10a | CR fragment of remake of Book IV, Chapter 2

We may fortify our sense of ownership by
finding the same pattern in other objects, or
projecting it into them. Direct observation
seems to reveal that, say in plants, some featu-
res are more essential to the organism than
others. We may find connections without excep-
tions, others with some very few exceptions,
and again others whose distribution follows the
binomial curve more or less closely (although
in actual practice it is often difficult to
decide what to take as the index of closeness
- the range, or the interquartile range, sigma,
or sigma as a percentage of M, or v, - and to
weigh up various statistical factors in the
curves through which, in an objective way,
plants reveal their essential identity, e.g. in
the case of skew or hyperbinominal curves). If
one says that 61.o6o (or 99%), out of 61.581 Lin-
aria flowers (A) show 5 petals (a), or that 90.2%
of Ranunculus bulbosus (A) have 5 petals (a),
one has 'measured' the frequency of a connection
between A and a. That A and a do at all belong
together is not thereby established, but it is
merely assumed previously, and the measurement
adds no new evidence to it. It is chiefly be-
cause they are seen in immediate neighbourhood
that commonsense regards the words 'Linaria'
and '5 petals' as applicable to the same thing,
as somehow together in it. Connections outside
the context are ignored as impossible. This is
botanically sound, ontologically unwarranted and
arbitary. To group the connections of things and
their properties into degrees of essentiality
takes those connections for granted. It adds no
new factor to account for their unity, which is
derived chiefly from spatial determinations,
practical preoccupations, and naming. This kind
of unit, as an element of our environment, is
thus almost entirely dependent on our practice
(cf. ch 1). When the practical aim is changed,
the units also change. When you treat the same
objects not as something to he handled, but as
something to be transcended, the distance of
observed facts from an imaginary centre, - from
a subject of belonging -, vanishes. It is their
distance from the Tathagata whicit then outshi-
nes all other relations. In that frame of mind
one would not regard anything as particularly