Page:An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge.djvu/29

 to the ultimate datum of material in time and space, the spatio-temporal configuration of such material being the object of perception. This conclusion is no news to philosophy, but it has not led to any explicit reorganisation of the concepts actually employed in science. Implicitly, scientific theory is shot through and through with notions which are frankly inconsistent with its explicit fundamental data.

This confusion cannot be avoided by any kind of theory in which nature is conceived simply as a complex of one kind of inter-related elements such as either persistent things, or events, or sense-data. A more elaborate view is required of which an explanation will be attempted in the sequel. It will suffice here to say that it issues in the assertion that all nature can (in many diverse ways) be analysed as a complex of things; thus all nature can be analysed as a complex of events, and all nature can be analysed as a complex of sense-data. The elements which result from such analyses, events, and sense-data, are aspects of nature of fundamentally different types, and the confusions of scientific theory have arisen from the absence of any clear recognition of the distinction between relations proper to one type of element and^relations proper to another type of element. It is of course a commonplace that elements of these types are fundamentally different. What is here to be insisted on is the way in which this commonplace truth is important in yielding an analysis of the ultimate data for science more elaborate than that of its current tradition. We have to remember that while nature is complex with time-less subtlety, human thought issues from the simple-mindedness of beings whose active life is less than half a century.