One actual entity has a status among other actual entities, not expressible wholly in terms of contrasts of eternal objects. For example, the complex nexus of ancient imperial Rome to European history is not wholly expressible in universals. It is not merely the contrast of a sort of city, imperial, Roman, ancient, with a sort of history of a sort of continent, sea-indented, river-diversified, with alpine divisions, begirt by larger continental masses and oceanic wastes, civilized, barbarized, christianized, commercialized, industrialized. The nexus in question does involve such a complex contrast of universals. But it involves more. For it is the nexus of _that_ Rome with _that_ Europe. We cannot be conscious of this nexus purely by aid of conceptual feelings. This nexus is implicit, below consciousness, in our physical feelings. In part we are conscious of such physical feelings, and of that particularity of the nexus between particular actual entities. This consciousness takes the form of our consciousness of particular spatial and temporal relations between things directly perceived. But, as in the case of Rome and Europe, so far as concerns the mass of our far-reaching knowledge, the particular nexus between the particular actualities in question is only indicated by constructive reference to the physical feelings of which we are conscious.
