Page:An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge.djvu/84

 individual experienced knowledge and self-sufficient nature. The essential existence of the event ‘here-present’ is the reason why perception is from within nature and is not an external survey. It is the ‘percipient event.’ The percipient event defines its associated duration, namely its corresponding ‘all nature.’

16.4 The ‘here’ in ‘here-present’ also refers to the specific relation between the percipient event and its associated duration. It means ‘here within the duration,’ i.e. ‘here within the present continuum of nature.’ Thus the relation between an event ‘here-present’ and its associated duration embodies in some form the property of rest in the duration; for otherwise ‘here’ would be an equivocation. The relation in any concrete case may be complex, involving more than one meaning of ‘here,’ but the essential character of the relation is that as we (according to the method of extensive abstraction) properly diminish the extent of such an event, the property of ‘rest in’ the associated duration becomes more obvious. When an event has the property of being a percipient event unequivocally here within an associated duration, we shall say that it is ‘cogredient’ with the duration.

16.5 An event can be cogredient with only one duration. To have this relation to the duration it must be temporally present throughout the duration and exhibit one specific meaning of ‘here.’ But a duration can have many events cogredient with it. Namely any event, which is temporally present throughout that duration and in relation to an event here-present defines one specific meaning of ‘there,’ is an event ‘there-present’ which has the same relation of cogredience to that duration and (to that extent) is (so far) potentially