Page:The Concept of Nature.djvu/53

40 occupy volumes of space, there seems to be no reason why causal nature should occupy any volumes of space. Thus space would seem to be merely apparent in the same sense as apparent nature is merely apparent. Accordingly if science is really investigating causes which operate on the mind, it would seem to be entirely on the wrong tack in presuming that the causes which it is seeking for have spatial relations. Furthermore there is nothing else in our knowledge analogous to these causes which influence the mind to perception. Accordingly, beyond the rashly presumed fact that they occupy time, there is really no ground by which we can determine any point of their character. They must remain for ever unknown.

Now I assume as an axiom that science is not a fairy tale. It is not engaged in decking out unknowable entities with arbitrary and fantastic properties. What then is it that science is doing, granting that it is effecting something of importance? My answer is that it is determining the character of things known, namely the character of apparent nature. But we may drop the term 'apparent'; for there is but one nature, namely the nature which is before us in perceptual knowledge. The characters which science discerns in nature are subtle characters, not obvious at first sight. They are relations of relations and characters of characters. But for all their subtlety they are stamped with a certain simplicity which makes their consideration essential in unravelling the complex relations between characters of more perceptive insistence.

The fact that the bifurcation of nature into causal and apparent components does not express what we mean by our knowledge is brought before us when we realise