Page:An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge.djvu/201

 aside the boundless eccentricities of abnormal perceptions. We are still at the stage of apparent characters, but rules have been attained, either by instinctive practice or by the exercise of intelligence or by the interplay between the two, by which we know what to attend to and what to discard in judging the character of an event from the situations of sense-objects. A physical object is the apparent character of its situation. Physical objects are found to be ‘material’ objects.

61.6 Science now intervenes with the express purpose of exhibiting our perceptions as our awareness of the characters of events and of relations between characters of events. All perceptions are included in the scope of this aim of science, namely, including abnormally perceived sense-objects and delusive perceptual objects.

61.7 The origin of the concept of causation (in this application of the term) is now manifest. It is that of the part explaining the whole — or, avoiding this untechnical use of ‘part’ and ‘whole,’ it is that of some explaining all. For the physical objects were obtained by discarding abnormalities, and physical objects express the characters of events, and all our perceptions (including abnormalities) arise from awareness of these characters.

61.8 But physical objects fail to satisfy the requirements of science. They lack definiteness and permanence, and are not adequate for the purposes of explanation. Now the characters of their mutual relations disclose further permanences recognisable in events and among these are the scientific objects. The gradual recognition of these permanences was at first the slow product of civilised thought without conscious direction. As regards their conscious discovery various