An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge/Chapter 18

CHAPTER XVIII

RHYTHMS

64. Rhythms. 64.1 The theory of percipient objects is beyond the scope of this work of which the aim is to illustrate the principles of natural knowledge by an examination of the data and experiential laws fundamental for physical science. A percipient object is in some sense beyond nature.

But nature includes life; and the way of conceiving nature developed in the preceding chapter has its bearing on biological conceptions as to the sense in which life can be said to be thus included.

64.2 An object is a characteristic of an event. Such an object may be in fact a multiple relation between objects situated in various parts of the whole event. In this case the quality of the whole is the relationship between its parts, and the relation between the parts is the quality of the whole. The whole event being what it is, its parts have thereby certain defined relations; and the parts having all the relations which they do have, it follows that the whole event is what it is. The whole is explained by a full knowledge of the parts as situations of objects, and the parts by a full knowledge of the whole. Such an object is a pattern.

64.3 The discussion of life in nature has become canalised along certain conventional lines based upon the traditional concepts of science. We are aware of living objects. But the phrase ‘living objects’ is misleading; we should more accurately say, ‘objects expressing life,’ or ‘life-bearing objects.’ Namely, the individual life is, beyond the mere object. There is not an object which, after being known as an object, is then in itself judged to be alive. The specific recognisable liveliness is the recognised character of the relation of the object to the event which is its situation. Thus to say that the object is alive suppresses the necessary reference to the event; and to say that an event is alive suppresses the necessary reference to the object.

64.4 We have therefore to ask, what sort of events have life in their relations to objects situated in them, and what sort of objects have life in their relations to their situations? A life-bearing object is not an ‘uniform’ object. Life (as known to us) involves the completion of rhythmic parts within the life-bearing event which exhibits that object. We can diminish the time-parts, and, if the rhythms be unbroken, still discover the same object of life in the curtailed event. But if the diminution of the duration be carried to the extent of breaking the rhythm, the life-bearing object is no longer to be found as a quality of the slice of the original event cut off within that duration. This is no special peculiarity of life. It is equally true of a molecule of iron or of a musical phrase. Thus there is no such thing as life ‘at one instant’; life is too obstinately concrete to be located in an extensive element of an instantaneous space.

64.5 The events which are associated by us with life are also the situations of physical objects. But the physical object though essential is not an adequate condition for its occurrence. A change in the object almost imperceptible from the physical point of view destroys the life in the succeeding situations of the object. The physical object, as apparent, is a material object and as such is uniform; but when we turn to the causal components of such an object, the apparent character of the whole situation is thereby superseded by the rhythmic quasi-periodic characters of a multitude of parts which are the situations of molecules.

In an analogous way we seek for a causal character of the event which in some way or another is apparent to us as alive, and we seek for an expression of this causal character in terms of the causal components of the physical object. It would seem therefore (if the analogy is to be pursued) that apparent life in any situation has, as its counterpart in that situation, more complex, subtler rhythms than those whose aggregate is essential for the physical object.

64.6 Furthermore in the physical object we have in a sense lost the rhythms in the macroscopic aggregate which is the final causal character. But life preserves its expression of rhythm and its sensitiveness to rhythm. Life is the rhythm as such, whereas a physical object is an average of rhythms which build no rhythm in their aggregation; and thus matter is in itself lifeless.

Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling. It exhibits variations of grade, higher and lower, such that the higher grade presupposes the lower for its very existence. This suggests a closer identification of rhythm as the causal counterpart of life; namely, that wherever there is some rhythm, there is some life, only perceptible to us when the analogies are sufficiently close. The rhythm is then the life, in the sense in which it can be said to be included within nature.

64.7 Now a rhythm is recognisable and is so far an object. But it is more than an object; for it is an object formed of other objects interwoverr upon the background of essential change. A rhythm involves a pattern and to that extent is always self-identical. But no rhythm can be a mere pattern; for the rhythmic quality depends equally upon the differences involved in each exhibition of the pattern. The essence of rhythm is the fusion of sameness and novelty; so that the whole never loses the essential unity of the pattern, while the parts exhibit the contrast arising from the novelty of their detail. A mere recurrence kills rhythm as surely as does a mere confusion of differences. A crystal lacks rhythm from excess of pattern, while a fog is unrhythmic in that it exhibits a patternless confusion of detail. Again there are gradations of rhythm. The more perfect rhythm is built upon component rhythms. A subordinate part with crystalline excess of pattern or with foggy confusion weakens the rhythm. ‘Thus every great rhythm presupposes lesser rhythms without which it could not be. No rhythm can be founded upon mere confusion or mere sameness.

64.8 An event, considered as gaining its unity from the continuity of extension and its unique novelty from its inherent character of ‘passage,’ contributes one factor to life; and the pattern exhibited within the event, which as self-identical should be a rigid recurrence, contributes the other factor to life. A rhythm is too concrete to be truly an object. It refuses to be disengaged from the event in the form of a true object which would be mere pattern. What the pattern does do is to impress its atomic character on a certain whole event which, as one whole bearing its atomic pattern, is a unique type of natural element, neither a mere event nor a mere object as object is here defined. This atomic character does not imply a discontinuous existence for a rhythm; thus a wave-length as marked out in various positions along a train.of waves exhibits the whole rhythm of the train at each position of its continuous travel.

64.9 The very fact of a non-uniform object involves some rhythm. Such objects appear to our apprehension in events at certain stages of extensive size, provided that we confine attention to those organisms with stability of existence, each in close association with one physical object or with one set of causal material objects. Molecules are non-uniform objects and as such exhibit a rhythm; although, as known to us, it is a rhythm of excessive simplicity. Living bodies exhibit rhythm of the greatest subtlety within our apprehension. Solar systems and star clusters exhibit rhythm of a simplicity analogous to that of molecules. It is impossible not to suspect that the gain in apparent complexity at the stage of our own rhythm-bearing events is due rather to our angle of vision than to any inherent fact of nature.

There are also stray rhythms which pass over the face of nature utilising physical objects as mere transient vehicles for their expression. To some extent this is the case in living bodies, which exhibit.a continual assimilation and rejection of material. But the subtlety of rhythm appears to require a certain stability of material.

64.91 Thus the permanence of the individual rhythm within nature is not absolutely associated with one definite set of material objects. But the connection for subtler rhythms is very close. So far as direct observation is concerned all that we know of the essential relations of life in nature is stated in two short poetic phrases. The obvious aspect by Tennyson,

“Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.”

Namely, Bergson’s élan vital and its relapse into matter.

And Wordsworth with more depth,

“The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.”