22. For reasons of convenience, we will give a name to the aggregate of perceptions of a given mind calling it the Experience[1] belonging to this mind, or, in short, the Experience of a given mind. Any part of its perceptual data which the mind is able to distinguish in its Experience, we will call an event. When we thus distinguish an individual part, or event, in a given experience, we have, in the first instance, to determine its boundary, as we defined that term in the foregoing chapter; so that we can define an event as a delimited part of the perceptual data of a given mind, and Experience as the aggregate of events which the mind distinguishes, or delimits, inits perceptual data. An elementary part of a given perceptual datum we call an element of experience.
Having recourse to the formula used above, we can define an element of experience as a part of Experience which has no extension as regards any attribute, by virtue of which it is a part of Experience; this definition is, however, unsatisfactory in so far as these attributes are not clearly defined, and we must therefore replace it by a better one.
23. If we define a spherical event[2] as a connected event, the co-intersection of which with any other spherical event which it intersects is itself a spherical event, we can define an element of experience as the co-intersection of a class of spherical events which have a common co-intersection, and which comprise every spherical event having a common co-intersection with all the members of this class.
23.1. We arrive at this definition in the following way:—Ideally we can regard every event as part of another event, and vice versa we can regard every event as composed of other events which are its parts. The ideal delimitation of an event depends on nothing in the events themselves, on no particular characteristic of Experience, but may be arbitrarily determined by the cognitive mind. From this it is evident that a given event or a given section of Experience can be divided ideally an infinite number of times, and that every section of Experience will contain an infinite number of (possible) spherical events, which will have an infinite number
- ↑ I use the term Experience (with a capital) as the best substitute I can find in English for the Czech word “dění” which I used when I conceived the work in my own language. The word “dění” conveys much better my meaning, its English equivalent being “the something that is going on”. “Experience” shares with it the advantage of being very non-committal as to any particular view of its mode of existence.
- ↑ The term “spherical” here does not imply the geometrical properties of a curved surface: a cube, for instance, in so far as it is an event, is a spherical event.
