Page:An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge.djvu/210

 individual life is, beyond the mere object. There is not an object which, after being known as an object, is then in itself judged to be alive. The specific recognisable liveliness is the recognised character of the relation of the object to the event which is its situation. Thus to say that the object is alive suppresses the necessary reference to the event; and to say that an event is alive suppresses the necessary reference to the object.

64.4 We have therefore to ask, what sort of events have life in their relations to objects situated in them, and what sort of objects have life in their relations to their situations? A life-bearing object is not an ‘uniform’ object. Life (as known to us) involves the completion of rhythmic parts within the life-bearing event which exhibits that object. We can diminish the time-parts, and, if the rhythms be unbroken, still discover the same object of life in the curtailed event. But if the diminution of the duration be carried to the extent of breaking the rhythm, the life-bearing object is no longer to be found as a quality of the slice of the original event cut off within that duration. This is no special peculiarity of life. It is equally true of a molecule of iron or of a musical phrase. Thus there is no such thing as life ‘at one instant’; life is too obstinately concrete to be located in an extensive element of an instantaneous space.

64.5 The events which are associated by us with life are also the situations of physical objects. But the physical object though essential is not an adequate condition for its occurrence. A change in the object almost imperceptible from the physical point of view destroys the life in the succeeding situations of the object. The physical object, as apparent, is a material