Page:An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge.djvu/180

 described. In our immediate thoughts which follow perception we make a jump from the situation of an object within the short specious present to its location in instantaneous space, and thence by further reflexion to its location in timeless space. Thus location in space is always an ideal of thought and never a fact of perception. An object may be located in a volume, an area, a route, or an event-particle of instantaneous space, and thence derivatively it will be located in a volume, or an area, or a segment, or a point of timeless space.

53.2 In considering the scientific object it is the occupied event which corresponds to the situation of the physical object. The occupied event is the situation of the charge, in so far as the single scientific object is conceived as an (ideal) physical object.

53.3 There are evidently many different kinds of location which satisfy the general definition of location in an abstractive element, even when the kind of abstractive element is assigned. These differences mainly arise from differences in the relations of objects to parts of their situations. An object is an atomic entity and as such is related to its situations. But a situation is an event with parts of various kinds, and we have to consider the various kinds of relationships which objects may have to various kinds of parts of their situations.

For example, if the sense-object ‘redness, of a definite shade’ be located in an area, it will be located in any portion of that area; and this arises from the fact that if it be situated in an event, it is also situated in any portion of that event. But it is not true that if a chair be situated in an event, that the chair — as one atomic object — is situated in any part of the event though it