Page:An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge.djvu/27

 knowledge cannot be understood without reference to the general characteristics of perception. Our perception of natural events and natural objects is a perception from within nature, and is not an awareness contemplating all nature impartially from without. When Dr Johnson ‘surveyed mankind from China to Peru,’ he did it from Pump Court in London at a certain date. Even Pump Court was too wide for his peculiar locus standi; he was really merely conscious of the relations of his bodily events to the simultaneous events throughout the rest of the universe. Thus perception involves a percipient object, a percipient event, the complete event which is all nature simultaneous with the percipient event, and the particular events which are perceived as parts of the complete event. This general analysis of perception will be elaborated in Part II. The point here to be emphasised is that natural knowledge is a knowledge from within nature, a knowledge ‘here within nature’ and ‘now within nature,’ and is an awareness of the natural relations of one element in nature (namely, the percipient event) to the rest of nature. Also what is known is not barely the things but the relations of things, and not the relations in the abstract but specifically those things as related.

Thus Alciphron’s vision of the planet is his perception of his relatedness (i.e. the relatedness of his percipient event) to some other elements of nature which as thus related he calls the planet. He admits in the dialogue that certain other specified relations of those elements are possible for other percipient events. In this he may be right or wrong. What he directly knows is his relation to some other elements of the universe namely, I, Alciphron, am located in my percipient