Page:The Concept of Nature.djvu/28

Rh nature still and looking at it. We cannot redouble our efforts to improve our knowledge of the terminus of our present sense-awareness; it is our subsequent opportunity in subsequent sense-awareness which gains the benefit of our good resolution. Thus the ultimate fact for sense-awareness is an event. This whole event is discriminated by us into partial events. We are aware of an event which is our bodily life, of an event which is the course of nature within this room, and of a vaguely perceived aggregate of other partial events. This is the discrimination in sense-awareness of fact into parts.

I shall use the term ‘part’ in the arbitrarily limited sense of an event which is part of the whole fact disclosed in awareness.

Sense-awareness also yields to us other factors in nature which are not events. For example, sky-blue is seen as situated in a certain event. This relation of situation requires further discussion which is postponed to a later lecture. My present point is that sky-blue is found in nature with a definite implication in events, but is not an event itself. Accordingly in addition to events, there are other.factors in nature directly disclosed to us in sense-awareness. The conception in thought of all the factors in nature as distinct entities with definite natural relations is what I have in another place called the ‘diversification of nature.’

There is one general conclusion to be drawn from the foregoing discussion. It is that the first task of a philosophy of science should be some general classification of the entities disclosed to us in sense-perception.

Among the examples of entities in addition to ‘events’ which we have used for the purpose of illustration are