Page:Philosophical Review Volume 27.djvu/258

246 against the application of the mathematical theory of continuity to experience. Change, he urges, is a fact. But change involves relations, and relations are fundamental. Thus change demands analysis. Now we may grant that relations are fundamental, but what exactly does this mean? Simply that so soon as we come to analyze experience reflectively in abstraction, we find that we cannot proceed at all without the concept of what we call 'relation,' in addition to the concept of what we call 'thing.' Yet in the actual concrete individual experience there is no question of 'relation' or 'thing.' There is just a presented whole perceived by the subject, a whole which simply exists and is given as a whole. For example, let us try and imagine what may be called an 'instantaneous' section of experience. At any instant we perceive in fact but one object, the presented whole. No spatial series of separate parts (however great in number and however small in magnitude the latter may be) enters into the actual experience itself. The same is the case when we include time within our purview, and consider individual experience as a whole. There is here no temporal series of sense-data. Experience in its actuality is not a series. Considered in its entirety (which is the only adequate way of considering it) it is simply 'subject perceives object.' The object is an individual whole, and therefore, by its very uniqueness, cannot be characterized, as such, by such a general term as relation, for the latter implies the existence of more than one distinct individual. It is only when we come to reflect upon experience that we are bound to consider it piecemeal, and to introduce such general terms as 'parts' and 'relations.' To whatever closeness we may in this way approximate to the actual experience, we can never entirely get rid of that element of the general, which necessarily renders inadequate the conception of what is essentially particular.

Mr. Russell makes the further statement, that the type of objection we have raised against regarding the continuity of experience as being of a mathematical kind is a particular example of a more general doctrine, which, broadly stated, amounts to