THE CONCEPT OF NATURE 135 



habits apparently in nature may really belong to its observers. It permits 

 an exclusive devotion to nature by simply regarding it as something known 

 and releases thought from the extra effort of widening its field to include 

 the knower. Science must constantly ignore the knower, and the " philo- 

 sophy of science " must constantly ignore him too : temporary restrictions 

 on the field of inquiry, temporary isolations of parts from the whole, are 

 required for the concentration of attention. Such simplificatory release from 

 the impossible feat of comprehending everything at once is essential for the 

 development of the " Concept of Nature " ; but, if persisted in as a permanent 

 principle of inquiry, the custom of ignoring the knowers may hopelessly 

 distort conceptions of the things they know. 



Thought probably began with a naive failure to understand the protest 

 that " none of our perplexities as to nature will be solved by having recourse 

 to the consideration that there is a mind knowing it." ^ Even when the 

 realisation that we are minds knowing does force its way into our absorption 

 in the things we know it requires a constant reflective effort to remember 

 the possibilities it may involve. It is now permanently obvious that we 

 can think either " homogeneously" or " heterogeneously " about nature, as 

 Whitehead expresses it : think about nature without thinking about thought, 

 or both think of nature and think of such thinking. 2 When he adds, " Natural 

 science is exclusively concerned with homogeneous thoughts about nature," ^ 

 and affirms the " property of being self-contained for thought" to lie " at 

 the base of natural science," * he apparently reaffirms his protest against 

 consulting our mental procedures when we endeavour to resolve the per- 

 plexities of nature. Yet, when he proposes to substitute for the traditional 

 concepts of " persistent ultimate material distributed among the persistent 

 ultimate points in successive configurations at successive ultimate instants 

 of time," 5 EVENTS as the ultimate facts in nature,^ he explains the ascendancy 

 of the concept of nature as bodies or substances adventuring through space 

 and in time by affirming that " what is a mere procedure of mind in 

 the translation of sense-awareness into discursive knowledge has been 



TRANSMUTED INTO A FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTER OF THE UNIVERSE." ^ If ^^q 



have been seduced into thinking of material, space, and time as ultimates, 

 and of events as their derivatives by a mental habit, and if we are invited 

 to note how we can escape deflection by this mental habit from the true 

 view of the event as primary, we seem to be explicitly invited to consider 

 the implications of remembering the knowing mind. 



We are certainly accustomed to a " macro-corpuscular " estimate of 

 nature : to thinking of the physical world in terms of separate bodies, 

 " macro-corpuscles," as it were, which are scattered through space, and able 

 to move with some degree of freedom both in space and time. This mental 

 habit, enforced upon us from the first, pervading our every notion and action, 

 is obviously reflected in our efforts to understand the microscopic structure 

 of physical reality. 



" The general principle of relativity now proposed by Einstein . . . ," 

 according to Prof. Wildon Carr, " shows that it is impossible to abstract 

 from the mind of the observer and treat his observations as themselves 

 absolute and independent of their objectivity." ^ He opposes to Whitehead's 



^ An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, Preface. 



2 The Concept of Nature, p. 3. 



3 Ibid. 



4 Ibid. 



^ An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, pp. 5-6. 



« The Concept of Nature, p. 15. 



■^ Loc. cit., p. 16. 



* The General Principle of Relativity, pp. 21-2. 



