Page:An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge.djvu/88



This demarcation of events is the first difficulty which arises in applying rational thought to experience. In perception no event exhibits definite spatio-temporal limits. A continuity of transition is essential. The definition of an event by assignment of demarcations is an arbitrary act of thought corresponding to no perceptual experience. Thus it is a basal assumption, essential for ratiocination relating to perceptual experience, that there are definite entities which are events; though in practice our experience does not enable us to identify any such subject of thought, as discriminated from analogous subjects slightly more or slightly less.

This assumption must not be construed either as asserting an atomic structure of events, or as a denial of overlapping events. It merely asserts the ideal possibility of perfect definiteness as to what does or does not belong to an event which is the subject of thought, though such definiteness cannot be achieved in human knowledge. It is the claim which is implicit in every advance towards exact observation, namely that there is something definite to be known. The assumption is the first constant of externality, namely the belief that what has been apprehended as a continuum, is a potentially definite complex of entities for knowledge. The assumption is closely allied with the conception of nature as ‘given.’ This conception is the thought of an event as a thing which ‘happened’ apart from all theory and as a fact self-sufficient for a knowledge discriminating it alone.

18. Extension. 18.1 The second constant of externality is the relation of extension which holds between events. An event x may ‘extend over’ an event y,