Page:An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge.djvu/28

 event ‘here and now’ and the immediately perceived appearance of the planet is for me a characteristic of another event ‘there and now.’ In fact perceptual knowledge is always a knowledge of the relationship of the percipient event to something else in nature. This doctrine is in entire agreement with Dr Johnson’s stamp of the foot by which he realised the otherness of the paving-stone.

3.7 The conception of knowledge as passive contemplation is too inadequate to meet the facts. Nature is ever originating its own development, and the sense of action is the direct knowledge of the percipient event as having its very being in the formation of its natural relations. Knowledge issues from this reciprocal insistence between this event and the rest of nature, namely relations are perceived in the making and because of the making. For this reason perception is always at the utmost point of creation. We cannot put ourselves back to the Crusades and know their events while they were happening. We essentially perceive our relations with nature because they are in the making. The sense of action is that essential factor in natural knowledge which exhibits it as a self-knowledge enjoyed by an element of nature respecting its active relations with the whole of nature in its various aspects. Natural knowledge is merely the other side of action. The forward moving time exhibits this characteristic of experience, that it is essentially action. This passage of nature — or, in other words, its creative advance — is its fundamental characteristic; the traditional concept is an attempt to catch nature without its passage.

3.8 Thus science leads to an entirely incoherent philosophy of perception in so far as it restricts itself