Page:The Concept of Nature.djvu/46

Rh Time and space would appear to provide these all-embracing relations which the advocates of the philosophy of the unity of nature require. The perceived redness of the fire and the warmth are definitely related in time and in space to the molecules of the fire and the molecules of the body.

It is hardly more than a pardonable exaggeration to say that the determination of the meaning of nature reduces itself principally to the discussion of the character of time and the character of space. In succeeding lectures I shall explain my own view of time and space. I shall endeavour to show that they are abstractions from more concrete elements of nature, namely, from events. The discussion of the details of the process of abstraction will exhibit time and space as interconnected, and will finally lead us to the sort of connexions between their measurements which occur in the modern theory of electromagnetic relativity. But this is anticipating our subsequent line of development. At present I wish to consider how the ordinary views of time and space help, or fail to help, in unifying our conception of nature.

First, consider the absolute theories of time and space. We are to consider each, namely both time and space, to be a separate and independent system of entities, each system known to us in itself and for itself concurrently with our knowledge of the events of nature. Time is the ordered succession of durationless instants; and these instants are known to us merely as the relata in the serial relation which is the time- ordering relation, and the time-ordering relation is merely known to us as relating the ingfonts. Namely, the relation and the instants are jointly known to us in our apprehension of time, each implying the other.