simple location

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"The characteristic common to both space and time is that material can be said to be here in space and here in time, or here in space-time, in a perfectly definite sense which does not require for its explanation any reference to other regions of space-time." (p.49) 

According to Alfred North Whitehead, "to say that a bit of matter has simple location means that, in expressing its spatio-temporal relations, it is adequate to state that it is where it is, in a definite finite region of space, and throughout a definite finite duration of time, apart from any essential references to the relations of that bit of matter to other regions of space and to other durations of time." (Science and the Modern World, p.58) 

Whitehead points out that "things are separated by space, and are separated by time: but they also together in space, and together in time, even if they be not contemporaneous." He calls these characters the separative and prehensive characters of space-time. (p.64) --prehension being his term for uncognitive apprehension -- feeling, valuing, etc. (is this the same as intuition?) For Whitehead, this unity of prehension defines itself as a here and a now. It is a process of unification (which, in part, is why his is a philosophy of organism.) It is also the definition of an event. 

Whitehead argues that none of the primary elements of nature as apprehended in our immediate experience possess the character of simple location, even as he acknowledges that "Everything which is in space receives a definite limitation of some sort, so that in a sense it has just that shape which it does have and no other, also in some sense it is just in this place and no other, just as in time a thing endures during a certain period, and through no other period." He calls this the modal character of space-time, which, he claims, "must be conjoined with the separative and prehensive characters." 

For Whitehead, simple location can be attached to abstractions, but to deny their abstraction is to err in the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.