Page:An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge.djvu/73



13. The Diversification of Nature. 13.1 Our perceptual knowledge of nature consists in the breaking up of a whole which is the subject matter of perceptual experience, or is the given presentation which is experience — or however else we prefer to describe the ultimate experienced fact. ‘This whole is discriminated as being a complex of related entities, each entity having determinate qualities and relations and being a subject concerning which our perceptions, either directly or indirectly, afford definite information. This process of breaking up the subject matter of experience into a complex of entities will be called the ‘diversification of nature.’

13.2 This diversification of nature is performed in different ways, according to different procedures which yield different analyses of nature into component entities. It is not merely that one mode of diversification of nature is incomplete and leaves out some entities which another mode supplies. The entities which are yielded by different modes of diversification are radically different; and it is the neglect of this distinction between the entities of complexes produced by different modes of diversification which has produced so much confusion in the principles of natural knowledge.