever completely new. But at that epoch they were systematised and made exact, and their complete consequences were ruthlessly deduced. It is the establishment of this procedure of taking the consequences seriously which marks the real discovery of a theory. Systematic doctrines of light and sound as being something proceeding from

CH.ii] THEORIES OF BIFURCATION OF NATURE 27 the emitting bodies were definitely established, and in particular the connexion of light with colour was laid bare by Newton.