An enquiry concerning the principles of natural knowledge

by Alfred North Whitehead

This definition is only important when the

-volumes of

are all nearly congruent to each other; because only in that case is this relation recognisable in perception.

62.3 Thus, each sense-object is primarily capable of its own sort of sense-figure and of that sort only. There are the sense-figures of blue of one shade, and the sense-figures of blue of another shade, and the separate sets of figures belonging to all the shades of reds and greens and yellows. There is the set of figures of the touch of velvet, and the set of figures of the touch of marble at particular temperatures of hand and surface and with a particular polish of surface.

62.4 But there is an analogy of sense-objects and this begets an analogy of figures. For example, there is an analogy between blues of all shades, and a corresponding analogy between their sets of figures. Each such analogy amid sense-objects issues in an object of a type not hitherto named. Call it the type of 'generalised sense-objects.' For example, we can recognise blue and ignore its particular shade. Correspondingly we can recognise a blue sense-figure, and ignore the differences between a light-blue sense-figure and a dark-blue sense-figure. We can go further, and recognise colour and ignore the particular colour; and correspondingly there are recognisable sight-figures underlying figures of particular shades of particular colours.

62.5 But it would be a mistake to insist on the derivation of the generalised sense-figures from the recognition of generalised sense-objects. In general the converse process would seem to be nearer the truth. Namely, the analogy amid sense-figures is more insistently perceptible than the analogy amid sense-objects; and the derivation is as much from the generalised sense-figure to the generalised sense-object as in the converse order.

We must go further than this. Perceptive insistency is not ranged in the order of simplicity as determined by a reflective analysis of the elements of our awareness of nature. Sense-figures possess a higher perceptive insistency than the corresponding sense-objects. We first notice a dark-blue figure and pass to the dark-blueness.

62.6 Indeed the high perceptive power of figures is at once the foundation of our natural knowledge and the origin of our philosophical errors. It has led the theory of space to be annexed to objects and not to events, and thus created the fatal divorce between space and time. A figure, being an object, is not in space or time, except in a derivative sense.