Page:An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge.djvu/108

 objects, located for an indefinite number of hypothetical percipient events. In other words, it is a judgment on the events of the universe as being favourable active conditions for the perception of the physical object, granting the correspondingly favourable percipient events. There are an indefinite number of such percipient events, actual or imaginary. ‘The characters of events as active conditions are to be inferred from their adjustment to these innumerable possibilities of perception of each physical object.

25.2 Also in another way physical objects are the links connecting nature as perceived with nature as conditioning its own perception. Physical objects are often termed the causes of the perception of sense-objects, other than the sense-objects which are among their own components. For example, the telescope is the cause of the astronomer’s seeing the star. But a physical object is a cause only in an indirect mediate sense. The fact of the telescope being in the right position at the right time was an active condition for the astronomer’s sight of the star. Now this fact is an event which is a ‘situation’ of the telescope. Thus in our experience the situations of physical objects are discovered to be active conditions for the perception of sense-objects. In this way a knowledge of the characters of events, in so far as they are active conditions, can be observed and inferred; and the passage from perception to causation is effected.

25.3 At once the question arises, In what terms are the characters of the conditioning events to be expressed? The unanimous answer has been, that the expression is to be in terms of ‘matter,’ or — allowing for the more subtle ether — in terms of ‘material.’ In