The Metaphysical Foundation of Buddhism and Modern Science

divergence of opinion as to the external relations. Newton himself was
inclined to construe them in terms of shock and of stress between
contiguous bodies. But his immediate followers, such as Roger Cotes,
added the notion of force at a distance. But either alternative was wholly
and completely a fact in the present, namely, the fact of that external
relation between two bits of matter either contiguous or distant. The
opposed doctrine of internal relations has been distorted by reason of its
description in terms of language adapted to the presupposition of
external relations of the Newtonian type. Even its adherents, such as
F.H. Bradley for instance, fall into this pitfall. It must be remembered
that just as the relations modify the natures of the relata, so the relata
modify the nature of the relation. The relationship is not a universal. It
is a concrete fact with the same concreteness as the relata. The notion
of the immanence of the cause in the effect illustrates this truth. We
have to discover a doctrine of nature which expresses the concrete
relatedness of physical functionings and mental functionings, of the past
with the present, and also expresses the concrete composition of
physical realities which are individually diverse.
Modern physics has abandoned the doctrine of Simple Location. The
physical things which we term stars, planets, lumps of matter, molecules,
electrons, protons, quanta of energy are each to be conceived as
modifications of conditions within space-time, extending throughout its
whole range. There is a focal region, which in common speech is where
the thing is. But its influence streams away from it with finite velocity