erty of the patch. No one thinks of the note as a
property of the concert-room. We see the blue and we hear the note. Both
the blue and the note are immediately posited by the discrimination of
sense-awareness which relates the mind to nature. The blue is posited as
in nature related to other factors in nature. In particular it is
posited as in the relation of being situated in the event which is its
situation.

The difficulties which cluster around the relation of situation arise
from the obstinate refusal of philosophers to take seriously the
ultimate fact of multiple relations. By a multiple relation I mean a
relation which in any concrete instance of its occurrence necessarily
involves more than two relata. For example, when John likes Thomas there
are only two relata, John and Thomas. But when John gives that book to
Thomas there are three relata, John, that book, and Thomas.

Some schools of philosophy, under the influence of the Aristotelian
logic and the Aristotelian philosophy, endeavour to get on without
admitting any relations at all except that of substance and attribute.
Namely all apparent relations are to be resolvable into the concurrent
existence of substances with contrasted attributes. It is fairly obvious
that the Leibnizian monadology is the necessary outcome of any such
philosophy. If you dislike pluralism, there will be only one monad.

Other schools of philosophy admit relations but obstinately refuse to
contemplate relations with more than two relata. I do not think that
this limitation is based on any set purpose or theory. It merely arises
from the fact that more complicated relations are a bother to people
without adequate mathematical training, when they are admitted into the
reasoning.

I must repeat that we have nothing to do in these lectures with the
ultimate character of reality. It is quite possible that in the true
philosophy of reality there are only individual substances with
attributes, or that there are only relations with pairs of relata. I do
not believe that such is the case; but I am not concerned to argue about
it now. Our theme is Nature. So long as we confine ourselves to the
factors posited in the sense-awareness of nature, it seems to me that
there certainly are instances of multiple relations between these
factors, and that the relation of situation for sense-objects is one
example of such multiple relations.

Consider a blue coat, a flannel coat of Cambridge blue b