Page:An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge.djvu/109

 so deciding none of the distinctions made above have been consistently held in view. The result has been the persistent lapses into confusion which have been exhibited in a brief abstract in the first part of this enquiry.

Matter has been classified into the various kinds of matter which are the chemical substances; thence the atomic theory of matter has been established; and thence some form of electromagnetic theory of molecules is emerging. It is in the last degree unlikely that the present form of this theory will represent its final stage. All novel theories emerge with a childlike simplicity which they ultimately shed. But, apart from specific details, it can as little be doubted that in its main concepts the theory is true.

25.4 We will accordingly pass by the elaborate task of tracking down and interpreting intermediate stages of scientific concepts — important though they are — and pass at once to the consideration of molecules and electrons. The characters of events in their capacity of active conditioning events for sense-objects are expressed by their relations to scientific objects. Scientific objects are not directly perceived, they are inferred by reason of their capacity to express these characters, namely, they express how it is that events are conditions. In other words they express the causal characters of events.

25.5 At the present epoch the ultimate scientific objects are electrons. Each such scientific object has its special relation to each event in nature. Events as thus related to a definite electron are called the ‘field’ of that object. The relations of the object to different parts of the field are interconnected; and, when the